Valeri took a step back as the scene unfolded in front of her.

She hadn’t had a moment to even breathe before there was a flurry of blows between the two men in front of her. Each strike that one launched against the other shook the air with the astounding display of physical might. She backpedalled even further as the man who had been serving as her trainer made a mock play for an attack against her.

Valeri would have been offended or shocked, but a quick glance at Midday’s face only told her that he could care less about actually going for her life. In fact, he was far too interested in his own battle for that.

The overwhelming Sun against the disappearing Shadow was mesmerising to Valeri, a pure display of just how small she was in the scheme of things. This was a battle that could be waged in a page of any number of history books and she’d barely blink an eye at the flowery language the author would use to exemplify how defining it’d been to an era.

But now that she stood close enough to two figures that seemed out of place in the real world, outside of a grand tale, she couldn’t help but relate to those poems that’d seemed so fanciful not so long ago.

“Powerful, for an old man.” The exuberant voice of Midday jibed mischievously, a far cry from the hardboiled man that she’d come to know. Yeram, her own attendant who’d revealed himself to be a Shadow Walker, barely changed his disposition at all.

“Only to a young one like you, Rethi.” The name rang out over the field with a great deal of power, making her trainer halt for a second. She looked between the two men, appalled that her attendant had somehow managed to discover the other man’s name. There was a short peal of laughter from Midday, or Rethi, who easily reached up to his face and ripped off his metal mask, something that’d become a part of his identity to Valeri.

“Honestly, I thought that Valeri would go and find it out but apparently she’s a goody-two-shoes.”

Valeri was, for lack of a better word, stunned. She’d know that Midday was young, likely younger than her, but seeing his face blew her expectations out of the water.

“You’re a kid!” Valeri squawked incredulously, making Rethi laugh heavily even as Yeram’s shadowy blade slashed out at him from through the cloak of darkness that seemed to cover his entire body and all of his movements, though Rethi didn’t seem to have an issue reading those movements, nonetheless.

“Wait, wait!” Rethi yelped between the blows and his uproarious laughter, “Time out, that’s fucking hilarious.” Yeram did not stop the blows, though Rethi didn’t seem to expect him to either, batting away the blades regardless of the direction they came from.

Yeram being a Shadow Walker was a massive surprise to Valeri, though she had known that he was strong in combat from a few little incidents over the years, yet being a Shadow Walker wasn’t exactly the top of her list on his past professions.

The man she’d known most of her life was a machine in combat, capable of spewing forth an unending barrage of blows from behind the wide cloak of shadow that obscured his every movement from sight to the normal eye. Valeri couldn’t even follow the movements; he may as well be floating underneath the cloak for all that she could discern.

However, Rethi’s gold-green eyes burned through anything. She had felt them on her numerous times, and when he was pulling so deeply on his power that she’d only be able to assume that they were many times more powerful now.

“I was waiting for the moment that Master Max made me reveal my identity, but Gods was this so much better!” The older Shadow Shifter didn’t respond, however four blades pierced from the cloak of darkness simultaneously, defying the fact that Yeram had two blades at most.

The boy smacked aside one of the blades, sending the blow wide, letting the three other blades deform into whisps of darkness as they faltered against Rethi’s tanned skin. Rethi grinned wolfishly, his own blade launching itself into the cloak at high speed, though Yeram jumped back a few metres with three arrow-like throwing weapons shrieked through the air towards Rethi’s flesh.

Each of the three throwing blades were snatched out of the air, fingers pinching them by their flats.

“Well, that’s just rude!” Rethi said, throwing them aside and glaring at the other man with some heat. Valeri stepped back a few more metres, eyes going wide with the sudden intensity of the battle. Everything that had happened was only over the course of a few seconds, and it didn’t even seem like either of the two men—or many and boy—were actually going at each other with full power.

“Look,” Rethi began somewhat lackadaisically, “we both know we aren’t going at full blast here.” Valeri raised an eyebrow at the strange expression but was too enraptured by the tense moment.

“I could very well kill you for attacking Valeri Ephars, and then your master for the threat he poses.” The voice that Yeram spoke in was cold and dangerous, like a raw blade in its essence, screaming murder and pain. Valeri had only ever known the man to speak with a calm and collected disposition, with the rare display of distaste, but never this murderous tone.

“Hah!” Rethi grinned, “You could certainly try, but you’ll be in for far more than you think.” The glare continued between the men before Rethi spoke again with a sigh.

“Look, we can continue with the fight and all, and I’ll probably end up wining because I can see right through every shadow you can muster, but there won’t be much to it other than me beating your ass.” The boy laughed; the vicious grin still drawn on his face with a savagery that Valeri could barely comprehend. “I won’t kill you until Master Maximilian gets to chat with you.”

“No.” Yeram returned, “He will get no information of the Shadow Walkers from me.”

“He won’t?” Rethi raised his eyebrow, amused, “Well, good luck trying to tell him that, hey?” Rethi chuckled, and even Valeri joined in briefly before the two men turned to look at her, one gaze being amused and the other being decidedly not.

“I have no idea why a Shadow Walker would be guarding a little girl, though. Care to enlighten?” Rethi said, gracefully pulling the attention away from Valeri who found herself covered in a thin layer of sweat.

“No, I do not care to enlighten you.” Yeram replied, his face a mask of cold anger. Rethi, however, seemed immune to the man’s stifling presence, the powerful rays of his light piercing through the veil of darkness.

“Ooh!” Rethi said aloud, tapping the tip of his bronze sword against the ground with a gentle ringing noise, “You tried to get out of the game, did you? Had to find a job in the middle of nowhere to get away from the shitstorm you made in the Empire?” Yeram went stock still, the darkness bleeding from the cloak around him rapidly, filling the ground directly around him with a layer of murky black fog.

“I retired.” Valeri’s attendant intoned darkly, but Rethi just scoffed.

“Oh, I’m sorry. I was unaware that fanatical religious assassins retired at all!” Rethi swung his arms outwards in an explosive motion of dramatic sarcasm, but his next words didn’t possess the same flippancy.

“Don’t mess me around, Shadow Walker. My master would pull out all your secrets in moments of speaking to him, and you’d like it. I don’t quite have the same ability as he does, so I will substitute charisma for physical violence, if worst come to worst.” Valeri gulped harshly against wall of searing heat the boy let off.

Those words were what Midday was to her. Hard and precise, unerring, and powerful. Rethi was the flippant and exuberant boy that surrounded that part of him that held the name Midday. She didn’t have the mental capability of treating him as anything other than the man she knew him to be, with the immense power that he and his master held.

Yeram looked at the boy piercingly, both of their auras clashing between each other, Yeram’s choking darkness and Rethi’s unending light.

“No amount of torture would loosen my tongue, boy.” Rethi smiled pleasantly, somehow giving off even more savagery int eh expression than before.

“You don’t know what torture is, old man. You might think you do, but you’ve only had a taste of it.” Yeram almost growled at that, an attack on what he was capable of rather than of his legitimacy was what really got him angry.

“I’ve been tortured more hours than you’ve ever trained.” Rethi tilted his head at the heated statement.

“But have you felt your body change against your will, bending to another’s instead?”

The atmosphere had finally reached absolute zero. Both Valeri and Yeram reeled from the statement, both of them being reminded of a few very specific legends that had survived the exile to Virsdis that many had faced. Yeram and Valeri felt the deep mortification within themselves, envisioning an army of monsters, made by melding ten different people and beasts together into an unholy combination that went against any reason.

“You have an Abomination Maker.” Yeram growled, his mind alight with the dire need to find and kill the unholy thing that was born with the ability to change a living being into whatever they wished. Valeri almost gasped at the proclamation, having thought that they would never reach Virsdis, or at least having hoped.

“Well, they’d rather you didn’t call them that. Life shifter is more apt.” Rethi said quietly before sighing sadly, “Will it really take me knocking you down?” Yeram’s form changed into a battle stance beneath the cloak that hid his every action. He was preparing to fight to his death, to keep himself and Valeri away from ever interacting with an Abomination Maker, yet he didn’t have a moment to move before the boy was upon him, his golden rimmed green eyes were right up against his own.

“You forget your place before the Sun, Walker of my Shadow.” The gold-green irises changed in an instant, burning entirely gold with a metallic tinge, the colour bleeding back into his skin like veins of molten gold power within bronzed skin. This was no longer the young boy he’d been speaking to not a moment before; this was something else entirely.

This was a God.

“Kneel,” the boy’s voice said, coated in a regal power far surpassing Yeram’s own, “you are the product of the Sun’s light, you are nothing without it.” Yeram struggled against the almighty power of the sun bearing down upon him, but as he did, he could only see flashes of the results of his actions. He was destined to become a sun-dried corpse, wasting away in the harshest desert while the few beings that lived there picked at his bare and crumbling bones.

Yeram’s legs gave way underneath the power, his knee pressing into the dirt blow, entirely visible now that the full force of the sun revealed all underneath it’s watchful gaze. The old Shadow Walker could barely muster the strength to glance up at the boy, whose eyes glowed with a gold power, whose skin was webbed with rivers of golden metal, whose sword burned with the heat of the Sun’s nigh infinite power.

The boy was no shifter of light, not like Yeram was a shifter of the darkness. He was no wayward paladin, taught by a defector of the Brauhm Empire’s Church of Daylight. No, he was beyond even a blessed like the girl that he’d protected for the majority of her life, and a significant portion of his own.

Yeram, although he appeared only just reaching his middle-aged years, had met many powerful people. He had even come close to being one of those powerful people once. Yet there was only one that even came close to the pure might that Rethi possessed. The Divine power that he held within him.

As Yeram’s mind struggled to stay conscious under the force of Rethi’s power, it still whirred with a cold calculation that he’d learned to maintain even if he were dying, something that he was exemplary at even amongst his peers.

Rethi was a Divine Warrior. To think that there was another on Virsdis, one so young no less. It was almost unfathomable to him. That there existed two Divine Artifacts on Virsdis, not even ones from the native peoples’ Gods.

But maybe that was what he needed.

Yeram watched the boy’s blade rise into the sky, piercing the sun for just a moment in his view, before falling down as if the blade was the arbiter of his existence. As the blade pierced his skin and ran through his shoulder and flesh, searing gruesomely, he stared into the boy’s eyes as he drew directly from the power of the God who’d once created the blade.

He lost his consciousness with a single thought remaining in his mind, resounding through the void of his sleep.

Maybe, if its him, he could stop them…