Black stone and violet light. That's the first thing he sees.
Kairos Vale opens his eyes to a ceiling made of runes so old they've grown like barnacles across the sky. The air tastes of iron and ash. Gravity is inverted above him — corpses drift upward like slow comets, armor glinting in phosphorescent arcs before dissolving into threads of black smoke. The arena has no walls; instead, monoliths float at impossible angles, engraved with sigils that shift like living eyes.
His hands are shaking. His body is heavier than he remembers. A scar burns across his chest in the shape of a circle carved with seven notches — a wound or a mark, he can't tell. Around him: silence, except for the faint sound of whispering runes. They hiss his name in languages older than breath.
He is already bleeding out.
His palms are slick, his breath ragged. The combat suit clings to his frame like a second skin, but its armor plates have been shattered, ribs showing through gaps. He tastes copper. Something is missing in his head. Memory bleeds away like ink on water — he recalls flashes: a battlefield, a woman's face, a promise broken, then nothing but sleep and the echo of screams.
A figure lands in front of him, kneeling on the inverted ceiling. At first glance it's human — until the head splits into four jaws lined with ivory hooks. The thing carries a blade fused into its arm, a shard of metal pulsating like a vein. Its eyes are dead white.
"Fight," a voice thunders from nowhere. It's not spoken; it's etched into his skull.
"Fight or be consumed."
The thing launches at him.
Kairos moves on instinct. His body remembers even if his mind does not. He ducks beneath the blade-arm, feels the air tear past. His ribs scream as he pivots, driving an elbow into the creature's midsection. It's like striking granite. The beast snarls, swinging its arm down. A fraction of a second slower and he would have been bisected.
He stumbles backward, breathing hard. No weapon. Only his fists and the jagged metal scattered across the arena floor. He lunges for a broken spear shaft, gripping it like a staff, spinning it between bleeding palms.
The creature charges again. The arena trembles — runes flare violet and invert the gravity around them. Suddenly, they're both falling upward, toward the corpse-sky. The floating monoliths tilt; black smoke churns like an ocean overhead.
Kairos kicks off a drifting slab of stone, using momentum to spin behind the creature. He drives the spear shaft into the thing's exposed side. It howls, viscera spraying out in globes of dark ichor that float like planets in zero-g.
Then the whisper hits him — not a sound but a pull, deep inside his chest. The mark on his chest ignites, a circle of scarlet heat.
Take it. Absorb it. Or die.
His vision tunnels. The creature convulses, dying but not dead. The shard fused into its arm glows — a cursed artifact, black and pulsing, like a heart. It calls to him, promising vitality. Promising survival.
He hesitates.
In that moment he sees a flash of himself in a mirror of black water: his face twisted, veins crawling with dark filaments, eyes pale as the dead. If he takes it, he lives. If he refuses, he dies clean. Somewhere in his memory, a child's voice: "Don't let it in, father."
The creature claws toward him. Reflex wins over morality.
Kairos drives his hand into the wound and rips the shard free.
The world implodes. Black light floods him like liquid fire. His heart lurches. His veins blaze with violet symbols, his muscles locking and then expanding as if inflated by a monstrous breath. He gasps. His vision sharpens — every rune, every grain of dust suddenly etched in painful clarity. A surge of memories he doesn't own flickers across his mind: other kills, other arenas, screams layered into infinity.
The creature's body collapses into ash. Its vitality floods him, cold and euphoric. Something deep inside howls approval.
> [Vitality Absorbed: 13%]
[Warning: Corruption Risk Elevated]
The runes display the words directly into his mind. He stumbles, half-expecting his skin to peel off. Instead, his muscles feel denser, heavier; his heartbeat syncs to the rhythm of the arena's pulse. For a moment, he almost understands the geometry of the place — like looking at a puzzle's solution from above.
Then the voice returns. Not the system-message voice, but the other one — oily, ancient, whispering directly beneath his skull:
"I have waited, Kairos Vale. I have tasted you before. You failed me once. You will not fail me again."
He clutches his head, groaning. The whisper swells into a scream that only he can hear.
> "Seven shards… seven arenas… reclaim them or rot. Every victory feeds me. Every breath you take writes my name in the marrow of worlds."
Kairos forces the voice down with sheer will. His breath comes in ragged bursts. The mark on his chest throbs, then subsides to a dull glow.
He looks at his hands. They're trembling, veins dark. For a moment he doesn't recognize himself. The arena still hangs inverted, monoliths circling like predators. Far above (or below), a thousand faces watch from shadowed balconies — masked figures, cultists, warlords, or maybe ghosts. He feels their hunger like teeth.
He forces himself upright. One thought crystallizes: This isn't the first time. He's been here before. He's lost something — seven somethings. He needs to get them back.
Across the arena, a black door opens. No walls, no hinges — just a slice of void unfolding like a mouth. Runes spiral around it, and a chant rises from the watchers above:
"Kairos Vale… Kairos Vale…"
He staggers toward it. Every step feels heavier, like walking through syrup. Inside the door, only darkness — but a darkness with weight, like a hand pressing against his skull.
Before he crosses the threshold, a figure steps out.
Tall, armored in jagged silver plating, carrying a halberd shaped like a crescent moon. A mask hides its face — a mask split with a vertical fissure, leaking faint blue light. The aura radiating from it is worse than the arena's gravity shifts, worse than the whisper in his chest.
The watchers fall silent.
The figure speaks with a voice like rust scraping across stone: "You survived the First Offering. Unclaimed Vitality. Untrained. Yet you live. Good."
Kairos straightens, gripping the stolen shard like a dagger. His muscles feel on fire but alive. "Who are you?"
"I am a Warlord," the figure says. "I enforce the Will of the Primordial Evil. And you are a fugitive piece of yourself, lost and crawling back. You don't remember, but you will. I have been ordered to test your resolve."
Kairos's breath catches. His heart beats like a drum in his ears. Warlord — one of the five. If this is already happening, he's far closer to the center of the war than he thought.
The Warlord lifts the halberd, and for a moment the entire arena bends inward, gravity convulsing. Corpses drift aside like leaves in a tide. The voice in Kairos's skull hisses delight:
"Yes. Fight. Feed me."
But another echo surfaces beneath it — a memory of his own voice, long ago: If I fall, the war continues forever.
Kairos squares his stance. He can't win, not yet. But maybe he can survive. Maybe.
The Warlord tilts its masked head, as if amused. "Then show me your hunger."
It strikes.
A blur of silver and black. The halberd's arc cuts reality like paper, slicing through three monoliths before reaching him. He dives, rolling across the stone as the impact detonates behind him, sending shards of violet rock spiraling into the void. He hurls the cursed shard at the Warlord's mask — it deflects off with a clang like a bell.
He's out of weapons. Out of time.
The whisper returns, not as temptation but as a cold offer: "Say the word and I will lend you power. Say the word and you will not be Kairos anymore."
He hesitates. The Warlord looms over him, halberd raised again. Around them, the watchers lean forward, silent, waiting to see whether the fugitive will become monster or corpse.
Kairos bares his teeth. "Not yet."
He grabs a fallen monolith shard, a chunk of rune-etched stone as big as his torso, and heaves it with every ounce of stolen vitality. His muscles tear but hold. The rock slams into the Warlord's midsection, staggering it just enough for him to sprint past, diving into the black doorway.
Darkness swallows him whole.
He falls — or rises — through an endless shaft lined with mirrors. Each mirror reflects a different version of himself: one a beast of claws and horns, one a corpse, one a king crowned in black light. They all speak at once:
"Welcome back, Kairos Vale. Welcome to the Forgotten Arenas."
Then the door snaps shut, severing the sound.