The silence before the challenge was worse than any battle.
A void of stillness.
Darius stood atop the fractured remnants of the Forge Nexus, the skies above torn between bleeding sunset hues and the suffocating black of null-code storms. The world had not yet recovered from his brutal rewriting of the laws of death and resurrection.
And yet, amidst his dominion, an old enemy returned—not as the broken puppet he once was, but as something far more twisted.
The Revenant King.
His form emerged from the veil of the Shattered Sky, no longer draped in the tattered glory of corrupted godhood. His flesh now pulsed with digital sinew interwoven with jagged code strands, infused with an ancient algorithm that predated even the Prime Coder's first iteration. He was something new—something neither god, man, nor AI.
Something forgotten.
