Yul threw an arm out, half-blocking Kei's path toward the light. "You're actually serious about touching that thing?" His eyes stayed locked on the crystal, wary, the way a man looks at a snake he is not sure is sleeping or just still. "Look at it — that's not just stone, there's something otherworldly running through it. We don't have the first clue what happens if we make contact. It could probably even kill you."
"We won't know until we try." Kei was already stepping past him, gaze fixed on the glowing shape suspended at the chamber's center, insects swirling lazy circles around it like it was the sun. "And we don't have the luxury of waiting to find out. We need this out of here now — before that man who hurt Yejin, or whatever's left of him, comes looking for it himself."
Yul opened his mouth to argue further, but Kei was already moving, and there was not time to drag him back.
Slowly, carefully, Kei brought both hands up around the crystal without quite touching it yet, close enough to feel the power radiating off it in waves — a deep, bone-level heat that had nothing to do with fire, crawling up through his palms and into his wrists. It should have made him pull back. Instead, he kept closing the distance.
"We won't know until we do," Kei said again, quieter now, and closed his hands around it.
The chamber tore apart with light.
The explosion hit before he even registered the crystal was fully in his grip — a violent surge of electricity bursting outward in every direction, arcing across the stone walls, splitting the air with a crack loud enough to hurt. Kei's whole body seized against it, muscles locking, teeth clenched hard enough to ache. But he did not let go. Couldn't, maybe, or wouldn't — his fingers stayed locked around the crystal even as the current tore through him again and again, and slowly, impossibly, he began to lift it.
"Kei!" Yul's voice cracked as he threw both hands forward, prana surging out to form a barrier around himself, bracing against the shockwaves rippling outward with every fresh surge. "Drop it! It's going to kill you — let it go!"
But Kei couldn't hear him. It was not possible to hear anything past the deafening, continuous roar of the crystal's fury, explosion after explosion crashing through the chamber in waves, each one shaking the walls a little harder than the last. The ground beneath them had started to tremble in earnest now, small stones shaking loose from the ceiling and clattering down around them both.
Far above, on the surface, the Hwa-Samurai standing guard at the cave entrance felt it too — a deep, rolling tremor rising up from somewhere far below their feet, and exchanged uneasy glances, hands drifting toward their weapons without any clear enemy to point them at.
Down in the chamber, Kei kept fighting, kept holding on, but the crystal was winning. Each surge left him weaker, his grip trembling, blood beginning to well up from where the current had split the skin across his palms. He gritted through it anyway, refusing to let go, right up until the moment the crystal answered his stubbornness with everything it had.
The final explosion swallowed the chamber whole.
It threw Kei backward like he weighed nothing, slamming him hard into the far wall, and tore straight through Yul's barrier like it was made of paper, the prana shattering apart in a shower of light. Both of them went down together as the ceiling gave way above them, rock and dust crashing down in a deafening roar that swallowed the chamber in darkness.
Hajun and the others did not wait to think — they ran, scrambling up through the shaking passages as dust and loose stone rained down around them, the whole cave groaning like something dying.
"What's happening?!" one of the Hwa-Samurai shouted over the roar, voice cracking with panic.
"Sir Yul and Kei are still down there!" Hajun's voice broke as he shouted it, the bag in his arms slipping from numb fingers and hitting the ground. He turned back toward the collapsing passage on instinct, only for two others to grab his arms and haul him bodily toward the surface before the whole tunnel came down behind them.
Deep beneath the surface, buried under a chamber's worth of shattered stone, something moved.
By some miracle, Kei was alive. He clawed his way up through the rubble that had buried him, coughing dust from his lungs, shoving rock aside with hands that did not seem to want to work right anymore. The darkness down here was absolute—total, suffocating, the kind of black that rendered his physical sight useless. But through the azure filter of his Deathsight, Yul's prana could not be mistaken, glowing faintly beneath him, buried under the same collapse.
He worked by touch alone, tearing stones and broken rock away from where instinct told him Yul's body had to be, fingers scraping raw against jagged edges he could not see coming. When his hands finally found skin instead of stone, he pulled Yul free and hauled him up against his chest, pressing an ear close, listening.
A breath. Shallow, but there.
Kei let out a breath of his own, ragged with relief. "We're really alive."
He could not call flame the way Vincent could, but he could still coax a few sparks of electricity from his fingertips, faint and stubborn. He stripped off what was left of his cloak, laid it out, and directed the sparks toward the fabric again and again, patient even through the pain radiating up his arms. It took several tries before a thin curl of smoke finally caught, then a flicker, then real flame, small but growing, casting just enough orange light to see by.
The chamber around them was a ruin. Collapsed walls, jagged slabs of stone where the ceiling used to be, dust still drifting thick through the air. He turned the light toward Yul — still unconscious, chest rising and falling slow but steady, alive despite everything. Kei searched the wreckage for any gap, any crack wide enough to crawl through, anything at all that might lead back toward the surface.
Nothing. They were sealed in.
As the small fire began to gutter and die, Kei lowered himself to the ground beside Yul, closed his eyes, and let his mind slip sideways, down into the quiet, folded space of his own pocket dimension.
When he opened his eyes again, he was standing in the middle of an endless blizzard. Snow tore sideways through the air in thick, blinding sheets, visibility reduced to almost nothing — but he did not need to see to know exactly where the beast was waiting. He always knew. He walked forward through the storm anyway, snow crunching underfoot, until a shape resolved out of the white ahead of him: a wolf, dark-furred, easily the size of three elephants stacked together, curled in on itself, sleeping.
"Wake up, Fenral," Kei said, his voice barely carrying over the wind.
The wolf's eyes gradually opened. A growl rolled up from somewhere deep in its chest, massive enough that the blizzard itself seemed to flinch, snowfall pausing mid-air for two full seconds before crashing back down harder than before.
"Kei..." The voice filled the entire space around them, echoing off nothing and everything at once. "Why have you woken me?"
"Did you save us? From the explosion?" Kei asked, cutting straight to it.
"No." Fenral's answer came flat, certain. "I did not."
"Then how are we still alive?" Kei pressed, frustration bleeding into his voice. "There's no way we could still be alive after that massive explosion. Unless you did something."
"I wish I had an answer for you." Something almost like regret colored the beast's massive voice. "I tried to stop you before you touched that thing. You couldn't hear me. Not even inside your own head."
"If it wasn't you, then—" Kei did not finish the thought. He was already pulling himself back, snapping out of the pocket dimension and into his own body, back in the ruined chamber with Yul still unconscious beside him. His Deathsight flared to life immediately, sweeping the wreckage, searching every corner and gap for any trace of the crystal's energy.
There was nothing. The crystal was gone.
"We lost it." Kei stood in the dark, turning the thought over uselessly. "Where could it have gone?"
He was still chasing the question when he caught movement beside him — a small shift, a groan, Yul stirring against the rubble.
"Yul? You awake?"
"K-Kei?" Yul's voice came out rough, disoriented. "I can't see anything. Where are we? What happened?"
"Thank goodness, you're awake. We're trapped. Buried, in the chamber — you remember the explosion? After I grabbed the crystal?"
"I told you not to touch that thing!" Yul's frustration cracked through even in the dark, sharp enough that Kei almost flinched.
"Yeah. That one's on me." Kei crouched closer to him, feeling for injury more than seeing it. "You hurt anywhere? Any pain?"
Yul stretched his arms out slowly, testing, waiting for the ache that should have been there. It did not come. "No... I don't think so. I'm fine. Which doesn't make any sense." He flexed his fingers, genuinely baffled. "How is that even possible? Did you heal me?"
"No. I was about to ask myself the same thing." Kei shook his head, though Yul could not see it. "I can't find the crystal anywhere near us either. Not with my eyes, not with anything."
"Well — I can see your eyes just fine, for what it's worth. Glowing and blue and all." A short, tired laugh. "Bit ironic that you can't see in the dark yourself, though." Yul shifted, feeling around until his hand closed on the hilt of his sword. "Hang on, let me get some actual light going." He drew the blade free and fed a thread of prana into it, the steel answering with a faint, steady glow — enough to finally see each other's faces, streaked with dust and dried blood, in the wreckage around them.
"Also," Yul added, breathing a little harder than the moment called for, "is it just me, or is it getting hard to breathe down here?"
Kei paused, actually noticing it now that Yul had said it — the air did feel thinner, heavier, dragging a little more with every breath. "No, you're right. It's not just you." He glanced around at the sealed rock walls pressing in on every side. "Which means we need to find a way out. Fast."
Yul pushed himself up out of the debris, rolling his shoulders once, then settled into a ready stance, sword raised. He drove it upward in one clean arc, a crescent of pale light tearing loose from the blade and slicing straight through the stone ceiling above them. Dust and loose rubble rained back down around them both, pattering off their shoulders.
"Still pretty far up," Yul muttered, squinting into the gap he'd carved, no daylight visible through it. "Let me try again."
He struck again — one slash, two, three in quick succession, then paused only long enough to reset his stance before driving three more into the stone, and three after that. Each strike bit deeper into the ceiling, chipping away another layer of rock, dust sifting down in steady curtains. But no matter how many times steel met stone, no light broke through from above.
Whatever lay between them and the surface, it was more than a sword alone was going to cut through.
"Save your strength," Kei said, holding up a hand before Yul could line up another strike. "Let me check for anything alive nearby first — any insects, anything moving."
Yul lowered his sword, frowning. "Why insects?"
Kei was already moving, stepping slowly through the wreckage, eyes glowing faint blue as he reached outward with his Deathsight, feeling for anything alive in the surrounding rock. "Those bugs need open air to fly in. If I find a cluster of them somewhere close, that tells us there's another open chamber near here — somewhere we can actually reach."
"Oh. Yeah, that makes sense." Yul let the glow on his blade settle to a low simmer to conserve it, lowering himself onto a flat slab of stone to wait, watching Kei's silhouette move through the dark.
But what Kei found was not insects at all.
Small points of light drifted at the edge of his vision — faint, wrong, colored a deep, sickly purple, moving with the unmistakable rhythm of people walking. Not insects. Something far worse.
"There's people nearby," he said quietly.
Yul was on his feet in an instant, sword raised, moving to Kei's side without a sound. "You're sure? How close?"
"Close enough." Kei's jaw tightened. "And they're not the kind of people you want to run into down here. That purple — it's not natural. Dark practitioners give off auras like that. Means they're steeped in corrupted crafts, spells that eat away at whatever soul they've got left the longer they use them."
Yul let out a long breath, dust sifting off his shoulders as he rolled them back, resettling his grip on the hilt. "So what's the plan?"
"They're probably the ones who took the crystal." Kei's eyes had not moved from the direction of the auras. "We can't let them walk out of here with it."
Without another word, they moved. Yul backed off a few paces, giving himself room, then loosed a string of crescent slashes into the stone ahead of them, each one biting deep, sending fractured slabs crashing down in a cloud of dust. Kei followed right behind, driving his fist through what was left of the wall, powered by enough raw strength to split the rock wide open on the first hit this time.
Together they broke through into the next chamber — still dark, still cramped, but the air here felt lighter, easier to pull into aching lungs.
Kei did not stop to enjoy the relief. He was already moving toward the next wall, throwing his weight behind another punch. This one gave way faster than the last, stone crumbling like it had already been weakened from within. They pushed on the same way, chamber after chamber, Yul's blade and Kei's fists working in rhythm — cut, punch, break through, move — the purple light growing steadily closer with every wall that came down, until finally, on the last strike, the final barrier gave way entirely, and they found themselves staring straight into the chamber where the dark practitioners stood waiting.