Lastlight's Revenant #10

Garran had already cut down three more duskhounds and over a dozen vermin-touched. Their corpses littered the street, twitching and smoldering from the golden magic seared into their flesh.

He had pushed deep into the chaos, close enough to the Faceless that the demons now swarmed him from all sides—vermin-touched shambling mindlessly forward, four duskhounds lurking among them, their spindly limbs coiled to strike.

And ahead, the fleshforged.

It lumbered toward him, its stitched-together body swaying with each monstrous step. Human hands sprouted from its shoulders, fingers twitching. Its gaping mouth stretched too wide, lined with rows of mismatched teeth—some human, some animal, some sharpened to fangs.

Garran didn’t slow.

Guided by Sylrithiel’s enchantment, he raised his sword—and with a growl, drove it into the ground.

A shockwave of golden light erupted.

The magic tore through the demons like a cleansing fire. Vermin-touched burst apart, their puppeteering ticks reduced to ash. Duskhounds shrieked as their limbs were severed, their bodies flung back like rag dolls.

The ones closest to the blast died instantly, their forms crumbling to blackened husks. The ones further away reeled, disoriented, their movements sluggish.

Garran yanked his blade free. The golden light had dimmed, the enchantment waning—but it still burned bright enough.

His gaze locked onto the fleshforged.

It staggered from the blast, one of its stitched arms hanging limp, but it didn’t fall. Didn’t die.

Garran stepped forward.

A duskhound writhed at his feet, its limbs reduced to stumps. He silenced it with a single downward stroke.

The remaining vermin-touched stumbled toward him, their movements jerky, their hollow eyes unseeing. He cut through them like wheat, his pace quickening with each kill. By the time the last one fell, he was already sprinting.

Only the fleshforged remained.

It roared, a sound like tearing meat and grinding bone, and swung its massive fist.

Garran ducked beneath the fleshforged’s crushing blow, his sword flashing as he stepped forward. The golden blade carved through the demon’s leg at the joint, flesh sizzling where it cut.

The monstrosity roared, a sound like splitting meat and grinding bone, its massive body swaying as it struggled to stay upright on one leg.

But it wasn’t done yet.

Flesh rippled along its torso, then extended—tendrils shooting toward Garran like javelins. He twisted, his blade a blur as he severed them mid-air. The severed limbs hit the ground, twitching grotesquely, black ichor bubbling from the stumps.

Garran’s face darkened. "Damned filth," he spat through gritted teeth.

He hacked into the fleshforged again. And again.

It swung wildly, but Garran dodged, his movements precise, relentless. A second strike. A third. A fourth.

Until the demon was nothing but a heap of singed, rotting flesh, dark vapor rising from its remains.

Garran turned his gaze to the Faceless.

It stood motionless, its blank face unreadable. Unimpressed.

That indifference stoked the fire in Garran’s chest. Rage was a weapon—one he had mastered long ago. He didn’t suppress it. He wielded it.

He sprinted toward the demon.

The Faceless didn’t move.

But its arm changed.

Flesh twisted, reshaped, until it held a sword—his sword. A perfect replica, down to the notches in the steel. Only the rapidly dimming golden glow was absent.

By the time Garran closed the distance, the Faceless was ready.

Garran took the initiative with a brutal downward swing, both hands locked around the bastard sword’s grip. The Faceless raised its blade in perfect tandem—two-handed, elbows bent at the same angle, shoulders squared identically—and blocked the strike with a metallic clang.

The impact sent a jolt up Garran’s arms. He expected resistance. Expected the fading enchantment to fail to cleave through. But what made him pause wasn’t the block itself.

It was the stance.

The demon’s footing. The distribution of its weight. The slight tilt of its wrists to absorb the blow.

It moved like him.

Before he could process it, the demon shifted. Its grip on the sword flicked to one-handed, its blade twisting at a precise angle, redirecting Garran’s strike downward. Then—

—its free hand shot forward, knuckles now encased in a gauntlet that mirrored Garran’s own, and slammed into his jaw.

Garran staggered back, his teeth rattling. His eyes snapped up, and his blood turned to ice.

The Faceless was changing.

Its blank flesh rippled, warped, until it stood before him as a perfect replica. His face. His scars. His armor, down to the dents and scratches. Even the sword in its hand was an exact copy—though the golden light along its edge was absent.

The demon grinned maliciously, a grotesque contrast to Garran’s coldly calm expression, and adjusted its stance to mirror his.

A realization settled in Garran’s mind.

This thing didn’t just copy his weapons.

It copied his skills.

Garran eyed the demon, his breath steady despite the blood trickling from his split lip.

"So that’s why you just stood and watched," he muttered. "You were learning."

The demon said nothing. Instead, it let out an eerie chuckle—Garran’s own voice, but warped, like a reflection in a muddy puddle.

Then it moved.

A perfect mirror of Garran’s opening stance—weight forward, blade angled for a rising slash. He barely parried in time, steel screeching as the demon’s sword grazed his pauldron.

The force behind the blow was greater than his own, the demon’s borrowed muscles unnaturally strong.

Garran pivoted, countering with a diagonal cut aimed at the ribs. The demon blocked, but he’d expected that. He twisted his wrist mid-swing, redirecting the blade to slam into the base of the demon’s sword—the same spot he’d struck three exchanges prior.

A hairline fracture glinted in the steel.

The demon retaliated with a flurry of strikes, each one a flawless replica of Garran’s own techniques—the quick jab to the throat, the sweeping low cut meant to hamstring, the feint-left-strike-right he’d honed in a hundred battles.

But there was a hesitation in its movements, a half-second delay where Garran knew what came next because he’d lived it.

When the demon lunged, telegraphing the same overhead chop Garran had used to kill the fleshforged, he was already sidestepping. His blade lashed out, not at the demon, but at its sword—hammering the same weakened spot again.

The demon’s grin faltered as a crack spiderwebbed up its blade.

Garran didn’t let up. His grip tightened as he swung. A brutal upward slash.

The demon’s sword shattered.

Golden light flared one final time as the enchantment died, the shards of the demon’s blade dissolving into black mist before they hit the ground.

The Faceless staggered back, its borrowed face melting away like wax, revealing the smooth, blank mask beneath. For the first time, it hesitated.

Then its flesh ripped.

Bone and sinew erupted from its back, stretching into grotesque, veined wings. With a wet snap, it launched into the air.

"Oh no you don’t—" Garran lunged, sword flashing—but the demon was already rising, its tattered wings beating wildly.

His blade bit deep into its remaining leg instead of its torso, shearing through corrupted flesh and bone. Black ichor sprayed as the Faceless shrieked, its flight turning erratic, but it kept climbing, desperate to escape.

Garran watched, teeth bared, as the demon pulled farther away—

—until a rusted chain whipped through the air.

The links snapped around the Faceless’s mangled leg with a metallic clang. Garran turned toward the chain’s source—

—and found the Varekai warrior from the woods, his tattooed arms straining as he yanked the chain taut.

"Ancestors guide my hand," the man grunted, and heaved.

The demon plummeted, slamming into the cobblestones with enough force to crack the ground. Garran was already sprinting forward, his boots pounding against the blood-slick street.

The Faceless writhed, its wings flapping uselessly as its clawed hands scrambled at the chain coiled around its leg. It barely managed to rise to its knees before Garran was upon it.

The demon raised its hands in a futile block—

—just as Garran’s sword cleaved down.

Steel met flesh. Flesh met bone.

Then there was no head left to scream.

The corpse toppled, ichor pooling around it as the chain went slack. Garran exhaled, wiping his blade on the demon’s tattered robes before turning to the warrior.

"Timely intervention," he said, finally returning the man’s earlier nod.

The Varekai warrior coiled his chain back around his forearm, the links clinking softly. "The ancestors guided me here," he said, his voice gravel and smoke. 

"They hate demons prowling their holy grounds, and they find you worthy of aid." His gaze flicked to the sky, where the smoke of battle still coiled. "But this is not over."

Garran followed his stare. Somewhere beyond the burning rooftops, the Hollow King’s laughter seemed to whisper on the wind.