The sky above Obsidian Castle was no longer blood-red; it had mutated into a heavy, ashen shroud, choked by thick smoke from lingering artillery blasts and the digital dust of millions of fallen players scattered across the valley. Amidst the burning craters, Valor stood tall in his draconian form, expelling residual cosmic energy from his palms after annihilating the international alliance's vanguard.

Yet despite the absolute dominance he projected, the remaining wave of players showed no signs of receding. They rolled in like an endless tidal wave. This was compounded by the game corporation’s enforcement of extreme Pay-to-Win systems, empowering elite high-tier players—digital mercenaries—to activate expensive, paid legendary items that cast blinding, radiant auras across their entire frames.

Atop the crumbling ramparts of the main fortress wall, the Shadow Knight Commander clenched his fists tightly. Behind him, dozens of shadow troops stood in profound silence, gazing down at the battlefield where their leader fought single-handedly against the onslaught of tens of thousands of players wielding god-tier item stats.

"Commander..." whispered one of the shadow warriors with a trembling voice, staring down at the dark blade in his hands beginning to fracture. "His Majesty is carrying everything all by himself. If we keep standing here, he could... he could run out of energy."

The Shadow Knight Commander turned, scanning his subordinates one by one. In their eyes, no trace of the fear of death remained. What lingered was a cast-iron resolve and unyielding loyalty that no programming system could ever purchase.

"We were born from shadows, and we live to protect him," the Shadow Knight Commander declared firmly, snapping his cracked iron helm back onto his head. "If our destiny is to shatter, then let us shatter beside our king. Open the side gate! Shadow troops, advance!"

SHREK!

In unison, dozens of Shadow Knights vaulted down from the ramparts, hurtling like a black tempest straight into the heart of the crowd of gold-glittering mercenary players.

"Hah? Look at that! The rest of the castle NPCs crawled out of their holes!" roared an expensively geared Berserker-class player, swinging his diamond battleaxe savagely. "Cut them down! Grab the remaining EXP and item drops!"

The battle instantly devolved into a pitch-black bloodbath. Although the Shadow Knights fought with tactical brilliance and elite agility, the gear quality gap was insurmountable. The mercenary players wielded paid legendary items granting temporary invulnerability and cosmic-tier elemental damage.

ZRAK!

A pay-to-win plasma sword arc slammed into the midsection of a shadow warrior. Unlike standard deaths where NPCs experienced automatic respawn within a dungeon system, the anomaly zone’s special rule was absolute and brutal: Perma-death. Permanent extinction.

The shadow warrior didn't burst into friendly blue respawn particles; his body fractured into pitch-black ash motes that the night wind immediately swept away, erasing him from the Chronos Online server forever.

"Soldier Two!" the Shadow Knight Commander shrieked hysterically upon seeing his subordinate wiped out without a trace. He flew into a frenzy, swinging his shadow blade to shatter the killer player's armor into instant death. "Hold the line! Don't let them break formation!"

Yet their numbers were tragically outmatched. One by one, the shadow warriors fell. Black ash drifted across the scorched earth, marking the permanent erasure of digital beings who had only just discovered the meaning of life and brotherhood.

Amidst the chaos, Valor—who felt the permanent deaths of his subordinates through their core bond—whirled around, his eyes widening in horror.

"No...!" Valor growled, ignoring the mob of players swarming around him as he tried to smash through the storm of attacks to reach his shadow troops. "Fall back! Why did you leave the fortress?!"

"Because we are Your Majesty's shield!" the Shadow Knight Commander shot back over their internal telepathic link, his voice tight with desperation yet carrying a smile behind his helm as he cut down two players at once to protect Valor's blind spot.

Tragically, the moment the Shadow Knight Commander dropped his guard while clearing a path for his king, an elite mercenary player from an international guild—draped in a stealth cloak and wielding a cosmic poison dagger—darted in from behind with a lethal stealth attack.

"Die, fake boss!" the mercenary snarled, driving his dagger straight toward Valor's undefended back.

The Shadow Knight Commander caught sight of the blade's trajectory in a fraction of a second. Without a second thought, pouring every ounce of residual code-speed left in his frame, the Commander lunged forward, positioning himself directly between the poisoned blade and Valor's spine.

SLLLLRRT!

The sickening crunch of a sharp edge tearing through metal and digital core rang out sharply.

Valor froze in his tracks, his eyes blowing wide as he spun around to find the Shadow Knight Commander pierced dead-center through the chest by the toxic dagger. Deep-blue digital blood spurted heavily from the gaps in the Commander's armor, soaking the scorched earth beneath their feet.

"Commander?!" Valor's voice cracked, catching in his throat as he lunged forward to catch his falling subordinate before he hit the ground.

The Shadow Knight Commander coughed weakly, expelling data particles from his mouth. His iron helm dislodged, revealing a pure shadow visage that now began to flicker dimly, signaling that his digital core had suffered permanent, irreversible corruption.

"Y-Your... Your Majesty..." the Commander whispered softly, a trembling hand reaching out slowly to touch Valor's dragon-scaled arm. "Thank you... for letting us... feel the true meaning of life... before we vanish entirely..."

"Don't talk nonsense!" Valor snapped, his voice trembling violently under crushing agony. Digital tears shaped like golden light droplets streamed from his reptilian eyes. "I can save you! I have duplicate data! I can patch your code!"

The Shadow Knight Commander shook his head gently, a thin smile carving across his fading shadow visage. "No... Your Majesty... My time... has run out. Protect... what remains of our home..."

Before Valor could reply, the Shadow Knight Commander's body shattered into a million pieces. Unlike before, the fragments left behind no ordinary data dust, but pitch-black ash that floated up into the air and bled into the soil of Obsidian Castle for all eternity.

Perma-death. The Shadow Knight Commander had vanished from the digital universe forever.

Valor knelt alone on the empty ground. He stared down at his palms, which now clutched only empty air where his subordinate's body had rested a second prior.

The world around him plunged into absolute silence. The gloating laughter of mercenary players celebrating their minor victory, the thunderous roar of artillery cannons, and the howling storm winds—all of it faded from Valor's hearing. What remained was a hollow emptiness burning through his chest, a grief that crushed his soul core, and a pure rage that shattered every boundary of programming logic known to mankind.

Down in the Apex Interactive headquarters control room, the main monitor displaying battle telemetry suddenly suffered severe visual interference. The green and red lines across Leo and Marcus's consoles shuddered erratically before flashing pitch black.

"What is this?! Why is the video feed from the Obsidian sector cut?!" Marcus panicked, slamming his fist against the console desk.

Leo stared at his monitor with eyes blown wide in dread, his finger pointing toward the primary anomaly graph surging straight past the system's absolute maximum scale.

"Sir... the boss's rage parameter values... the curve is punching right through server calculation limits! His core data... his core data is undergoing extreme overheating!"

Back on the digital battlefield before Obsidian Castle, the players who had been cheering moments before suddenly ground to a halt. The atmosphere turned so bitterly cold that their breath froze in the air.

Valor slowly rose to his feet.

His head remained bowed, shrouded by the deep shadow of his dark cloak. Yet as he slowly lifted his gaze, the sight that met the millions of players on the battlefield struck them dumb in absolute, paralyzed terror.

Valor's reptilian eyes, previously burning with golden fire, had completely transformed. They blazed blindingly bright with a deeply concentrated pendar of pure cosmic energy—a frequency of light and color entirely unrecognized, never authored, and never existing within any game's core database.

The air around Valor warped and fractured, generating cosmic gravitational ripples that sucked nearby boulders floating up into the air. The suffocating weight of the death aura exuded by the Dragon King was so colossal that millions of players across the battlefield froze stiff in their tracks, unable to raise a weapon, or even take a single step back to save their own lives.