The bastion sits deserted and deathly silent under the pitch-black blanket of the night. Inside the central chamber, tension hangs like a suffocating mist that steals the breath from everyone present. Everyone sits huddled close together, eyes fixed tightly on the cold stone floor, consumed by uncertainty.
Ren breaks the heavy, oppressive silence, his voice trembling but filled with a deep, pure hope. “My father always used to say… when things are at their darkest, you light a small wooden stick. You let the smoke curl up toward the heavens. That is how the gods hear you. That is how they show the fallen the way home.”
Outside the window, deep in the infinite, thin void of the starry sky, a bright, flashing streak suddenly lights up. A fireball cuts through the clouds at insane speed, leaving a glowing trail behind. No one in the bastion has the slightest suspicion that the distant blaze is actually the runaway refrigerator to which Silarias, Beat, and Aurelius are clinging at Mach 6. From this immense distance, it looks like pure magic.
Nicola bolts upright, pointing at the glass with an intense glimmer in her eyes. Her voice cracks completely with pure hype, determined to instill courage. “Look! Guys, look! A falling star! That’s the sign! Make a wish, right now! Anything you want, the gods are listening!”
Miki and Ren storm toward the window simultaneously, their faces pressed tight against the cold glass. Thick tears stream down their cheeks, shimmering in the light of the distant trail of fire. They squeeze their eyes shut and fold their hands together, trembling in a desperate prayer.
“Please, let them come back soon…” Miki whispers with a massive lump in her throat, her voice breaking with emotion. “Let Silarias, Beat, and Aurelius be safe. We miss them so terribly… Bring them home!”
Thousands of kilometers away, a unique, breathtaking city lies in the Ward. It is a stunning melting pot where the visual splendor of our world flows together: the imposing, giant domes and lively markets combined with steep, impassable mountain landscapes and vast, rugged plains. Beautifully detailed stone houses adorn the steep mountain faces, while hundreds of colored prayer flags flutter wildly and noisily in the harsh mountain wind.
But the peace in this paradise has been bloodily excised.
On the central square stands a brutal, psychopathic warlord named Olivier. He is the newest, ruthless recruit of the Corrupted Prince, sent to sow fear. Behind his back floats a monstrous, grotesque floating beast, an organic weapon that makes the entire air around it shimmer with pure, purple-black destructive energy. All the food, the winter supplies, every precious possession, and every gold coin of the terrified population are stacked in heavy, wooden carts.
The citizens are kneeling en masse in the dirty dust, their courage completely lost, begging for mercy.
“Knock it off, your time is officially up!” Olivier spits with an arrogant, nauseating grin, while raising his hand toward the floating monster with a theatrical gesture. “This infernal creature will wipe your entire miserable history away in one fell swoop. No survivors. No mercy. This is the price you pay for opposing the Corrupted Prince! Beast, devour them!”
The floating monster opens its gaping, tooth-filled maw. A blinding, crackling purple-black energy surge builds up in the creature’s throat with a screeching sound, ready to reduce the entire square to a sea of ash. The citizens close their eyes, crying, waiting for death.
SCREEEEEECH!
The beast lets out an icy, eardrum-shattering screech that is abruptly cut off mid-way by a brutal, extraterrestrial impact.
The gigantic, white-hot glowing steel refrigerator on chariot wheels comes shooting straight out of the stratosphere like a released meteor. With the brutal impact of a nuclear blast, the contraption slams head-on into the floating monster. The creature doesn’t know what hit it. The energy built up in its throat has nowhere to go, collapses entirely inward, and explodes with a nauseating shockwave. Blood, entrails, and organic remains splash across the entire square.
The refrigerator plows meters deep into the ancient stone floor with a terrifying screech of metal and splashing sparks, leaving behind a smoking crater. The entire vanguard of Olivier’s heavily armed troops is crushed and reduced to fine dust by the brutal air pressure in a single blow.
Olivier staggers backward with large steps, rancid blood splatters all over his face. His arrogant gaze shifts within a fraction of a second into total, insane bewilderment. “What… what kind of godforsaken madness is this?! How is this possible?! A… a refrigerator?!”
Three figures step out of the heavily smoking steel crater. Their faces are completely covered in black soot, their clothes are torn, but their eyes glow with an unadulterated, brutal lust for battle.
Olivier loses his mind immediately. The humiliation eats at his pride, and his body begins to mutate in a terrifying way under the extreme rage. “You dirty maggots will pay!” he roars. Golden, blinding light bursts through his skin with brutal force. His muscles swell to monstrous proportions, and a third, piercing eye opens on his forehead with a bloody tear. He transforms on the spot into a gold-shining demigod.
“I AM OLIVIER!” he bellows at the top of his lungs, while the vibrations cause the surrounding mountain wall to tremble. “THE ORIGINAL PRINCE! THE ONLY TRUE ONE IN MY BLOODLINE! THE STRONGEST ENTITY YOU WILL EVER IN YOUR MISERABLE LIVES-”
CLANG!
In the middle of his roaring monologue, he is slapped completely out of his words with a brutal, deafening blow. Aurelius flashes forward with a blood-red light beam and rams the flat back of his sword blade full into Olivier’s jaw with the force of a hydraulic hammer. The golden light shatters into thousands of fragments. “Shut your mouth and fly,” Aurelius mutters. Olivier shoots sideways into the air like a launched doll, his teeth breaking under the impact.
Before he even gets the chance to fall, Beat flashes above him in his brand-new, cobalt-blue Oni mode like a possessed lightning bolt. “Not so fast, princess!” Beat screeches. With a brutal, upward kick from his extra arms, he launches the groaning demigod much higher into the clouds at breakneck speed.
High in the air, floating between the clouds, Silarias is already waiting. His heavy gauntlets are roaring and whining with the deep-blue, heavy fire that melts the entire air resistance. He locks his gaze onto the approaching target and pulls his fist back with a brutal swing.
“My turn,” Silarias growls with a voice like thunder.
With a brutal underhand punch that shatters the sound barrier for the second time that day with a loud sonic boom, he rams Olivier straight into his stomach. The visual impact is bizarrely intense: Olivier’s golden form completely implodes under the pressure, his three eyes roll back, and he is shot away at top speed like a scorched, burning comet, far outside the village where he crashes into the mountain wall with a gigantic cloud of dust.
It remains dead silent on the square for a second. The population barely dares to breathe. Then the entire crowd erupts all at once.
“THEY DESTROYED THE MONSTER! WE ARE FREE!” the citizens shout, embracing each other while weeping with joy.
Hundreds of people jump up, waving their arms wildly in the air between the beautiful, historic roofs. Tears of pure relief stream down the faces of the rescued child slaves and villagers. They scream out of pure happiness and celebrate their sudden freedom, while the three warriors sit down on the smoking refrigerator, exhausted but with broad, satisfied grins.
Mayor Ishna crawls with great difficulty from under a large pile of stones and wooden beams. He coughs the dust out of his lungs, straightens his back, and looks with large, glistening eyes at the three strangers who just knocked a demigod into the stratosphere.
“Ehehe… ho-how can I ever thank you?” the man stammers while wiping the sweat from his forehead. “And who are you actually, unknown heroes?”
Silarias, Beat, and Aurelius look at each other immediately. Their gazes cross in a fraction of a second.
Shit, we need to go undercover. No real names.
They frantically start thinking of a fake identity.
Aurelius takes the lead, straightens his back, and says with a dead-serious face: “I am… Photo.”
Silarias is terrified by such a bad name, starts stammering, and looks wildly around him. “Yes… eh… ehh… I am Flamo.”
Beat looks at the two and gives them a quick, arrogant wink.
Got you
, he thinks. He puts on his most confident grin and steps forward. “And I am… Beto. Hehe.”
Silarias and Aurelius slap their hands flat against their own faces simultaneously. Beto? Flamo, Photo, and Beto? What kind of shitty, ugly names are these?
The mayor, however, looks at them full of admiration and begins to speak with almost idiotic enthusiasm. “Oh, beautiful names! Truly, never heard them before! Very exotic, too! Photo, Flamo, and Beto… it sounds like music to my ears!”
Beat has to struggle to keep from screaming with laughter. He is cracking up inside at the pure stupidity of the situation.
The man bows deeply to the trio. “I am Mayor Ishna of this place. You have just saved our entire city from an absolute slaughter. You will be richly rewarded! We will celebrate!”
His face immediately falls, however, and his voice sinks into his boots with full disappointment. “But… the unfortunate thing is… our money… Olivier’s troops already took a large part of our treasury to the Corrupted Prince. And because of that gigantic explosion just now… almost all of our stored food has been destroyed or ruined. We have almost nothing left to make it through the winter.”
Silarias, Beat, and Aurelius look at each other.
Ehh, wait a minute.
Without a word, the three gentlemen walk synchronously back to the smoking crater. They jump into the deep hole, put their shoulders under the heavy steel contraption, and the three of them lift the gigantic refrigerator upward. With a brutal swing, they throw the thing out of the crater, right in front of the mayor’s feet. The doors fly open, revealing the gigantic stockpile of Inquisitor delicacies and food that miraculously survived the impact. It is practically bursting with luxury products.
Mayor Ishna falls directly to his knees in the dust. He folds his hands together and begins to pray aloud with tears in his eyes. “You are a gift from above! A blessing that keeps on giving! Thank you, thank you a thousand times! The gods have heard our prayers!”
Beat steps forward and places a hand on the man’s trembling shoulder. “Please stop praying. Listen, take us into your village. We need a place to stay. We still have an immense amount to learn and we have to train incredibly hard. Someday… someday kindhearted travelers will arrive here. Until then, we need to stay undercover here.”
Beat looks the mayor straight in the eye. “Take us in as normal citizens. Give us clothes to mutilate and hide ourselves if you have any, and teach us what you know. Who are your best masters here?”
Mayor Ishna looks at the ground for a moment, but then suddenly breaks into a generous, roaring laugh. The concern falls from his face in one fell swoop.
“Well, heroes… then you are absolutely at the right place!” he exclaims, spreading his arms with a wide flourish. “All our very best masters have settled right here in this Ward. The legendary Mahakala, Shiva, Vishnu, Buddha, and Shinto… they are the grandmasters who train our warriors.”
Suddenly, the mayor’s demeanor shifts. Humility gives way to an immense, deep-rooted pride. He straightens his back and looks toward the distant horizon. “Even though this square is now completely in ruins from the blast, this place luckily still has so much more to offer. My realm extends further than your eyes can reach. Just take a good look.”
As renewed ,Photo, Flamo, and Beto step to the very edge of the stone mountain plateau. Beneath their feet, the rock faces drop off perpendicularly into a fathomless, misty depth, but the void between is anything but empty.
Dozens of massive stone temples float completely loose in the thin air, relieved of gravity. The giant roofs are covered with shiny gold and deep-blue mosaic tiles that break what little light there is. Between these floating islands, wide paths of crystal-clear water meander, but the current is completely reversed: thick, liquid streams cascade from the depths in an upward motion, grazing past the floating structures, only to evaporate into the clouds above.
As far as their gaze reaches, the highest, sharp mountain peaks are occupied with immense pagodas and wooden palaces. They are connected by razor-thin stone arch bridges that hang over the chasms. Everywhere along the rugged rock walls, gigantic tree roots break through the stone. The leaves of these trees pulse with a vivid, constant glow that illuminates the mists in soft shades of fuchsia and azure blue. The pure, spiritual energy vibrates so tangibly in the cold air that the hairs on their arms instantly stand on end.
Silarias stares motionless at an upside-down flowing waterfall that shoots upward right past a floating terrace, while the bright neon light of the trees reflects in his pupils.
“Okay…” Beat whispers, as he slowly lets his extra Oni arms disappear into his back and lets his gaze glide over the floating sanctuaries. “This is a whole different ballgame.”