Loud, solitary appuse echoed through the twilight space. The Cursed looked ahead. Someone was sitting on the throne again. And it was he who had just been cpping.

  “Bravo! You dealt with him excellently. That final strike was especially spectacur and beautifully executed. But that trick won’t work on me.”

  The figure on the throne had long fair hair and wore a bck combat suit.

  “This throne isn’t quite worthy of me. Still, it’s very comfortable to sit here. So, what’s the weather like tonight? Ah yes— the demons promised a great hurricane and a swift death.”

  The Cursed turned his head toward the tall windows, beyond which thick clouds had gathered and a strong wind was rising. Jagged lightning fshed several times, followed by powerful peals of thunder. The pace trembled.

  Outside the windows, people were flying helplessly through the air—new victims of the camity that had come.

  The window shutters burst open, and a hurricane rushed into the throne hall. It seized the Cursed and smmed him against the side wall, forcing him to hang ten feet above the floor. A terrible magical force pressed against him, pinning him to the wall and trying to tear him apart.

  A powerful icy hand seized him by the throat and dragged him outward—into the cold, chaotic nightmare of the hurricane and the death that filled the air with the countless flying bodies of the city’s inhabitants. A heavy rain poured from above.

  Two figures hung high above the night forest beyond the city. The Cursed—and the Messenger of the Curse who held him by the throat. Gray-haired. With a grim face and a malicious gaze from eyes burning with blue fire. The hurricane raged beyond the bounds of a certain radius, at the center of which the two of them hung suspended. Jagged lightning sshed through the dark ndscape in the distance.

  The Messenger of the Curse raised his free hand—and several bolts of lightning struck the Cursed. The world shuddered. And he with it, together with the stranger who held him by the throat.

  Another strike of lightning. And another.

  Suddenly, the Cursed’s head transformed into that of a terrifying beast with long teeth. He barely had time to notice the pupils of the eyes bzing with blue fire widen. Then the beast’s head lunged at the enemy’s head and tore it off with its powerful jaws. It chewed several times before spitting it out into the forest far below.

  "Before the Grim Baron, I killed a terrible werewolf in the forest!" the creature growled after the departing head.

  The headless body still held him in the air. The hurricane and the rain began to subside. The headless body plunged rapidly downward. The werewolf tched onto it. Several flips in the air. Then they smashed through the branches of tall trees and fell into the grass. The werewolf ended up on top, digging its long bck cws into the headless body of the Messenger of the Curse.

  In the pre-dawn twilight, a road to the north appeared in the forest. The Cursed stood among the trees, gazing at it. Then he stepped forward and continued along it.

  In the damp darkness, the Demon King awoke. His dark eyelids opened, revealing yellow eyes with narrow pupils. A grim message reached him, flooding his mind with discomfort and unease. He felt that one of his favorites had been killed. The Bdemaster. An unprecedented event, foreboding nothing good for the future. Throughout the Dark Kingdom, a soaked, desote bastion of his tyranny and grim majesty, there was no force capable of destroying a favorite of the Demon King imbued with his magic and backed by his influence. Unless, of course, external powers—still beyond his control—had intervened.

  He stepped out of the technological artificial-sleep capsule, crossed the uninhabited, half-ruined hall, and stepped out onto a vast balcony. The panorama of the night-time city, ravaged under his sickly rule, spread before him. Countless houses, some with lights flickering in their windows. Somewhere in the distance, the rhythm of giant magical drums beat dully, sustaining the magical network of spells that enshrouded the capital and the entire Dark Kingdom. His dominion was meant to st forever. To expand endlessly. And nothing and no one must stand in its way.

  A fsh in his mind, like a heavy blow and a stunning pain, pierced him. He shuddered. He saw the face and figure of the one who had sin the Bdemaster—and recognized him. He frowned. The old enemy had returned. And nothing would ever be the same again. He braced himself to issue the command: to dispatch the squads of Dark Hunters who would find him and destroy him.