Chapter 2: Restoration
"Vos des!"
Mike's voice cracked through the heavy air—ragged, desperate, each word torn from a throat that had already surrendered to death. Dark, viscous blood pooled beneath him where his leg had been torn away when Dax was blasted backward, spreading across the churned earth like spilled wine.
"This must be why the cult sent us," Mike rasped, his chest heaving as every breath became a labor. "We have to kill him before he grows any further."
"Vos," Kakarai intoned flatly, jabbing a thick finger toward the empty space where Mike's limb had once been.
Mike's gaze followed the gesture as the world tilted around him. Pure terror carved itself across his face—eyes wide, mouth slack with deep denial. Then his expression shattered, twisting into something broken and unhinged. Laughter spilled from his bloodied lips, high, frantic, and teetering on the edge of madness.
"Ahahahaha! Kakarai! Please…" He clawed at the dirt, dragging his mutilated body forward with fingernails that tore and bled against the stones. "Give me your blood! Heal me!"
Kakarai stood motionless, his head tilting at an unnatural angle. Darkness gleamed in his eyes as a deranged smile stretched across his split face, his aura thickening like coagulating gore.
"Why are you hesitating?" Mike's voice thinned, dragged under by rapid blood loss and the creeping cold of death.
"Hei!"
"Hei."
Kakarai's lips peeled back. He looked like a demon freshly clawed from the abyss—all teeth and bottomless hunger.
With deliberate slowness, the hulking priest shrugged off his blood-red robe. The heavy fabric pooled at his feet like an opening wound. Beneath it, his pale torso was a map of ritual scars—jagged lines carved with dark purpose around a festering centerpiece etched deep across his sternum.
The carved letters writhed like worms burrowing through raw meat, pulsing with a sickly crimson light as the wound itself drew breath.
"Haha… so that's how it is."
Mike let his head fall back. His fading eyes found the sky, bruised purple and indifferent, and a cold, eternal acceptance settled over him like a shroud.
"I don't want this… but it's the way of the cult," he whispered, coughing up a mixture of blood, denial, and resignation. "Let the world drown in blood. My bastard friend… do it, Kakarai. Consume me."
Step.
Kakarai advanced, his bare feet silent against the gore-soaked ground. His shadow stretched long and crooked behind him, reaching toward the treeline like grasping fingers.
Step.
Mike did not close his eyes. He forced himself to watch, even as panic warred with his paralyzed throat. Kill me, kill me, kill me! he tried to scream, but his voice was already gone.
Stab.
Kakarai's arm punched forward, clean and merciless. His hand drove straight through Mike's chest with the ease of a blade sinking into water. Bone cracked. Flesh parted. Mike's heart ruptured between Kakarai's fingers, snuffing out his thoughts in an instant.
Rising from the crater across the clearing, Dax watched the grotesque ritual unfold through the drifting dust.
"You almost had me," Dax said quietly.
Shattered rock crumbled into fine powder beneath his boots, scattering on the thickening wind as he stepped out of the pit. He brushed the dirt from his torn clothes as though recovering from a minor inconvenience, a thin trickle of blood still drying at the corner of his lips.
Across the churned earth, Kakarai lifted his dead comrade's corpse effortlessly, slinging it over his shoulder like a butcher hauling fresh slaughter. Thick rivulets of blood poured down Kakarai's extended arm—yet not a single drop reached the ground. Drawn by invisible threads, the crimson streams crawled upward across his skin and coiled into the rotting inscription carved across his chest, which drank the offering greedily.
"Vos!"
Kakarai's voice rose into an ecstatic, delirious howl as Mike's corpse began to wither and sink directly into his flesh. Skin split and bones ground together like crushed stone as Kakarai's right arm bloated and twisted into something monstrous, veined with black and ending in wet, gleaming claws. From his shoulder, Mike's severed head pushed outward like a living tumor, its eyes burning with sickly emerald flame and its mouth frozen open in an unending, silent scream.
Reaching into his storage ring, Kakarai drew forth a massive tome bound in human flesh. Its pages rose and fell as if breathing, and the crimson letters on its cover bled downward, staining the air: Worship the Blood River.
Opening the book with reverent care, the mad priest traced the ancient script with a blood-soaked finger, his split lips shaping soundless words never meant for mortal throats.
"Vos… Vos vos vo… Vos des." He nodded slowly, listening to whispers only he could hear. "Vos ehh."
Hovering several meters in the air above him, Dax looked down with effortless grace, observing the mutated cultist like a scholar studying a specimen beneath glass.
What is happening down there? Dax mused with detached curiosity. How amusing.
Almost casually, Dax reached out with his telekinesis and plucked Mike's severed leg from the crater floor below. Turning the limb over in his hands, he examined the angle of the tear and the way the blood had already begun to coagulate.
Then he brought the flesh to his lips and bit down.
Every bite was unhurried and deliberate, as though he were savoring the texture. There was no hesitation as he swallowed, nor any frantic rush—only a calm, methodical savagery, like a man sampling dried jerky on a quiet afternoon.
"AHHH!"
A deafening scream tore downward from the heavens—raw, anguished, and laced with a divine fury that made the atmosphere itself recoil. The plains shuddered. The bruised sky cracked open, and rain began to fall.
Pat.
A heavy droplet struck Dax's upturned palm.
"It's raining…" Dax murmured.
The scent of wet earth rolled across the plains, suddenly washing the foul air clean. Dax lifted his hand toward his face, watching the liquid slide between his fingers.
"Crimson," he noted softly. "Does it rain blood in this world?"
Ding.
Ding.
Ding.
A cascade of ethereal chimes rang clearly inside his skull.
{Congratulations, Master. You have broken 105 shackles.}
{Restoring physical body to the Trait General realm.}
Power flooded through his frame like a bursting dam—warm, familiar, and intoxicating.
"Ahhhhh…"
Dax exhaled, long and low. His entire body vibrated with deep, bone-level satisfaction. Beneath his pale skin, veins lit faintly with intertwined threads of black and crimson as his true strength reawakened within the chambers of his flesh.
Down on the ground, Kakarai stared up at the sky, the tumor-head on his shoulder gaping while his malformed claw pointed frantically up at Dax and then down at the earth—completely ignored.
With serene composure, Dax crossed his legs midair into a lotus position and closed his eyes.
Directly behind his floating figure, reality tore open. A yawning black hole materialized in the air—a sphere of absolute, bottomless darkness, hungry beyond comprehension. Above his head, two radiant halos bloomed into existence, stacked one atop the other, their soft light deceptively tranquil.
At first, the gravitational pull was subtle.
Within seconds, it became ravenous. Every falling drop of crimson rain curved out of its path, defying gravity in twisting red streams that spiraled straight into the void behind Dax. The black hole drank greedily, and with every swallowed droplet, Dax's presence grew heavier and more suffocating, compressing the air over the clearing like a falling sky.
"Vo! Vosss!"
Kakarai staggered backward, his legs trembling violently beneath the crushing pressure radiating from above. His knees buckled, and his monstrous, clawed arm scraped uselessly against the dirt as the weight pinned him down.
"What are you doing, idiot?!"
Near the treeline, the soil ruptured as Vabon burst partially out of the earth. His face was deathly pale, his reserves drained, and his eyes wide with terror as he looked up at the black hole drinking the sky.
"We have to report back! The mission is a failure!" Vabon's voice cracked as he tore his gaze away from Dax. "Kakarai, escape if you can—you're on your own!"
Without waiting for a reply, Vabon sank back into the mud like a bolting shadow.
"Damn it… he's an hidden monster!" Vabon's muffled voice echoed up from the subterranean earth, thin and shaking as he burrowed away. "Why did he let his companions die if he possessed this kind of strength?! Did the cult miscalculate?! I won't die here—I cannot!"
Above the plains, Dax's eyes remained closed, his posture unshaken between the halos and the void.
"Halt."
The single word drifted downward, quiet yet carrying the absolute weight of a sovereign command as it settled over the battlefield like a shroud.