"Something inside me… had awakened." The admission left Asta's lips as vapor, swallowed by the dungeon's stale cold. The translucent screen hung where his fear should've been, lines of pale light breathing like a living thing.
[Shadow System: Active]
[Designation: Hollow Vessel, provisional]
[Commandment One: RISE]
[Compliance Window: 00:59]
Asta's throat tightened. "What, what do you want me to rise?" His voice sounded small, like it had to crawl before it could stand.
The chamber had changed while he'd been dead, or while he hadn't. The cracked concrete walls were still slick with condensation. The veins of black crystal still pulsed like a heartbeat. But the bodies were gone; even the blood seemed thinner, as if the room had sipped it up and licked its teeth clean.
Somewhere beyond the jagged archway, a scrape answered him. Not loud. Not close. The kind of sound that was made by something patient. Asta swallowed and lifted the chipped blade, which felt even more ridiculous now that his eyes could not stop tracking the hovering countdown.
[00:43]
"I'm not a Vessel," he said, mostly to convince his hands to stop shaking. "I'm Asta."
No response. Only the scratch of something dragging itself along stone. He edged backward until his shoulder bumped a column of black crystal. Cold crawled through his jacket.
"Rise," he tried, because disobedience without understanding felt like begging to be punished. "Rise—what? Rise, me? Rise, screen?"
Silence. Then a single new line etched itself across the light:
[Hint: All things cast a shadow.]
He stared at the nearest torch. Its flame was guttering, but its light still scraped a crescent from the column and threw it across the floor. His own silhouette trembled in that puddle of dimness, a smear with a heartbeat.
[00:26]
"Rise," he told his own shadow, feeling foolish, feeling insane. The dark stain of himself lay there, loyal to the floor.
The scrape became a shuffling, closer. He pictured the obsidian knight's eyes, those white slits that never blinked. His mouth dried to paper.
"Rise," he said to the darkness in the archway.
For a second, only a second, the gloom thickened, like a held breath.
[00:14]
[Penalty will initiate upon non-compliance.]
"Fine," Asta said, and the word came out as a cracked laugh. "I get it. I'm late to my own nightmare."
He turned toward the heaviest patch of darkness, the space where the ceiling had warped and bent the light into a lake of black, and drew a breath that felt like it scraped the inside of his ribs.
"Rise."
The darkness rippled.
Something inside it, inside him answered.
The scrape stopped.
[00:00]
[Non-compliance detected. Initiating Penalty.]
The screen exploded into black petals that rushed him all at once.
The black petals hit like winter. They slid under his skin, behind his eyes, into the soft places of his mind where fear stored its teeth. The dungeon blinked out. In its place: a void like a blindfold pulled over the world.
No floor. No sky. Just pressure.
Asta gagged and swung his sword because muscle memory was all he had, and the blade rang off nothing with a dull, mocking thunk.
[Penalty Zone Engaged]
[Objective: SURVIVE]
[Duration: 00:60]
Something wrapped his wrists. Not rope, temperature. The cold of a cellar step. The chill beneath a bed where childhood nightmares crouch. He wrenched and the cold wrenched back. Hands. Shadow-hands, innumerable, each one only the idea of fingers until it tightened and became very, very real.
"Get off." He yanked, twisting his forearm, scraping skin against air that felt like glass plates. The more he fought, the more the dark gripped him, as though it was testing where he would break.
"Let go!"
The void obliged, not out of mercy but curiosity. He fell onto a floor that revealed itself only when his knees hit it. The surface was smooth and slightly slick, like polished stone that remembered old blood.
[Calibrating pain threshold.]
A line of fire lanced up his back; he swore, breath shattering. Then another across his ribs. Not cutting. Measuring. His vision went white around the edges.
"Stop," he hissed, hands splayed, fingers fishing for purchase. The chipped blade found his palm and he clutched it like a rope thrown to a drowning man.
The dark obliged again; the pain slid away like it had never been, only the sweat remained, cold as confession.
Across the Penalty Zone, small white motes appeared: eyes opening in the dark. Three, four… a dozen. They blinked out of sync, curious, and the sound of claws whispering over stone gathered around him in a circling halo.
[Advisory: All things cast a shadow.]
[Advisory: Shadows may be commanded.]
[Keyword: RISE]
Asta pushed to his feet, legs shaky, and twisted to keep every eye in view. The motes were low to the ground, things that skulked, that liked to hamstring before they fed. He breathed, in and out, through a throat that wanted to close.
"Survive a minute." He laughed, and this time it sounded like something thrown from a ledge. "Sure. Sure."
He drew his boot heel across the slick floor to feel the line, to make a boundary that meant nothing but would mean everything to his stupid, stubborn mind.
They rushed him at once.
He did not meet them with steel first; he met them with breath. One heartbeat to plant his feet, one to see the angle of their approach, one to name the thing that had been placed in his mouth like a knife.
"Rise."
It wasn't a shout. It was a command dragged out of the place that had awakened when the knight killed him.
The darkness under his boots bucked.
Asta lurched, expecting to fall, then realized the floor's shadow had thickened, cupping the soles of his feet like hands, sliding him half a step sideways. A claw where his head had been swiped air and squawked in frustration. His blade completed the circle his body had already started; steel hissed through something that should not have given way and yet did. The shade split like wet paper. Its eyes went out.
It didn't die. It came apart. The halves of it sloughed to the floor as smears. The smears twitched.
His mouth found the word again before his panic could. "Rise."
The smears drew together with a wet, reverse-splash, gathering into a kneeling shape: a small, hunched silhouette with its head bowed. It wasn't fully real, more suggestion than creature—but it was there. And it was waiting.
"You're mine," Asta whispered, because the thing's obedience touched something in him that had been starving a long, long time. "Move."
He didn't know how to say it. He didn't have to. The kneeling shape slid ahead of him, quick and close to the ground, and met the next rushing shade with a jackal's enthusiasm. It hit like silence becoming a fist. The two merged, twisted, then the new whole snapped bright eyes open and looked back at Asta for instruction.
"Left," he said, testing.
It scuttled left, dragging the enemy shade with it like a hooked fish.
Three more came. Asta's breath shortened; sweat stung his eyes. He let the word carry him.
"Rise."
His own shadow bulged and then snapped forward like a curtain yanked in a storm. It erased a pair of reaching claws from the wrist down. His blade took the head that followed, as if the steel had been waiting all his life for the moment his courage arrived.
They weren't strong. They were many. The fear wasn't that he would lose a duel; the fear was that he would run out of breath before he ran out of them. The Zone's timer stayed hidden, cruel.
"Rise. Rise."
Each repetition cost him. He could feel it, a thread pulled from the center of him, spun into the dark, knitting obedience. He swayed. The shadow that was his shadow returned to cup his ankle, steadying him.
"Good," he told it through gritted teeth, because praise had been a rare coin in his life and now he was rich with it to spend.
One last shade slipped under his guard, small and fast. It went for his throat. His blade was wrong-angle, too slow.
"R-"
He didn't finish. The hunched minion he'd raised hit the attacker in midair, tackling it, folding it, stuffing it into the floor like wet laundry. Asta staggered back, hand to his throat, feeling the ghost of a wound that hadn't landed. He could see the minion shudder, as if swallowing.
Then the void's hush changed.
Not louder. Deeper. Like a massive door had opened somewhere behind the dark and let in very old air.
[Proficiency: Basic Command—acquired]
[Skill Unlocked: Shadow Bind (Rank: F)]
[Description: Attach your will to a lesser shade. Sustain cost: minor.]
He didn't have time to marvel. The eyes in the distance blinked out, one by one, swallowed by a tide of colder black.
Footsteps. Measured. Armored.
"Not you," Asta breathed, his voice suddenly small again.
But the Zone didn't do mercy.
They drew a rhythm on the floor that his spine remembered before his mind did. The knight stepped out of the dark like the idea of a blade stepping out of a scabbard. Obsidian plates. White slits for eyes. The same sword, long as regret.
The Zone gave the courtesy of a single line:
[Final Subtest: Overcome the Echo]
"Overcome," Asta muttered. "Sure. With what? My charming personality?"
The newborn shadow at his feet, a dog of darkness, shoulders sharp, head a smear lifted its not-face and made no sound he could hear but which he felt along his bones: attention, eager, pain-shy.
The knight advanced. Not hurried. Not arrogant. Inevitably.
"Left," Asta whispered. The shadow slunk left, drawing a line of gray along the floor that the knight's gaze tracked, just for a fraction.
Asta moved the other way.
The sword came up. He saw the first strike before it happened—not with foresight but with memory. The angle it had come in the first time. The question: Will it be the same?
It was. The echo had rules.
His body reacted because terror had already taught it the answer. He ducked, not low enough, and the blade kissed a line along his shoulder that bloomed heat and wet. He spun with the force and spoke without breath: "Rise."
The floor obeyed. His shadow bulged, tripping the knight's lead step just enough to deform perfect balance. The sword's return angle came wrong; Asta slid inside it, too close to die properly, and rammed his chipped blade into the gap between two obsidian plates where the under-arm met the breastplate.
Sparks. Screech. The knight did not make a noise; its helmet turned, eyes narrowing, and backhanded him with the shield.
The world flared and then flickered. He hit the floor and saw the sky that wasn't there crack for a heartbeat.
"Again," he told himself, crawling, tasting metal. "Again again again."
The shadow-hound hit the knight's flank. It didn't hurt it. It taught Asta where the weight shifted when a perfect thing was annoyed. He spoke the word again, and the darkness on the knight's far side rose like a wave that decided to be a wall. The knight's foot took a half-step to correct and in that half-step Asta committed all of himself, shoulder screaming, lungs on fire, blade a stupid, beloved shard and drove the point into the seam at the top of the thigh, under the hip plate.
The knight stumbled.
He felt it: not pain. Permission. The Zone had waited for him to prove he could make a perfect enemy do something as human as break rhythm.
"RISE."
He shouted this time. It cost him. The wave of dark slammed up the knight's back, pinning it forward, and the shadow-hound leaped, its jaws a cutout of night that closed over the place where a throat would be. Asta tore his blade free and hacked, not at the armor but at the eyes. White slits split. Light spilled out like dust.
The obsidian knight sagged to a knee with a sound like a bell lowering into water.
Asta stood swaying over it, panting. The chipped blade quivered in his hand, petulant at being asked to be more than it was. He pointed it at the knight's visor because that is what heroes do in stories when they are made of words stronger than steel.
"I'm not a hero," he told the kneeling thing. "I'm a Hollow, right? Then kneel."
The visor tilted, considering him. Then, in an obedience that did not feel like surrender but rather recognition, the knight's head bowed.
[Subtest Complete]
[Offer: Shadow of the Black Knight, Available]
[Bind? Y/N]
[Warning: Binding exceeds usual Vessel capacity. Risk: High.]
Behind the lines of pale light, he could see the knight's outline unraveling from itself, the darkness separating from the armor like a man stepping out of his own reflection. The shadow that had been its shape gathered on the floor, a deep well that felt like it led somewhere with teeth.
His shoulder throbbed. His breath came in broken ropes. His shadow-hound pressed itself against his ankle, seeking the comfort of foot and bone.
"High risk," Asta croaked, smiling because nothing had ever come easy and now the world was finally speaking his language. He lowered the point of his blade until it touched the pool of darkness that was an offer, a future, a dare.
He drew a breath that had to come from the soles of his feet because there was nothing else left.
"Rise," he said to the knight's shadow.
And the darkness began to lift...