The surface sealed behind him in silence.
Ayanokouji sank without resistance. Arms wrapped around the corpse's massive torso, legs folded in, spine still, face dipped beneath the curve of the Vowalker's jaw. He didn't kick. He didn't blink.
No motion betrayed intent.
He allowed gravity to do the rest.
The corpse was monstrous—easily over two hundred kilograms, built like a slab of compacted ore rather than flesh. Every inch of it dragged him downward with mechanical steadiness.
No flinch.
No buoyancy.
Just an uninterrupted descent, like tethered stone falling through black glass.
His lungs remained full, not strained. No air leaked. No movement broke form. His body entered a quiet stasis—heart rate lowered, muscles neutral, every biological process shifted toward survival. Not a breath. Not a thought wasted.
The wound at his ribs began to bleed again, but the blood didn't rise in pulses. It unwound—soft, almost elegant—dispersing into the water in a slow, unfurling trail.
The lake absorbed it like ink drawn across wet paper. Still, there was no pain. Just cold.
The deeper he sank, the dimmer the world became. Colors vanished early. Then contrast. Then shape. Eventually, even movement lost meaning.
There was no visible descent—only the tightening of pressure and the loss of light.
Sound disappeared second.
What remained was sensation: the creeping numbness of the outer limbs; the thick, sterile texture of the water as it filled the folds of his clothes and soaked deep into the fabric; the subtle weight of the Vowalker's corpse pressed against him like a second spine.
The cold wasn't sharp. I
t settled in quietly, like a presence. Bone-deep.
Old.
Somewhere in the dark, his body began to change.
Blood rerouted from his fingers and feet toward his core.
Hands began to dull.
Knees stiffened.
Yet he didn't loosen his grip.
Even as sensation thinned, his hold on the corpse remained constant—unreadable, unshaken.
Then came the seventh minute.
It began subtly. His diaphragm gave the first betrayal—a shallow inward twitch, like the ghost of a breath trying to return to memory. Not from desperation. From habit. A reflex imitating the idea of breath, not the need.
Next, a pulse behind the eyes. A tightness. The kind that gathered not in pain, but in pressure—a swelling at the edge of consciousness, not dangerous yet, just wrong.
His chest began to feel heavier. Not suffocated—compressed. As though the air inside had thickened into something denser, something no longer meant to be held. Each second, it grew.
His fingers ached—not from cold, but from stillness. The joints felt ancient, cemented into place by the weight of the corpse and the refusal to move. Below the ribs, the wound had numbed completely, but a deep irritation lingered—like something foreign had crept beneath the skin.
The first sign of invasion.
Eighth minute.
A twitch in the jaw. Then another. His throat tightened once, uselessly. He didn't open his mouth. He didn't need to. But his body began to rebel in small ways—spasms too light to stop, too deep to ignore.
His grip faltered for a heartbeat—barely. Then steadied again.
Ninth minute.
A sharp bloom of heat surged from his gut, radiating outward in a slow, reverse fire. The cold had sunk too deep. His core was beginning to compensate. His organs were beginning to resist.
He did not react.
Not in movement.
Not in breath.
Not in thought.
He simply continued downward—silent, rigid, eyes open in pitch-dark water, anchored to death as though it were the only thing keeping him alive.
***
The ninth minute bled into the tenth without grace.
Ayanokouji's limbs had lost warmth entirely. His fingers—still locked beneath the corpse's armpits—hung inert, not by weakness, but by deliberate stillness. His calves floated slightly now, as if memory of tension had slipped away from his joints
The wound below his ribs continued leaking—thin wisps of blood unfurling behind him like threads in slow motion, barely alive.
There was no thought of rising.
Only descent.
Somewhere in his chest, the diaphragm trembled again. But this time, it wasn't reflex. It was resistance. As if the body, confused by stillness, had decided movement was necessary.
He ignored it.
His eyes did not blink. Muscles around the sockets had hardened—frozen, not from cold, but endurance.
And with that, the tenth minute passed.
The eleventh minute began quieter than the rest.
No pressure spike. No suffocation.
Just depth.
The kind that couldn't be measured in meters anymore.
The lake had become heavier, darker. Even memory began to detach. He couldn't feel the surface anymore—not in direction, not in presence. The world above might have ceased to exist.
The corpse grew heavier in a way that defied mass. Its density warped against his arms. Not drag—anchor. Not flesh—weight. It no longer sank. It consumed. And he went with it.
His chest held firm, but tension now echoed behind the ribs—each second a soft pulse of discomfort trying to gather into need. But it hadn't gathered yet. Not fully. His body still obeyed.
His thoughts, though, had thinned. Not confused—muted. Like words written in water instead of carved in thought.
The first strain built in his spine. It wasn't the water.
It was his own back—tightening from cold, from pressure, from refusal.
He didn't move.
And with that, the eleventh minute ended.
***
The twelfth minute began with silence—but not the quiet kind.
It was the silence of tissue folding inward. Of marrow bending. The kind of silence that made noise inside the bones.
Ayanokouji's jaw clenched—subtly, reflexively—as his lower back began to contract. The pressure had changed. Not external. Internal. His lungs weren't crying for air yet, but the muscles around them had started to stir—twitching in place, disturbed by stillness they hadn't evolved to endure.
The corpse no longer felt like a body.
It had become a burden. Absolute. Its spine pressed back against him like it had grown heavier, like death itself was deepening by the meter.
His grip shifted slightly—not willingly. His right wrist spasmed, curling in as if nerve fibers had begun to misfire. Not pain. Just cold. Deep cold, the kind that hollows muscle before freezing it.
He tightened his core—not to move, but to suppress.
The ache in his gut expanded as if his organs had begun to drift apart under the pressure. Everything inside him was pressing downward now—gravity made heavier by depth.
And then, a flicker.
A nerve behind his eye throbbed once.
The first warning sign. Not of drowning.
Of stress.
Nightmare had mentally attacked him the worst time possible... And sadly he had no way to fight with it currently.
The cold had reached behind his face.
And with that, the twelfth minute ended.
The thirteenth minute began with weightlessness—but it was deceptive.
His sense of time stretched. Seconds felt uneven, like the water itself had started to slow them down. He noticed something new: the trail of blood above him had blurred, diffused, smeared into nothing.
His vision was losing depth, only showing what was directly ahead. Not clarity. Compression.
He blinked.
Only once. And that blink nearly cost him balance.
The eyelids stuck together for a fraction too long. When they opened, the corpse had drifted an inch closer to his chest. Not movement.
collapse.
The body was compressing under its own decay. The joints had started to give, just barely, subtly.
But they did not break.
His arms remained locked. Even as the right one began to tremble beneath the elbow. The tendon shook so faintly it might've been invisible. But he felt it—like a line about to snap.
Something deep in his lower back gave a dull twitch.
No response from his legs.
His knees floated with minimal resistance now. The muscle tone had slipped. His body was beginning to shut away unnecessary movement to preserve core stability.
His heart still beat. But it did so behind a curtain.
And with that, the thirteenth minute ended.
The fourteenth minute did not begin like the others.
Something broke loose—not bone, not muscle. Control.
His body lurched an inch downward, like his shoulders had lost grip for a second. He clenched everything at once—abs, thighs, hands—forcing himself not to lose the corpse.
The diaphragm convulsed.
A tiny one. Shallow. But real.
Air-hunger had begun.
Not panic. Not yet.
But a contract had been broken. His body no longer believed it was descending on purpose. It now wanted to rise.
The instinct wasn't loud, but it was permanent.
There would be no forgetting it.
His mouth stayed sealed, but his jaw tightened again. Not in pain—anticipation. He knew what came next. The ache in the stomach would rise toward the chest. The lungs would begin to cramp—not from emptiness, but from betrayal. From not being allowed to do what they were designed for.
His mind held, even under the influence of nightmare, it held.
But something was flickering at the edge of thought now. A buzzing. Not sound. Awareness. The last layer of resistance preparing to split.
And with that, the fourteenth minute ended.
***
Fifteen minutes.
The cold had long shed its fangs. Now it was simply weight—endless, invisible weight pressing against every part of him with impartial malice.
His lungs were no longer struggling; they had gone eerily still, conserving what little tension remained.
His blood moved slow, dull and syruped, trailing faint red threads into the void above like ribbons of memory too fragile to resist the current.
The corpse had stopped shifting in his arms. Its rigid weight no longer sank—it pulled. Dead weight, in the most final sense.
Each second that passed scraped microscopic shivers into Ayanokouji's shoulder sockets and wrist tendons.
The only thing keeping his fingers wrapped around the corpse's arm was the lack of command to release.
And then, below—
He saw them.
Not approaching. Not revealing themselves. Just there.
Two colossal rocks, ancient and enamorus, slumbering in the depths like submerged gods with no myth to justify them. They didn't rise from the dark. They were the dark.
Their size was unknowable, their texture smooth yet unnaturally unmarred by water's erosion. A matching pair—positioned like gateposts without a gate, resting in eternal silence.
They had always been here.
Somehow, he knew.
No tectonic shift. No motion. No threat. Yet the water around them felt denser, as if it remembered pressure the surface never knew. Even in his slowed, half-broken state, something in him tensed—not from fear. From recognition.
And if rocks like these had always rested here…
Then the bottom could not be far.
These things did not float. They stood. They required ground.
The last stretch of descent dragged seconds out like wire. His legs moved on memory alone. His spine bent inward. His jaw had locked five minutes ago, but now even the pain in his ribs had grown quiet, like a child that had learned screaming didn't help.
And then—
His feet touched something.
Not soft. Not silt.
Stone.
The corpse dropped fully. It hit with a final thud against the lakebed, sending up a shallow, shivering puff of dust and blood that instantly dissolved into the gloom.
He didn't let go. Couldn't.
Ahead—just seven meters beyond where he stood—the two enamorus rocks stirred the water without moving. The pressure between them breathed.
And in that moment, something inside him whispered:
'…Is this how it ends?'
'Have I finally misjudged the depth?'
'Even if those are enamorus rocks… what good is knowing, if I can't breathe again?'
His arms trembled. Not from fear, not from cold—but from quiet resignation.
'So this is failure.'
'I destroyed half of this nightmare, ran away from corpses across ruined villages, tore through illusions, endured the vines, the nails… and still—this body gives in before the world does.'
His eyes stung, not from salt but pressure.
'There's no air.'
'No surface.'
'No escape.'
'Nothing left but the dark.'
The nightmare had fully overpowered the masterpieces brain.
The one who was never defeated after a certain point was finally tasting defeat.
All it took was just... Everything, It took everything imaginable to finally defeat him.
Body which was highly nerfed, Mind which was in a constant battle, Regrets of his life coming in front of him, Constant danger of death, Exhaustion, Starvation, Vowalkers acting like dogs... It took everything for him to finally taste this defeat.
And as if answering that thought, his knees gave. He sank beside the corpse—fingers still latched to its forearm—and allowed his spine to rest against the cold stone beneath.
He had failed in killing shirou, he was only gonna go down this river if there wasn't any other way...
He finally looked back to the time he spend in ANHS.
The best time he ever had.
And finally...
His vision fluttered. Not violently. Softly.
Like a curtain giving up on the wind.
His eyelids began to close, not in fear or agony, but something stranger—acceptance.
With this, The Masterpiece was finally in peace.
His body stopped moving, he accepted his fate under the influence of nightmare.
The nightmare hadn't tricked him. There had been no deception.
Just a slow, perfect end.
But just as the darkness settled fully—
The water shifted.
The rocks did not move, but something between them did.
A slit parted—narrow, precise—and light spilled through.
Not golden. Not warm.
But enough.
The black turned to gray. The pressure lifted, if only slightly. And the slit behind the enamorus rocks gave shape to something deeper still—something waiting.
His eyes opened again.
The cold remained. The corpse still weighed upon his arms.
But now, so did the light.
Yet... It might have been too late.
He was correct about there being something down in the river, But he underestimated the depth.
And his body broke with his mind.
It was over.