The flames' lights, previously extinguished, reignited with a blue fire. The formless darkness had now transformed into an indistinct silhouette hovering over two meters tall. It seemed alive, as if it could breathe—not an organic breath, but an expansion and contraction of the void that sucked the air.
The cold became a blade against exposed skin, cracking Hogan's lips. The butcher released Simon's wrist as if burned. He stumbled backward uncontrollably, tripping over his own legs, his bulging eyes uselessly trying to pierce the impenetrable darkness. His face, once a mask of cruelty and arrogance, twisted with the fear of an animal cornered by a predator. He tried to scream, the muscles in his neck straining like ropes, his mouth forming a perfect "O" of panic. No sound came out. It was as if his voice had been devoured. Only the vapor of his breath, freezing instantly in the air, bore witness to his mute attempt.
Simon, even on the brink of unconsciousness from the pain, looked toward the center of the cell where he saw Hogan desperate. He felt that, though he was at his end, his infamous executioner wouldn't meet a good fate either.
Two vertical slits opened where a face should be. They weren't eyes. They were fissures holding only emptiness within.
"Let's see..." said the shadow, solidifying a dark fist that struck Hogan's face, hurling him against the wall. The impact shattered all his teeth, forcing him to spit them onto the floor.
"Still not enough..." murmured the shadow.
Then, looking at the fallen Simon and seeing he was missing an arm, the entity leaned in: "Ah, certainly... "this" is what's missing!" In one fluid and brutal motion, it tore off Hogan's arm as if it were a dry leaf from a tree. The butcher opened his mouth in a silent scream of indescribable pain, but no sound emerged.
His face, deformed by agony and tears, combined with the stench of the yellowish liquid running down his legs, buried the entire cruel persona Hogan had crafted for Simon.
Hogan fell to his knees, his hands clutching his throat in a futile attempt to force out a sound—a scream, a plea for mercy. Nothing came out, and his eyes could only witness as this being toyed with him like a ragdoll.
Then, the shadow tried to materialize something resembling a smile: an empty slit tearing from one end to the other of the shadowy face, but it disintegrated instantly.
"I cannot grasp where the joy is in this?" it hissed, as if speaking to itself with contained rage.
Where Hogan had displayed his broken teeth, the black mass contorted. Two horizontal slits opened below the vertical "gaze," curving upward in a grotesque imitation of a smile. It became nothing but a frightening deformity—a mask of darkness. The expression froze, empty and fundamentally wrong.
"Is this joy?" roared the void. "Why do I feel NOTHING?"
The entity turned toward Hogan, who lay in a pool of blood, teeth, and urine, his face contorted in agony. The executioner could barely focus his eyes, on the verge of passing out.
"What am I doing wrong?" The voice echoed, now sharp with childish frustration, like a child facing a broken toy. "I did exactly what you did. The squeezing... the impact... the angle." The shadow pointed to its own distorted "mouth." "But I cannot smile like you. I don't feel the... emotion!"
It leaned over Hogan, the void-slits devouring every detail of his shattered face. The cold intensified, crystallizing the blood in his wounds.
"Show me." The command wasn't a request; it was a cosmic force crushing bones. "Where is your happiness? The one that shone in you when he screamed?" A tentacle of solid shadow emerged from the mass, poking Hogan's bloody stump like someone stirring dead embers. "Find it. Now!"
Hogan tried to swallow, but only managed to gurgle blood in a thin stream trickling from his mouth. His eyes rolled back in horror. *What the hell was that? Happiness? What kind of demon had he encountered?
The shadow watched, immobile as an obsidian statue, waiting for an answer.
"I... can give you an answer..." Simon moved his lips, gathering the little energy he had left. No audible sound came out—only a trickle of dark blood slid down his chin.
But the entity froze.
The mass of shadows didn't move—it simply reconfigured itself. A vacuum in the air, a silent snap, and the black silhouette was now centimeters from Simon's disfigured face, filling his entire field of vision. The cold was a needle driven into his brain.
The voice that emerged was no longer that of the frustrated child. It was deep, weighted as if carrying the burden of countless years—the voice of an ancient.
"What do you know about happiness... the man who abandoned his own?" The words were blows, each syllable cold and cutting. The void-slits pierced the depths of Simon's soul, searching. "Do you wish to teach me... to deliver my bride into the hands of my worst enemy?"
The shadow leaned closer, its "face" almost touching the flesh melted by acid. The tone saturated with contempt.
"Or perhaps teach me to be tortured and humiliated by a worm..." A tendril of darkness pointed at the unconscious Hogan, "... no different from maggots crawling in dung?"
A pause. The cold crystallized Simon's tears into tracks of ice on his face. Then, the ancient voice seethed with raw perplexity:
"Where is the happiness in that?" The shadow rose, undulating like a cloak of living darkness. "I do not comprehend. Where does joy reside in causing pain..." The void-slits narrowed in fury. "... and yet you dare claim you can show me? So where is it?"
The final question hung in the cell like a riddle thrown at the feet of a condemned man. Simon felt the shadows tightening around his chest, crushing his lungs.
Ever since learning that Sophia had come to rescue him only to be captured herself, she hadn't left his thoughts. Even under torture, in his final moments, her image endured. Guilt devoured him from within.
The shadows squeezed his chest like an icy hand, but it was within himself that Simon found the deepest void. The ancestral voice of the abyss still echoed "Where is she?", yet a series of images surged forth, accompanied by a clear, concise voice:
The Village of the Old Oak.
The name came from the thousand-year-old tree in the center of the square – now a charred trunk surrounded by burning houses. The smell of bread burning in the communal oven mixed with the acrid smoke of a house devoured by flames. The shrill panic of animals in the pen fused with human screams. And amidst the chaos, the face of Ana, the nine-year-old girl he'd sworn to protect, cornered against the base of the dead oak, her eyes wide with terror as the Iron-Plated Tiger advanced. The Gold Rank beast roared, claws capable of cutting stone gleaming in the firelight.
Why am I here? The question hammered inside his skull, louder than the physical pain.
He saw himself acting on blind impulse:
Simon leaped between Ana and the beast, the mana shield on his left arm groaning as it blocked the first claw. The impact slammed him against the oak. "Ice Fang!" His voice echoed over the chaos. From the shadows beneath the destroyed stalls, the snow wolf materialized in a whirlwind of ice, biting the tiger's hock. The beast spun, roaring in pain, giving Simon the moment he needed. "Silver Eagle!" The silver-winged eagle dove like a projectile, pecking at the monster's eyes. Ana ran towards the bakery ruins.
Me? A hero? The thought flickered ephemerally, stained with blood and ashes.
The image blurred – as if being carried elsewhere – but no...
It was the same scene, minutes later: the Old Oak square transformed into a charnel house. Villagers' bodies lay like rags on the dirt roads. And at the foot of the chapel steps, Ana's tiny body hung over the stone stairs, cold and stiff, her eyes still wide with eternal fear. A claw mark tore across her chest.
He saw himself on his knees amid the bakery rubble, mana-suppression manacles clamped onto his wrists, the triumphant smiles of Torgon's thugs cutting into his soul.
Now Sophia was in Torgon's hands because of him, the village destroyed... everything he'd done was useless.
His weakness. His stupidity. His recklessness.
His guilt overflowed in a dark torrent, as dense as the shadows before him. The image of blood-soaked Ana merged with Sophia's smile, which he'd never see again.
"She is..." Simon whispered with bloodied lips, not to the shadow, but to the abyss within himself, "...in the hell of those who caused me pain."
A final breath, tearing through the icy silence:
"Call it retribution... or blind justice..." His fingers convulsed on the soaked ground. "...that's where happiness lies!"
Everything turned dark. The beats of his heart ceased; his breathing stopped.
— He has potential! Told you, Nolan. — A voice completely at odds with the shadows spoke animatedly.
— Indeed. I didn't expect to find something as valuable as the objective of our mission.
— Think he'll agree to come with us without trouble? — the childish voice said.
— We can convince him without problems.
An apparently masculine hand emerged from the darkness, touching Simon's body, which rapidly gained tones of life.
— His cores... — the childish voice from the darkness spoke as if with pity.
— Not a problem. — Then the mass of darkness turned and approached Hogan, who watched everything, but being mute and with all his limbs broken, could do nothing but be a spectator.
A choked scream caught in Hogan's throat, blocked by his swollen tongue and the taste of iron.
*****
Simon awoke. His gaze, still blurred by pain and the proximity of death, fixed on the figure towering before Hogan, who lay further ahead—a broken, silent heap. It was no longer a simple mass of shadows. The darkness had condensed, gained defined contours: a tall, imposing human silhouette, yet still composed of dense, smoke-like shadows that devoured the faint light. But what those shadowy hands held made Simon's heart—or what remained of it—stall.
In the figure's palms, three objects pulsed with an intermittent light.
—"Three mana cores"— a childlike voice floated through the surrounding darkness, a whisper tinged with near-clinical pity.
The shadowy human figure turned its head slightly toward the voice's source. Its eyes—not eyes, but two vertical slits, hollow and darker than the deepest night—seemed to pass over the pulsing cores with calculated assessment. No audible reply. Only action.
With supernatural fluidity, the shadowy hands closed around the three cores, which trembled violently.
Then, the shadow figure clenched its fists with absolute, decisive force.
CRACCC!
The sound was dry, final, like bones crushed beneath stone. The individual lights of the three cores vanished abruptly, swallowed by the darkness of the hands crushing them. For an eternal, suffocating instant, there was only darkness and the heavy silence of recent death. Hogan, unmoving, watched with bulging eyes, a frozen trail of terror on his bloodied face.
Then, between the shadow's clenched fingers, a fissure began to glow.
Not the cold, desperate light of ice. Not the sharp, agonizing gleam of silver. Not the dull lament of earth. It was a new, primordial light—blinding white. It pulsed with overwhelming intensity, radiating heat, a raw and untamable energy that vibrated the ground beneath Simon and made his skin prickle meters away. It was like witnessing the turbulent birth of a miniature star.
The shadow figure slowly opened its fingers, revealing what lay in its palm.
There it was. A single core.
Smaller than the three originals combined, compact, almost too dense for reality. Its white light pulsed with a powerful, rhythmic cadence, like the beating of a divine heart. Waves of heat distorted the air around it. Hairline fissures, like frozen lightning strikes, traced its seemingly smooth, vitreous surface. It was a thing of terrible beauty—a crystal of pure potential force, wild and volatile.
—"A singular core"— Nolan's masculine voice resonated, clear and cold, seemingly emanating from the shadow figure itself. There was undeniable satisfaction.
A sharp pain, throbbing in unison with the white light's pulse, radiated from the center of Simon's chest where his cores had been torn out. The shadow figure, its human form unmistakable under the blinding light it emitted, turned fully toward Simon. The white light partially illuminated its featureless face.
—"Simon"— Nolan's voice cut the air like a blade. —"I can offer you a chance to fix all your mistakes, but you will have to pay a price. After all, what I did was not charity."
—"Do you want to save your bride? Do you want vengeance against the men who brought you here?"— The shadow made the glowing mana core float until it hovered centimeters from Simon's face. —"Then behold my conditions. First: I can restore your ability to summon monsters... and grant you power enough to end everyone in this fortress. I could do this for you, but I believe you desire to wield your vengeance with your own hands..."
—"And what do you ask in return?"— Simon rasped, his voice rough.
—"That you abandon everything... including Sophia. I want you to work for me. And if you work for me, it will put her in danger. So, this isn't truly a request from me, but for you. I gave you life and a chance to start anew, to do what is right. Surely I deserve your gratitude?"
Simon was moved. —"My life is yours. Serving you will be my greatest honor. But I beg you—let me have my vengeance."
—"As you wish"— Nolan replied, his voice cold as steel.
Then, the glowing core moved. It floated to Simon's chest... and passed *through* the space over his sternum, as if flesh and bone were but mist. It entered.
The pain in Simon's chest exploded, mingled with a sudden, overwhelming influx of heat. Not the comforting warmth of life, but the scalding heat of a forge, of a volcano poised to erupt within him. He choked, gasping, his body arching in an involuntary spasm.
The gelid cold of death, which he knew so well, retreated before that searing heat. But it was not life that returned. It was something different. It was the crushing weight of an imposed destiny. His fingers, once clenched in final agony, dug once more into the muddy, blood-soaked ground. Not in death throes, but in rebirth.