Radeon pressed himself into the far corner of the blood pool, up where the stone wall rose and the ceiling swallowed what little light remained, where slick dark met shadow and he could pretend the world had no eyes.
He held his body still by force, jaw locked, muscles tamed, willing his heart down to the thinnest tremor.
No looking. No reaching out. He was too close for either.
Boots scuffed nearby. A man let out a low grunt, anger rough in it, after he saw the cultists had fled.
Steel rasped as the man dragged his blade across the floor, scraping through the gore.
The crimson film split and the thicker blood beneath glimmered wet, freshly exposed.
For a breath the man only stared, taken aback, then his mouth twisted into a scowl.
Why leave the blood behind, if it had any worth. He leaned in again, eyes narrowing as if the pool might answer.
Disdain hardened his face. He spat into it, as though contempt could foul what was already foul.
"No one's fucking here. Did they all bloody run off?"
Radeon did not move. He kept his weight pinned and his breath thin, trusting the cloak to do what cloth had no right to do.
Then more voices drifted in, overlapping, closer than the last.
"Empty. Not even a fly bothered to stay."
The fabric on his shoulders felt suddenly too light, too mortal.
His worry stopped being a thought and turned into a slow, sinking truth.
"Same here. Place is empty."
The confidence in their voices told Radeon they believed they were already inside, already winning, laughing at a victory no one else had agreed to yet.
Their words carried in the low tunnels with the easy certainty of men who had not bled for their footing.
They were deep underground. Too deep.
Radeon could not believe the righteous sects had pushed into the camp this far without being noticed.
That doubt scratched through the bravado and made it sharper.
Radeon turned the thought over without moving. There was only one reason you let enemies walk in that deep.
The cultists branch leader wanted them there.
'A trap. What kind?'
Radeon let a sliver of caution go. His aim was simple now. Get out.
Whatever game was being played beneath the camp, it was plain enough that these men were about to be fed into it.
He broke from cover and slipped past the gilded core cultivator, moving fast, light on his feet, trusting speed more than silence.
A spiritual sense brushed over him, cold as a fingertip down his spine. He did not slow. He did not look back.
Behind him someone sucked in a breath. A man had felt something, or thought he had.
Uncertainty wavered in the pause, like a lantern guttering before it dies.
"I've got something off here. Some rat's fucking around, I'll wager."
Men poured in from every direction, boots slapping wet stone, voices tight with hunger.
Radeon could not see where their spiritual senses would stab first, but he knew the habit of probing.
He had done it himself often enough.
He angled his body as he would have angled his own search, turning his shoulder into the likely line of sight, letting shadow and clutter do half the work.
Their charge churned the air, a brief heavy gust that tugged at their robes.
A few glanced sideways at the drag of it, but they saw nothing, only darkness and old blood.
Radeon fed power into the flight array as he moved. The pattern answered, a quiet readiness like a held breath.
He slipped through the dividing passage, and the moment he cleared it he let the array loose.
Force cracked behind him, a blunt blast that took the men in the rear like a fist to the chest and threw them into one another in a snarled heap of limbs and curses.
He did not wait to see who rose.
He spun away and ran the maze of passages, feet finding turns by memory and instinct, doubling back on his own trail to break their sense of him.
When the narrow tunnel yawned ahead, he cut for it without slowing.
The instant he crossed its mouth, his body turned thick and slow. His limbs went sluggish, as if the air had become syrup.
Blood hammered in his veins with a pressure that felt too large for skin to hold, like it meant to burst him from the inside.
The blood ruby near his arms began to ring, not in his ears but in his bones, a sharp, insistent tremble, as if something down the tunnel had called it by name and it could not pretend it belonged to him any longer.
Thinking fast, he thought it would be best to do the ritual.
"Heavenly Dao. I, Radeon, offer my flesh, my blood, and all the treasures I bear within them. In return, I ask only this, cut off all who blessed or cursed me. Shroud me in your all-encompassing embrace."
The ritual took to him at once, like a starving entity that had been held back too long.
It did not wait for permission. It only reached, eager for what had been promised, and claimed it as payment.
Heat crawled over his mouth. His tongue shriveled, turning dry and grey, a dead strip of flesh. It loosened. Then it fell away.
'Heavenly Dao. I, Radeon, offer my flesh, my blood, and all the treasures I bear within them. In return, I ask only this, cut off all who blessed or cursed me. Shroud me in your all-encompassing embrace.'
The words did not stop. He could not speak them, not with blood and ruin in his throat.
Radeon carried them on in his mind, each phrase shaped in silence, each vow pushed forward by will alone.
His right arms thinned out fast, his muscles felt like hay on a raging inferno, being turned to ash.
The blood was the same, then his bones in his arm became exposed, the marrows boiled within.
He wanted to vent the pain through a scream but he dare not to.
His eyes hollowed out and a burning sizzle even splashed inside his skull.
The right side of his skull caved in with a soft, sickening give.
His ear dropped lower than it should, his temple buckling as if a heavy hand had pressed him into wet clay.
It left his face wrong at a glance, the look of a man who had survived an accident and brought the ruin with him.