The Titan lifted one of its six arms and snapped its fingers.
Stars cascaded up.
The darkness peeled back, and suddenly the arena was not void but vast. A colosseum of metal unfurled around me, endless rows of seats climbing high into the gloom. Rust devoured some sections, while others shone flawless, as if freshly forged. The iron walls caught the light and gleamed like silver.
Above, starlight shimmered—constellations spilling across a conjured sky, galaxies bleeding pale fire into the dark. For a heartbeat, the place looked divine, almost holy, an arena lit by heaven's own lanterns. Awe pressed into me before it curdled.
The longer I looked, the more the light betrayed.
Bones littered the ground like gravel, crunching underfoot. Skulls piled in heaps. Spines draped the aisles like discarded rope. The seats were not empty—they were filled. Corpses slumped in eternal silence, some long rotted, some perfectly preserved in grotesque poses.
A chest rose and fell. Eyes flickered.
Living remnants remained.
Awe bled into disgust, into rage.
The starlight turned cold and cruel, illuminating horror in perfect detail.
Behind the Titan, far at the opposite end, the Gate loomed. My exit. My condition for survival. Of course it sat directly in the monster's shadow.
The Jester spread its six arms wide, as if presenting this masterpiece to me.
A cathedral of rot dressed in stars.
My stomach twisted.
Awe and revulsion warred in my chest, but my thoughts did not blur. They sharpened. The aura gnawed at my mind, and something deep inside me gnawed back.
The mark burned faintly against my skin.
[Dormant Vessel] - Devil
I had laughed it off before, but now… now it felt real.
The Jester's crimson eyes lingered on me as if it knew. As if it was greeting not prey, but kin.
"Devil…" it whispered, though its painted lips never moved.
I grinned despite myself. If my ancestor truly was a devil, then this stage was already mine. Devils didn't win by strength. They won by misdirection. By turning others into their weapons.
A single black feather drifted down, turning to ash.
Two enemies. One stage. Use it.
I bowed, drew breath, and keyed into the mark's heat..
[ Dormant Vessel ] — Devil.
The Titan's gaze met mine. It didn't carry killing intent. That would have been mercy. Instead, I felt it reaching past flesh and bone, down into the strings that made me me. It wasn't looking at prey. It was appraising a puppet, deciding how best to make it dance.
Then something inside my skull popped.
I collapsed to my knees. Agony swarmed through me, a hive of invisible bees boring into my ears, their droning buzz swelling until it devoured thought itself. Warm liquid ran down my jaw. Blood. My own scream followed, high and raw, but it sounded thin compared to the chorus gnawing at my mind.
[Time Stop]—too slow. The Titan was already there. Too fast. It was simply there, six arms folding around me like bars of a cage.
"Devil…"
The word wasn't spoken. It was exhaled. A curse carried on breath that stank of ancient rot.
Then came the voice again — not loud, but cavernous, as if a cathedral of corpses whispered in unison:
"Devils are not warriors. They are vermin in silk, thieves of fate, parasites who weave lies into chains. You will not die here, little devil. You will break… and break again… until even your smile forgets what it means."
Hands like iron tore me apart. Flesh split, bones wrenched loose, consciousness unraveling in a spray of pain. Then the same hands reassembled me, reknitting tendon to tendon, sinew to sinew, until I was whole once more — only for the cycle to begin again.
The Titan's laughter scraped against my bones as the cycle repeated, flesh and spirit unraveled and rewoven like thread on a loom.
The cycle of being unmade and remade had a certain rhythm to it. My body was a canvas, painted with agony and then wiped clean by the Titan's strange magic. Flawless. Whole. But the pain that lived behind the eyes remained. The buzzing in my skull was still there, a constant reminder of the violation.
I was waiting. Every second felt like an eternity carved from my own flesh.
The first sensation was always the same: a clean, hot line as iron-hard fingers sank into my torso, followed by the wet, tearing sound of muscle parting from bone. Joints popped from their sockets with a sound like grinding stone. Ribs snapped like dry branches. There was a moment of dizzying pressure, then a wet, cold release as I was pulled apart.
I learned to detach from it, to watch the process from a great distance. My body was just a thing. A project being disassembled and reassembled with brutal efficiency. But through the red haze of agony, through the symphony of my own destruction, I held onto the one thing it couldn't touch.
Betting everything on a single, insane deduction.
Then, I saw it.
A single black feather drifted down from the conjured sky. It turned to ash an inch from the floor.
My signal. My gamble.
A rustle went through the stands of the dead, and then… silence. The kind of silence that waits for the true master of the stage to arrive.
The hands that had just been unmaking me paused. The Titan straightened its impossible body, its six arms spreading wide in a gesture of deference.
It bowed to something I couldn't yet see.
My opening.
Now.
[Time Stop]
The first second was a war against my own screaming nerves. I was on the floor, the ghost of a thousand tortures weighing me down. My limbs were heavy, my thoughts sludge, but I forced myself onto one knee, then two feet. The scrape of my boots was the only sound in a frozen world.
Stand first. Think second.
The second second began. The world was a perfect sculpture of a moment. The bowed Titan. The suspended ash. The incoming Raven, a black streak of motion frozen mid-dive…
Except it wasn't.
It was here. In front of me. No sound, no transition. Its upside-down eyes stared into mine, and the buzzing in my skull intensified into a piercing shriek under its gaze. Blood dripped from my chin as I offered a grin that felt more like a predator's than a victim's.
"So," I breathed, the word a wisp of vapor. "I was right. You're from a different layer."
The third second. A cold line of text burned across my vision, an answer and a death sentence all in one.
[An Authority of a higher order has superseded the Temporal Lock]
The Raven's head tilted, an almost curious gesture. Its voice wasn't sound; it was the feeling of ancient paper turning inside my skull.
"Loith. You understand the laws of this stage, yet you are not one of its actors. A rare quality."
A pause stretched for an eternity within that final, fleeting moment.
"But you have broken the rules of this stage, little devil."
The Titan remained frozen in its bow, a player whose role had ended.