Shojiro didn't slow.
He moved like a god scorned—each motion a sentence, each strike a verdict. The new heartbeat in his chest did not merely keep time; it wrote rhythm into his limbs. Vythra screamed through his veins, braided now with the memory of his father's hands, and the world answered in kind.
He slammed into Erekrath with the force of a meteor.
The first collision folded ribs inward. Shojiro's crimson fist punched through plated shoulder into the wet, hot meat beneath; bone splintered like old wood. He wrenched, tore, and the creature's skin parted with the sound of cartilage ripping. Shards of plated bone spun into the air and rained down, dusted in red light.
Still Erekrath breathed.
Shojiro's onslaught was a machine of violence—Vythra-coated elbows driving into sockets, forearms locking around spined vertebrae, pulling and twisting until vertebrae sheared like rope. He climbed the beast's flank, ripping away armored lat-plates with both hands, turning bone plates into brakes and flails, throwing pieces back into the creature's own face. The monster howled; the sound was a cracked bell in a canyon.
But the heart stayed hidden. The orb's glow moved deeper as the beast's ribs reknit. Where Shojiro ripped a slab of bone free, crimson filaments laced out from the creature's chest—thin veins of the beast's own Vythra—reweaving and sealing. The first time Shojiro downsized a shoulder plate into powder and shoved his fist toward the beaten core, the pulse there hissed and the wound closed like a living seamstress sewing flesh.
He adapted. He didn't try to kill what mended; he tore it apart again. He hammered at the joints until the creature's gait stuttered. He ripped out a knee and used the jagged femur as a spear, driving it into the flank and wrenching out a geyser of black-streaked blood that painted the floor. He hacked through the tail base and hurled the severed spike like a javelin; it embedded in the far wall and chimed hollowly as if mocking him.
Every piece Shojiro disassembled stitched back minutes later. The orb pulsed, and Erekrath's Vythra-slurry seeped into fractured bone and hardened into new plates. The monster's chest convulsed with each stitch; the orb's light throbbed like a metronome for the repairs.
Shojiro realized the pattern and shifted tactics. Direct strikes only burrowed him into deeper wounds; the orb's proximity healed too quickly. He needed an opening—not to kill outright but to force the heart to show itself.
He began baiting the beast—feinting left, drawing powerful counters, then slamming his weight into places the creature didn't expect. He used the tricks he'd learned: the crimson hand to thread Vythra into crevices, overloading seam-lines like he did with the slimes, detonating localized ruptures to force the orb to slide. He hammered on the plates not to break them cleanly, but to make the beast shift its balance, to move the hidden ledger that was the core.
At one point he smacked a rib clean through to the beast's spine; the impact dislocated bones with a sound like a hundred sticks breaking. The orb slid—just a hair—toward a gap. For a breath Shojiro saw it: a heartbeat of exposed light glinting between ribs, a molten red eye beating in time with his own.
He lunged, pouring his life into a massive crimson gauntlet that crushed through soft tissue and found the orb's rim. He stabbed threads of Vythra into it, pushed, overloaded. For a ticking second the orb answered—it pulsed violently, flared, and shock rolled back through the beast. Shojiro felt the overload burn through his arms, an inferno that left him howling as veins erupted beneath his skin.
Then the core slid. Not away this time—down.
Erekrath convulsed, and with a hideous intelligence exposed, it relocated the orb behind a moving cage—a rib-bridge that folded and rotated like a living mechanism. The heart vanished into a deeper chamber inside the beast's torso, out of reach. As it moved, stubby offshoots of Vythra sank into the wound and reformed bone in a blink; the creature's chest became an armored drum again.
Shojiro staggered back, breathing ragged, tasting iron. The Vythra in his arms sputtered—exhaustion and backlash burning the edges of his vision. He forced himself not to hesitate. Never hesitate. Never die. The rules hammered like mallets into his skull.
Erekrath didn't flee. It advanced—limping, stitched, furious—and its healing showed the cruel truth: the beast would not die until that orb was destroyed. It could reseal, reroute, recede its heart to vaults under bone and tendon. Shojiro had to pry the heart from its hiding places and utterly annihilate it.
So he kept dismantling.
He tore plates, sheared spines, unmade limbs. He launched volleys of Vythra into the folds of tissue where the orb might be, forcing the monster to twitch and rebalance. Each time the creature rebuilt, it bled; each rebuild left a new seam, a small weakness. Shojiro learned to choose the seams—overload the seam's Vythra until it split not to heal but to reveal.
When he finally punched through a seam and found nothing but a molten tunnel leading deeper, he jammed his arm into the maw of the cavity. Fingers met an inner chamber that twitched with the orb's presence. He could feel it: the core's pulse staticky through the meat like a second sun.
He drove a palm into that dark light, pressed his Vythra into the shell. Threads fed into the orb—he could taste its power like metal on his tongue. He prepared to trigger it, to detonate the core he'd threaded with his own life-force.
Erekrath reacted like lightning. The beast contorted, its ribs doing a mechanical slide that slammed Shojiro's forearm against an internal plate. A jagged hook of bone caught him in the wrist and wrenched—a brutal, grinding tear—and Shojiro howled as tendon and sinew protested. The creature's internal mechanisms were designed to deny him purchase; they swallowed his strike and spat it back out.
He ripped free, arm torn, blood arcing from the wound, but the core stayed—unbroken, shifting, mocking.
For a long, staggering minute the two simply stared, maimed trophies littering the floor between them. Erekrath's orb beat steady; its Vythra veins glowed with a furious, invulnerable pulse. Shojiro's breath came in shreds; his remaining eye burned red with the collision of grief and fury. He'd carved the beast nearly in half and felt only the impatience of a true hunt—this thing was bound to a rulebook written by Primordial will.
Then, slowly, the monster sank a shoulder and withdrew into its own repaired cuirass, its chest becoming an armored vault once more. The orb's light dimmed as it hid, and the creature turned with a slow, deliberate motion—no longer purely on the defensive, but gathering itself.
Shojiro knew he had done damage. He had unmade the thing piece by piece—legs gone, tail severed, plates flayed—and yet the heart beat on. The chamber smelled of iron and steam, of bone dust and the remnants of his fury. Blood slicked his boots. He tasted the victory and it tasted small.
Erekrath took a step back, then a second. Its healing Vythra threaded outward, knitting like the pull of tide, and the wound edges sealed. The orb shifted again, deeper into caverns Shojiro could not reach by brute force alone. The creature flexed as new plates grew, and where bone had been torn, fresh carapace gleamed. The monster did not die. It had been maimed; it had been humiliated—and it was learning.
Shojiro did not lower his guard. He had no time to revel. He had proven something vital: the orb could be baited, forced, overloaded—but never simply smashed while it remained free to crawl beneath its ribs. The beast would always find sanctuary for its heart unless he could make it vulnerable and pinned.
He wiped blood from his lips and, breathing through the ache in his chest, let out a low laugh—half madness, half exhilaration.
"You'll heal," he snarled, voice a broken blade. "Fine. I'll break you again. And again. And again. Until you have nowhere left to hide."
Erekrath answered with a sound that was almost a promise—a grinding, bone-deep shriek that vibrated through the stair-socket. The chamber's air shifted; the next staircase remained buried for now. The beast retracted into the cavern like a wound pulling closed, orb safe for the moment.
But the tower had recognized something as well—the test had been answered. Shojiro stood bloodied, maimed, and alive.
This was not the end. It was not even the finish line. It was a reckoning that had only just begun.