For fourteen days, the chamber knew only screams, silence, and the soft repetition of a divine whisper.
[Judicator's Requiem] consciously activated.
Again.
And again.
And again.
Zay died in every way imaginable.
Throat slit. Heart frozen. Limbs shattered. Aura Core shattered. Suffocated in an endless blizzard. Skewered by crystalline spears. Drowned in a lake of liquified frost. There were moments where death took seconds… and others where it crawled over hours.
He struggled at first.
He tried to fight with every shred of willpower—swinging Evershade, summoning aura, screaming her name with defiance, hatred, desperation. But it never mattered. She always won. She always enjoyed it.
And then came the ninth day.
When even struggling hurt more than the dying.
His aura would flicker. His eyes would narrow. He'd grit his teeth, but there'd be hesitation now. A flinch. A delay. Because every movement, every scream, every act of resistance brought only more delicious cruelty from Seraphae.
On the twelfth day, she began to talk more.
"Look how beautiful you are," she whispered, dragging frozen fingers down his ruined chest.
"Each scream purifies you. Each fracture teaches you humility. This is mercy... you cutie."
Her hands would tremble with restrained joy as she opened his ribs or painted the floor in crimson frost, and her breath would hitch—not with exertion, but rapture.
She'd lean close and whisper things like:
"It's working. You're quieter now. Less defiant. Closer to salvation."
"Only monsters resist healing. Are you still trying to be a monster?"
"Let it go. Let me save you."
By the fourteenth day, Zay no longer screamed.
He barely moved when she approached.
The cold wasn't just on the outside anymore—it had seeped into his bones, his aura, his soul. There were no dreams, no moments of peace between deaths. Just darkness… followed by pain. Miserable pain.
Then her voice.
Then death.
Then again.
Until finally, on the fourteenth sunrise—though the chamber had no sky—Zay was reborn once more in her arms, and he didn't move.
His body trembled faintly, lips bloodied and cracked, aura so faint it flickered like the last breath of a dying flame. Seraphae held him close, one hand stroking his tangled hair, the other gently cradling his jaw.
"Much better," she whispered, a faint sigh leaving her lips. "You're almost ready."
Seraphae leaned down, her breath cold against Zay's skin. Her lips, deceptively soft, pressed against his—gentle, reverent, as if she were kissing something sacred.
Then her fist slammed through his chest with a wet crunch.
A violent gasp tore from his throat—but no scream came, only a choking rasp drowned in blood.
She exhaled with pleasure, her breath trembling as her fingers closed around his heart. Then, with a slow twist of her wrist, she ripped it out—icy veins still twitching—before tossing it lazily into the air like discarded meat.
A blade of ice shimmered into being in her other hand. She didn't even watch.
With a flick of her wrist, the blade flew, slicing clean through the airborne heart with clinical precision.
She slowly parted her lips from his, licked them, and let out a gentle sigh.
The severed halves thudded to the ground with dull, wet splashes.
[Judicator's Requiem]
And breath returned to his lungs again.
Pain. Awareness. Memory.
He was alive.
Still trembling in her embrace.
But this time… Seraphae didn't hold him.
She stood.
Her lips were red, bitten raw from suppressed pleasure. A thin line of his blood trailed down her wrist as she walked away, hips swaying slightly, her silhouette casting a long, elegant shadow across the frost-laced floor.
Zay didn't move. Couldn't. His limbs were too heavy, his soul too shattered. But for the first time in fourteen days, he was granted more than seconds of clarity. More than gasping, dying moments.
His amethyst eyes followed her retreating form with quiet dread—waiting for her to turn, to smile, to return with another promise of "salvation."
But she never turned and kept walking away.
She left him there—alive.
His chest heaved slowly.
Each breath a miracle. A curse. A reminder.
Then, like a whisper rising from the void… one name took shape in the back of his mind.
'Ashgrave.'
The name flared like a dying star, a last light in the black.
His fingers twitched. Not from pain. From resolve.
If he couldn't escape Seraphae…
Then maybe... just maybe Ashgrave was the monster that could devour an angel.
Zay summoned every last ounce of his remaining aura, pushing through the searing pain coursing through his body. He focused on the depths of his consciousness, reaching out to the only being he knew that might be powerful enough to help him in this moment of desperation.
His vision blurred, and there, looming before him, stood the massive form of Ashgrave—the wolf of the night, the beast who stained Akser. His eyes glowed with darkness as he stared down at Zay, a primal hunger radiating from him.
Without a word, Ashgrave's nostrils flared as he growled deeply. The low rumble resonated through the darkened realm, sending shivers down Zay's spine. His towering presence was a force of nature, intimidating, yet Zay knew he was no longer a mere pawn in this dance.
Ashgrave, with a snarl, roared—a deafening sound that echoed through the vast expanse of the realm. The beast's fur bristled, and his claws scraped the ground, as though he were readying himself for a hunt. But Zay's resolve didn't waver. His voice, weak and hoarse, broke the silence, cutting through the tension in the air.
"Devour... that bitch."
The words barely left his lips before Ashgrave's eyes burned with predatory desire. The wolf's massive frame tensed, and with a savage, primal lunge, he surged toward Zay, the darkness of his aura billowing as he broke through, intent on the one target Zay had set for him.
In the waking world, Seraphae continued to walk away, her back turned to Zay, seemingly unbothered, expecting nothing more than the cycle of death to continue. But as her footsteps echoed, something in the air shifted. The temperature dropped even further, and she paused, feeling an unsettling presence stirring behind her.
She turned at the sound—something primal, something wrong.
Zay's body, once limp and broken, now pulsed with a blinding, abyssal black aura. The streaks of red and white in his hair bled away like smoke on the wind, until nothing remained but a cascade of void-black strands that rippled in slow motion, as if time itself feared to touch him.
His amethyst eyes, once vibrant with life, faded into an unfathomable black—eyes so dark no light could pierce them, as if they had become twin voids gazing back at the world.
[Unholy Regeneration] ignited.
His muscles twitched, then pulsed. Bones snapped back into place. Torn skin rewove itself in seconds. The cold vanished from his limbs. The ache, the agony, the trauma of countless deaths—all erased. His aura erupted in full, an ocean of violent black that cracked the very space around him.
He stepped forward.
The ground beneath his foot shattered like glass under a hammer. A thunderous boom echoed across the chamber. Ice split and collapsed around him in waves as if rejecting the existence of whatever he had become. The blue stone beneath returned, scorched and smoldering.
He raised one hand.
[Forbidden Flame] surged from his palm in a roaring stream of black fire, consuming everything in its path. The chamber screamed as the blaze devoured all remnants of Seraphae's ice. Walls hissed, steam burst, and frost turned to molten rivulets in seconds.
clang.
Evershade flew into his grip with perfect timing, spinning twice in the air before his fingers closed around its hilt. His nails had grown—twisted, sharpened—into black claws that caught the light with a deadly shimmer.
Ashgrave roared.
A sound that fractured the air, and echoed like the war cry of the void itself. His abyssal eyes narrowed and locked onto the one target Zay had marked for death.
The chamber trembled beneath the weight of something ancient and wrathful. The hunt had begun.
He took another step.
The instant his foot touched the floor, the blue stone cracked—not gently, not gradually, but violently, as if the chamber itself recoiled from his presence. Deep fractures webbed out beneath him, veins of destruction that split the ancient flooring with a groan that echoed like the death rattle of something sacred.
Then the light died.
The chamber was plunged into an abyss so absolute that even the concept of light seemed foreign. No glint, no shimmer, not even a trace of glow from Evershade. It was a darkness deeper than night—one that swallowed perception, muffled sound, and silenced breath. A void where even aura struggled to exist.
Ashgrave's breath rolled across the room like a storm—hot, thick, and foul with the scent of blood and ancient fury.
And Seraphae, for the first time, could no longer see the light.