Shadow Slave

Six minutes.

That was how long Sunny managed to hold on until things really went from bad to terrible.

By then, the ground in front of the Gate was littered with piles of corpses, their blood flowing down the pavement like a crimson stream. He had lost count of how many dormant abominations he had slain, how many ancient hunters he had sliced apart. Despite how strong and fearsome the primeval wraiths were, their assault had broken against the impenetrable barrier of his blade, his Aspect, and his will.

Sunny paid a price, though.

By now, his muscles were burning, and he had to force the air in and out of his struggling lungs. The Mantle of the Underworld held, but his body beneath the black stonelike metal was beaten and battered. The armor itself was covered in blood and dented slightly in several places.

Those dents did not come from the hunters, though.

During the third wave, new Nightmare Creatures emerged from the darkness of the Gate… among them were larger beasts, more terrifying than the hounds Sunny had been slaughtering.

And their masters.

The demons of the mysterious Barrow were similar to the desiccated huntsmen, but much taller, stronger, and better equipped. They wielded masterfully crafted flint weapons and armors made out of rotten leather and bone, their empty eyes burning with hungry red flames.

What's worse, they really knew how to use their stone spears and swords.

Met with the strange, ferocious, and deviously lethal battle style of the primeval demons, Sunny was sent for a loop. This was like nothing he had ever experienced before. They fought with the straightforward, yet insidious resolve of cunning apex predators, with the evil will to kill through any means necessary, always following the most efficient and barbarously cruel path to dominance.

It should not have worked, but it did.

on Sunny's armor could

surprised. If these ancient wraiths came from people similar to his own world's prehistoric humans, then they were the

like a plague, eviscerating whole types of living creatures — including all other nascent branches of the human kind — in one fell avalanche. With their flint weapons and the knowledge of fire, they became nothing less than the cause and perpetrators of the

starting to miss

terrifying fighters — a few of them, at least — too. More than that, he reached into the very essence of Shadow Dance and greedily absorbed every nuance of their primeval and ferocious fighting style, and then reflected

had long

and growing dangerously tired, his reserves of shadow essence swiftly diminishing, for a

just maybe… he was going to stand

realized that

the world, and something massive lunged at him from the darkness of the Gate. The barrier of corpses he had built in front of it exploded, and a giant beast — twice as tall as Sunny as weighing at least twenty times more — emerged

stared at it with wide

of long, scarlet bone spikes piercing the

that thing is

hounds and larger beasts he had been fighting against, since it — just like the ancient hunters — was itself a wraith. A corpse reanimated by the malevolent

'Crap!'

make his armor as heavy as possible and lowered his stance, knowing full well that he couldn't allow that thing to get past

kilograms of rotting flesh and sharp horns crashed into him

'Cr…'

split second, everything became

speed, up until the moment a wall of

'Not... good…'