The world blurred once again. I faded in and out at random intervals. When I was conscious, which seemed less and less now, I watched as James expended endless potions, magical items, and even ancient scrolls that enabled him to bring down both crippling shock and singing flame upon his enemies.

It was then that I began to realize, it: whatever life James had lived before settling down, it had been one of a formidable man who had collected countless treasures and tools of war, and now that same man was bringing every ounce of his capability to bear to allow him to fight through the swarms of enemies that should by all rights be able to put him down.

I had seen this determination before. It was the suicidal dedication of a man who had already accepted his own death, but that would not be stopped until he had reached the moment he'd chosen for it.

But just what death had James chosen? That I didn't know--or, at least, didn't want to know.

My father fought forward with a relentless abandon. One that was born out of a dogged will to beat fate and outrun the hourglass that it had set on his newborn's life.

When he faltered under strain or exhaustion, he recovered through a skill and will that was perfectly aligned and aimed towards cold violence. When his flesh and body was cut open, he fought through and mended himself with potion and balm; and yet, despite the healing, the sheer amount of damage that the man was experiencing had to be tortuous even if his items kept it from being fatal. It would likely drive a lesser man mad and even a greater one all but feral--and yet James kept advancing, his steady feet descending stone and stair at a rapid pace.

All doors and every enemy eventually led to one final stone passageway. One that appeared both ornate and threatening. It was sealed entirely shut, appearing to have no seams to be opened against.

James stopped, but didn't hesitate. From his body he pulled a single, copper key. The item glowed and became a light that shot into the pseudo entranceway.

At first nothing happened, but soon the magicked stone began to glow, then rumble, and finally to shake violently. My father only had a single moment of warning to jump back and shield my face, before the stone burst violently forward away from us to reveal a glorious chamber of shining crystal lights and sarcophagi.

James entered the room confidently, but all the while his eyes stared at the one thing that had instantly garnered both our attentions upon first glimpsing the room: a single man, standing before a twinkling, purple tear in what appeared to be space-time itself.

Unlike the rest of the undying enemies that James had all but slaughtered, this man appeared untouched by time. He was aged, but also presented an air of being much older than he seemed. However, he also radiated authority and appeared unhindered by this weight of eternity that seemed to call out from his ornately armored form.

And yet, there was one thing that marked this guardian as being at least related to all the others: his glowing, luminously brilliant eyes. I found it offsetting, like glaring into the heart of a newborn sun--something that was both unbelievably ancient relative to man and yet also hardly such by the standards of the gods.

[Watcher at the Door, Level 15 Sainted Paladin, Unknown 2nd Class, Unknown 3rd Class, Unknown 4th Class, Boss]

[HP: 800/800]

"Your intentions are not impure, James," the entity broke the ancient silence; his body did not move from his eternal vigil as the battlemaster approached. There was an ethereal, and yet altogether comforting echo to his deep timbre.

There was a hesitation and sadness showing through my father's expressions. "I can't let my son die, not if it also means he might... you can't ask that I do, Saint."

I wondered for a moment just how my father was familiar with this being, when a textbox appeared.

[Saints make up many of the religious figures of the central region's humans. Sometimes when a hero or ancient figure is raised through deed and belief, an echo of their spirit can be bound to an earthly talisman to allow their will and protection to persist on the material plane.]

"No. I can't ask that," the Watcher relented. "Yet, you can not ask me to allow you to pass."

"What lies beyond this tear to the Other will only bring pain. I know that to compare what may seem as only a potential pain of people you don't even know to that of your own family may seem hollow right now, but I need you to imagine the same pain you feel, only amplified across entire worlds."

"That is the danger we speak of now. The warnings that must have led you here were not exaggerations, nor, I admit, were the promises that may have accompanied them, but the price you would pay or have others fund for you?"

"You may be allowing realities to burn, James. For uncounted innocent souls to be stripped of their essence and shattered in confused agony for timeless eons of horror that they will be incapable of even fully understanding, but that they will feel nonetheless."

The great silence returned and James closed his eyes with a weighty pain.

"I know... and I'm trying to care, and I do, but I also don't," James replied. "I would watch worlds burn for my family, Watcher. I'm sorry."

The guardian began to frown, proving that he was apparently not immune to human emotions despite his near godly seeming presence.

"I ask you once more to turn back," the Watcher said with an honest man's earnestness. "Please."

"Can you heal him?" James asked with a final hope.

"No," the guardian said sadly, but did not hesitate to furnish the emotionally crushed battlemaster with the truth.

"I know," James admitted and slowly opened his pained eyes.

"Then you'll have to stop me, Saint," the man said as he fell into a defensive stance. "And a part of me truly hopes you do."

The next flash of movement was almost imperceptible to my eyes. One moment the Watcher was heaving his hammer from the ground and the next he was raising it above James' head, ready to crush him in a single blow--and having crossed a dozen feet in seconds.

In response, every muscle in the battlemaster's body surged with an incredible power as a necklace around his corded neck began to glow with a deep amber ambience; the roaring of an endless throng of wild beasts could almost be heard screaming into the aether and trying to burst free from within James' now empowered form.

And yet the strength this enchantment imbued was only just enough to allow James to barely dodge the massive hammer blow of the Watcher, which slammed into the floor of the temple with a stone-cracking might.

Unlike before, when I had watched James evade to direct his foes, now the man already seemed to truly be fleeing from an overwhelming force that no mortal man could hope to corral.

And yet my father tried, James roughly pirouetted around the back of the heavy-looking paladin, but, instead of the opening he hoped to make, he found the man's arm leaving his massive hammer to smack violently against his face.

The Fighter flew horrifically away from the Watcher and I felt the force of the otherworldly backhand dislodge my body from my father's chest. Midway through our flight, I felt myself roll upon the cold floor of the Temple; luckily the pain was dulled quite a bit by my dangerously thin hold on the waking world.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

The Watcher turned to stand and cast a sad gaze upon me and then returned his eyes to James. "I take no pleasure in slaying a good man, nor dooming a dying child to a lonely death. Please, lower your weapon."

"Is he?" James asked with a look of abject shock in his eyes, for a moment desperately imploring the Watcher for an answer to his question.

"Your son lives. The fall did not seriously injure him any further," the Watcher replied.

A look of determination began to edge itself back into the eyes of my father as his necklace continued to glow.

He pulled a potion from his belt and swallowed it. Quickly his muscles pumped up even further and he groaned in pain and a new sounding rage.

[Unidentified Elixir]

"Then we continue, Saint," he said and held his blade out in front of him as the weapon began to glow a brilliant azure. The eye socket the watcher had thundered his gauntleted hand against was clearly all but shattered and the eye itself leaked both blood and fluid; I highly doubted it still functioned at all.

The Watcher drew himself up to his full height and easily held his massive warhammer out to his side with but a single hand. Golden light sparked across the entity's fingers and licked its way like cold fire up the handle of the weapon, to wrap and then glow ominously across the polished, silvered head of the masterwork weapon of war.

Again the Watcher came all too fast, but this time it was not in a straight line. He quickly made his way to the side of James that his first strike had blinded.

"I will not take your ability to see your son's face in your final moments," the watcher said as he raised his hammer high.

James couldn't dodge this time; it was too late. He raised his majestic looking, glowing bastard sword; magic infused every crystal structure of the steel, the weapon looked flawless and untouchable--and yet, in the microsecond before James met the hammer, there was for the first time doubt in his half-gaze.

The hammer met the half-swording battlemaster's deflecting blade and shattered it.

The love-fueled determination still did not leave James' face even in his shock at having his artifact quality weapon destroyed. The man fell back on his skill and relentless nature and merely drew the small longknife from his thigh and dove for a gap in the Watcher's armor.

James put everything he had in the lunge, likely hoping even the Watcher wouldn't be able to get his hammer up in time for another blow. The longknife appeared no weaker than his shattered blade had been; I hoped there was a chance this could work.

My hopes were shattered, however, as the Watcher grabbed the Fighter's wrist and halted it easily. James met the glowing eyes of the being and likely felt a sad kindness reach out to him as his bones no doubt snapped within his skin.

I felt a deep sickness in my stomach, as I watched my desperate seeming father grab for a small dagger strapped to his chest with his remaining hand, but it wasn't long before he was stopped in his tracks yet again.

James gasped in agony as his grasped arm was turned and his own enchanted blade was forcefully driven through his thick chest plate and into the gap between his ribs. A cough of blood left his mouth and his body shook in its first death throe.

I wanted to cry out, to fight, to do something. To simply act. But, there was nothing I could do. My agency was not my own. My body wasn't mature enough to allow it. And, for the first time in a long time, I felt a soldier's bloodlust and fury well up inside me--something I thought the love of my wife and daughter's had long ago removed from me.

I watched in emotional helplessness, as my father's eyes searched the Watcher's body and the paladin slowly embraced the man to allow him to come to lay on the floor peacefully. The watcher slowly removed the blade from his victim's flesh as he lay James down.

Blood spilled from both the Fighter's mouth and his chest as a puddle of the liquid began to form beneath him.

"Please," James said and glanced over to where I lay.

The Watcher nodded and stood to retrieve me. I found that his touch was far more gentle than any purely flesh and bone creature was capable of and my rage subsided somewhat; this being clearly had only been defending itself from James--and yet it was also clear James wasn't quite the villain in this story either.

The kind seeming, if militant, Saint brought me to my father and kneeled slowly to offer me to James.

The fallen battlemaster brought a shaking hand up. "Help me sit to hold him."

The Watcher shifted me into the crook of one arm and grasped his other hand against James' outstretched palm. "Of course."

As he supported the man in leaning up, the Watcher passed me to James. "Neither of you has much time left. I can not promise you an afterlife, but I will perform any rites that you ask."

So, was this it? This life definitely hadn't lasted long. I wondered what my strange godly benefactor would think. Had this been the life she had said I was owed? If I was being honest, I felt quite shortchanged, but I felt even worse for James--who had seemed to now sacrifice everything for a child that wasn't even really a child.

I should have thought my choices and the ramifications of them through. Maybe I deserved this for that, for seeing this life as too much of a game, but James didn't.

My father glanced down to where his and the Watcher's hands met. His one working eye focused on the golden band upon the ring finger. "You had a family?"

The watcher glanced down. "Yes, it is for them that I stand guard. The evil here would make it so that even their souls, long departed from this world, would not be safe from torment."

There was a look of sorrow in the battlemaster's eyes and the Watcher slowly began to pull back.

"I'm sorry, you didn't deserve this, but I needed to be sure your talisman was on you to make this count," James said. A single crimson stoned ring on the battlemaster's hand began to burn an infeneral, smokey crimson. Black veins of corruption shot forth from where the ring touched James' skin.

Realizing the deception, the Watcher tried to let go before it was too late, but by the time he had begun to escape it was in fact apparently too late. His own veins were already filling with the same black ichor from where he'd touched the battlemaster's own and he stumbled back in an sudden agony that appeared greater than anything a man should be able to feel.

"No!" he screamed as the vessels on his hands touched where his own wedding ring sat, before they burst open with a wet pop and a black mass of cackling and living shadow began to swirl around his divine form.

A demonic, impish laughter filled the ornate room as from within the Saint's body, and then his armor, more of the inky darkness violently tore its way out, only to then physically puncture its way back through his holy figure over and over again.

The scream that the Watcher gave was that of an innocent man who was faced with an unearned damnation.

The blackened veins of corruption soon spread up the faultless warrior's neck. The Watcher slammed to his knees as his body began to fail him. Tears fell from his vibrant eyes, running down his sickly silver skin, which had quickly lost its tanned and beautiful hue as the curse had all too rapidly spread. Soon, even the luminance of his gaze was extinguished as the darkness filled first the edges of its light and then seeped in to smother the light entirely.

The Watcher continued to shriek, reduced from a spotless paragon to a wailing animal. His hands and fingers raked at his face and drew blackened blood, that had once no doubt flowed like molten gold, as he desperately tried to claw the rotted filth of corruption out from his very skin in a final desperate bid for a now impossible salvation.

Yet, the Saint appeared to be powerless to fight back as the very last of his divinity was finally consumed and snuffed out--and the last beam of light shining from his eyes went dark.

With a final cry and then a violent spasm of coughing, the Watcher fell to his palms and then convulsed onto the ground. In that moment his chest heaved and he vomited out a cloud of black, sludge-like liquid that pooled on the floor and across his once spotless face.

The wedding ring upon the Saint's finger was the first thing on his body to be fully consumed by the shadow, but not before his arm--now the only thing moving on his body, reached out as if pleading for help.

Soon, the darkness spread in between his veins to fully engulf him. The darkened flesh began to fall in wet-looking clumps off of his body and to sink between the cracks of the temple floor.

In the end, all that was left of the virtue filled paladin was a charred looking skeleton that dripped a thick, noxious looking black goo. Its jaw was still stretched out in a silent scream.

James simply stared at what he had done. No expression was upon his face. Slowly he stood. His own arm was blackened in complete necrosis and hung as if completely dead by his side, the demonic stone of the ring he had used to obliterate the Watcher had been shattered with it's activation; likely due to the nature of the Saint, the ancient and very demonic power of the ring had by far given him the worst of the torment, though I very much doubted he would ever use his arm again.

I was almost too shocked to feel anything now. Whatever James had done, the morality of it was beyond questionable. A weapon like the one he used, it reminded me of the more advanced tools of war I had once seen employed on the battlefields that I'd been stationed on across the many planets of the United Terran Federation--unlike those, however, no matter how terrible, this weapon seemed to attack more than just the physical body and that was something I wasn't even sure was forgivable.

The battlemaster cradled me in his only working limb and limped towards the still twinkling portal.

I felt as if a distorted and somehow dry ocean of water had washed over us as we entered the tear in reality. Yet, I didn't find myself fully occupied with this odd and uncomfortable sensation, but rather with a single question: would I have gone as far as James had for me if my own daughters were equally at risk?

The answer came almost as quickly as the question had, and with almost as much guilt as I was sure James himself felt: irrevocably, without a single question or true regret, yes I would.

I wondered on the fate of James' soul and, as I realized my own true feelings about his actions, of my own if I were ever faced with a similar decision.