Black Mage's evil energy and easily unmakes not only the Light Warriors' class changes, but also removes their original abilities. Sarda's power quickly becomes erratic and unstable, and Chaos, the King of Demons, takes the opportunity to possess Sarda's body and announce his plans to annihilate the universe. However, before a final battle between the Light Warriors and Chaos can begin, he is destroyed off-panel by a group of four White Mages, a party combination that was dismissed in one of the earliest episodes as ineffectual for the game, and all credit for saving the world goes to a group of bystanders, the Dark Warriors. The Epilogue picks up three years later. White Mage visits Red Mage and Dragoon at a restaurant, where they have started up an extremely unsuccessful support group for sole survivors of ancient sects. Afterward, White Mage visits King Thief in Elfland, who has been trying to locate Black Mage and Fighter, in an effort to obtain more riches from their adventure. Black Mage and Fighter find themselves poor and out of work in a remote town, trying to make money by taking job postings in the town square. The epilogue ends with Fighter suggesting that they resume their search for the "Armor of Invincibility" that Fighter has been searching for since the beginning of the comic. Reception Readership figures Around 2003/2004, 8-Bit Theater was the most popular sprite comic on the Web and was one of the most popular and successful webcomics of all. In 2009, Multiverse Comics described it as "massively successful" and "one of the bigger smash hits of the web-comic world". Clevinger said in 2003 that standing out among webcomics was a big issue to success at that time, noting that he pulled in a lot of readers by being one of the first sprite comics, but said "a gimmick like that can only take you so far. And usually it takes you to a lot of first time visitors with no repeat traffic." Reviews during its run Writing for 1Up.com in 2005, Nich Maragos said that "it was unquestionably Brian Clevinger's 8-Bit Theater that took [sprite comics] to its fullest expression and greatest popularity." Maragos said, "Unlike a lot of the lesser sprite comic creators, Clevinger spices up what could very quickly become a repetitive gimmick with lots of effects, original backgrounds, and uniquely altered sprites to make sure the series