Grey didn't need to turn to know.
The monster was behind him.
The moment his instincts screamed, the world narrowed—sound thinning, vision sharpening to a painful clarity.
His breath stalled in his chest as something leaned into his presence, close enough that the air itself felt bruised.
Cold sweat run down his spine.
Yet he muster every bit of his courage and turned—
And the moment he did his blood froze.
The monster stood inches away, no longer tethered to its body.
It had no shape now—wrong and unfinished—like a silhouette cut out of the world itself.
Its surface writhed, edges blurring as if reality refused to acknowledge it fully.
And then the monster look at him...
Eight eyes opened within the dark.
All of them were staring at him.
Grey's body loosed all will to do anything Infront of such abomination...
Run.
That single word detonated in his mind—but his legs refused to obey.
His sacrifice rune burned faintly...
But grey knew it was pointless even if he scarifies everything he won't be able to escape the creature Infront of him...
He knew this feeling all to well.
The feeling of helplessness.
The feeling of death.
The shadow leaned forward.
Its mouth—if it could be called that—split open, stretching far wider than anatomy allowed.
From within came that whisper again, closer now, clearer, scraping directly against his mind.
*Flesh…*
Pain lanced through his skull.
He gasped, clutching his head as something pressed inward, probing, peeling at his consciousness like fingers digging into soft fruit.
Images flashed—his mind torn apart, his existence reduced to nourishment.
Just Then—
The world shattered.
A soundless impact ripped through space.
Light exploded past him, so bright it burned white across his vision.
For a fraction of a second, he felt nothing—no pain, no fear, no weight.
Just cold.
But for some reason this cold wasn't so unsettling.
In the next second, a scream tore through the air—
SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE—
It came from beside him—a monstrous, mind-rending shriek.
The sheer force of it shattered his eardrums.
A warm trickle of blood traced the line of his jaw, dripping from his ears.
The world washed into silent, blinding white.
For a disoriented moment, he thought he'd lost his sight.
But no. It was his hearing that was gone, ripped away without consent.
Gradually, the whiteness receded. Color and shape seeped back into the world.
He looked down.
The creature that had been moments from devouring him now lay twitching in the dirt, its life seeping away.
His gaze lifted, searching the distant sky.
There she was.
Elsa, hovering like a wrathful deity, a bow of shimmering ice held loosely in her hand.
He was too far to see her face, but he could feel the smirk that played upon it—cold, triumphant, and utterly merciless.
He tried to draw breath, but his chest was a vise.
The panting that wracked him was a silent, desperate thing.
He just wanted to collapse.
Just then a blur—a ripple in the air.
FWIP.
Before the thought could even form, she was in front of him.
All Grey felt was arms wrapping around him.
Tight.
Protective.
Familiar.
And then—
The world folded.
There was no sensation of movement. No wind, no acceleration. One heartbeat, he stood beneath a fractured sky. The next, the ground vanished.
Space inverted. And Distance lost its meaning.
His stomach lurched violently, as if reality itself had been yanked out from under him.
His vision blurred, colors smearing into incomprehensible streaks.
He tried to breathe, but the air refused to settle. It felt like falling sideways through infinity.
All he could feel was the cold skin of the girl holding him, and her sheer, desperate urgency.
It lasted only seconds before Elsa's speed slowed.
He collapsed against her as the world violently snapped back into place.
The first thing he felt was the warmth.
It wasn't the warmth of the sun or a hearth—it was a living, breathing heat that invaded his pores.
It assaulted him, suffocating, oppressive, alive.
The scent of sulfur stung his nostrils and burned his lungs, a bitter taste of ash and fire coating his tongue.
Somewhere below, deep within the throat of the world, came the deep-throated roar of magma churning.
He knew what this was.
Their final destination: the volcano.
But how?
They had been thousands of kilometers away just a moments ago.
How had they crossed a such distance in a matter of a heartbeat?
His mind, still reeling from the silence of deafness and the nausea of the fold, couldn't begin to process the distance.
It was impossible.
Just before his vision was swallowed by the volcano's dark interior, it flickered one last time, looking back to the place they had fled.
Far behind them—far beyond reason—the very sky seemed to move.
A darkness deeper than the night coalesced.
Within that impossible distance, a shape loomed, vast enough to eclipse the heavens themselves.
For the briefest instant, it took form in his mind:
A crow.
An enormous crow.
Its wings, immense as storm clouds, blotted out stars that did not exist in that torn sky.
They seemed to stretch across the horizon, not beating, but holding—an eternal span of living shadow.
And clutched in its obsidian beak was the corpse of the eight-eyed monster—a thing that had been a peak A-rank predator just moments before, now reduced to nothing but nourishment. It dangled, limp and broken, like a discarded scrap of nightmare.
Just like that, the ruler of the wastes had become a prey.
Then Grey looked, and met the shadow's gaze.
It was impossible to miss them...
Those eyes—
Those immense, sun-like eyes burning in the abyss.
Dark.
Blood-red.
Ancient.
They were pits of a crimson so deep it seemed to swallow the light around it, glowing with a malevolent, knowing intelligence.
And in that final, chilling fraction of a second before the volcano's rock enveloped him, those ancient, blood-red eyes shifted.
They looked directly at him.
Not at the place he had been.
Not at the fleeing pair.
They saw him, even now, across the impossible gulf.
Agony detonated behind his eyes.
Grey screamed as pain tore through his head, pressure crushing his thoughts, his memories, his sense of self.
It felt like his mind was being seen—measured, weighed, and dismissed.
Too small.
Too fragile.
Unworthy.
His consciousness slipped.
The last thing he felt before darkness swallowed him was Elsa's grip tightening—strong, unyielding—as if daring the world itself to take him away.
And somewhere, impossibly far—
A crow cried.