Nanashi look at the small settlement and then took in the view of the world, before his eyes shifted and finally locked on to the figure on the corpse mountain, his voice gave chills as he called out
"Mandatory Spirit"
The Figure atop the Corpse mountain, The General Mandatory Spirit did not move. He sat atop his mountain of dead, head tilted, the void in his eyes still as before
"Mandatory Spirit," Nanashi said again, and this time the words invoked some kind of power, the skeletal soldiers in the air froze mid-flight, silver bone catching the light like a thousand broken mirrors.
The General Mandatory Spirit rose slowly his steps like thunder, Robes drifting in the air,
"That title,"
the General said his voice steel dragging on steel, His voice is quiet, almost sad.
"hasn't been spoken since before you drew your first breath feathered pigeon."
Then the Imperial Robes on him slid off like a shed skin, imperial silk sloughing off like dead skin, and underneath was not bone anymore,
Tall and unnaturally lean, he possessed the kind of beauty that felt distant, His skin was deathly pale, not sickly, but smooth, Messy black hair fell carelessly around his face, strands drifting over his forehead and shadowing his eyes.
The upper left side of his face had no skin.
From his brow to the edge of his cheekbone, blackened bone remained exposed, scorched dark like something burned long ago and never allowed to heal. The empty hollow where an eye should have been was not truly empty.
Something moved inside, a faint ember like glow, Below the ruin, the rest of his face remained unsettlingly handsome, pale lips often curved into the faintest hint of amusement. His hands were pale and elegant, Six fingers on each hand. The fingers slightly longer than normal.
The mountain of corpses beneath him sank an inch,
"ahhhhaahh, Mandatory Spirit,"
the thing that was no longer a Corpse General agreed.
"The Cursed Emperor sealed me under skin and titles so I'd forget what I was." The red fire flared.
"ahhhh....., u just reminded me of me, it feels so good to be here again"
Above, the Angels of Vengeance loosed their first volley.
Gold string bows sang in unison, a sound like a thousand funeral bells struck at once, and the arrows that followed didn't fly so much as fall , each one a line of burning judgment drawn straight down into the skeletal horde. Bone met fire and a canopy of destruction, soldiers caught mid air collapsing into silver ash before the sound even left them.
The corpse army answered the only way it knew, with unbridled ferocity
Thousands of skeletal soldiers, soldiers that had been farmers, soldiers, children an hour ago, threw themselves upward in a wave of bone and silver, not formations, not tactics, just mass, the same way the General had described it: collect more, unleash carnage. They didn't dodge the arrows. They didn't need to. For every ten that burned away, a hundred more were already climbing the air toward the Angels, claws outstretched, jaws unhinging wider than any jaw should.
It was hell on earth, again, but now hell had wings on both sides.
One of the Angels of Vengeance broke formation, a corpse-soldier, small, child-sized, jaw unhinged wider than its skull, had latched onto his wing, claws sinking through chain and feather alike. The Angel didn't scream. He simply turned his bow inward, point blank, and the corpse-child became ash and silver rain.
He didn't have time to feel anything about it. Three more were already climbing toward him.
Below, the corpse mountain's shifted again, vomiting more of itself skyward the dead becoming the dead's weapons, an endless tide with nothing more than ferocity directing it.
Nanashi didn't watch his Angels, His eyes where trained on Mandatory Spirit.
The first blow came without warning, Mandatory Spirit simply was in front of him, faster than the eye should allow, one smoking claw raking for Nanashi's throat. Nanashi's bow came up, blackened metal meeting the claw with a sound like a mountain cracking, and the shockwave of it pushed Angels and Corpse Soldiers alike around away
"You came alone," Mandatory Spirit said, almost gently, like he was disappointed. "You came down here, into a war that isn't yours, for them." A claw gestured lazily toward the praying settlement below, still untouched,
"Do you know what's beneath us, angel? Do you know what hears when something like me finally says its real name out loud?"
Nanashi said nothing. He drew the bow.
The string, chains wrapped in burning gold, pulled taut, and the air itself seemed to bend toward the arrowhead, light folding inward like the world was being swallowed by the point of it.
Mandatory Spirit grinned, "There it is. The Promise to Mankind. Let's see if it's still worth keeping, after ten thousand years of silence."
Nanashi released.
The arrow didn't streak, it simply arrived, a column of red white light punching through the space Mandatory Spirit's chest had occupied a heartbeat ago, vaporizing a kilometer of corpse-mountain behind him into glass. The shockwave alone took out three hundred skeletal soldiers mid-flight, their silver bodies flash-melting into rain.
But Mandatory Spirit wasn't there anymore.
He was behind Nanashi now, claw already buried to the wrist in the angel's side, black smoke pouring from the wound where gold light should have been. Nanashi didn't cry out. He simply turned his head, slow, eyes like red ash meeting two points of dull crimson fire, and for the first time, something in Mandatory Spirit's stance shifted,
Nanashi's free hand closed around the General's wrist,
And the world went white.
When the light cleared, the corpse-mountain was gone not destroyed, gone, a perfect hemisphere of nothing where it had stood, the edges of the crater still glowing faint gold. The Angels of Vengeance hung frozen in the air above, the remaining skeletal soldiers scattered and burning, the battlefield reduced to smoke and silence and the distant sound of the old woman still praying, voice hoarse, refusing to stop
Nanashi stood alone in the crater, Bleeding black smoke from his side, Wings slightly opened
Mandatory Spirit was gone,
Not dead, he wasn't, Nanashi knew he wasn't dead, dead didn't leave just like that a cold that crawled up through the soles of his feet and into his chest, He looked down. At his feet, scratched into the glass melted stone in a script older than the Court itself, a single phrase, already fading,
We'll finish this where I belong~Mandotary Spirit~
Nanashi's eyes lifted. Past the smoke, past the settlement, past the horizon, toward the cracks in the world that led down, and down, and further down still, to where the depths waited.
His twenty four wings spread covering the world
He didn't look back at the people he'd saved, nor at his Angles, with a swing of his bow he swept himself up in the air and disappeared into the depths of the world where no light that was holy touched upon the place
He stepped into the depths, and the world swallowed him whole.