Dietha?

Dawn broke over the Neoth Range, its light painting the snow-dusted peaks in hues of rose and pale gold.
In the cave that had served as our sanctuary, the air was still and cold.
The reunion was a fragile thing, it was a brief moment of fresh air, before the coming battle.
Tulote and Cassandra, though freed, bore the spectral scars of their captivity.

Tulote, however, was already a general, his personal suffering secondary to the monumental task ahead.
He stood over Elara's map, which was now weighted down with stones on the cave floor.

"They've shown us their hand," he began. "The Heralds are their command . They neutralize threats like us, so the horde can act as a blunt instrument. The last Herald will be coordinating the siege from a high vantage point, likely the old watchtower on the western ridge."

Xerta, who had been methodically checking the haft of her hammer for stress fractures, looked up.

"So while the big bosses sit on their thrones, the army in the valley gets ground to dust. Sounds about right for them folk."

A flicker of annoyance crossed Tulote's face, but it was quickly replaced by a nod of grim understanding.

"Precisely. Which is why we will not allow them to fight their battle. We will force them to fight ours."

The plan he laid out was impressively simple.

"The First Company need an opening. Xerta, you and I will provide it. Our task is to launch a direct, overwhelming assault on the demonic siege lines at the mouth of the valley. We will break them, shatter their engines, and force the horde to respond to us."

He then looked to Cassandra and me.

"The chaos of our assault will be your cover. You will bypass the main battle, ascend the western ridge and find that watchtower. Your only objective: kill the last Herald. The moment is command is severed, the horde will devolve into a disorganized mob, and General Kaelen will have the opening he needs to sally forth."

We departed as the sun crested the peaks, splitting into two teams.
Elara, her duty done, gave us a final, tearful farewell before beginning her long, solitary journey back to the safety of Ormas.

Tulote and Xerta were a force to be reckoned with.
From my vantage point on the ridge, I could see them crash into the demonic lines like a tidal wave.
Tulote and his Flamma, carved swathes through the enemy while great walls of rock erupted from the ground at his command, breaking charges and creating fortifications from nothing.
At his side, Xerta and her hammer rose and fell in a blur of motion, each impact sending shockwaves through the demonic ranks and turning those creatures of nightmare into broken piles of chitin and ichor.

"They're certainly making a lot of noise," Cassandra murmured beside me. "Come on. It's our turn."

We moved through the periphery of the battle like ghosts, the screams, and explosions covered our silent ascent beautifully.
My perception was wide open, and the threads of the world laid bare.
I guided us past hidden sentries and magical traps.
I watched Cassandra move and felt a familiar admiration for her lethal grace.
I found myself comparing her to Xerta every so often these days…
Maybe it was because I finally had someone who understood me in this world.

We reached the watchtower.
It stood on a lonely crag, a spike of ancient half-human masonry against the sky.
The final Herald of Ruin was there, its shifting, chaotic armour was a direct contrast to the ordered stone.
It stood with its back to us, directing the horde below with telepathic commands.

We moved in for the kill.

And the world ended.

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Silence.
Total and absolute silence.

The roar of battle, the howling wind, the very thrum of life in the mountain, all of it vanished.
The colour bled from the world, the vibrant sunlit peaks fading to a monochrome grey.
The temperature plummeted, and a cold that had nothing to do with ice seeped into my bones.
Cassandra, a step ahead of me, froze mid-stride.

A figure coalesced before us.
She was a woman of impossible, terrifying beauty, her form sculpted from the perfect absence of light.
Her gown was woven from the void, and her eyes were twin black holes that consumed the very concept of sight.

It could only be her.

The Second Calamity stood before me.

Dietha.

Her attention was a physical weight, an infinite, crushing pressure focused solely on me.

"The Hero," her voice whispered.

But it was not a whisper for ears, but to the soul.

"The little flaw in my grand design. I had hoped my Heralds would be sufficient to correct you, but your persistence has become... tiresome."

The mountaintop dissolved.
The world remade itself around me into a grey, dead caricature of my home.
The houses were crumbling husks, the tree's skeletal claws reaching for a blank white sky.

"I know your heart, Arda Nebula." Dietha whispered. "It is a vessel of grief. You fight for a world you barely know to reclaim a life that is already broken. You fight for memories."

"Order is a cage. It creates love so you can feel the agony of its loss. It grants life only to sentence it to death. It is a cycle of beautiful, meaningless suffering. Chaos... Chaos is freedom. I offer you an escape. An end to the cycle."

She extended a hand shaped from the void.

"Join me. Become my champion. I will not just give you your children back. I will give you the power to craft a new reality for them, a paradise free from pain, where Kathuria still lives, where goodbyes do not exist. A perfect, eternal haven."

I will admit.
I considered it for way longer that I should have.
The offer sang to the deepest, most broken part of my soul.
A world with no more funerals.
No more final words.

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But I saw Yui's face, not in death, but in life, his smile so full of pride.
I saw Xerta, standing defiant for a family she didn't know.
I saw Kathuria, not as a memory to be resurrected, but as a person, my wife, and she had lived a beautiful, complete, albeit tragically finite life.
Her end did not invalidate her existence; it made every moment we had shared infinitely precious. Even more so.

"You're wrong," I said.

The Gladius flared to life in my hand, as though it had a mind of its own.

"Our pain is the proof that we loved. Our endings are what give our stories meaning. You don'f offer peace. You offer nothingness. And my family... my family is everything."

Dietha's perfect face twisted, the illusion of calm shattering into a mask of divine rage.

"So be it. If you cherish the flawed creations of Order so much, then you will have the privilege of watching them burn."

She reached out, her void-like hand tearing a hole within spacetime itself.
She violated the stasis of my world.
Through the swirling rift, four small figures were pulled, tumbling onto the grey ground, their eyes wide with terror.

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Idrian. Ioas. Iriam. Izacc.

"Papa?"

Iriam's small, confused voice shattered my universe.

Dietha raised her hand, a sphere of pure, soul-annihilating Chaos forming in her palm.

"A lesson in the futility of love."

A scream of pure, powerless agony ripped from my throat as I charged, knowing with sickening certainty that I would be too late.

The world tore open a second time.

It was not a gentle tear.
It was a violent, discordant rip, a flash of midnight blue and shimmering silver.
From it, a new figure exploded into being, landing with immense grace between Dietha and my children.
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She was a demoness, clad in ornate, articulated armour that seemed to absorb the grey light.
Her face was completely hidden by a full helm, its visor crafted into the shape of a stoic, sorrowful mask.
She wielded two blades of a dark, star-speckled metal, and the Chaos that rolled off her was not wild and hateful, which I did not understand.
I found her Chaos to be disciplined, focused, but above all, filled with a grief as deep as my own.

She moved.
Her twin blades became a blur, meeting Dietha's sphere of annihilation not with opposing power, but with a thousand precise cuts that seemed to unweave the spell, causing it to dissipate harmlessly.

Dietha hissed in surprise.

"Who dares?"

The demoness didn't answer.
She charged.

My own paralysis broke.
I was at her side in an instant, the Gladius Nobellus a blade of pure Order.
What followed was a battle that defied reason.
We had never met, never spoken, yet we moved as one.
She would feint left, forcing Dietha to counter, creating an opening that I was already moving to exploit.
I would raise a shield in Order to block a wave of chaotic energy, and she was already phasing through my shield, her blades striking from an impossible angle.

Dietha, her projection faltering against our unified assault, recoiled.
Her final whisper was a promise of eternal pain.

"This changes nothing, Hero. The cage will fall."

And then she was gone.

The grey realm collapsed, and we were back on the mountain.
My children, my beautiful, terrified children, stood before me.
Before I could move, before I could even speak, the mysterious demoness raised a hand.
A soft, dark energy enveloped them, not with malice, but with a gentleness that seemed utterly at odds with her form.
It was not a cage, but a sort of sanctuary, shielding them from the harsh wind and hiding their presence from the demonic horde below.

I finally reached them, falling to my knees and pulling them into a desperate, trembling embrace.
"Idrian, Ioas, Iriam, Izacc... you're real, you're here."

They clung to me, sobbing, their small bodies in my arms.
My quest to return home was over.
My home had been dragged into the heart of the war.

The sound of running feet announced the arrival of my companions.
Tulote, Xerta, and the now-revived Cassandra skidded to a halt, their eyes going wide at the impossible scene, me my four children huddled in my arms, and a powerful, unknown demoness standing guard over us all.

"Arda... by Erton's beard, what is happening?" Tulote breathed.

He held his Flamma at a low ready.

"It's a demon, Arda," Xerta spat. "Get the little ones away from that thing! Now!"

Cassandra, however, was more cautious, her elven eyes narrowed as she studied the silent figure.

"Wait. Look at her stance. She is not threatening them. She is... shielding them?"

I looked up from my children, my own eyes meetin the unreadable, masked gaze of their saviour.
Logic, reasion, every instinct I had honed in this world screamed that she was an enemy.
But my heart, the part of me that had just watched her move with impossible grave to save everything I had ever loved, screamed louder.
I felt an inexplicable connection to her, a sense of familiarity that defied all reason.

"Put your weapons down," I said. "She saved them."

I met Tulote's shocked gaze, then Xerta's distrustful one.

"My family. From my world. Dietha brought them here to kill them (I lowered my voice so as to prevent my children from hearing), and she saved them. She protected them when I couldn't."

I loked back at the enigmatic warrior, whose very presence was a conundrum.
My mind was confused.
But my sould was certain.

"I don't know who she is, or why she's here. But right now, she is the only reason my children are alive. She stays with us, until we can figure out what to do with her."

The standoff on that lonely peak was tense.
The war for the mountain still raged below, but here, a far more personal battle unfolded.

My saviour, whose nature was the very essence of the enemy we sought to destroy.