CRUNCH.
The sound of the periosteum cracking under the pressure of Hayjin's elongated canines echoed through the dungeon with the clarity of a dry branch snapping in winter. The boy wasn't merely biting; he was devouring. With a blind, animalistic ferocity, he sank his vampire fangs into the muscular tissue of the severed forearm, tearing away a large chunk of flaccid flesh along with strands of grayish tendons that frayed with a wet, elastic sound.
Thick, dark, warm human blood spurted between his lips, trickling down his altered chin and soaking the geometric lines of the Brand which, on the back of his neck, continued to expand like a cancer of ink.
Hayjin chewed, smearing his face, his mismatched eyes staring wide into the void: the left, an electric purple gem devoid of a pupil, glowed with a malignant light; the right, a snow-white sphere, remained glassy, fixed, dead. With a sharp snap of his jaw, he broke the radius bone, sucking out the bone marrow mixed with blood with a rattle of pure sensory gratification.
A few centimeters away, the mutilated cultist collapsed to his knees, but his reaction defied all human logic. From the gaping wound on his right shoulder, where the bicep had been cleanly torn away, blood gushed in rhythmic, pulsing torrents, soaking the blue crystal floor. Yet, the man did not utter a single groan of pain. His face, partially visible beneath the dark hood, was not contorted in agony, but illuminated by a mystical and terrifying ecstasy.
Tears began to stream from his eyes, warm and copious, tracing clean paths through the sweat and dust of the chamber.
"Yes... yes! Oh, my Lord... you did it..." the man began to sob, but it was a weep of pure, uncontrollable joy. His lips trembled, stretched into a smile that pulled the skin of his face almost to the breaking point. "It's me... I am the first victim! My blood nourishes the resurrected Calamity! Thank you... thank you for choosing me! Thank you for granting me the honor of baptizing your new flesh!"
The cultist raised his remaining left arm toward the ceiling, heedless of the exsanguination emptying his blood vessels, as his body began to undergo mild clonic spasms due to hemorrhagic shock.
Behind him, the rest of the cult members remained motionless for an instant. Then, as if moved by a single, harmonious impulse imprinted upon their corrupted minds, they began to applaud.
CLAP. CLAP. CLAP.
A rhythmic, slow, ceremonial applause. The palms of their gloved hands clapped against each other, producing a muffled sound that mixed with the wet noise of Hayjin chewing. The cultists began to exchange looks of deep congratulation, whispering words of praise as if they were witnessing the birth of a deity.
"Splendid... look at the cleanliness of the bite," one of them whispered, a thin man whose partial mask revealed the wrinkles of old age. "The bone transition is perfect. The frequency of the Brand is digesting the residual mana in the tissues."
"Congratulations, young Messiah," another female voice said from the back of the group, her hands pressed together in prayer while a genuine, almost maternal smile lit up her features. "We are so proud of you. You have surpassed the illusion of the human form. Look how he accepts the essence of his nature... it is magnificent."
While Hayjin's physical body continued to mangle the remains of the forearm in a splatter display of synovial fluids and marrow, inside his skull, reality had been completely reset.
The "normal" part of Hayjin his consciousness, his original identity as a boy from Earth found itself projected into a non-place of absolute darkness. There were no walls, no floor, no ceiling. It was an infinite psionic space, saturated with a blackness so dense and heavy it seemed almost liquid, akin to an immense ocean of lukewarm ink.
Hayjin noticed he was floating in the air, suspended in nothingness, completely weightless. He was entirely naked. His skin was smooth, free of the purplish sores from the magic beam, free of the cultist's blood. His right arm was whole again, his fingers intact, his ribs perfectly aligned. He felt neither cold nor heat. He could not feel his heartbeat, nor the need to inhale air. It was a condition of total sensory deprivation, an anesthetized limbo where the concepts of time and space held no value whatsoever.
"Am I dead? Again?" his conscious mind wondered, but the thought floated away lightly, devoid of the anguish that usually accompanied it. Here, everything was muffled. The despair for Zhilian, the fear of the Cult, the anger at his own weakness... everything seemed far away, like a bad dream had by someone else in a previous life.
Suddenly, the silence of that inky nothingness was fractured by an invisible movement.
Behind his back, the density of the darkness seemed to shift. Hayjin did not turn; his consciousness was too apathetic to make a voluntary movement. From the depths of the darkness, a female figure emerged silently. She, too, was entirely naked, but her body lacked the consistency of ordinary flesh: her skin was of a lunar pallor, nearly translucent, veined with thin filaments of gold and silver that moved beneath the epidermis like rivers of sleeping mana. Her hair was long, black as the deepest night, and floated around her head as if she were underwater.
The woman slowly approached Hayjin's suspended body. With fluid, supple movements, she embraced him from behind.
Her long, cold arms wrapped around the boy's chest, her fingers with dark, sharp nails resting gently upon his sternum, right where the fatal wound was located in reality. The woman literally clung to him, pressing her belly against his back, intertwining her legs around his hips in a symbiotic, almost parasitic grip.
She didn't say a word. Not a breath escaped her perfect, dark lips, nor did a single heartbeat transmit through Hayjin's back. It was an embrace of pure silence, a promise of eternal oblivion clutching the boy's soul to prevent it from rising back to the surface.
And the "normal" Hayjin, trapped in that nest of darkness and lunar flesh, remained totally impassive. His dull gray eyes stared into the void ahead without blinking. He didn't try to break free, he felt no fear toward that mysterious presence, nor did he seek to understand who she was. He accepted that psionic imprisonment with a chilling resignation, letting the control of his physical body remain entirely in the hands of the ruthless intelligence of the Brand.
Outside, in the world of Alius and in the dungeon, the "insane" Hayjin finished swallowing the last piece of cartilage from the wrist. His head snapped upward, red saliva dripping from his elongated canines. The cultists' applause ceased at the exact moment the creature bent his knees, accumulating an inhuman kinetic tension in the tendons of his legs.
Then, the attack launched.
It was not a magical combat. It was a mechanical slaughter, a brutal choreography executed at a speed that surpassed human visual perception.
Hayjin launched himself at the nearest cultist the elder who had praised the cleanliness of his bite. The boy used no weapons: he drove his left hand directly into the man's chest. His fingers, empowered by the distorted frequency of the Brand, pierced through the fabric of the robe and the ribcage as if they were made of dry mud.
SPRACH.
Hayjin's hand clenched around the elder's heart. With a brutal rip, he pulled his arm back: the entire cardiac mass, along with the aorta and a frayed network of pulmonary blood vessels, was uprooted from the man's chest. Blood spurted from the open hole in his torso in a violent jet that sprayed the surrounding cultists.
The elder fell backward, but as life faded from his eyes, his lips contorted into a shrill, maniacal laugh.
"Ah... ahaha! The touch... the touch of the Origin! What warmth... what purity!" the man exhaled his final breath laughing, blood filling his mouth and choking out his last sacrilegious praises as his body thudded onto the slick floor.
Without stopping for a single millisecond, Hayjin spun on his axis. His ash-gray hair whipped through the air as he intercepted two cultists who were walking toward him with open arms, their faces illuminated by blissful smiles, completely devoid of any defensive intent. They didn't want to fight; they only wanted to be consumed.
Hayjin grabbed the first one the woman who had spoken in a maternal tone by her black hair. With a sharp, angry twist of his wrist, he snapped her head through a full 180-degree turn.
CRACK-SNAP.
The cervical vertebrae shattered with a series of dull pops, the skin of the neck stretching until it tore, revealing the white trachea snapping in two. The woman dropped to her knees, her face contorted into a grotesque smile that now stared at her own back. Her hands weakly reached for Hayjin's ankles, not to strike him, but in a final, desperate attempt to kiss his feet as her eyes went dark in the blood.
"Thank you... Messiah... thank you..." her backwards-facing head whispered, before a dark rivulet definitively cut off her voice.
The other cultist, a young man with a shaved head, burst into tears of joy at the sight of his companions' deaths. He dropped to his knees before Hayjin, offering his taut neck with the submission of a sacrificial lamb.
"Purify me! Please, purify me too! Do not leave me in this world of imperfect forms!" the youth shouted, tears streaking his cheeks as he laughed hygienically.
Hayjin showed neither mercy nor understanding. He raised his left leg and brought his boot down directly onto the crown of the young man's skull.
SPLASH.
The pressure accumulated in the strike was enough to detonate the cultist's head like a ripe watermelon under a hydraulic press.
Fragments of parietal bone, grayish brain matter veined with red, and ocular fluids splattered in every direction, smearing the surrounding crystal columns and even landing on the clothes of Zhilian, who continued to groan a short distance away, lost in the void of her shattered mind.
The massacre continued for several minutes in a crescendo of gore-filled violence that transformed the upper platform of the tower into a literal industrial slaughterhouse. Hayjin moved like a whirlwind of flesh and bone:
To one cultist, he ripped off the lower jaw with his bare hands, leaving the tongue dangling over an open throat that continued to emit bubbling sounds of joy.
To another, he sliced open the abdomen with a knife-hand strike, unrolling meters of small intestine onto the blue floor; the man grabbed his own entrails in his hands, laughing like a child and using them to scrawl sacrilegious symbols onto the crystal before fainting from shock.
A pair of twins, also members of the inner circle, were grabbed by their necks and slammed into one another with such violence that their faces fused into a shapeless pulp of nasal cartilage and shattered teeth, their final breaths united in a chorus of devout weeping.
There was no fear in the dungeon. There was only the unbearable stench of iron, of fecal matter released from bodies losing sphincter control, and the echo of laughter and praise dying out one after another under the blows of the gray Calamity.
After what seemed an eternity of shredded flesh, silence returned to reign over the upper platform of the tower. Or, at least, over what remained of it.
The blue crystal floor was no longer visible: it was entirely carpeted by a layer of blood several centimeters deep, a scarlet swamp in which severed limbs, twitching fingers, fragments of ribcages, and internal organs floated, still contracting from final nervous reflexes. A lukewarm, iron-laced mist rose from the carnage, making the air unbreathable.
Hayjin halted in the center of that slaughter. His body was entirely coated in the blood of his victims; his gray hair was plastered to his forehead by clumps of brain matter, and his vampire fangs continued to drip a serum mixed with vitreous humor. His purple eye pulsed dangerously, while his snow-white eye locked onto the only man left alive in the entire dungeon.
The man in the long leather coat had remained standing near the edge of the tower, the only spot that hadn't been completely bombarded by the rain of blood. His hands were clasped behind his back. He hadn't made a single defensive gesture during the entire carnage; he hadn't tried to flee, nor to use his brass cylinder to strike the boy.
As Hayjin slowly turned toward him, his feet making wet, heavy squelching sounds as they sank into the mush of flesh, the Leader did something unexpected.
He slowly pulled back his dark hood, revealing his true face for the first time.
He was a man in his forties, with harsh, almost ascetic features, a deep scar cutting across his left cheek from his ear to the corner of his mouth. But the most striking thing was his eyes: they were not the eyes of a madman, but those of a man who had finally found the absolute truth of the universe.
An incredible, immense smile of a chilling purity spread across his scarred face. His lips stretched, revealing clean, white teeth that stood in stark contrast to the surrounding horror. And then, large tears of joy began to streak his cheeks, dropping into the blood below.
"Magnificent... simply magnificent..." the Leader said, his voice a trembling whisper, cracked with the profound emotion of someone witnessing a divine miracle. He brought his hands to his chest, clutching them in a sign of deep gratitude. "The deed is done. Finally. The circle has closed in the most perfect way we could have hoped for."
The man took a step forward, voluntarily sinking his boots into the red pool surrounding the remains of his companions. He looked at the mangled bodies with a gaze full of love and devotion.
"Look at what you have done, my Lord... you have purified them all. They have abandoned their shells of mud, their identities corrupted by the Association's light. They have returned to the Origin through your hands. There is no nobler end, no greater grace than to be destroyed by the very force that gave birth to the world."
The Leader shifted his gaze to Hayjin's mutated face, staring with total adoration at the boy's purple eye and white eye. His smile widened even further, his sobs of joy growing more frequent.
"And now... now it is my turn. I, too... finally... will be purified. I have spent my entire life preparing for this moment, guiding these faithful to the slaughterhouse of salvation... and now the prize is before my eyes. Do not wait, Calamity. Take my flesh. Drink my blood. Destroy this useless form of mine and welcome me into the darkness of your Limbo!"
The man spread his arms wide, completely exposing his chest and throat, closing his eyes in the happy weeping of a condemned man watching the gates of paradise open.
Hayjin emitted a low, guttural growl. The Brand on the back of his neck gave a final, violent dark pulse, and with a single snap of his clawed hand, the gray creature surged forward to claim the final tribute of that moment of pure terror.
The Cult Leader stood motionless before the creature that had once been Hayjin. The blood of his own companions flowed in thick rivulets around his boots, but there was no shadow of regret upon his face. His eyes, glistening with genuine tears, reflected the boy's distorted figure: ash-gray hair plastered to the skull, elongated canines oozing serum, and the frightening asymmetry of his eyes one purple like the abyss and one white like death.
"Yes... I feel your hunger, my Messiah," the Leader murmured, his voice vibrating with an almost erotic emotion in his devotion. "It is my moment. It is time that I, too, am purified by your blessed hand. My blood is yours. My flesh belongs to the earth you tread upon."
The man, however, did not stand still waiting for the fatal blow. With a fluid movement, he slid his left hand along his hip, pulling out a second brass cylinder finely engraved with desecrated runes. His smile grew narrower, sharper, laced with a perverse logic.
"But I won't make it easy for you," he continued, his tone turning into that of a master testing his best disciple. "I want to stoke that thirst even more."
"I want the Calamity within you to feed not only on my flesh, but on my resistance. A god does not sit at a pre-set table; a god rips his prey from the jaws of creation. Show me how deep your abyss is!"
Before Hayjin could make another feral lunge, the Leader raised the cylinder. A blast of dark purple energy, dense as boiling tar, erupted from the ritual weapon. It wasn't a concentrated attack like the previous one, but a volley of magic projectiles with kinetic fragmentation.
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.
Three spheres of energy impacted the crystal floor inches from Hayjin's feet. The explosion didn't seek to strike the boy directly, but kicked up a massive storm of blue crystal shards and iron-laced smoke, completely obscuring his vision.
Hayjin emitted a choked, wet roar, the arm of the previous cultist still partially wedged between his vampire fangs. His purple eye darted frantically through the blanket of smoke, trying to trace the man's thermal frequency, but the Leader knew how to move within his own magic.
Exploiting the curtain of debris, the Cult Leader executed a psionic micro-shift a shadow step that brought him instantly to the opposite side of the upper platform. His goal was not escape. It was the emotional fulcrum of the situation.
The smoke cleared slightly, revealing the new, horrific arrangement of pieces on the chessboard.
The Leader had positioned himself exactly behind Zhilian's body. The princess of Opes still lay on the ground, but her condition was pitiful. She had stopped screaming several minutes ago. The hallucinations of the forest and the throne room had pushed her past the point of psychological collapse; her mind had shut down to protect itself from the ultimate shock, leaving her in a state of total catatonia, completely defenseless.
Her blue eyes were wide open, staring toward the invisible ceiling of the tower, but her pupils were glassy, devoid of light accommodation reflex. A thin thread of saliva mixed with bile slipped from the corner of her mouth, wetting the blue marble floor. She didn't move. She barely breathed, save for faint, imperceptible rises of her chest.
The Leader grabbed her by her blonde hair, pulling her head back with a cold brutality. The girl made no sound; her head lolled backward like that of a ragdoll. With his right hand, the man drew a ritual obsidian knife from his belt, its blade serrated and dark, planting the sharp tip directly against the taut skin of her throat, right over the carotid artery.
One more millimeter of pressure, and the royal blood of Opes would drench the crystals.
"And now, my splendid Messiah, let us look at reality through your new eyes," the Leader said, his scarred face inches from Zhilian's ear.
The man laughed, but it was a laugh devoid of mockery, full of a scientific and fanatical curiosity.
"The princess... her spirit has fled into the labyrinths we prepared for her. She is sacrificial meat. If I kill her, the ritual is completed."
"If you kill me first, you save her... but for what purpose? Is there still a shred of my savior from Earth inside that skull or has the Calamity erased even the memory of his name? Resolve this frequency, Hayjin. Show me how you destroy the world without destroying yourself!"
Hayjin froze on all fours in the middle of the pool of blood. The amputated arm finally slipped from his jaws, dropping with a wet sound onto the floor.
His head snapped sideways, his white eye and purple eye focused on the obsidian blade pressing against the girl's neck.
From his exposed throat came a disjointed sound, a sequence of syllables devoid of logical connection chasing each other through the iron-saturated air:
"The knife... cuts the cord of the sun... Zhilian is a circle that doesn't close... we must... we must... kill the blade... kill everyone..."
Outside the veil of the psionic barrier, the world continued to burn under the strikes of the crystal wyvern.
Evelyn found herself in a position of extreme tactical isolation. Atlas lay on the ground thirty meters away, wedged among the rubble of the rock wall, temporarily KO'd after the monster's devastating tail whip. His mana was reduced to a latent pulsation, insufficient to get him back on his feet anytime soon.
The wyvern, exhilarated by the warrior's fall, dashed forward toward Evelyn. Its massive front leg came down from above, its mineral claws ready to shred the girl like an insect.
Evelyn didn't move until the final millisecond.
With a geometric elegance that defied the monster's brutality, Evelyn didn't erect a shield. She utilized a kinetic micro-barrier tilted at 45° relative to the claw's impact axis. When the wyvern's leg struck the barrier, the downward force of the blow was entirely deflected sideways.
The beast's claw slipped across the invisible surface, burying itself deeply into the rock, while Evelyn floated lightly to the side, dodging the air displacement without a single black hair being ruffled.
However, while maintaining her concentration for the next counter, her mind was divided. A logical processor in her brain was analyzing a variable that didn't add up.
"Where the hell did Zhilian and Hayjin go?" she wondered, her eyes scanning the area of the collapsed tower during her evasive maneuver.
From the instant the wyvern had struck and separated them at the beginning of the encounter, the two students had literally vanished from her sensory radar. Evelyn was a realist, a first-class analyst. According to her structural calculations, based on the energy of the blow taken and the absence of active defensive barriers on their bodies at the moment of impact, the probability of survival for two novices was lower than 2%.
"They are dead," her logical side had concluded moments prior. "The dungeon has likely consumed them. The priority now is to incapacitate this monster, and above all, retrieve Atlas."
Yet, just as she prepared to cast the finishing spell against the wyvern, her magical sixth sense that fraction of pure perception that transcended charts and equations registered an anomaly.
Evelyn executed a rapid twist of her torso, dodging a rain of crystal scales that the wyvern had unleashed by shaking its wings. In doing so, she expanded her sensory perception network to the maximum, raising the sampling frequency of the surrounding mana to levels well above her average.
There, corresponding to the upper platform of the tower that appeared deserted and semi-destroyed to the naked eye, lay something. The Cult's barrier was nearly perfect, a masterpiece of frequency inversion that deceived sight and hearing. But no veil is absolute in the face of a psionic collapse.
The congressional mental breakdown of Zhilian, the transition of her consciousness into catatonia, had provoked a sudden, incredibly violent spike of disorganized spiritual energy. A "scream" of raw mana that, despite lacking kinetic force, had created a micro-fracture in the structure of the invisible barrier.
Through that tiny crack, Evelyn perceived a trace. An energy signature she knew all too well.
It was Zhilian's mana.
It was incredibly weak, reduced to an unstable filament hovering near magical absolute zero.
But she was alive. The princess had not died beneath the rubble. She was right there, trapped behind that invisible wall of distortion.
Of Hayjin, however, there was no trace. His total absence of natural mana rendered him completely invisible to Evelyn's elemental scan, and the mutation of the Brand was operating on dark frequencies that magic was not programmed to detect.
"She is still alive," Evelyn realized, and for the first time, a trace of urgency disrupted the stability of her expression. "If her mana is this weak, it means her core is suffering a massive leak. I no longer have time to play defense with this monster. I have to end this here. Now."
The wyvern, sensing the shift in the girl's intent, threw its jaws open once more, determined to launch a second plasma beam to incinerate her. But Evelyn had stopped playing defense; she had gone on the attack.