Chapter 637: From Knight to Nightmare
Pontiff Sulyvahn ..that colossal monster who had killed so many and filled their hearts with fear ..was nothing but a plain man whose features were carved with suffering.
His hair was ash-gray, devoured by age. His skin was ghastly pale and hideously darkened from years of living on nothing but tainted blood.
His eyes were wholly red, as if he had wept blood; his bones jutted under shriveled, ulcerated skin.
Those mad eyes of the Pontiff that had terrified so many no longer looked frightening now that their cover was gone ..
they were merely eyes steeped in deep sorrow and utter despair, the eyes of a man whose story few knew.
“Pontiff Sulyvahn… you are living proof the clearest example ..of the demons’ crimes and what they did to humankind,” Frey said, voice cold, as he kept breaking the Pontiff down.
“I know there’s nothing left in those dead eyes but despair and hatred… rage, and suffering.
“You’ve been through so much, and there’s nothing I can give you now but my regret—by ending this wretched torment of yours.”
“So… forgive me.”
SLASH!!!
With a final blow carrying all of Frey’s might, the black blood sprayed more fiercely than ever.
The Pontiff dropped his sword at last and crumpled, no strength left to stand.
His chest cleaved wide open, his eyes gone lifeless.
He looked up at the sky one last time. Its light fell across him, and a glimpse of the past passed before him ..
enough to bring those monstrous eyes back to what they once were, for a single heartbeat.
One second only ..yet it was enough to draw one last tear.
A tear of blood, a farewell that freed him from the curse laid upon him ..
the curse of demon blood.
“Ah… Maria…” From the Pontiff’s lips slipped a whisper ..an old name no one recognized but him, and Frey standing at his side.
“Farewell, Pontiff Sulyvahn.”
To the world ..and to the Empire in particular .. that was the end of a monster who had terrified so many.
Even the Ultras felt much the same toward him; he had butchered countless of them, too.
But only a few knew the true story of the man behind that broken armor.
…
…
…
The demons have always been the vilest and most terrifying race of all.
And humans may be their most prominent recent victims.
Humans are… different marked by a strange capacity to adapt, able to endure and live through whatever conditions they’re thrown into.
That made them the perfect testing ground .. fertile soil waiting to be violated.
And that is exactly what happened, decades ago, when second-generation demonic contracts first appeared.
Where the first generation had been limited to transferring Aura from demon to human, this time they granted blood—
tainted, poisonous blood that amounted to a slow death for humans.
Some died the instant it was injected. Others turned into nightmare creatures. A few survived, adapted, and became powerful demonic contractors.
At the start of the second generation, the Ultras forced their citizens to have that blood injected into their veins for testing. Only a few were spared.
At that time there lived a taciturn, upright knight in an old city called Vekor.
Vekor was a lively city with a name and standing among the Ultras.
Its people were civilized—no different from the Empire’s humans, perhaps even better off.
Pontiff Sulyvahn was the foremost of the knights who guarded that ancient city’s peace.
He was a good man, with a wife and a single beautiful daughter ..a family of three.
Everything was calm. Ordinary. Until the day the second-generation contracts appeared and Vekor’s citizens were forced to have that poison pumped into their bodies.
It was a brutal process. In those dark days, women, children, and men alike were dragged from their homes and hauled to filthy laboratories brimming with that thick, black substance.
Many died.
Others became misshapen, foul beings now known as nightmare creatures.
In those days, Pontiff did everything he could to save his family—and because of his rank in the city, his wife and daughter were exempted from the injections.
In exchange, he was forced to bear their share .. living with an even greater quantity of demon blood rotting in his body.
It was pain. It was hell.
But Pontiff was a warrior with iron nerves, and he endured, even as the process cast its shadow over him, tugging him apart bit by bit.
Later he and the remaining city knights were ordered to hunt the nightmare creatures that kept appearing in greater numbers as the injections continued.
With his own hands with his sword—Pontiff Sulyvahn killed those monsters who had once been people.
People he had lived among. Grown up with.
Night after night he went out to hunt until late, drowning himself in killing and in the reek of foul demon blood.
Sometimes he was so late his wife would go searching for him.
She was clever, and she always found him always calmed him ..
and she never once failed to bring him home.
Despite the demon blood invading his body, Pontiff held on. For his family.
But the killings kept repeating, and every time…
he was made to inject more demon blood.
Pontiff Sulyvahn was not “chosen.” His body was never suited to that blood; only his will kept him going.
But will alone is not always enough. There is a limit to what a human can bear.
Days passed, one after another.
Hunts and injections, again and again, until Pontiff’s mind grew drunk on slaughter, and madness took him piece by piece.
Then, on a cursed moonlit night, Pontiff Sulyvahn lost himself and drowned in the blood of his victims.
The killing was heavy that night. He found himself drinking his victims’ blood and devouring their bodies ..like an animal.
He was gone ..unable to sense time.
He was so late that his wife went out to look for him. As always, she found him ..but this time,
her voice was not enough. The monster he had become was not something words could stop.
And so he did the unthinkable, staining his hands with blood he should never have shed.
Pontiff never truly knew what he did that night. His madness lasted so long that when he finally came to, several days had passed.
When his mind began to work again ..when he realized what his hands had done .. Pontiff felt his world crumble. He rushed home
to find the last member of his family.
He reached his house and found it in chaos; his heart sank.
He went in, searching for his only daughter.
“Maria…”
The house was small; it didn’t take long.
He found her .. and how he wished he hadn’t.
Before him, hanging from a thick rope.
She had taken her own life, her body swaying quietly, all signs of life gone.
Her mother had died at the hands of her father turned monster.
For the child, there was no reason left to live .. especially after their home was attacked later and she barely escaped death anyway.
And so Pontiff Sulyvahn lost the very people he had suffered to protect.
You could even say he caused their deaths with his own hands.
That was the final blow .. the one that took his self, and his mind.
What followed was pure madness.
Madness as he killed everyone he found, spilled their blood, devoured them.
He killed, and killed… and killed anyone who stood in his way,
until he personally slaughtered all the people of his city, then went on to commit a massacre so great the Ultras sealed him off from the world.
His power kept growing as he drank demon blood in grotesque quantities, turning him into a savage beast feared across the world.
This, in brief, was the story of the broken knight whose life Frey Starlight brought to an end ..
the end of a silent suffering no one knew, save Pontiff and Frey.
To the world and to the Empire the one who died was not a noble knight or a man,
but a vile, loathsome monster whose absence made the world better.
“What a farce.”
Frey said it with an expressionless face as he turned away, leaving the Pontiff’s corpse behind.
He returned to the war, kept fighting—
burying another story behind his back.