The golden light flickered. Lucid stood beside Valen on the fractured pillar, his body screaming with pain that had not faded since the auction ended. The afterburn lingered, hot and grinding, chewing through his bones like slow acid. He pushed through it because there was no other choice.
"You are insane, you know that," Valen said. His voice was flat, but his golden eyes kept flicking to Lucid's shattered hand.
"The feeling is mutual," Lucid replied. Blood dripped from his fingers. He did not look down.
He would probably pass out from the pain soon. His vision blurred at the edges. His heartbeat was a ragged drum in his chest. But if he fell now, he would not get up again.
"We have to do something about this god," lucid said.
Valen circling his footsteps careful on the narrow stone said.
"Take on a god?" Valen rasped. "Looking like that?"
He gestured vaguely at him. He looked like a bloody ragdoll that had been dragged through a war. His shirt was torn. His arm hung at an awkward angle. But yet beneath the bloody ragged clothes was pristine untouched skin due to the healing.
"If you are going to talk, then I suggest you talk to the others." Lucid took a step toward the edge of the pillar. More blood spilled from his mouth. A chain materialized at the tips of his fingers, a pale white thread of light, signaling that he was ready to fight or fall.
Mercyros stood in the center of the golden sky, waiting. The Monolith's golden eyes measured the pillar, the participants, the value of every breath they took.
"Wait," Valen said.
Lucid stopped. He did not turn around.
"There is a way out of the Domain," Valen continued. His voice was lower now, almost reluctant. "You can use fate essence, right?"
Lucid looked back at him. His gaze was lazy, half-lidded, heavy with exhaustion. He considered the words. Fate essence. The one thing he had in abundance. The one thing Alice had given him.
Before he could answer, Mercyros interrupted.
"My subject," the Monolith intoned, its voice smooth and terrible, like a wave pulling back from shore. "Mortal being. You posses the holy lyre. I will have it back."
Mercyros swung its hand.
A shockwave tore through the golden air. It was not aimed at anyone in particular. It was aimed at everything. The wave expanded, a wall of pure force that threatened to consume the pillars, the bodies, the light itself.
Lucid jumped forward. His hand shot out. The chain in his fingers expanded into a thin membrane of white light, a chain shield woven from fate essence and desperation. The shockwave hit.
The shield broke.
His hand burst.
Bone fragments scattered like shrapnel. Muscle tissue shredded. Blood sprayed across the stone pillar.
Lucid screamed. The sound was raw, torn from a throat that had already screamed too many times.
Valen stepped back. His hand came up to cover his face for a brief moment, as if he could not bear to watch. He muttered something under his breath.
"Unpredictable...."
Lucid turned back. His hand was already reforming. New bone knitting together. New muscle wrapping around it. New skin stretching over the raw tissue. The pain was indescribable. He did not have time to describe it.
Another shockwave burst from Mercyros's hand. This one struck the pillar directly. The stone cracked. The foundation shuddered.
Lucid grabbed Valen's arm with his newly formed hand and hauled himself upward with another chain that seemed to make his body lash back. He swung. He twisted. He narrowly avoided the next blast.
"Chronos Stasis," Mercyros announced.
The words hung in the air like a sentence.
Lucid braced himself. He felt the pressure of the Domain pressing in, trying to freeze him in place, trying to suspend him in a moment that would never end.
He moved.
He was free.
Valen was not. The yellow-haired boy hung suspended in mid-air, his eyes wide, his body locked in place by an invisible grip. His mouth was open. His hands were reaching for something that was not there.
Lucid thought he had caught him off guard. Then Valen threw up blood.
Nausea swept through Lucid. His stomach lurched. He started tumbling downward, the golden void opening beneath him like a mouth.
Fenwick was just above him, near the pillar he had been heading toward. The nobleman's face was pale with terror.
"Oi, buddy! Get it together!" Fenwick shouted. His voice was thin and reedy, the voice of a man who had never fought anything in his life.
Lucid was tumbling helplessly. The golden light spun around him. Up became down became sideways.
Mercyros started chanting. The sound crawled into his ears and wrapped around his brain.
He halfway registered the word gravital.
'No. He is going to...'
'Come on. Move. You useless piece of shit.'
With the last of his strength, Lucid summoned the Midnight Spear of the Pierced Spine. The weapon materialized in his grip, solid and cold and familiar. He drove it into the nearby pillar, the impact shattering the stone and engraving a deep groove that stopped his descent.
He hung there with one arm, his body swinging like a pendulum. Blood dripped from his wounds. The spear creaked under his weight.
He swung up and placed his feet on its shaft, he knelt on the spear and gathered every scrap of fate essence he could find. He poured it into his body, enhancing his physical attributes, pushing his muscles beyond their limits. The chains in his chest screamed. His heart stuttered.
Mercyros's lips moved. The chant was reaching something that resembled gravity impact. Something that would end him.
'I have sustained enough damage,' Lucid thought. 'I can do it.'
He jumped.
The spear shattered beneath him. The pillar's foundation shook. He moved at a speed so fast that the air around him caught whistled. It seemed as if he had blitzed across the void in a single breath.
Valen stared. He could feel the pressure of the impact approaching, the weight of Mercyros's fury condensed into a single point.
Lucid yelled.
"Divine Wrath!"
He blitzed through the air. His fist connected with the Chronos Stasis that held Valen prisoner. The stasis shattered like glass, ethereal shards exploding outward. His hand broke again in the process, bone and blood littering the golden air for a moment, suspended like tragic beauty.
He gritted his teeth. He grabbed Valen and threw him away from the impact zone.
In that moment wrath descended.
Lucid took it.
The blast hit him square in the chest. He did not scream. There was no air left to scream with. His body folded around the impact, bones cracking, organs shifting, blood spraying from his mouth in a fine red mist.
Valen tumbled through the air. He managed to grab onto a pillar where Fenwick was standing. Fenwick pulled him forward, his hands shaking, his face wet with tears.
The sound of cartilage tearing and blood spattering echoed through the void as he got up. It was sickening. It was everywhere.
Valen touched himself, checking that he was still whole. He felt as if he should have been slammed into a pulp, ground into a pure paste. But he was alive.
He had been saved.
"That is impossible," Valen muttered. "I saw myself being crushed. For good. How is he..."
He could not see through time normally when Lucid was involved. The futures were distorted as soon as he entered the equation. Every path branched and twisted and refused to resolve.
He looked around. Fenwick was there, trembling.
A brief recognition went through Valen's eyes. Then sadness. He realized who Fenwick was. What he had lost. What he had failed to protect. The person he used.
Lucid started to fall again.
A hand caught his mangled body.
"You are surprisingly resilient, mortal," Mercyros said. The Monolith lifted him up, holding him like a doll, its golden eyes studying his face from inches away. "From close view, you look like any Illuminate. A mortal one. But you possess the characteristics of a deity. Your thread of fate is brilliant. Radiant."
Lucid remembered nothing like that. He remembered pain.
"I am afraid I will have to rebuy that relic you took," Mercyros continued. Its voice was almost gentle, which made it worse. "You think you can buy something beyond you. But your faith can be bought. And I will buy your faith. It is not a mere transaction. It is an exchange of essence."
The Monolith raised its hand.
"Now. Will you undergo a transaction? I offer you the divine relic you sought over your thread of fate."
[A bid has been placed. Thirty seconds remaining.]
"Sell the lyre!" Fenwick yelled from the pillar. His voice cracked.
The white-haired magistrate yelled "Young kid, sell it! Your judgment is absolute!"
The cultists chanted in the background, their voices wet and fervent. "Our martyr. Our savior. Sell it. Sell it. Sell it."
Valen stood watching Lucid. He was waiting, but not for an answer. He was watching different paths, different futures. But they were vastly distorted and different. He could not tell what would happen.
Normally, he would have something to say. Some clever remark. Some calculated move.
But when it came to Lucid, everything went blank.
He knew one thing, though. What Mercyros was asking was a simple transaction on the surface. But something was fundamentally wrong from another point of view.
"Buy faith?"
He glanced at Fenwick.
The nobleman believed he could uncover the truth behind his brother's killers by taking up his name, he knew that cholera wasn't the reason. But belief alone hadn't been enough. It had never been enough.
Fenwick had needed access. Influence. Proximity.
So he became him.
He wore his brother's name like a second skin, slipping into noble circles, forging connections under a ghost's identity, all to move unseen through an affair that would have otherwise been closed to him. Disgusting, perhaps. Necessary, certainly.
Because there was still one brother left to save.
That was when he met Lucid, under a name that wasn't his own. And in that brief, fragile thread of chance, he saw it: a possible future where the last living heir could be spared.
It hadn't been his original plan.
But it had been real.
No… that's not possible. I of all people should know that.
His thoughts drifted back to the slums.
He had paid for loyalty there. Bought protection, bought voices, bought belief—at least, something that looked like it. He had built symbols people could point to. The orphanage. The order. The illusion of something greater.
And for a time, it worked.
Until it didn't.
When everything fell apart, so did they. The same people who had praised him turned away without hesitation. What he had purchased had never been faith, only compliance, only convenience.
Money could gather a crowd.
It could shape a message.
It could even mimic devotion.
But it could never create belief.
Then it settled in him, quiet and undeniable.
True faith wasn't something you could buy.
It was something that endured.
Something that remained when there was nothing left to gain.
Something that held, even when everything else broke.
He stepped forward.
His voice rang out, sharp and unyielding.
"Fogged One… don't sell it!"
Lucid hung in Mercyros's grip, broken and bleeding. One of his popped eyes found Valen's. He smiled. It was a bloody, broken thing.
Lucid was beyond any condition to speak.
But he did.
"I was not planning to," he whispered.
[Ten seconds remaining.]
Mercyros's golden eyes narrowed. "Then you will fall."