The air crackled with malice, and the glint of their weapons was a promise of swift, brutal violence. The initial wave crashed over them. Augustus moved like a shadow, Eleonoré a burst of focused light, a perfect, brutal synergy. Blades clashed, crude shouts mixed with the hiss of void energy and the chime of holy steel. Augustus, his eyes narrowed, moved with cold precision, his Greatsword a black blur that left men stunned and gasping, their very life force momentarily leached away.
As a crude axe, hurled with surprising force, spun through the air towards him, Augustus's left hand moved with impossible speed. He pulled out a heavy, dark-metallic revolving pistol of substantial caliber. The weapon's design was archaic yet potent, a six-chambered cylinder ready to unleash significant force. The shot was precise and instantaneous. It wasn't aimed at the bandit who threw it, but struck the axe's haft with a sharp crack that redirected its trajectory. With a sickening thud, the axe spun wildly off course and pierced deep into the chest of another bandit who had been rushing Eleonoré from the flank.
Eleonoré, weaving with paladin grace, deflected strikes with her sword and retaliated with holy fire that cauterized wounds before they could fully bloom.
But the sheer numbers pressed in, and in the chaos,
one particularly brutish bandit, driven by a fanatic's zeal, managed to slip through their defenses.
He lunged, a snarling beast, his blade arcing down, his target...The baby...aimed with sickening precision at the most vulnerable point imaginable: Aurené's head...As the bandit, an inch close in front of Aurené's hair to his blade.....
there
followed
a faint cracking sound.
Impossible speed.
The background became white as if it was the purgatory.
Both parents, their eyes now stripped of their usual hues, unmatched white light, burning with a pure, terrible wrath
appeared simultaneously from opposite sides.
Their blades,
one forged from nothingness and the other gleaming with holy light,
met in a perfect,
horrifying
cross-cut through the bandit.
The man's snarl was choked off, The twin blades, moving with agonizing slowness, carved a precise, gruesome path across his skull. From crown to jaw, the steel sunk in, parting bone and flesh. His eyes, fixed in a final, horrified stare, bulged and then began to distort, pulled by the grotesque parting of his own head. A torrent of crimson erupted, a macabre fountain staining the air, splattering the ground, and coating the very blades that continued their deliberate, relentless cut, splitting him in a silent, utterly complete devastation.
A soft whimper escaped Aurené's lips, not from the grotesque sight, but from the raw surge of protective power that had emanated from her parents. Her tiny fingers clutched at the air, as if grasping at the fading remnants of their power
Eleonoré, her face a mask of fierce devotion, snatched the child into a tighter embrace, her luminous gaze sweeping the remaining bandits, like the speed of light, promising a fate worse than death should they dare another move.
Augustus, his head snapped up. His eyes, glowing fiercely, fixed on the remaining bandits. A raw, guttural sound tore from his throat, not his usual booming command, but something chillingly clear:
"Singularity..."
The earth shuddered as enormous power took hold.
the enigmatic scar over his right eye, which had always remained sealed, began to visibly regenerate, the dark runes pulsing and burning away the suppression. From the void, a swirling vortex of absolute blackness erupted, materializing in the air before him. Reality buckled around it.
A high-pitched whine tore through the air as the singularity, began to assert its terrible will. Time itself distorted, stretching and snapping around the remaining bandits. Their screams elongated, becoming guttural moans as their forms began to warp. Limbs twisted into impossible pretzels, faces elongated like melting wax, and the very ground beneath them rippled and flowed. As they were inexorably drawn into the swirling maw, a voice, deep and resonant yet tinged with an ancient, cold finality – a voice that seemed to emanate from the very void within Augustus – echoed through the agonizing distortion:
"I am the truth of silence. Even light screams into it, unheard."
They were not merely being mangled; they were being unmade, their existence pulled into the hungry, temporal maw of the void.
Eleonoré watched, transfixed. Terror coiled in her veins—yet beneath it, fiercer still, the unshakable pull of him. The raw, unfiltered power of Augustus's true might was something she had only glimpsed. This was annihilation on a cosmic scale, wielded with a terrifying, protective precision, and born from a single, wrathful word. The vortex consumed the last of the screaming bandits, leaving behind only fractured air and a lingering sense of displaced time.
With the threat utterly vanished, Eleonoré collapsed to her knees, burying her face in Aurené's hair. Her body trembled, a raw mix of terror from the close call and an almost unbearable relief that her child was safe. Augustus stood over them, unmoving, a guardian carved from void and vengeance. The scar appeared once more, but the aftershocks of his wrath resonated through the very fabric of the world. The silence that followed was absolute, broken only by Aurené's soft, rhythmic breaths,
and the palpable absence of those who had dared to touch what was sacred.