“I swore upon steel and shadow to guard the fallen dawn—yet here I stand, cast into an endless void.” In his home reality—once a world of perpetual twilight—Umbre was the last sentinel of the Citadel of Gloaming, a fortress perched on the edge of oblivion. Clad in ancient obsidian plate that drank every flicker of light, he patrolled the battlements with an unwavering vow: protect the innocent from the dark. His greatsword—an obsidian relic forged in preternatural gloom—was both his burden and his blessing. One night, as he performed his midnight vigil atop the ramparts, a living stain of pure darkness seeped through the cracks in the stones. It curled around his armor, cold as the void between stars. Before he could draw breath, he was yanked from his world and flung—still upright, still armored—into the sands of the Death Arena. He emerged not bleeding, not bruised—but unbroken. Around him, torches blazed and crowds roared. Umbre simply knelt, rose, and gripped his greatsword. His first opponent was a hulking brute wreathed in flame. Umbre let the fire reach him—his armor swallowed the heat—and then, in a breathless instant, he “blended” into the shadows pooling beneath his foe’s feet. No one saw him move… until a black blade cleaved the gladiator’s skull. The head burst like spilled ink, sinew trailing like tendrils of night before collapsing in a pool of rust and shadow. Opponent’s last thought: “Where…? How? Over the course of that brutal cycle, Umbre’s “Guillotine” became legend: stepping through an enemy’s own shadow, he’d bring down his greatsword with such force the arena shuddered—and the victim’s armor, flesh, and bone would rain apart in a silent crescendo of gore. Once, a leviathan-armored knight charged him; Umbre simply expanded the darkness around him until every torch guttered out, and then he struck. When the light returned, there was only a shattered helm and a blackened ruin where a man once stood. Fira’s first sighting of Umbre came at the edge of the battlefield. She watched, awestruck, as his armor absorbed both the sunburst of a summoner’s orb and the echoing cheers of the crowd. He turned once—his helm’s visor splitting slightly to reveal the faintest hint of purple flame where an eye should be—and spoke four words that seemed to chill even the torches: “The vow remains unbroken.” In that moment, Fira understood: Umbre was not a creature of darkness, but a knight forged by it. His discipline and code rendered him almost inhuman—but his purpose resonated with her own fledgling resolve. And though the Arena claimed him time and again, Umbre’s silhouette—calm, unreadable, terrible as a living eclipse—always reappeared, a testament to an unyielding will that not even oblivion could extinguish.