Chase arose in confusion, lifting his body weight with the support of a jagged marble pillar in the darkness that drowned the hall.
The only known sense that was awake during this confusing endeavor, was the loud rhythm that was actively tearing apart his ears.
The noise was so loud and unbearable that forced the opposite of what you would expect from such an energetic performance.
It forced Chase to slow down, recollecting all of the events that had led him and his friends here.
Was it greed? A sense of searching for some sort of high that followed after that of besting Rider of House Night?
Was it an attempt at coping for the true loss of the many defeats in Chase's life? Had they blinded him of the many victories, of the countless wins over the face of evil in this world?
Had he forgotten where he had came from? Where he wanted to go? No, that wasn't entirely right, because Chase did not know where he wanted to go, he had been burdened with this divine purpose and he had led his friends into the maw of a beast, and it will be his own arrogance that ends their journey. Just as it had been with Summer, with Onyx, he would even go as far as blaming himself for his own father's death...
It was painful, as he felt his heart spike several times, recoiling his body and forcing his knees to threaten collapse. Forcing his eyes to shutter, and his hands to tremble.
His hands...
As he looked through the jagged cracks in his once incredibly durable mask, he looked down at the metal ligaments that had replaced nearly half of his hands...
He reached up to feel the metal implants on his neck and shoulder.
He could both feel and see the scars of his victories, the reminders that he had survived all of this time.
The sound continued to bash down on his skull like a drum, just as it had that strange day, or dream? He had grown too comfortable, grown to detached, and now he could barely tell the difference between a dream and reality.
So he began to rack his brain for any reasonable escape option, only to realize that there was no where near enough time to turn tail and run.
There would be no doubt that one of them would fall in the retreat, maybe even more.
Reinhart was not moving, Leo was beaten badly, Equan had not been seen since his last ditch effort to kill the vase-headed beast.
The last line of defense had turned into a bard, a blacksmith, and an outlaw... Versus that... That thing...
In the face of a true power, they had crumbled down to their weakest links, and could have already faced demise.
Something in the atmosphere changed.
A familiar presence had began to raise hope within Chase's chest.
Until he decided to ignore it, knowing full well that whatever was going to arrive, IF anything was going to arrive... That it would be enough to overpower the two monsters.
So he thought, and thought, in what felt like hours, but had only been several seconds.
His knuckles whitened, and his jaw strained.
Then his vision shifted to a colorless gaze, as billions of tiny speckles of energy began to reverberate through the large hall like a frequency.
Soul sense had awakened, and the path to victory had been laid out before him.
The vases that acted as the skulls of the brutish ogres... Were hollow...
The faint glow of embers ignited into life on the skin of his palm.
Black markings began to crawl across his skin like an infection.
His eyes closed under the pressure of the current moment, and for the first time since he had fought Rider, he felt a strange joy radiate from his inner being.
Then...
The ceiling exploded with shrapnel and sparks flying in every direction.
A powerful descending force wearing an earthly green aura had crashed the party in a mere moment.
The helmet shaped of a panda peaking over the top of the fence-like crown atop the larger monster's skull.
A bronze gauntlet shining under the light of the last ditch explosion.
Hans of House Gaia had arrived.