This never-ending nightmare seemed impossible to escape.

  Luminescence, as a concept, had ceased to exist in this world. Aaron had just received the sitrep for his dire situation, and it felt as though fate had switched off the bedroom light, inviting the Babadook under the bed to come and play.

  Muted drumbeats echoed around them, faint whispers of light caressed their irises, growing ever stronger. The air was fraught with desolate tension.

  The Black Butcher leered at Yuri, inhuman malice seeping from his ethereal form. Andross stood stoic and angelic, her gaze steady as she regarded the creature before her.

  Malkaleth—the Black Butcher, a Void One—was an unimaginably dangerous entity. Every time he revealed himself, the cost to civilization was catastrophic. Millions. The Plague Whisperer had reaped millions of lives, genocide incarnate in the tortured, warped humanoid form of the man he had once been—the man she had once known. Before the Void swallowed him and spat out this abomination.

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  The black smoke that oozed from his being drained the vitality of anything nearby, even Yuri's. She knew all too well what he was capable of. But he was right—she couldn’t go all out. Not here. Zeva. Rex. She had to be smart.

  A reassuring hand rested lightly on her shoulder. "You are not alone, Yuri," whispered Zarkhan as he shone with purifying light. The cloying tendrils of darkness failed to gain purchase against the expanding halo of radiance. "I shall keep them safe. Finish him once and for all."

  Yuri’s scarlet eyes sharpened, their intensity unmatched. The world seemed to stop. She drew a liquid katana, its edge spilling aquiline tendrils of plasma. Malkaleth mirrored her action, unsheathing two curved short swords of jagged bone painted a sickly maroon, each weapon shrieking with the coalesced torment of the million souls it had devoured.