"Y–You demon! The priest was right to kill you—s-stay away from me, you vile creature!"
Gareth's voice shook as he drew a black dagger, its edge shimmering faintly with divine runes. He swung for his neck—
Almost.
A hand caught his wrist mid-swing.
A voice—dark, melodic, and terribly calm—whispered,
"Let's not be so quick to end this... Little beautiful moments like these deserve to be savored."
Thump.
The world flipped. Gareth dangled upside down, suspended by chains that hadn't existed a moment before. His head throbbed, and when he looked up—he froze.
Two hollow pits stared back at him, black and endless. Then came a smile. Twisted. Terrifying. Beautiful in its wrongness.
Eyes began to split open across his skin.
One. Two. Dozens.
Blinking, bleeding, convulsing—until he screamed, every nerve on fire.
Thump.
Azareal stumbled, coughing up thick, dark blood. His voice was a broken chorus.
"Arghhh! I can't take it! The voices—too loud, too loud, LOUD, LOUD, LOUD!"
The air vibrated. Bloodlust poured out from every eye on his body like a miasma of madness. They blinked and twitched in frenzy, leaking tears of blood.
Then—snap.
A single movement.
Gareth's head was torn from his shoulders, his final expression frozen in horror—
—and then smashed against the ground until it was nothing but shattered bone and pulp.
"Shut up—shut up—SHUT UP!"
Azareal screamed, the words twisting into a song, a melody of pain and ruin.
Popping. Sizzling. The sound of burning flesh.
Then he fell—face-first into the crimson pool—his body convulsing once, twice, before falling still.
Silence.
The dungeon was quiet.
In that silence, a bloodied young man with black, half-long hair sat trembling amid the gore. His voice broke in a sob.
"W-What have I done? I killed them... I killed them... I killed them all."
Reflected in his wide, shaking eyes—
—was a room painted with death.
A corpse burned and split by a thousand eye-shaped scars.
A wall painted in flesh, streaked with crimson handprints and something that might have once been a man.
And a headless body gripping a black dagger, its fingers stiff and cold.