When Varik surveyed the battlefield, the hall lay in ruin—a graveyard where the echoes of voices and hope had died together. The stench of rusted iron and clotted blood choked the air, thick and heavy with the residue of agony.
Of the thirty mercenaries who had entered, only eighteen remained. The rest were scattered across the rubble—some mangled beyond recognition, others decaying with unnatural speed, their stench a curse upon any who lingered.
"Tsk."
Varik exhaled slowly, chest rising once, then settling. A faint smirk curved his lips, his voice cold enough to cut through the silence.
"Pathetic. A mere skirmish, and they nearly got wiped out."
His gaze swept over his squad. Without them, every corpse here would have been swallowed by shadows.
Light in the hall dimmed further, plunging the space into the same gloom as the corridor.
Marissa stepped forward cautiously, voice soft but strained:
"The warding spell is breaking... The light that kept this place alive—it wasn't real. It was a barrier to contain the Rust Shadows. And it… failed."
Darius moved closer, blood dripping from his steel gauntlet. His grey eyes traced the faded runes carved into the walls.
"That's not what matters now... What I want to know is—how did they get in?"
turned to Varik.
"Without the artifact you carry, even we couldn't have breached the castle gates."
Varik inclined his head slightly—acknowledgment without expression.
Orin, still inspecting his bow, spoke quietly.
"Even my sub-ability couldn't detect an entry point when we scouted. Like the castle itself rejected us."
Ryn let out a bitter laugh that curdled into rage:
"Damn Barrick for lying to us—said the beasts were few, the path safe... Damn him and his cursed intel!"
Varik shot him a cold glance, lips curling into a humorless smile:
"Who said the beasts weren't here from the start?"
The words froze in the air.
His squad exchanged uneasy glances, grasping at the meaning behind his words.
Varik offered no clarification. He only smiled faintly—like someone amused by a truth too dark to share.
Across the ruined hall, Sylvan dragged himself through dust and debris. Sweat mingled with blood across his shoulder, where the wound still burned beneath torn fabric.
But Elwyn's salve dulled the pain—enough for him to move—barely.
He shuffled toward the corpse of a young woman crushed near a pillar—her body mangled by a Rust Shadow, reeking of decay.
He knelt beside her, fingers brushing her swollen hand to pluck a faded, ash-grey ring—identical to his own.
"What are you doing?!" Elwyn gasped, clapping a trembling hand over her mouth. "That's… that's desecration!"
Sylvan ignored her, a dry chuckle scraping from his throat.
"Look around before preaching morality."
Confused, she hesitated—then obeyed.
And froze.
All around, the surviving mercenaries were doing the same. Rifling through the dead. Stripping rings, belts, jewelry—any faint glimmer of worth.
The hall filled with muffled voices. Arguments. Growls. The clink of metal and greed.
Disgust contorted Elwyn's face. "Is… is this what they call survival?"
Sylvan met her eyes—cold, unblinking, carved from stone and silence.
"In the Grey Strip, honor and mercy are luxuries. Survival is cruelty—learn that, or die ignorant of why."
He turned to a Rust Shadow corpse, unfazed by the smoke-like ash rising from its flesh. The stench of burnt iron and rot hung thick. Blood-smeared fingers moved with grim precision.
Raising his dull, battered sword, he drove it into the creature's warped skull. Bone cracked. Black blood splattered across his face. He didn't flinch.
Then—carefully—he pried the beast's eyes from their sockets. Two orbs of pulsing crimson light, beating faintly in death.
Sylvan lingered, then carefully prised the blazing crimson eyes from their sockets. He lifted them before him. Their eerie glow still pulsed, life flickering in death—like a trapped heartbeat refusing to fade.
He blinked slowly, studying this final spark of extinguished life, then clenched his fist around the eyes. No remorse, no shame—only the familiar cold that precedes regret in souls long dead inside.
"Why?!" Elwyn recoiled, stumbling back as if shielding her eyes from the scene. Her breath hitched, voice trembling with revulsion and awe: "Why do this?!"
Without looking up, he answered, voice rough but steady:
"Rust Shadow eyes fetch good coins from The Embertrade Cartel Guild. One's worth more than a day's wage. Leaving them to rot would be the only sin here."
She looked at the hollow sockets, dark pits that seemed to weep black tears.
Ignoring her words, he pulled a tattered cloth from his pocket and slowly wiped the blood from his hands, as though brushing away the dust of a long road—not the blood of something he had killed.
To him, the whole act was routine, a habit as natural as breathing, leaving no place for pity or disgust.
He rose to his feet and cast a brief glance at the eyes in his hand before placing them into his storage ring.
It wasn't an act of greed, but a survival instinct carved into him by the cruelty of this grey world—where morality is measured only by the price of food and medicine.
Elwyn stepped closer, voice barely a whisper:
"I can't... I can't even touch them."
He finally faced her. Gaze cold and steady as wind-scoured rock.
"You will learn... or you will die."
A heavy silence settled between them, broken only by the soft drip of blood from the surrounding corpses.
In that moment, everything seemed still—so still that even the breath of the place itself seemed hesitant to escape.
But the calm shattered.
A voice. Deep. Resonant. Cutting through the silence like a blade drawn from its sheath.
"Enough trifling there. Gather here—now!"
Sylvan looked up, tracing the sound to its source.
Varik stood atop rubble and mangled corpses, broad shoulders squared, arms clasped behind his back—posing not in death's arena, but a parade ground.
Even surrounded by ruin, his eyes gleamed sharp and alive—scanning, weighing, judging.
"Scarcely a handful of you left worth mentioning," he said flatly. A faint smile, devoid of warmth, touched his lips.
"Stay close to my squad. Dying this fast serves no purpose."
Some of the mercenaries flinched, their gazes darting between one another—tired, hollow, mistrustful. No one spoke. Silence pressed against their throats like a blade.
Sylvan's eyes drifted over them, once brimming with confidence, now hollow shells. Eighteen from thirty. Skin ashen as ghosts. Eyes vacant, as if their souls had fled bodies torn apart by beasts.
He studied them quietly. And then… the past bled through.
His first battle.
A boy gripping a sword longer than his arm, trembling yet grinning as if courage alone could rewrite fate.
He remembered the sound—the tear of flesh, the wet collapse of a man dying too loudly.
How something inside him cracked open that day.
How innocence had a sound when it broke.
That same sound echoed now, faint but real, behind the hum of blood and iron.
The same truth—this world was never built for mercy.
Here, blood was the only language humans ever spoke fluently.
Varik's voice sliced through the stillness:
"Move out. We leave this hall—now. The ward-spell still holds, but one reckless spark of your sub-abilities and we start again from the pit. Test it, and you die first. Understood?"
He turned, leading them down another dark corridor plunging into the castle's heart. His squad followed.
Sylvan moved too—slow, but steady. Elwyn walked beside him, face still etched with terror, but her eyes held a new glint: resolve. Or perhaps nascent cruelty. No longer the girl who hid behind others.
Before exiting, Sylvan paused. Looked back at the brink of death.
Corpses strewn. Blood pools are still slick. Shattered weapons. Faint light dancing with restless shadows like unquiet souls.
A whisper echoed in his mind—that hazy vision: three figures in mist, auras shaking his core, dread unlike anything before.
That memory... What was it?
He turned his back on the hall and walked into darkness.
Walls seemed to breathe. Air grew heavier with each step, as if the castle itself watched.
Their footsteps were the last sound... before shadows swallowed them whole on the path to the castle's heart.