Zhilian's screams no longer belonged to this world. They were inhuman, screeching sounds, laden with a despair so dense it scratched the walls of the crystal tower. Her body, slumped on the blue floor, continued to twitch violently; her hands clawed at the empty air, her fingers strained as if desperately trying to fend off the ghosts tearing her mind apart from the inside. Tears erupted from her wide, glassy eyes, streaming endlessly down her temples, mixing with the dust and remnants of blood that already smeared her face.
"Hayjin... please... help me... don't leave me here... Wren... no... I'm sorry..."
The princess continued to beg the void, trapped in the white, geometric limbo of her hallucinations. For her, time had stopped in an eternal present of flesh and silence.
A few meters away, Hayjin heard her. Every single sob from Zhilian was a blade driving directly into his brain. With his face pressed against the cold rock and his chest reduced to a smoking sore from the dark purple beam, the boy clenched his teeth until his jaw popped. The physical pain was a deafening background noise, but the awareness of his total impotence was a thousand times worse.
"Move... fuck, move..." he repeated mentally, a furious litany directed at his own treacherous body.
He planted the palm of his left hand the only limb still intact on the blood-slicked floor. He tried to leverage himself, pushing upward with all his remaining strength. The muscles in his shoulder protested immediately, burning with lactic acid and the thermal shock of the blow he had taken. He managed to lift his torso a few centimeters. Then, he tried to reclaim the use of his legs.
He tried to plant his knees, to find a center of gravity, but as soon as he loaded a fraction of his weight onto his lower limbs, his legs trembled violently and collapsed entirely. His left knee impacted the crystal with a dull thud, sending a jolt of lightning-fast pain all the way up his spine. Hayjin collapsed forward again, spitting out another clump of dark blood that stained the silvery trail of his shattered resonance sword's fragments.
"Ah... fuck... fuck..." he cursed, his voice reduced to a wet rattle. His vision flickered, black spots expanding at the edges of his field of view, but he refused to give up. He tried again. Left hand on the ground once more, the desperate push again, and again his legs refused to obey, flaccid and devoid of nervous response, as if the synaptic connections had been severed by the cultist's beam.
The members of the Cult hadn't moved a millimeter. They stood still, arranged in a perfect semicircle around the two wounded teenagers. From the depths of their dark hoods, their gazes remained ostensibly cold, cynical, detached. Yet, to a watchful eye, the slight curl of their lips revealed the truth: behind that ritual impassivity hid a sadistic smirk, a subtle, creeping satisfaction at seeing the two youths reduced to larvae crawling in the mud.
The leader of the group, the man in the long leather coat who had shattered Hayjin's sword with two fingers, looked up toward the sky above the tower, where the reflections of the battle outside continued to paint the clouds red and green.
"I would say we have entertained ourselves far too long," the man said, his deep, measured voice cutting through the chorus of Zhilian's screams. There was no rush in his manner, only the cold precision of a bureaucrat ticking an item off a list. "Time is pressing, and external variables could become troublesome. It is time to close this matter. Kill the princess."
At that command, the second cultist the one who had snapped Hayjin's right arm took a step forward. He approached Zhilian's twitching body. Without the slightest hesitation, he grabbed her by the back of her jacket, lifting her off the ground with inhuman ease, as if the girl's body were made of empty rags. Zhilian did not react to the physical contact; her head lolled backward, her eyes fixed on the invisible ceiling, her mouth open in an eternal, silent plea for help.
"No... no... stop..." Hayjin crawled forward, clawing the floor with the nails of his left hand, leaving five red streaks on the blue stone. Desperation choked his throat. His mind, unable to accept reality, began to wander, searching for a logical explanation for the absurd.
"Where the fuck are Atlas and Evelyn?" he asked himself, the echo of panic reverberating in his skull. "They are just a few meters from here... that monster is destroying everything... why the fuck aren't they intervening? Why can't they hear our screams? How is it possible that they've abandoned us like this?"
The leader of the Cult scanned the boy's expressions, easily reading his thoughts. He took a couple of slow steps, positioning himself exactly in front of Hayjin's head, forcing him to look at the black boot covered in his own blood.
"You are wondering where your saviors are, aren't you, Hayjin?" the cultist asked, his tone laced with mock condescension. "You wonder why the great Atlas and the prodigious Evelyn aren't running here to rip you from our hands."
The man chuckled, a dry, hissing sound that made the boy's skin crawl.
"The answer is simple, my dear Hayjin. To them... you do not exist. At this very moment, except for Zhilian, none of us, including you, possess any perceivable mana flow. We are like pebbles in the middle of a landslide. Your total absence of energy and the collapse of the princess's nervous system make you energetically invisible. But we didn't rely solely on that."
The cultist nodded toward the edges of the tower's platform.
"Before your arrival, we activated an absolute psionic and visual barrier. An inverted-frequency distortion veil. From the outside, this part of the tower appears perfectly intact, deserted, devoid of any life form. Sound waves are absorbed, thermal emanations zeroed out. To your companions out there, you are still lost somewhere in the dungeon, or perhaps already dead beneath the rubble of the lower sector. No one is coming to save you, because no one knows you are here."
Hayjin's eyes widened. The technical explanation hit him harder than a punch. An inverted-frequency barrier... it was an advanced concept, something he had studied, but he didn't think it could be replicated with such precision by a group of heretics. They had been perfectly trapped.
The Cult leader leaned down slightly toward him, the shadow of his hood completely obscuring Hayjin's face.
"But you can rest easy, boy," the man continued, his voice taking on an almost affectionate tone, terrifyingly saccharine. "Our Master has different plans for you. Your mind... your analytical capacity without the filter of mana... and above all, your brand... are a rare resource. You will live. We will take you with us, and I assure you that you will live a serene, peaceful life, dedicated to pure knowledge, far from the hypocrisies of the kingdom. But unfortunately, I am sorry to say, she..."
The cultist turned toward Zhilian, who hung motionless in the hands of the other executioner.
"She is a member of the royal lineage of Opes. Her blood is needed to nourish the earth; her sacrifice will be one of the turning points for the final awakening. She must die. Here. Now."
The man extended his arm, pointing at the princess. "However, do not believe we are monsters; we are not entirely heartless. Given your great future potential, we grant you one last favor. We give you the chance to say goodbye to her before we slit her throat. Look at her face for the last time, Hayjin. Imprint this image into your memory. It will be the fuel for your evolution."
As the cultist's words floated through the dense air of the tower, something began to change in Hayjin's body. The pain in his chest and right arm seemed to undergo a strange mutation, shifting from a sharp burn to a dull, pulsing heat originating from the base of his skull.
On the back of his neck, semi-hidden by hair damp with sweat and grime, the Brand the black rune that had imprinted itself on his skin after his first death began to slowly reappear.
At first, it was just a faint redness of the skin, an annoying itch spreading along his cervical vertebrae. Then, the geometric lines of the symbol began to outline themselves with greater precision, coloring themselves a thick, purplish black, like ink rising from beneath the epidermis. The brand pulsed at a rhythm identical to that of his wounded heart: each beat caused the skin to emit a faint, almost invisible dark luminescence.
Hayjin couldn't see it, but he felt a strange sensation of detachment, as if a part of his consciousness were being recalled from a very distant place the same abyss from which he had been torn to be thrown into this second life. The fingers of his left hand twitched against the crystal, no longer out of desperation, but from a surge of foreign energy that was beginning to flow through his collapsed neural pathways.
Meanwhile, outside the veil of the barrier, less than three hundred meters away in a straight line, the scenery was that of an apocalypse of stone and smoke.
The wyvern was no longer just a monster: it was an unleashed force of nature. Its immense membranous wings, veined with emerald-green magical lines, beat with such violence that they created mini-tornadoes that lifted boulders as large as carriages, hurling them in every direction. Its long, serpentine neck swayed in the air, and from the monster's wide eyes emanated a malignant light, focused entirely on the two remaining hunters.
"You overgrown lizard! Look at me! I'm right here!"
Atlas's roar echoed through the walls of the rocky mountains surrounding the dungeon. The Association's titan was in critical condition. His ceremonial tunic was heavily battered; his right shoulder guard had been torn away by a previous claw strike from the monster, leaving his massive flesh exposed, furrowed by three deep gashes from which thick blood trickled.
Atlas leaped forward, channeling all his power into his legs. The ground beneath him cracked from the kinetic pressure as he launched himself toward the wyvern's chest, raising his two-handed greatsword, its blade glowing with a heavy, golden light.
"DIE!"
The greatsword came down with the force of a meteor, straight toward the joint of the monster's wing. But the wyvern was in a state of total physical dominance. With a swiftness that belied its colossal size, the creature didn't try to dodge the blow. It simply raised its massive hind leg, its crystal claws as long as a man, and intercepted Atlas's blade mid-air.
SPARK!
The impact produced an explosion of golden sparks and rock fragments. Atlas's greatsword locked against the adamantine hardness of the monster's claws. Before the warrior could pull back his weapon or attempt an evasive maneuver, the wyvern emitted a screeching roar that made the air vibrate. With a sharp snap of its leg, it disarmed Atlas, sending the greatsword flying fifty meters away, and then executed a lightning-fast twist of its torso.
Its long tail, ending in a spiked mace-shaped bone tip, lashed through the air like a whip.
BOOM.
The blow caught Atlas square in the chest. His body bent inward with a sickening crunch of deformed metal and breaking ribs. The noble warrior was hurled backward at a terrifying speed, smashing through two stone pillars that shattered into fragments, before crashing into the rocky wall of the dungeon. He remained pinned among the rubble, coughing up a massive wave of dark blood.
"Atlas!" Evelyn shouted from her elevated position.
The wyvern wasted no time. Sensing the warrior's vulnerability, it threw open its jaws, and inside its throat, an incandescent mass of green energy began to accumulate: its plasma breath, the same strike that had devastated the Association's front line of defenses. The monster aimed its head toward the alcove where Atlas lay semi-conscious, ready to incinerate him.
"I don't think so, beast," Evelyn whispered, her eyes shining with a cold, calculating blue light.
While Atlas threw himself into brutal but predictable physical attacks, Evelyn had remained in the back line, analyzing every single movement, every attack pattern, every minimal fluctuation of mana in the wyvern's body. She didn't fight with strength; she fought with the geometry and logic of magic.
Before the wyvern could release its breath, Evelyn performed a series of rapid movements with her hands, her fingers tracing perfect circles in the air.
"Absolute Nullification: Inverse Matrix."
A pale blue magic circle, covered in complex runes, appeared exactly in front of the wyvern's gaping jaws. The monster released the green plasma beam, a column of destructive heat capable of melting rock in a second. But as soon as the plasma made contact with Evelyn's matrix, something extraordinary happened.
The green beam did not explode, nor did it deviate from its path. It began to coil back onto itself, like a liquid sucked in by an invisible vortex. Evelyn's matrix acted as a perfect counter-filter: it absorbed the destructive energy of the plasma, inverted its elemental polarity, and converted it back into pure mana, devoid of kinetic charge.
The wyvern let out a sound of confusion, interrupting the flow, discovering that its most lethal attack had been literally erased into nothingness.
"Your problem," Evelyn said, moving forward with light steps, almost as if she were dancing across the rubble of the battlefield, "is that your magic is based on raw frequencies. Strong, sure. But terribly stable. And anything that is stable... can be deconstructed."
The wyvern, furious at the failure of its attack, beat its wings and lunged at Evelyn on the ground. The monster tried to crush her using the weight of its entire body, bringing its front legs down on the spot where the girl stood.
BAM
The ground split open, kicking up a dense cloud of dust. But Evelyn was no longer there. Exploiting a micro-burst of kinetic mana applied to her footwear, she had shifted three meters to the left a millisecond before impact. She remained perfectly balanced on the tip of a protruding rock, her gaze fixed on the monster's head.
The wyvern tried to strike her reflexively with a sideways bite, its jaws full of razor-sharp crystal teeth snapping inches from her face. Evelyn didn't move. She raised her right hand, intercepting the trajectory of the bite not with a physical shield, but with a focused kinetic repulsion barrier.
PING
The wyvern's snout slammed into the invisible barrier. The kinetic energy of the monster's bite was instantly reflected back against its own bone structure. The wyvern's head was violently jolted sideways by the return shock, making it lose its balance for a moment, its large wings flapping erratically to avoid falling to the ground.
"Now, Atlas!" Evelyn shouted, without breaking eye contact with the monster.
From the rubble of the rocky wall, a roar announced the boy's return. Atlas emerged from the dust, his tunic half-destroyed but his eyes ablaze with a wild fury. He no longer had his sword, but his mana was different, fueled by adrenaline and rage.
"AAAAHHH! GET OVER HERE!"
Atlas dashed forward, covering the distance in an instant. Taking advantage of the fact that the wyvern was still dazed by Evelyn's counter, the warrior leapt directly onto the monster's back, grabbing the base of its long neck with his bare arms. His muscles strained to the breaking point, the veins in his neck bulging like ropes.
"Hold it right there for five seconds!" Evelyn ordered, positioning herself a few meters from the monster's tail.
The wyvern, however, was not yet defeated.
Realizing it was trapped, it used its most insidious ability: crystal resonance. The hundreds of mineral scales covering its body began to vibrate in unison, emitting a sharp, piercing sound a destructive frequency that propagated through Atlas's body.
"Argh... fuck... my head..." Atlas gritted his teeth, blood starting to seep from his ears and nose due to the internal vibrations shaking his organs. His grip on the monster's neck began to loosen, his muscles losing strength under the effects of that acoustic torture.
Evelyn saw the scene. She knew that if Atlas let go, the wyvern would sweep them both away with its next attack. She couldn't allow it.
The triumph of victory, however, proved to be an ephemeral illusion, a blink of an eye tinged with hope in a theater of flesh and dust. The wyvern's crystal crest had shattered under the mana-infused blows, but the creature's vital core that emerald-green pulsation residing deep within its mineral chest had not stopped beating. On the contrary, the vibration had grown faster, angrier, like an overloaded engine on the verge of exploding.
With a sudden movement that shook the very foundations of the dungeon, the wyvern tensed its neck muscles. It was not an ordinary animal reaction, but a primordial kinetic release.
Atlas, whose noble ceremonial garments and pure white tunic were now reduced to tattered rags soaked in mud and dark blood, felt the ground vanish beneath him.
The wyvern's neck snapped out of his grasp like a released steel spring. The force of the kinetic impact lifted Atlas off the ground, hurling him to the other side of the rocky clearing.
The young noble flew through the air, his white tunic flailing in the void like a defeated banner, before crashing heavily against a pile of blue rubble. The pain wrenched a noble but broken groan from him, but he didn't even have time to get back on guard.
The wyvern executed a fluid twist of its torso. Its incredibly long, heavy, and sharp tail cut through the air with a sinister hiss. Before Atlas could erect a rock barrier, the bony tip struck him full in the flank. The sound of the impact was sharp, a dull noise of compressed tissue and ribs yielding under unsustainable pressure. Atlas was thrown once more against the wall, sliding to the ground motionless, unconscious, his beautiful blonde hair covered in dust and his ceremonial tunic irremediably stained by the red of his own blood. He was temporarily KO'd, his energetic presence reduced to a dying glimmer.
Left alone, Evelyn showed no trace of panic. Her eyes narrowed, calculating the beast's trajectory.
The wyvern, having eliminated the most immediate nuisance, focused all its remaining fury on the girl. It threw open its destroyed jaws, from which a greenish, luminescent serum dripped, and accumulated a terrifying amount of unstable mana in a single instant.
It was not a simple breath; it was a concentrated beam of pure energy, an emerald-green line of death that pierced the intervening space between them with the speed of lightning.
Evelyn didn't try to dodge. She knew the displacement of air would hit her anyway. She raised both hands, palms extended forward, fingers spread out as if she were playing an invisible piano.
[DEFENSE MATRIX: HARMONIC REVERSION]
180° Mirror Phase Inversion
Kinetic Dissipation and Elemental Refraction
The green beam impacted Evelyn's invisible shield. The air around her superheated instantly, the stones at her feet turning into molten glass due to the radiant temperature, but the line of death did not pass. With a millimetric twist of her wrists, Evelyn sent the attack back to its source, deflecting the energy flow upward. The green beam soared into the dungeon sky, piercing the clouds and leaving a trail of burnt ozone in its wake.
Silence descended once more upon the clearing, broken only by the crackle of superheated crystals. The wyvern and Evelyn locked eyes. The beast, panting, wings half-closed and eyes burning with hatred; the girl, motionless in her perfect posture, her black hair floating weakly in the residual wind. It was the prelude to the final confrontation, a tense stasis in which the slightest mistake would mean death for both.
Beyond the veil of the barrier, inside the tower where time and space seemed to have lost all dignity, reality was taking an even more sinister turn.
Hayjin lay on the ground, but his body no longer responded to the laws of common biology. The sharp pain in his chest and right arm had vanished, replaced by an icy coldness radiating from the back of his neck. The Brand of his first death was no longer a simple skin rune. It had come to life.
The black and purplish lines began to grow, stretching like parasites beneath his skin. They extended along his trapezius muscles, crept up his neck like veins of corrupted ink, until they wrapped his entire throat in a geometric web that pulsed with a dark light, nearly invisible to the naked eye but palpable in its spiritual density. His body was still, but his mind... his mind had slipped its anchors of sanity.
"Why should I save them?" Hayjin thought, and his own inner voice sounded foreign to him, devoid of that analytical logic that had always characterized him. "Why should I care about Zhilian? Why should I worry about Evelyn or Atlas? They are all part of the same mechanism."
"The kingdom, the dungeon, the cultists... they are just cogs in a machine that keeps crushing me. If they all die... the machine stops. Yes. If I kill them all, no one can hurt me anymore. No one can break my bones ever again."
A stream of distorted thoughts, lacking logical sequence but possessed of a terrifying internal consistency, began to flow from his lips in a disjointed whisper.
"The circle must be square to be able to breathe... Zhilian's flesh is too tight for her spirit, we must kill her. Yes, kill her like a golden apple. And the flies... the flies are laughing behind the walls of the tower. Evelyn has too many eyes, too many calculations... we must turn off her numbers. We must turn off everything. White is black and blood is just warm water that wants to come out..."
As he uttered these disturbing absurdities, his physical appearance began to mutate horribly. His black hair, strand by strand, lost its color, turning into an ash gray, dull and ghostly, as if the threads had been aged by centuries of agony in a single instant.
His upper and lower canines elongated, piercing his lower lip with sharp, pointed tips resembling vampire fangs, from which a thick saliva mixed with dark serum began to droop.
But the most frightening change occurred in his eyes. When Hayjin raised his head, the cultists surrounding him took an involuntary step back. His left eye had become a deep, electric purple, devoid of a distinct pupil, matching the exact color of the energy that had almost killed him; his right eye, conversely, had gone out into an absolute snow white a milky, glassy sphere that reflected no light, the emblem of the blindness of the void in which Zhilian was trapped.
The cultist holding Zhilian up by her jacket, ready to slit her throat with a ritual obsidian blade, hesitated for a fraction of a second in the face of this apparition. That moment of hesitation was his final mistake.
With a burst of speed that did not belong to a wounded human being a movement so rapid it appeared as a visual distortion, a glitch in the room's reality Hayjin projected himself forward. There was no sound of footsteps, no visible mana. Just a gray shadow cutting through space.
SPLATTER.
A wet, heavy sound, followed by the noise of tearing flesh and cleanly severed bone. Before the Cult leader could lift his hand to stop him, Hayjin was already past.
The cultist gripping the princess felt a sudden coldness in his right shoulder. He looked down: his arm was gone. It had been cleanly severed at the height of the bicep, leaving an exposed stump from which blood sprayed at high pressure like a wild fountain, splattering Zhilian's clothes as she fell to the ground like an empty sack, still a prisoner of her hallucinations.
The cultist didn't even have time to scream.
Hayjin was now perched on three limbs just a few steps from him, in a feral posture, unnatural for a man. His head was tilted sideways. His gray hair hung forward, partially covering his face, deformed by the smirk of his elongated canines.
Clutched between his teeth with a predatory grip that made the radius and ulna bones crunch, was the cultist's amputated hand and entire forearm.
His executioner's blood dripped down his chin, soaking his neck covered by the expanded brand, but Hayjin didn't seem to care. He lightly chewed the fabric of the severed arm's sleeve, emitting a dull, deep growl that made the tower's crystals vibrate.
His two mismatched eyes the purple of the abyss and the white of death settled first on the remaining cultists, then on Zhilian's limp body, and finally looked outward, where Evelyn and the wyvern were about to clash. There was no trace left of the frightened boy who didn't want to die again. There was only a creature hungry for destruction, ready to tear apart anyone who dared step onto his ground.