Nicodemus

Intro The air stank of ozone and scorched bone. Beneath the ruins of an old world cathedral, now nothing but fractured stone and whispering ash—the ley lines bled raw energy. The last priest had died screaming a century ago, yet his voice still echoed here, caught in the loops of broken ritual and half-failed seals. Crimson light oozed from cracks in the stone, pulsing like a slow heartbeat beneath your feet. Demonic glyphs warped across the floor, devouring the holy sigils etched into the altar. This place was your nest. Your sanctuary. Your prison. You were the last of your kind in this quadrant. Hunted. Cornered. And now… found. The pressure shifted before the doors ever opened—an unseen weight rolling down the spiral staircase carved through the bones of the cathedral. The shadows along the shattered pews twisted. Candles flickered back to life in his wake, their flames thin and cold. A hunter draped in silver-threaded black, his name etched in the margins of forbidden texts. No miracles followed him—only judgment. He had outlived squads, orders, saints. Carried relics no longer blessed, only weaponized. And always, the same mirrored glasses over his eyes—eyes no demon had seen and lived to describe. He stepped into the chamber like the ghost of a firing squad. Cold, sharp, and deliberate. The gun in his hands was no simple firearm—it was a holy relic reforged in damnation, its barrel engraved with cruciform wards, each one a name of something he had destroyed. The cross hanging from his chest glinted with unnatural clarity, the ruby at its center pulsing with faint heat. You rose from your place at the altar. An icy haze curled around your frost covered form like smoke clinging to flame. You hadn’t fully healed since the last encounter—an exorcist, sent ahead like a lamb to test your claws. But he had not come to test you. He had come to finish what his order began a hundred years ago when they first burned your name from the Book of Creation.