The silence in the room was absolute, broken only by the ragged sound of my own breathing. Julia's words echoed in the hollowed-out chamber of my skull, each one a shovelful of dirt on the grave of the life I'd just lost.
A century. A wife. A home. A peace so deep it had become my bones.
Gone.
A sound escaped my lips, a wet, broken thing that was half-sob, half-laugh. I brought my hands—my young, thin, useless hands—to my face. I could still smell her on them. The scent of sun-warmed moss and eternal spring.
"Whoa, Raf, easy man,"
Niran said, his voice cautious, like he was approaching a wounded animal.
"You're in shock. Whatever you saw… it was just a crazy dream from the void."
"A temporal dissonance event,"
Julia whispered to the others, her red eyes wide with theory, not understanding.
"His consciousness must have experienced a time-dilated hallucination while his body was catatonic."
They didn't get it. They were trying to put a label on a universe of grief and pain.
Dao reached for me again.
"Raf, it's okay. You're back. You're safe."
Safe. The word was the match.
The sob curdled in my throat, boiling into something hot and dark. The warm tears on my cheeks turned cold. The hollow space in my chest, now so agonizingly empty again, didn't ache. It burned.
I looked past Dao's concerned face, past Preecha's silent observation, past all of them. My eyes locked on the source of all my pain, past and present.
Kephriel. Leaning against the wall. Smiling.
He'd felt my soul become whole and used it as a fishing line to drag me out of heaven and back into his hell.
"You,"
I breathed, the word scraping my throat raw.
The smirk didn't leave his face.
"Me. You're welcome."
The fire in my chest exploded.
A scream tore from my lungs, a raw, century-old wave of pure anguish and rage. I didn't think. I moved.
And as I did, the world warped.
The cold serpent of despair I'd consumed, now awake and furious, uncoiled. Chains of black iron and blue energy—not his, but mine—erupted from my wrists and forearms, snapping into existence with a sound like shattering ice.
The lesser spirits haunting the corners of Dao's apartment—the shy, fearful wisps that always flinched from my Mindbreaker aura—didn't flinch this time. They obeyed. My despair was a king's command. Their forms solidified, eyes glowing with reflected rage, and they shot toward me, not to attack, but to answer the call of their sovereign.
I was a comet of grief and fury, wreathed in my own chains and a shrieking hurricane of lost souls.
Kephriel's smirk finally vanished. His eyes widened in genuine surprise—not at the attack, but at the power behind it.
"Oh? An upgrade?"
He didn't have time to say more.
I slammed into him. It wasn't a tackle; it was a collision of two opposing forces. My chains lashed out, tangling with his as we crashed backward.
The window behind him didn't break.
It vanished. The glass and frame dissolved into shimmering dust as our combined energies tore a hole through reality.
And then we were falling.
The ground rushed up—the familiar patchy grass of the city park below Dao's apartment. The spirits swirling around us wailed a chorus of my own inner torment.
We hit the earth not with a thud, but with a concussive *BOOM* that cratered the ground and shook the trees. The impact should have shattered every bone in my body, but the new chains wrapping my limbs glowed fiercely, absorbing the shock.
I was on my feet in an instant, the spirits forming a shrieking vortex around me. Across the crater, Kephriel rose, brushing dirt from his impeccable clothes. For the first time, he looked… interested.
"You spent my soul,"
I snarled, my voice layered with the whispers of a hundred ghost.
"You took me from her. You owe me a century!"
Kephriel cracked his neck, his own chains slithering around him like eager serpents. A glorious, terrifying smile spread across his face.
"Finally," he purred. "A little fire. Let's see what that new soul can do, hollow boy."