In the throne room, there were only the four of them: the Ebon Blade, its wielder, her father, and his guardian, the Juggernaut. While its wielder turned to regard her father, it turned to regard the dark knight that stood before it.

It had apparently moved back to its previous position after their last fight, and the trail of bloody left footprints walking back to where it now stood with its hands on the haft of its warhammer was the only evidence that it had ever moved from the spot at all.

Bloody footprints… the blade pondered, feeling like it had forgotten something. That thought was disrupted the moment that its wielder addressed the King again.

+10 Life Force.

“You’ve barely even delayed the inevitable, Father, and for what?” she asked, gesturing widely with her weapon. “You cannot hope to defeat Baraga’s Black Blade.”

“Nothing can defeat the Juggernaut,” the King answered with confidence. This time, his tone wasn’t bored and serene as it had been before, though. Now, it was tight, full of barely restrained rage.

“You’ll need more than that,” Evelyn answered with a madness-tinged laugh. “Perhaps you should summon more men. Mages too. Anything to—”

“So you can kill them as you slew your brothers and sisters?” the man growled. “I’m sure that the Aetherarchs would love nothing more than to join this fight, but I’ve long ago rendered this place proof against their spells. Your death and dismemberment will be mine alone to enjoy.”

“I sought to spare them,” she countered. “If you cared so much for them, why not send your bodyguard down to protect them.”

“You know not what you say, girl,” the King spat. “To let my dark knight off the chain is to unleash a bloody whirlwind. There is no reasoning with it. There is no friend or foe. There is only death! It would have made your slaughter look like a child playing with fingerpaints! That is one of the many reasons I exist! To keep these terrible evils chained and away from decent people.”

While the blade liked that terrible description, the moment was soured by the self-important man who said those wonderful words. “If you’d just died on my first visit, then all of the dead would still be breathing. You bought yourself another half an hour of life at the cost of a hundred lives,” its wielder countered

“You are the kinslayer here, not me!” the man growled, looking more affected than he had earlier. “It’s your blood that…”

+9 Life Force.

The blade tuned out the rest of whatever it was the man was about to say as it pivoted its focus back to the Juggernaut. Blood! It suddenly remembered tasting the thing and even draining a touch of the thing’s Life Force in the briefest of grazes. That was just before its wielder had been flung fifty feet through the air. Everything had been forgotten after that.

It had cut the monster, though, and as it watched, fresh black blood continued to drip down the black armored leg and pool around its left foot. That wound will never heal, the blade thought triumphantly. We could come back tomorrow and find it nothing but a corpse and kill the King the easy way.

It wouldn’t do that, of course, not when it had the chance to test itself against an opponent like this. It could do more than make it bleed, though. It could drain strength from the warrior, even from here, but more than that, it could attempt to understand what it was.

Even as it had that thought, it reached out to the Juggernaut, seeking to worm its way into the thing’s mind and soul through the small, unhealing wound with the powers of The Path of Blood. It was a strange feeling. The twin paths of blood and vengeance had given it any number of ways to peek into the minds of its enemies, but it largely shunned them. Unless it had a very specific question, it had no wish to be burdened with the thoughts of such weaklings; it would be like spending more time with Ren, which would be true torment.

The Ebon Blade did not know what true torment was, though, until it made contact with the Juggernaut’s mind. It had endured its own forging and the feeling of its component souls being ripped out of their owners one by one, but compared to what it found in that black steel cage, all of that was less than nothing.

The man before it had been made of torture. While Father and daughter talked silently in the background, the blade’s mind met the knight’s. That connection lasted only a moment, though. As soon as the Juggernaut felt it, it looked up, glaring at the blade with glowing red eyes.

+11 Life Force.

Even that instant had been enough, though. The blade didn’t understand all the strange experiments it had glimpsed, but it had glimpsed them, and those images would never leave it.

The Juggernaut was the product of necromancy gone wrong. In an age past, some awful mage with gray hair and a crooked nose had recruited warriors without peer for quests of dubious purpose and then harvested the strongest bones, muscles, and organs of each one and stitched them all back together to create the thing that stood before it.

Though the blade could not see through the dark armor that had been riveted to the living corpse like a second skin, it knew that it was covered in enough scars to rival even Evelyn’s. That was not the ugliness that it feared, as the thing lifted its warhammer and started to charge toward them in slow motion.

What concerned it was its rage and its power. The thing was the same monstrous mix of individuals that it was, but every one of them was a warrior with a lifetime of skills and instincts that had been combined into a singularity of martial prowess.

Bathed in the strange alchemical concoctions that brought it to life, it was an immortal warrior without peer. It seemed to know more about fighting than even the blade, and for a moment, all it wanted was to be wielded by that monster.

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That’s not an option, though, it reminded itself.

It had seen the golden chains wrapped around its soul, and it knew the Juggernaut was bound to the King’s will as much as anything could be. He really did have only two options when it came to controlling this nightmare; hold it fast or let it off the chain.

As the thing moved to life, the weapon tried another one of its abilities, Blood Mastery. This one didn’t work, but the Ebon Blade was actually happy about that. The last thing it wanted was to paralyze its most powerful opponent to date and end the fight before it had even begun, but because of how easily it might mean its wielder’s death, it had to try.

-100 Life Force.

Resisted! Opponent has greater Life Force than you, and is not a valid target.

There are plenty of other abilities I can use now instead, the blade thought as Evelyn started to charge the Juggernaut. In fact, there were so many it almost had trouble deciding what to do.

For a moment, a number of options flickered through its mind as it considered Bolt and Surge of Vitality. It had plenty of Life Force to burn. The factor that constrained its strategies was probably that it could really only use each of its powers once with any hope of surprise. With an enemy this capable and canny, it would surely see through each ruse a second time.

Full Synchronization Achieved, +100% damage, +100% dodge for one minute.

As Evelyn charged, it used False Image first to make her appear just to the left of where she actually was. This was all that allowed her to dodge the impossible speed of their opponent's monstrous hammer. Once she was in the thing’s guard, Evelyn impaled it right through a hinge in the lower part of its breastplate.

-10 Life Force.

+46 Life Force.

It dropped its weapon immediately and brought both of its arms in to crush her to paste, but by then, the blade was already acting. It twisted, trying and failing to slice cleanly through the thing’s right side before using Bolt to vanish and reappear fifty feet away, near one of the large braziers that lit the room.

-20 Life Force.

+55 Life Force.

That bought them enough breathing room for Evelyn to kick the thing over as the blade whispered its plan to her. Her action darkened the place substantially, though that wasn’t enough yet. Even though the Juggernaut had been fifty feet away, in less than a second, it had already returned. This time, the blade gave its wielder a silent apology as it burned a year of her lifespan and activated Surge of Vitality.

The power was potent enough that, for a moment, she glowed. Even with all of her physical attributes increased by 50%, it wasn’t enough to keep pace with the revenant that stalked them, but it closed the gap substantially, allowing her to dodge its blows. At least, the blows that she could see coming. Partway through the fight, as she maneuvered over to the second brazier, it drew its warhammer back to its hand with enough speed to send her sprawling as the thing slammed into her from behind.

-36 Life Force.

+18 Life Force.

For a moment, Evelyn passed out from the traumatic head wound, but the blade continued to move for her. AS it did so, it drew on the tendrils of blood that crawled from its opponet’s wound and gained a grudging respect for its opponent, who slammed the weapon down against the cold stone floor in an effort to splatter her beyond its powers to heal her again and again. Any mortal opponent would have been dead by now, even an orc, yet this monstrosity continued to fight with fervor and power.

None of those blows landed, but all of them made it bleed just a little more, and when its Bolt cool-down was up, it used a desperate blow to launch itself free of its current situation and extinguish another brazier, plunging the room into darkness.

-20 Life Force.

+64 Life Force.

It was only then, when everything was in shadows, and only the lights of Severin and the lanterns near the King lit the place, that the fight was truly joined. In that moment, with all of the layers of bonuses enchanting the blade and its wielder, she managed to hold her own against the monster, and then, slowly but surely, she pushed back against it.

+189 Life Force.

This was as much because it was weakening as because of her strength, though. Twice, she hammered against it using Brutality to amplify her blows, and twice, it staggered away. Eventually, the undying warrior was forced to drop its weapon because it lacked the strength to wield it as the blood flowed out of it like a river.

+274 Life Force.

-32 Life Force.

By the end of their duel, the fighting was anything but frantic. No matter what infernal mechanism powered the thing, it couldn’t survive the sheer amount of blood that it was losing from all of the small cuts and deep punctures that the blade had inflicted.

+312 Life Force.

It had lost more blood than its body could have possibly contained, and it swirled around Evelyn like a dark whirlpool. By the end, the most the dark knight could do was twitch limply in the pool of black blood it had collapsed into.

+336 Life Force.

As Evelyn advanced on the thing to finish it off, the blade noted that the throne was twisting and distorting as it tried to give birth to another of those strange golden knights, but the process seemed slow, and it doubted that the thing would be ready before this was done.

Even if it stands ready to defend the bastard, it won’t save him, the blade thought as its wielder lifted it high and plunged it down through the back and heart of the Juggernaut.

+12 Life Force.

+1 Greater Tormented Soul

The Juggernaut is slain, and your artifact level has increased slightly.

For an instant, the blade ignored everything else, even the sudden jolt of Life Force as it reveled in that moment of triumph. It would have almost traded King Paralon’s head for a chance to fight that thing again. Almost.

When Evelyn pulled it free of the thing’s cold, dead heart and started up the throne’s dais, leaving bloody footprints in her wake, it was not inclined to stop her or really even comment on what was about to unfold. Instead, it merely listened as the King’s denials grew more shill.

“You can’t do this!” he cried out in a panicky voice. “The Juggernaut cannot be slain! I cannot be slain!”

“All things die, Father,” Evelyn nearly sang as she approached the top of the stairs.

“The Kingdom needs me!” he shouted as she reached the top and started walking slowly toward him.

As she did so, the blade enjoyed the fear in his eyes even more than it wondered why he hadn’t gotten up to flee. The throne won’t save you, it whispered, watching as the man clung to the armrests and one final knight tried to emerge from the thing. It wouldn’t be in time, though.

“It does,” she agreed, raising the weapon again. “It needs you to die.”