Shurima is dying. I don't think she'll ever rise again.

The wriggling emptiness in the marrow of my hometown is a morbid, unspeakable thing. It spreads. It devours. The slightest touch of it is death. A thousand times a thousand deaths, a thousand times, a thousand times, a thousand times. There may have been people who were able to confront it head-on with the hope of victory, but no longer are.

Here I walk, alone, in the darkest places beneath the world, looking directly into its existence with my eyes through the delicate lens of my helmet. What you see cannot be ignored, and what you know cannot be forgotten. Nowhere is this more than ever in the here and now. I'm tired, very tired.

But I'm still walking.

I couldn't feel the ground beneath my feet, I couldn't feel the walls of the cave, but I was also exempt from the biting cold wind that came up from beneath the abyss. For that I am deeply grateful, because the chill is greater than the dark night of the desert. I have sat on the endless plains of Farajese under the first bright moon of winter, but I have never experienced such a biting bone. This deep cold belonged to the Void Ignorant Ancient People may have named their underground world after the Void, and the root of all evil in the mortal realm.

But I think the truth is even more terrifying. Even the air here felt wrong, unnatural, throbbing with a fierce purple black light, illuminating people's minds with a dull pain.

That dark shadow that even my eyes can't see, you come from it.

Three. Four. Probably five. Hardly. I've faced hundreds, if not more, of you, and killed you to death. Your howls resound through the darkness, but I am not afraid of you, for you have left me with nothing.

My wife; My dear. My daughter; Our Binschy. I called their names, as always, reminding myself of what they were fighting for. Then I raised my handguards.

Even if you have fangs and claws, you can't defeat me. Either I will send you back to the abyss, or you will send me to the afterlife so that I will finally be at peace. I will be reunited with them again.

Either way, I'm the winner. No, you can't defeat me, you are Shaatin, the ultimate endless beast

In my other hand, I clutched the stone tightly. Its alien magic kept me going here, deep beneath the wasteland of Old Acacia. It holds you back, but at what cost my body and soul, I can't guess, for this small object is now beating at the same time as my heart. That terrible pulsating rhythm did not belong to life, not to magic, not to anything whole, but to the annihilation of nothingness. These, I am sure.

Stand down, beast. Don't move forward.

The Blade of the Underworld ejected from the back of my gauntlet and appeared out of thin air between you and me.

Yes. Yes, you know the weapon, don't you remember it all.

Just now you were thirsting for my flesh, and now you are on guard. Now you are hesitating. You're going around the bend. If any of you have long eyes, you can't help but stare at the edge of the blade. Even you must know that this thing should not be held in the hands of mortals, nor should it belong to mortal souls. It was the subtle magic that made it, and the inhuman that made it no longer exists. I wonder if you remember them too

You scream and roar and stomp your feet on the uneven ground. It's easy to think of you as something that hates life, but you don't hate us, I think. Not really hateful. You don't know what hatred is.

Hatred is a flame, and when your race enters our world, hatred burns in the hearts of the Celestial warriors. Hatred tends to them to resist, again and again, even though they know they are almost certain to die.

Yes, this weapon remembers you. It remembers how to end you.

His name, Horlock, was his first declaratory blow to your master. Holok, the great warrior of the Ascended Regiment, the name will live on forever. He is the pioneer of the hidden way, the only one who has followed it. It was Horlock who dared to turn away from the sun that gave him power, into the darkness, and come down to face you. It was Horlock who was the first dastardly heart to pierce the blade of the underworld into the void.

It was Hollock who showed his siblings the way to overcome the abyss.

I am not the Ascended Hero of Shurima, nor the Celestial warrior that the Ruined Empire remembers in the Great Hall. In my life, I was just an ordinary person, a sad father, a child of Dasai. I'm from dust, so I'm going to return to dust soon.

But not yet. I'm following in Horlock's footsteps, I'm going to take his blade in the final moments, and

The closest one of you rushed toward me. The shell and razor-sharp claws brushed me by, and I twisted to the side, breathing through the tube on my mask. For a moment I lost my sight and was trapped in a rudimentary armor of my own invention.

Then I swung the Blade of the Underworld, severing what would be what other creatures could call their necks.

The sinuous body collapsed, and my sword-wielding hand could feel the hunger of the weapon, a sour taste at the base of my tongue, like the afterglow of a scream. Who's next, which of you will try

The desert recognizes Horlock. His name lives on. Even when he was betrayed by the tyrant Nezuk until his death, no one would be able to take the blade gauntlet from Horlock's wrist. While the Celestial Warriors had fallen to that point, even they could not deny that the land might once again be threatened by the Void, and that in some unseen future, this great weapon would need to be prepared.

This is my native land. Now such a horrible thing is rampant in broad daylight, and I cannot allow it. I will plunge this blade into the terrible nothingness beneath Shurima, just as a dozen times before.

Is this destiny no. It's not something as noble as the Mandate of Heaven. It's my fate, and it's my destiny to know where to find it. A few years ago, I led the Ekonibi treasure finders to Holok's tomb on the banks of the River Kharry, just to get the gold of Piltover to feed my family. I gladly helped them open the tomb that had been sealed for thousands of years. Iconibi's target wasn't the Blade of the Underworld, but they still recognized it as something of value.

Someone in the tribe calls me a mercenary. Someone called me a traitor. All I know is that in the grotesque days since, Hollock's mausoleum has been completely devoured by the enemy. If it weren't for the treasure hunters and the commission they paid me, this weapon would not be recoverable now. Just like my compatriots. My family.

The blade is different from theirs, and in a pinch, I have the ability to find it again.

Cassey Adion. Who does the desert recognize

The desert doesn't know you, beast. You are not welcome here. In this ancient land of gods and men, you are lost.

But the desert recognizes my name because that's my name.

I've never gotten lost. I knew very well where I was and how many steps I was from the destruction of everything. I will make up for the mistakes I have made, and the duties I have not done.

I will fight you to the end.