Chapter 73: Arandiel: Fallen Star Of Veils

The Sanctum of Veils offered nothing.

No sound, wind, or movement across the shallow water stretching in every direction beneath their feet. Just stars overhead and complete silence. Vi stood close, scanning the dark.

King reached into his inventory and equipped an Arcbearer’s Medallion. He selected the summoning option and activated it.

White light cracked outward from his position, cutting across the dark water in sharp lines before pulling inward and reshaping itself. Barlan materialized from the convergence, the enormous coffin strapped across his back settling into place with a familiar, heavy thud that sent ripples spreading across the still water in perfect circles.

Barlan looked around once, taking in the sanctum, then fixed his attention on King.

Next, King activated the combatant skill, Ultimate War-Chief.

Mana poured outward from him in a wave, washing over Vi and Barlan. The skill embedded itself into their frames, amplifying reaction speed, physical output, and spell potency across every category simultaneously. Vi straightened slightly as the enhancement settled over her. Barlan rolled his neck and summoned the Hammer of Ruin, gripping it in his right hand.

"Vi," King said. "Keep your distance from the center. Stay back and watch for an opening."

Vi moved without argument, drifting to the far edge of their formation.

King and Barlan advanced together across the water. King kept his gaze fixed upward, watching the stars scattered across the void overhead. He did not blink. He did not look away.

Then — one twinkling.

A single star pulsed. Once, twice, and then it fell.

It descended in a straight line toward the water below, its light dimming as it dropped, the brilliance fading to a dull, muted glow by the time it reached the surface. It touched down in a spreading cloud of white dust that dispersed across the water in all directions, and from within that settling dust, wings parted.

Arandiel stepped forward.

Vi registered him immediately. The recognition hit her before she could organize it into a thought, her mind pulled back without warning to the moment King had found her. That same presence stood before her now, and it carried the same weight.

He looked different in small ways. The tattered robes were gone, replaced with new grey fabric, clean and whole. The scarred skin had smoothed. But the wings were unchanged, dull, broken, the feathers stripped and fractured along their length. And the halo above his head still flickered with that dying, inconsistent light, struggling to maintain itself against whatever had corrupted the source beneath it.

A cutscene materialized around them, the world holding still.

Arandiel regarded King with an expression that held neither surprise nor aggression. His gaze moved across the scene , King and Barlan standing before him, Vi positioned at distance, the dead body of Henoch lying at King’s side. Arandiel looked at the body.

He spoke. His voice was resonant and shaped by language similar to the Nephilim.

"Who art thou, and what dost thou seek?"

His gaze did not waver from King as he continued.

"Thou hast slain Anakin, watcher of my gates. Thou hast cut through my worshippers, my priests." He looked at Henoch again. "And Henoch, my high priest."

He extended one hand toward the body, and it dissolved completely, breaking apart into fine grey ash that drifted upward before dispersing entirely. "And now thou standest before me, within the Sanctum of Veils itself."

He paused.

"What couldst thou possibly hope to achi..."

He stopped.

His eyes lit for a single second, a flash of recognition passing through him as he read something unseen.

"Ah," Arandiel said. "I see it now."

He let the word sit for a breath.

"Zauron."

Another breath.

"Thou art come for the rings."

His dull-lit longsword materialized in his grip, forming from nothing with a low resonance that pulsed once through the water beneath them.

"But thou shalt find," Arandiel said quietly, "that in my house, there is nothing for thee,"

"ONLY DEATH!"

A name tag appeared above his head.

[FALLEN STAR: ARANDIEL]

The cutscene released.

"Vi, brace yourself!" King called out.

Arandiel’s entire bearing changed. He drew himself fully upright, and the sanctum’s ambient darkness deepened, the void overhead pressing closer, the starlight dimming as something thick and suffocating rolled outward from his position.

[DREAD ACTIVATED]

King had anticipated this. He had watched Arandiel use it in every prior playthrough, had studied its radius and duration and output. The Ultimate War-Chief buff was already active across Barlan and Vi. He knew what was coming.

Knowing it didn’t make it easier.

The effect hit differently in a body than it did through a screen. It was not pain and it was not fear, it was a pressure from everywhere at once, settling into the joints and the chest and the base of the skull, pushing downward and inward with a weight that had no physical source. King felt his knees want to buckle.

"Unyielding Fortress."

His tank skill fired. The ground locked under him, resistance flooding upward through his frame and holding him steady despite every instinct pulling in the opposite direction. The Red Imp Talisman activated alongside it, working against the Dread’s grip, chipping at the effect from within.

He held.

Barlan moved. The Arcbearer surged forward through the water, covering ground in long strides despite the Dread dragging at him, King could see it in the reduced pace, the effort that each step cost him, his usual explosive movement blunted. But Barlan moved anyway.

He reached into the coffin and produced the Hammer of Ruin, manifesting it in both hands as he closed the distance.

Arandiel’s Dread lifted the moment Barlan reached him.

Mobility snapped back.

Arandiel stepped aside from Barlan’s first swing with fluid motion, then drove the flat of the longsword into Barlan’s torso, the impact launching the Arcbearer several meters backward. Barlan hit the water surface hard, spray erupting in a wide sheet.

[BARLAN HP: 910/1000]

The Dread’s residual weight still clung to all of them for a few seconds longer. King worked through it, pushing his concentration outward and extending both arms.

He cast simultaneously.

"Sovereign Gale."

A wide wave of cutting wind erupted forward, crossing the distance to Arandiel in a fraction of a second. Arandiel folded both wings around himself, pulling them closed into a sealed shell. The wind wave struck the outer surface of the wings, the blades dragging across them and opening dozens of shallow cuts along the feathers without truly cutting through.

King’s other hand was already moving.

"Ember Spark."

A small, dense coin of concentrated flame launched from his fingertip, aimed not at Arandiel’s body but at the narrow gap between the folded wings where they met at the center. It threaded through. Inside the sealed wing-shell, meeting the Sovereign Gale’s current still swirling within, the ember detonated into a full conflagration.

Fire bloomed from within the covering of the wings, contained by Arandiel’s own barrier turned against him.

Arandiel convulsed, wings snapping open as he thrashed.

[ARANDIEL HP: 1120/1200]

Barlan was already back on his feet. He sprinted forward and swung the Hammer of Ruin in a rising arc, connecting clean.

BOOM.

The force drove Arandiel backward, his feet skipping across the water’s surface as he skidded meters before stopping.

[ARANDIEL HP: 1020/1200]

King spread both arms wide and channeled construct creation, pulling the technique to its current ceiling. Weapons assembled in the air around him, blades, lances, spike arrays, dozens of them, the image borrowed from an anime he’d spent too many late nights watching, a heroic spirit summoning an infinite armory.

He lined them up, tracking Arandiel’s position, and prepared to launch.

Then he noticed.

Arandiel’s form was becoming translucent.

King recognized it.

"He’s going invisible. Vi, retreat now!"

Vi pulled back and King launched the entire construct arsenal at Arandiel’s current location before the transition completed, sending the volley into the space where the fallen angel stood. Arandiel vanished mid-barrage.

King focused his eyes and ears.

Clank. Tang. Tang.

Weapon striking weapon, the deflected constructs carving trajectories that mapped Arandiel’s position and movement through the invisible space. King tracked the sound and the clash, adjusted the coordinate, and held it.

Barlan charged forward without hesitation.

TANG. BA-TANG. CLANG.

The Hammer of Ruin rang against the longsword repeatedly, the exchange loud and percussive across the still water, Barlan trading blows with Arandiel as if he could see him, maybe he could.

King kept his focus on the sound pattern, waiting for a clean window to cast into without hitting Barlan in the exchange.

He found it.

Then King gathered fire into a compressed ball and launched it directly into the gap between exchanges.

The blast connected. The explosion scattered the water outward in a ring and Arandiel’s form snapped back into visibility mid-roll, the invisibility undone. He absorbed the momentum of the roll and launched himself upward in one fluid motion, rising into the air above the water’s surface and leveling his attention directly at King.

The familiar hue returned.

The void darkened gold.

[DREAD ACTIVATED]

The weight came down again, Vi, keeping distance, watching , noticed something she had not caught in the chaos of the first activation.

A pattern.