The sky tore open like parchment.
The creature of light — the 8th Law: REMOVAL — descended, slow and absolute, trailing threads of unraveling existence behind it.
Where its touch passed, names were swallowed.
Mountains lost their history.
The sea forgot its tides.
And on the broken crater of the Blighted Coast, Raen and Dareth stood — two men written out of history, facing the very force that had devoured them once before.
---
Raen gripped his sword tighter.
It wasn't fear he felt.
It was rage.
A cold, burning rage that screamed in the hollow of his bones.
> "You erased me once."
"You won't do it again."
Beside him, Dareth's hands sparked, unstable lightning crawling up his arms as his breathing grew ragged.
> "We can't beat that," Dareth muttered.
"That thing isn't alive, Raen. It's conceptual. It deletes."
Raen smirked without humor.
> "Good."
He raised his sword.
> "Then let's remind it who we are."
---
REMOVAL moved.
It didn't attack with fists.
It unwrote reality.
Raen felt it — a pulling at his chest, at his memories, trying to peel his existence apart.
He roared — not words, not spells — just raw will, slamming his sword into the ground.
The crater pulsed.
For a heartbeat — the world remembered him.
---
Dareth charged first.
Lightning roared around him as he threw everything forward — arcs of chainfire, spears of plasma, ancient techniques once hailed across kingdoms.
It didn't matter.
The bolts touched REMOVAL's light…
…and vanished without a sound.
Dareth skidded back, teeth gritted.
> "It's erasing the magic itself—!"
Raen didn't hesitate.
He lunged through the broken air, blade spinning, carving through the currents of deletion.
His sword burned with memoryfire — the last flame in a world of forgetting.
He slashed.
And for the first time—
REMOVAL flinched.
---
The Arc Keepers gasped from above, their perfect formation breaking.
The woman in light — the one leading them — screamed in a language older than sound.
> "He carries a Forbidden Core!"
Raen didn't hear her.
He pressed forward.
Every swing was a prayer written not to gods, but to the self he refused to lose.
> I am Raen Val'torren.
I am the hero you tried to forget.
I am the flame you cannot drown.
---
But the Law fought back.
REMOVAL raised a single thread — shimmering with the force of a million lost names — and sliced across the sky.
The ground behind Raen ceased to exist.
A direct hit, and even his soul would be erased.
Dareth screamed.
> "RAEN—!!"
---
Time slowed.
The sword hummed.
Raen knew.
He wouldn't survive the next strike.
Not without giving something up.
---
> Choose, the sword whispered.
Memory... or victory.
If he unleashed the full memoryfire...
He could cut through REMOVAL.
But it would cost him.
Pieces of himself — the few fragments still left from the boy who believed in heroes — would burn away.
He would win.
But lose… himself.
---
Raen laughed under his breath.
Of course it was never easy.
Of course it demanded a price.
> "Fine," he whispered to the storm.
"If I'm going to burn..."
He raised the sword high.
> "...then I'm burning brighter than any crown."
---
The sword ignited.
The crater shook.
The sky remembered.
For the first time in centuries, the world spoke his true name:
> "Raen Val'torren."
---
He moved.
One step.
One breath.
One swing.
And the world split open.
---
REMOVAL screamed.
A soundless scream that tore the stars and cracked the bones of reality.
Raen's blade cut through the Law — severing concept, burning through the decree that said he could not exist.
Light exploded outward, devouring the Arc Keepers in a tide of white fire.
The woman in light vanished, her final scream swallowed by the new dawn.
---
When it ended, Raen fell to his knees, gasping, trembling.
Dareth staggered to his side, catching him before he hit the ash.
Around them, the coast was silent.
No Arc Keepers.
No Law.
Only two broken men.
And the empty sky, weeping silver rain.
---
Raen smiled faintly, blood trailing from his mouth.
> "We're still here," he whispered.
Dareth laughed weakly.
> "Damn right we are."
They sat there — not as kings, not as gods — but as two men the world tried to erase, sitting beneath a sky that no longer knew what to call them.
> Survivors.
> Brothers.
> Unwritten.