"My Lord"
The cloaked figure appeared beside Maximus and saluted, giving him a towel to clean the blood off his body.
"My lord, may I ask why you fight like this?" the man asked in a respectful but still confused voice. "This is not your usual fighting style."
"What did you see?" Maximus replied with a question, his eyes were still scarlet as he turned, waiting for a reply.
The man in the black cloak did not need to think before answering. He had memorized his master's way of fighting inside his bones and every little move, but for the past fifteen years and only against monsters did Maximus' style change.
"I saw lord's unfamiliar barbarian style, a raging battle of a berserker, quick but with no rhythm and grace. However..." the man hesitated before finally saying what bothered him, "... I could sense that it wasn't your true self. It appeared to me that you were pretending to be savage."
"..." Maximus smiled. It wasn't an evil smile, nor a sadistic one, or even a happy one. But he was genuinely amused and happy that his student noticed.
He reached out and took the towel, wiping the blood from his jaw, his collarbone, and the slick rivulets that ran like warpaint down his abs. The towel was soaked before he'd finished half his body. Still, he continued the motion with deliberate care, as if the act itself was a return to something quieter.
The wind had begun to calm. The crater still steamed. 80% of the monster horde lay dead, more than ten thousand lives ended in a few minutes, and the rest managed to escape only because Maximus allowed it.
"You've been watching me well," Maximus said, voice low but rich with pride.
"Tell me what monsters truly fear?" he asked with a mysterious gaze.
"The Blood Queen," the man in the cloak replied instantly. It was not because he was being quick, but because there was only one answer.
"Indeed," Maximus' smile widened as if he was recalling a good old time, but his face instantly darkened. "The Blood Queen is no more, so we need a replacement quickly before the monsters grow balls and attack our city."
The weight of the name—the Blood Queen—hung in the air like iron dust, thick, metallic, and dangerous even in memory.
The cloaked man lowered his head, fists clenched at his sides. Even saying her title summoned the echo of her presence—laughter like razors on silk, a silhouette of carnage and seduction carved from the blood itself. She hadn't just fought monsters. She terrified them. She turned fear into a weapon sharper than any blade and made entire battalions of humans and monsters flee at the mere scent of her approach.
And now she is gone.
Maximus turned his gaze to the battlefield, to the mutilated husks of nightmares he'd just culled, to the ones that had fled into the mist. Their survival was not a mercy. It was a message.
"Her absence is an open wound," Maximus said, staring into the horizon. "They're testing us. Pushing farther each month. Small horde raids. Harvester-class incursions. Just enough to feel bold, not enough to trigger the full response."
He glanced at his student, eyes narrowing with a molten edge.
"And if they're brave enough to test the mountain, it means they've already started to forget her."
A silence passed, not just between them—but in the world. As if something sacred had been violated, and as her son, her firstborn, he cannot allow that.
"Let's go back," he finally said, his tone turning to business.
"Yes, sir"
...
After a few minutes.
Maximus and his cloaked companion stood before an imposing structure: a colossal black wall that stretched 700 feet into the sky.
The Black Aegis, a monolith of obsidian and enchantment, is the last and greatest defense of the human domain. Its surface shimmered faintly under the twilight sun, ancient runes embedded across its face glowing like molten veins, pulsing with protective power drawn from the ley-lines buried deep below the earth.
The wall didn't just stand—it watched.
Every stone was inscribed with warding sigils, every inch layered in defensive magic so dense it distorted the air around it. Towers rose along its length like silent sentinels, manned by elite rangers and arcane tacticians, their forms barely visible against the blackened backdrop. Massive cannons hummed softly, each a relic from the Age of Old, their barrels etched with the names of fallen cities, aimed forever outward toward the monstrous territories.
Beyond the wall—the Waste. The rest of the destroyed world.
A dead land of red mist, shifting shadows, and endless threats.
Before it—The Crimson City. The Capital.
And the home Maximus had sworn to protect.
"MY LORD!" The soldiers at the gate did not salute. They knelt.
As Maximus and his cloaked companion approached, the command channel hummed to life in the air around them. Voices layered in magical projection filled the space like a chamber choir made of urgency.
[Confirmed: Sector Delta clean. Crater depth: 37 meters. Aura readings... still active. Spirits above…]
[Maximus has returned. Prepare the debrief.]
[Send word to High Command. And... notify the Council of the Red Seat. They'll want to know he... *Bizz*... CAN'T YOU BE MORE CAREFUL MAXIMUS!]
"..."
Maximus paid none of it any mind. He knew the owner of the voice very well and... nothing good would come from speaking with an angry woman.
He approached the center of the massive gate where a black platform began to rise—summoned by his presence alone. It lifted both men high, above the battlements, above the patrols, until they stood at the very peak of the wall. From there, the world could be seen in halves:
Behind them, cities. Civilization. Light.
Before them, desolation. Nightmares.
And monsters that had started to 'believe' again.
Maximus stared into the horizon. His cloak whipped behind him. The lion's form flickered, only partly visible now as if unsettled by the encroaching night. Something stirred out there. Something intelligent. Watching.
"Come if you dare," he spoke with a domineering tone. His words felt ancient, earthen, soaked in authority.
Grrr
The lion's rumbling growl echoed out.
"If you want a piece, show your fangs the next time."
Maximus spent a few minutes just watching the landscape. No one dared speak to him, and his subordinates were silent, waiting for his orders. He took another platform down, heading toward the massive castle in the center.
The guards there didn't kneel. They simply tilted their heads slightly and stepped aside. No more, no less.
Maximus didn't mind this gesture and simply kept walking toward his destination. These knights were special.
Genetically modified humans with the power of magic and science, each one was a massive warrior of 7-8 feet tall, built for endurance, precision, and absolute loyalty. Their armor was unlike standard military issue: forged from soul-tempered alloy, layered in obsidian mesh, and inscribed with deep-buried oaths older than history itself. Red runes pulsed faintly beneath their plates, synchronized with the rhythmic thrum of the city's Heart Engine buried deep below the capital.
They didn't bow because they didn't need to. These were the Crimson Sentinels, the keepers of the Inner Citadel. The Blood Queen's personal elite guard. She crafted them by hand with the help of his father, who was in fact Lilith pretending to be a man.
Maximus passed through the colonnade without a word, boots echoing against Blackstone floors polished like glass. The air inside the castle was different—cool, thick with incense and ambient aether. Red banners still hung from vaulted ceilings, bearing one of her many sigils: a sword wrapped in thorns, dripping with endless blood. No one had dared take them down.
His footsteps led him to the throne room, and the moment he pushed the door open, spikes and spears made from ice and frost flew directly at him.
THUD! THUD!
Maximus didn't avoid them or defend them. He just let them pierce his flesh, sticking on him as a show of challenge. He took a step forward, entering the throne room where more spears of frost came, aiming at his arms, legs, neck, and groin.
"Sister, it's me."
Only when he spoke a word, did the frosty attacks disappear, and Maximus was able to reach the center of the room, where a woman with long white hair was sitting on the frozen floor next to a glass coffin.
"Sister?" Maximus walked closer and repeated with a much softer tone, but the woman didn't turn her head. She sat motionless, knees drawn to her chest, white robes spread across the frost like snow-drenched silk. Her hair flowed down her back like a river of moonlight, shimmering faintly in the dim aura that hung around the coffin.
"Hello, Mother."
At its center, sealed in perfect stillness, surrounded by rose petals suspended in the preserved aether, lay the Blood Queen herself.
Morgana.
Her form is untouched by death. As if merely sleeping. Yet it was incomplete, only her head was inside the glass coffin—the rest was taken.
The woman finally turned her head. Her eyes were winter incarnate—irises pale blue, rimmed in white frost. Tears hadn't fallen. They'd frozen beneath her lashes. She didn't weep. She never had. Not since that day. And for the past fifteen years, she did nothing but stay next to her mother, sealing her remains with ice magic.
"You shouldn't be here," she said softly.
Maximus said nothing for a moment. Then he lowered himself to one knee beside her, ignoring the bite of the frost beneath his skin, before taking his sister into a warm embrace.
"Did you find who did this to her?"
"..."
This was the question that Maximus feared and hated the most, for it wasn't simple. He knew who did this to their mother. But he's afraid to say—or maybe, he was in denial, unable to accept the fact that their second brother killed their own mother.
"No, I'm still looking."