With the first volcanic-stone skeleton neutralized and held perfectly balanced between his left hand and his right foot, Shin'ya didn't waste a single heartbeat.
He gently slid the severed ribcage onto the floor, ensuring the rusted bell didn't move an inch. Then, channeling his newly refined Shadow Slip, he dissolved back into the floorboards. He popped up directly between the remaining two Calcified Stalkers.
Slice. Slice.
The Ketsugai moved in two perfect, horizontal arcs of concentrated darkness. The black blade sheared through their ancient spines effortlessly. Before their stone bodies could hit the ground and shatter, Shin'ya's shadows erupted from the floor like liquid tendrils, catching the pieces mid-air and lowering them to the stone floor in absolute, unbridled silence.
Shin'ya stood up, his gray hood falling back slightly as he let out a long, controlled breath. He wiped a bead of sweat from his forehead, looking down at the three piles of calcified stone.
He had done it. A perfect, flawless stealth execution.
But as he stared down at the small, rusted brass bell resting inside one of the shattered ribcages, his frantic, high-stakes adrenaline began to fade. And when the adrenaline faded, Shin'ya's hyper-analytical, anime-nerd brain automatically took the steering wheel.
He squinted at the bell. Then he looked up at the thick, swirling black fog of the sound-eater miasma hovering around him.
He remembered the Guild Master's grave warning. "The sound of a single bell vibration cutting through that silence will instantly wake the Titan."
Shin'ya's left eyebrow twitched. He bent down, picked up the rusted bell by its handle, and stared at it with a completely dead, flat expression.
Wait a minute, his inner voice stated, his internal logic suddenly hitting a massive, screeching halt. Hold the freaking phone I-i mean bell.He looked at the fog. He looked at the bell.
The Guild Master literally said this Miasma consumes all sound energy. I tried to snap my fingers, and nothing happened. I tried to hum, and my vocal cords were muted. The physical laws of this room literally prevent sound waves from traveling through the air.
Shin'ya's face twisted into a look of profound, immense intellectual offense. He wanted to throw his hands up and scream at the dungeon designers.
THEN HOW THE HECK IS A MECHANICAL BRASS BELL SUPPOSED TO RING?! he shouted inside his own head. If the fog eats sound, the bell should be completely useless! It's a plot hole! A fundamental flaw in the world-building! Are you telling me a rusted piece of metal can completely bypass an S-rank magical anomaly just because it's spooky?! That makes zero logical sense!
For a brief, delusional second, Shin'ya actually felt a wave of relief. Ha! I've been stressing out, suffocating myself in the woods, and ruining my physical stamina for a gimmick that doesn't even work! Fantasy writers really need to check their physics—
To test his hypothesis, Shin'ya lightly flicked the brass clapper with his index finger.
He expected nothing. He expected absolute silence.
The bell itself didn't make a sound. The air in the corridor remained perfectly, chillingly dead.
But the exact millisecond the clapper touched the rim, a violent, screeching cathedral alarm exploded directly inside Shin'ya's skull.
GONG—
"GAH!" Shin'ya internally screamed, his eyes nearly popping out of his head as a wave of pure, agonizing psychic feedback slammed into his brain. It wasn't an auditory sound wave traveling through the air; the bell was a cursed artifact that transmitted a conceptual sound vibration directly into the nervous system and mana cores of any living soul within a two-kilometer radius.
The sheer force of the mental sound wave made his vision tilt. His knees buckled, and his body violently shuddered from the psychological shock.
In his brief, panicked stagger to keep his balance, his left boot slid backward.
Scrape.
It was the tiniest, faintest friction of leather against a loose piece of gravel on the stone floor. In the real world, it wouldn't have even triggered a mouse. But a physical footstep wasn't protected by the bell's psychic immunity—it was a real physical vibration. And the physical vibration traveled straight down into the stone floorboards, rippling through the foundations of the catacombs.
Deep beneath the floor, a massive, ancient tremor rippled through the earth.
Shin'ya froze, his heart dropping straight into his stomach as a low, ominous vibration rattled his teeth. Far below in the deepest abyss, the Grave-Weaver Titan had just shifted in its sleep.
Shin'ya clutched the bell tightly, his deadpan mask completely shattering into pure, unadulterated terror.
I take it back! The world-building is flawless! The physics are terrifying! I need to move RIGHT NOW!