Warning: Some readers may find scenes in this chapter distressing. Please proceed with care.
In that instant between heartbeats, the illusion shattered.
The fragile hope born from the crystal detonation dissolved like a mirage beneath the pitiless sun of a merciless desert. The air in the magnificent Crystal Sanctuary was no longer merely a gas to breathe-it had transformed inside Dex's lungs into something viscous and heavy, suffocating as swamp mud, laden with a sharp metallic smell he knew well: the smell of imminent death.
Dex looked at the grey demon through eyes reddened and streaming from the blinding light. The creature had stopped its retreat. Though its white oval eyes were still weeping from the force of the Mana flood, its aura had not weakened by a single degree. On the contrary-the killing intent radiating from it had intensified until it was dense enough to choke the blue light emanating from the crystals.
Dex understood, with the rueful clarity of an old prisoner who had memorised the savage laws of survival in lightless cells, that his luck had been exhausted entirely. In the prison of his earth, intelligence and cunning could defeat a man who outweighed you-but here, in this merciless magical world, absolute power did not acknowledge tricks. There was no mud trap that would work on this creature, no gap in a Mana wall he could slip through, no small blade hidden in a boot that could pierce this dead skin.
What he faced now was not a fight. A fight presupposes some chance of victory, however slim. What he faced was an execution with a stay of proceedings-an ancient and brutal ritual practised by a hunter who knew nothing of mercy, upon a prey that had dared desecrate the secrecy of his den.
Despite the despair beginning to coat his heart, Dex's survival instinct refused to go quietly. His subconscious screamed: run-reach the red passage. The corridor pulsing with its deep arterial heat loomed at the cavern's far end like a gateway to hell, or perhaps to salvation-it no longer mattered which. What mattered was putting distance between himself and this grey abomination by any means.
Dex gathered what remained of the scattered shreds of strength in his trembling, shredded muscles. He pressed his feet against the stone floor and attempted to drive his body forward in a desperate lunge toward the run. His movement was slow-pitifully slow-like a man sinking in a sticky dream where his limbs refuse to answer the commands of his brain.
But the demon's speed defied every law of physics and dynamics the human mind could conceive. It did not run-it erased distance. In the blink of an eye, with a sound like the very fabric of the air being torn apart, the enormous grey shape vanished from its position near the passage.
Dex had barely taken his second step before the light above him was blotted out completely. He froze. He raised his eyes with a dreadful slowness-and found the grey shape standing directly over him, casting his small body in a vast shadow of rocky muscle and the black darkness pouring from its horns. The demon looked down at him. Not with anger. With absolute coldness. The coldness of a machine engineered for systematic killing.
With a coldness that killed the soul and crushed the will before it ever touched the body, the demon moved. It did not raise its fist to deliver a devastating blow as it had the first time-that would have required effort it did not consider necessary. Instead, it extended its massive hand, with its long fingers and dense black claws, and closed it around Dex's left forearm at the midpoint.
It was not merely a grip. The instant the demon's fingers made contact with Dex's skin, it felt as though the jaws of a steel wolf had snapped shut around his arm. A living vice of iron-its black nails driving through the leather coat, through the shirt, through layers of skin and fat, burying themselves with vicious force until they rested against the bone itself.
Dex gasped sharply, his eyes going wide with the shock of the pain. This arm-his left arm-was not merely a limb of flesh to him. In this new world, after the brutal training he had endured, his left arm had become the primary Mana channel through which he directed his magic and shaped his spells. It was his gateway to the energy of the world, his only instrument for defying his human frailty. And now that instrument was caught between the jaws of a Rank B creature.
The demon gave its victim no time to process this. It raised its heavy foot-sheathed in dead grey skin as thick and hard as a tortoise's carapace-and placed it directly on the centre of Dex's chest. It pressed down with measured, deliberate force, pinning him flat against the stone floor like an insect to be crushed and held beneath a magnifying glass.
Dex felt an immense weight compress his ribcage-a weight that made his recently healed ribs groan under the pressure, collapsing his lungs and denying him even a sliver of air. He was completely immobilised: an enormous foot crushing his chest, a steel grip devouring his arm.
And with total composure-as one might pluck a wilted leaf from a tree, or as a child might pull the wing from a fly out of pure idle curiosity-the demon began to draw the left arm upward.
In those few seconds, which stretched inside Dex's mind into what felt like aeons of pure, distilled suffering, he began to hear the sound of reality itself fracturing.
It was not a clean severance like the stroke of a magical blade. It was an animal tearing-slow, and horrifying in its every detail. It began with the sound of muscle fibres and skin splitting apart. Dex felt the fibres of his shoulder muscles stretch to the absolute limit of their elasticity, then begin to snap one after another, like threads of cheap fabric pulled too hard. A burning pain, resembling boiling sulphuric acid poured directly into his veins, swept through his entire nervous system.
Then came the cracking. The strong ligaments that anchored the arm to the trunk-designed to bear heavy loads-were being pulled now with a force hundreds of times beyond their capacity. Dex heard them snapping inside his body: a sound like thick rubber cables tearing apart.
The human brain possesses a defence mechanism that renders a person unconscious when pain exceeds a certain threshold, to protect the mind from breaking. But the adrenaline flooding Dex's blood, combined with the residual Mana still trapped in his body, forced his consciousness to remain awake-made him drink every last drop from the cup of this hell.
Then came the sound. The sound that would haunt his worst nightmares if he lived to see another night: a deep, wet, muffled pop. The head of the humerus being wrenched violently and forcibly from its socket in the shoulder joint. Followed immediately by a dry grinding-the sound of the collarbone and shoulder blade fracturing under the abnormal angle of the pull and the irresistible, overwhelming pressure.
Dex screamed. Not with an ordinary cry of pain. Not the scream a man releases when he takes a knife wound or a bullet. This was a sound that was not human at all-a scream that rose from the deepest pit of his soul, from that dark region that harbours pure and primal terror. A scream that married the agony of a body being torn apart with the despair of a spirit being broken.
In his former life, Dex had heard many screams. In the cold nights of the prison, he had heard men cry out as they were stabbed in the dark, or as they were dragged to solitary confinement. But his own scream now surpassed all those sounds in horror. It tore apart the silence of the blue cavern, and the enormous surrounding crystals shook in answer, until small shards rained from the ceiling.
But that terrible echo, that involuntary plea which a collapsing body sends into the world, did not stir a single atom of pity in the grey executioner's heart. Not one eyelid flickered. Its mechanical, savage pulling did not pause for an instant.
With one final, hard, irreversible motion, the demon tore the arm free from Dex's torso. The limb separated from the body, and with it the primary arteries and major veins ruptured. The demon raised the severed arm-still pulsing with warm drops of blood-and looked at it for a moment with profound contempt. Then it cast it aside without the slightest care, letting it fall onto the stone floor with a wet, meaty sound, as though it were a piece of discarded rubbish, or the scraps of a meal not even worth the trouble of eating.
The moment the demon's foot lifted from his chest, Dex fell-or rather, what remained of him collapsed-onto the floor. He could no longer sit or support himself. He rolled onto his right side, his body convulsing in violent, involuntary spasms.
The blood was everywhere. From the open, ravaged wound where his left shoulder had been, blood erupted in a deep crimson jet. The severed brachial artery pumped with every desperate beat of his terrified heart, spraying the stone floor and the nearby blue crystals with the scarlet pigment of death. The scene was contradictory in its horror: the calm, pure blue of the Mana crystals, defiled by the raw heat of human blood.
The world around Dex had begun to spin with insane velocity. The blue light of the crystals began to bleed and smear into expanding patches of dense black that crept from the edges of his vision toward its centre. A lethal cold-nothing to do with the temperature of the cavern, everything to do with the blood draining from his body-began seeping from the tips of his toes and his remaining right hand, crawling with slow, steady purpose toward his heart.
His consciousness was fading-leaking from his body with every drop of blood that fell to the floor. And in those last moments of clouded awareness, amid the death-drone ringing in his ears, the soul of the Prisoner understood the absolute truth of this world.
He had paid the price. In his old world, the price of weakness was beatings, humiliation, years spent in a cell. But in this savage magical world, the price of weakness was paid in flesh and bone and soul. He had been arrogant to believe that his knowledge of the novel and his strength of will were sufficient to bridge the colossal chasms of power that separated the ranks. And now, lying in a pool of his own blood, looking through a half-closed eye at his severed arm discarded metres away from him, he understood that this price had been exorbitant... and that perhaps, this was the last price he would ever pay in his life.
The grey demon stood over him, looking down at the dying body with blank coldness, preparing to deliver the final blow that would crush his skull and end this human contamination of its sanctuary forever.