The fire blazed into the sky, casting a crimson glow over the wilderness as the wails of cattle and sheep echoed across the land.
The ritual had begun.
In the distant village, the bound livestock grew restless.
They twisted and kicked, trying desperately to escape their restraints.
It was as if they could already sense the oncoming threat to their lives.
Their cries filled the air, endless and pitiful.
The flames lit up the villagers' faces, painting them blood-red in the flickering light.
Driven by fear and the instinct to survive, the animals thrashed wildly.
But their struggle was meaningless.
The villagers had expected this. They'd tied every animal tightly to wooden stakes at the center of the square.
No amount of kicking or biting could break free from the thick ropes. The stakes didn't budge.
Then came the first tremor—deep and subtle, but unmistakable.
The moment of sacrifice had arrived.
The villagers quickly backed away from the square and gathered at a safe distance.
Without hesitation, they dropped to their knees, foreheads pressed low to the ground.
Their voices rose in a low murmur, chanting in the long-lost language of ancient Icathia.
Despite their devotion, their bodies betrayed their fear.
Shoulders trembled. Eyes flickered with terror. The Void haunted their minds.
Yet their worship remained devout. Like cultists in a trance, they knelt, unwavering.
Trembling or not, they still knelt among bones.
That contradiction—faith mixed with dread—was etched into every one of them.
The fear of the Void, and the belief in it, coexisted in a twisted harmony.
To Kai'Sa, they were no different from the animals they were sacrificing.
Weak. Afraid. Enslaved by ignorance.
At the front of the crowd stood the village chief, Karu.
He didn't kneel. Instead, he danced—a strange, frenzied ritual of sweeping arms and stomping feet, clearly symbolic in its intention.
He wore no clothes. Only a black, chitinous helmet—crafted from the carapace of a Voidborn—covered his head.
His body was smeared with purple blood, the kind only Void creatures bleed.
From afar, he looked like something born from the Void itself, dancing under the pale night sky.
Despite his age, Karu's body moved with unnatural flexibility.
He no longer resembled an old man, but something... altered and touched by power.
And from his mouth came a whisper.
No, not a whisper—a sound unlike anything natural.
At times high-pitched, other times guttural.
Sometimes sharp, sometimes hollow. It wasn't a language. It was noise—chaotic, layered, maddening.
It buzzed like a swarm of cicadas screaming in unison.
Then it screeched like nails on a chalkboard—dozens of them.
It wormed into ears and minds alike.
The villagers clutched their heads, eyes squeezed shut.
Their thoughts splintered under the auditory assault.
The pain was unbearable, like knives carving into their minds.
At the center of the square, the animals came to a sudden halt.
Their limbs stiffened. Blood ran from their nostrils and mouths, pooling around the stakes until the ground ran slick and dark.
Boom... Boom...
The tremors returned, stronger now.
The ground quaked like something massive was charging beneath it, like titanic beasts galloping below the surface.
Far off, watching from a cliffside, stood two figures: Ryan and Kai'Sa.
Kai'Sa narrowed her eyes, her voice sharp with disdain.
"The Void's scent is thick in the air. They're coming."
She knew that presence all too well.
After years of surviving among Void creatures, she could recognize their approach instinctively.
Ryan, expression unreadable, said nothing.
His eyes flickered with rune-blue light, though no magic radiated from him.
In his magical perception, the earth wasn't just shaking.
Beneath the ground—deep, deeper than most could imagine—a swarm of Voidborn was closing in on the village.
They weren't mindless.
They moved with purpose, like a trained horde.
Kai'Sa turned her gaze back toward the village, her expression tense.
"Lord Ryan... if I act now, what happens to them?"
Her eyes, sharpened by years in the dark, saw even from afar.
The ground in the center of the ritual site had begun to crack.
Thin black fissures spread across the earth, releasing a dense, unnatural pressure.
A dreadful aura poured from the depths below.
She knew this sign.
It was the harbinger of the Void's arrival.
The second skin Kai'Sa wore—a carapace that once belonged to a Void creature—had long fused with her body. It was both armor and warning.
Everything she had become—the strength, the speed, the awareness—she owed to the very thing that haunted this world.
And now, that same horror was clawing its way to the surface.
At that moment, in Kai'Sa's perception, nothing emerging from the fissure felt threatening.
To her, they were just insects—vermin she could crush without effort.
Ryan glanced at her from the side, his voice calm as ever.
"Whether or not I find the Prophet... this place will fall. They won't survive. They won't go inland. They'll die here."
When he said 'they,' he was referring to the villagers.
Last night, he had given them a choice.
The presence behind the Voidspawn feared Ryan and Kai'Sa.
That much, the villagers had suspected.
But none of them came forward. No one asked for help.
Kai'Sa's body tensed. She understood what Ryan meant.
The moment the two of them appeared here, the village's fate had already been sealed.
Forced or not, these people had made their choice.
And by doing so, they no longer belonged to the world of humans.
"I understand, Lord Ryan."
Kai'Sa's gaze shifted to the growing crack in the ground, where voidborn began to emerge.
She drew in a deep breath.
Snap!
She broke free from Ryan's levitation spell and dropped from the air, hitting the ground hard. Without hesitation, she sprinted toward the village.
As she ran, her body transformed—her shoulders extended into wing-shaped carapaces, glowing faintly with pulsing purple light.
The moment the transformation completed, arcs of Void energy surged forward.
Two bursts of violet light—like condensed stars—fired from the carapace.
They lit up the night sky like flares, trailing long, shimmering tails of energy behind them.
The signal was unmistakable: the battle had begun.
Kai'Sa knew what she had to do.
To give Ryan the time he needed to find the Prophet... she had to hold the line.
Fwhoosh!
The two orbs of light screamed through the air and struck the ground near the crack.
From deep below, a chaotic roar echoed upward as Voidspawn flooded out from the abyss.
The sound alone was enough to split minds, raw and invasive.
The two projectiles detonated with surgical precision.
BOOM!
The explosions rippled outward like purple firestorms.
No Void creature was thrown; they were vaporized, reduced to puddles of viscous purple fluid that hissed and steamed as they spread.
Black mist curled from the carnage, thick and choking.
The sacrificial livestock and wooden stakes were obliterated in the blast.
There was nothing left but scorched, smoldering ground.
Kai'Sa landed in the village like a bolt of lightning, cloaked in void-adapted armor.
Her movement blurred, streaks of violet marking each leap and turn.
She ignored the panicked villagers. She didn't flinch at Karu's shrieks of rage or fear.
She moved without hesitation, vaulting through alleys and past huts, diving straight into the swarm of Voidspawn.
Her shoulder-mounted weapons gleamed again, firing a fresh barrage of void energy into the creatures.
Under the dark sky, the air flashed with bursts of color—an eerie purple glow illuminating the writhing forms of her enemies.
One after another, they disintegrated in her wake.
It was like a performance—sound, light, destruction.
Everywhere Kai'Sa moved, enemies fell and faded into the dirt.
Their corpses dissolved, feeding her momentum.
She had survived the Void.
She had taken its power and reshaped it.
The Void could destroy.
So could she.
The Void couldn't feel.
But she could.
Her presence disrupted everything.
The Void had come to feast on sacrifice. Instead, it found resistance.
Rumble—
RUMBLE—
Two violent quakes tore through the village.
The fissure at the center widened, spreading out like a spider's web until it formed a massive pit.
Kai'Sa reappeared at the edge, glowing faintly in the dim light.
She stepped forward, standing firm at the brink, and looked down into the chasm.
Her breath caught.
Inside the enormous hollow were countless Voidspawn, densely packed and heaving in layers.
Not massive titans—but crab-like horrors with four legs, armored in black and purple carapace.
They skittered and hissed, clawing over one another.
Hideous. Endless.
Some looked up and saw her. They screeched eagerly, then began climbing, stepping over their kin to reach her.
Burn. Consume. Devour.
A tide that never stopped.
It was like staring into a pit of hell, like watching a locust swarm surge across a golden field in autumn.
No mercy. No pause.
Only hunger.
"Dirty betrayer…"
Kai'Sa's voice was low, her teeth clenched as she spat out the words with fury.
Disgust flashed in her eyes.
Without hesitation, she blurred into motion again, darting across the battlefield, tearing through Voidspawn with surgical precision.
Each blast, each strike, was fueled not just by survival, but by hatred.
She loathed the betrayers—those who had once been human but surrendered themselves to the Void.
Even more than the mindless horrors of the Void, it was these traitors she despised.
Because she understood the Void.
She knew the creatures of that abyss had no concept of loyalty or dominance.
Enslavement wasn't part of their nature.
That, ironically, was something only mortals did to one another.
So when she saw organized behavior—coordinated attack patterns—it meant one thing:
Someone was controlling them.
Someone like her.
Someone who the Void had touched… but instead of resisting, chose to embrace it.
Did that person not realize what the Void would take?
It would consume everything: emotion, body, beauty, memory, civilization, history, soul.
Everything known would be devoured—just nourishment for the Void's endless evolution.
And yet someone had chosen to feed it.
"Help…! Help! Help me!"
The monstrous swarm rising from the pit finally shattered the villagers' composure.
As the Voidspawn surged forward, the villagers scattered in panic, eyes darting toward Kai'Sa—once feared, now their only hope.
They fled in every direction, praying that the sacrificial beasts would buy them time.
But they didn't know the truth.
Those cattle, sheep, and chickens had already perished—vaporized by the first salvo of Kai'Sa's attack.
Their blood now mingled with the ichor of the Void.
The chaos spread quickly.
Some villagers, too slow or unlucky, were overwhelmed and devoured.
Others managed to flee, but the psychic screeching of the Void broke their minds.
They staggered and screamed, descending into madness.
Wails and shrieks rang out—terrified, animalistic.
Just like the cries at the start of the sacrifice.
It was as if the ceremony had looped, starting anew, but now with human victims.
The only constant was destruction.
Explosions shook the earth. Voidspawn howled. The air itself trembled.
The world was unraveling.
Yet on a nearby mound, one figure stood motionless.
Ryan.
He remained composed, unmoved by the carnage below.
His eyes glowed a bright, rune-blue, nearly incandescent, as he scanned the battlefield.
His gaze passed over rooftops, through the soil, sweeping the terrain like a precision instrument.
His target had yet to appear.
The Voidspawn, after their initial frenzy, began to regroup. Their movements became more focused and coordinated.
They split into formations and pushed into the village with unnatural order.
Someone was directing them.
They weren't trying to destroy Kai'Sa.
They were trying to trap her.
To cut off every escape route.
This kind of precise control… it could only be the work of another Void-linked mind.
One watching through the creatures' eyes.
One shaping the battle from the shadows.
And magic—true magic—could reveal the source.
The light in Ryan's eyes pulsed brighter.
He locked on—one mile east, buried deep underground.
There it was.
Without delay, he raised his hand—fingers splayed, magic already coiling at his fingertips...