Within that consuming blackness, Lilith’s senses expanded beyond their normal limits. She was like goddess descending from the celestial realm, in her case the Nether realm to deliver judgement and harvest souls.

She saw every monster on the island—not as blurred shapes or distant presences, but with perfect clarity. Each mutated cyclops was illuminated to her perception as if by a spotlight only she could see. Their gray skin. Their scars. Their single, terrified eyes darting left and right, unable to pierce the darkness that surrounded them despite doing their best, their overwhelming strength couldn’t do anything.

She saw the settlement: forty-three cyclopes in total. Some were warriors, their bodies bulging with crude muscle, their stone swords already raised. Some were elders, their horns longer and more cracked, their movements slower but their eyes sharper. A few were young—smaller, their horns just budding from their foreheads, huddled together in confusion and fear.

Forty-three, she thought. A good start.

But the spell was not yet complete. The darkness was not merely a blindfold. It was a tomb.

Lilith’s lips curved upward.

And the spell finally showed its true worth.

It began as a tingling sensation—so faint that the cyclopes might have mistaken it for a nervous itch. Then the tingling became a burn. The burn became a gnawing, as if thousands of invisible mouths had attached themselves to their skin and begun to feed.

The darkness was not simply dark. It was alive. It was a sentient hunger that consumed not just light, but life itself.

Lilith watched, and she savored like when you enjoy a somptuous breakfast.

The first cyclops—a massive warrior with a jagged scar across its chest—raised its stone axe and roared defiance into the black.

’’!!!"

Unfortunately, the sound was swallowed instantly. No echo. No resonance. Just silence. Then the warrior’s roar turned into a gasp. Its skin began to crack, not bleeding but drying, as if every drop of moisture within its body was being pulled toward the surface and then evaporated. The cracks spread like fissures in parched earth. The warrior dropped its axe. Its hands curled into claws, clawing at its own face, its own chest, trying to tear off the invisible thing that was eating it alive.

Its single eye rolled wildly. Its mouth opened in a scream that had no sound.

’’!"

Within thirty seconds, the warrior was a husk—gray skin stretched tight over bones, mouth frozen open, eye shriveled into a dried raisin. It collapsed into dust before it hit the ground.

One.

Lilith’s smile grew.

The second cyclops tried to run. It turned and sprinted toward the edge of the island, its massive feet pounding the earth, its arms pumping. It had no idea where the edge was, but anywhere was better than here. The darkness followed it. Clung to it. Penetrated it. The cyclops stumbled as its left leg turned brittle and snapped beneath its weight. It fell, crawled, dragged itself forward with its fingernails. Its fingernails cracked. Its fingers crumbled. Its arms withered. It died face-down, reaching for a light it would never see.

Two.

The third cyclops—an elder with a horn the length of a forearm—did something unexpected. It stopped running. It stopped screaming. It stood perfectly still, closed its single eye, and began to chant. Lilith recognized the guttural syllables as a primitive prayer, a plea to whatever gods these creatures worshipped. The elder’s body began to glow with a faint, sickly green light—a desperate attempt to push back the darkness with raw mana.

It almost worked.

For three heartbeats, the green light held. Then the darkness bit down, and the elder’s mana shield shattered like glass.

Crack!

The green light turned black. The elder’s chanting turned to choking. Its body did not dry out slowly like the first. It imploded—folding in on itself as if crushed by an invisible fist, collapsing into a sphere of bone and flesh no larger than a fist, which then crumbled into ash.

Three.

Lilith laughed. A soft, delighted sound.

The deaths varied, each one a unique composition of agony. The darkness did not kill in a uniform manner. It entertained its master.

A fourth cyclops—a female, larger than the males, her gray skin marked with tribal tattoos—tried to fight back. She swung her stone club in wide arcs, slicing through the darkness as if she could cut it. But you cannot cut what has no form. The darkness seeped into her wounds—old scars and fresh scratches alike—and began to eat her from the inside out. Her muscles convulsed. Her back arched. Her mouth opened in a silent scream as her internal organs turned to dust, then her blood, then her bones. She remained standing for a full minute after death, a hollow statue held together by nothing but the darkness that had consumed her, before finally toppling.

Four.

A fifth cyclops—one of the young, its horn barely a nub—huddled with two others of its age. They pressed their backs together, holding hands, their single eyes squeezed shut. Lilith felt a flicker of something. Pity? No. Not pity. Appreciation. There was something almost beautiful about their terror, their futile attempt to find comfort in each other. The darkness took them together, as if honoring their bond. Their bodies withered in unison, shrinking, drying, crumbling into three small piles of gray dust that merged into one.

Five. Six. Seven.

The cries began to fill the air.

Not screams—screams were too brief, too sharp. These were wails, long and deep and trembling, the sound of creatures who knew they were dying and could do nothing to stop it. The wails echoed off the invisible walls of darkness, multiplying, overlapping, creating a chorus of anguish that would have driven a mortal mind to madness.

Lilith drank it in like music.

Eight. Nine. Ten.

She watched a monster tear off its own arm when the darkness infested the limb. The arm crumbled in its remaining hand. Then the darkness spread to the stump. The warrior roared and tore off the other arm. Then a leg. Then the other leg. It died as a torso, still snarling, still defiant, before its head withered and fell.

Eleven.

She watched an elder try to bargain—speaking in broken continent tongue, offering treasure, offering servitude, offering its own children.

Lilith found this one particularly amusing. She let the elder live longer than the others, let it grovel and beg, let hope flicker across its single eye. Then she killed it last, so it could watch the others die first.

Twelve. Thirteen. Fourteen.

The wails grew louder. The darkness seemed to pulse with each death, feeding, growing stronger, as if the spell were a living thing that had been starved for millennia and was now gorging itself.

Fifteen. Sixteen. Seventeen.

Lilith closed her eyes for a moment, not to block out the carnage, but to experience it more purely. Through her connection to the darkness, she felt every death as if it were happening within her own body. The crack of drying skin. The snap of brittle bones. The final, fading pulse of a heart that had stopped beating. Each death was a note in a symphony, and she was the conductor.

Eighteen. Nineteen. Twenty and this number continued to grow.