"Slay… or serve," Asta repeated, breath clouding in the iron chill. The word Heir still crawled under his skin like frostbite trying to learn his name.
The chamber shook. Black light pumped from the crack in the floor, throbbing in time with the crystal-veined walls. The corpses he had bound with Necroshade Bind hunched and trembled, their shadows hammered into obedience by his will. Behind him, the Black Knight's silhouette loomed—white eyes fixed on the fissure like a warrior regarding an altar he once bled upon.
[…Heir.] The voice rose again. Not loud. Not a roar. A statement, patient as a noose.
The System pulsed:
[Commandment Two: Choose.]
[Definition: Slay—seize sovereign claim through violence. Serve—kneel, accept Mark, receive command tree.]
[Timer: 00:30]
Asta's knees wanted to fold. Not out of fear. Out of gravity. The crack pulled at him as if his bones were iron filings and it was a magnet shaped like fate.
"Not this time," he hissed, digging his heels into the stone. The shadow-hound pressed against his shin, a steadying weight of darkness. "I'm done kneeling."
The Black Knight stirred. Its sword tilted, the edge angling toward the crack in a silent answer. Serve meant safety, maybe. Structure. A chain, cataloged neatly as a "command tree." Slay meant every mistake would be carved into him with interest due.
Asta wet his lips. "You ask if I'm yours." He raised his bloody palm, letting the scent cut the air. "I'm not."
He extended his hand over the crack, feeling the pull lurch stronger. The air tasted like pennies and cold smoke.
"I choose," he said, and the word had to fight its way out of his throat against the drag of that patient gravity. "Slay."
[Acknowledged.]
[Constraint: Slay requires contest of claim.]
[Contest: Hold your shadow sovereign for 60 breaths.]
The crack widened in displeasure.
From the crack lifted a shape like a man if a man were a wound. It wore no helm, only a circle of broken knives where a crown should be, each shard orbiting an empty head that ate light. Its cloak was the mistake darkness makes when it tries to pretend it was ever cloth. On its chest, socketed into ribs that were ribs only because the eye needed a word, an eye opened—sideways, like a mouth.
[Designation: Crownless Warden]
[Class: Void Adjutant]
[Status: Incursion-Anchor]
The sideways eye looked at Asta and then down at the corpses kneeling by his leash. "Little shepherd," it said without moving, the words uncoiling in the room. "Borrowed lambs. Return them."
Asta tightened the string of his will. The bound dead juddered, as if jerked by two puppeteers at once.
The Warden extended a hand. The shadows of the corpses reached toward it like truant children called by a stricter parent.
[Warning: Dominion challenged.]
[Countermeasure Tip: Interlace.]
Asta didn't know the technique. He knew the word. He thrust his free hand back, palm to his own shadow where the Black Knight dwelt. "With me."
The knight's silhouette stepped closer, and where its shadow fell over the kneeling dead, their darkness thickened, took on the polish of armor. The borrowed lambs grew wolf-teeth.
The Warden's hand flexed. The dead shuddered again and then settled—stabilized—like lines pulled taut and then locked.
The Warden's sideways eye narrowed. "Heir," it said, again, this time tinged with curiosity. "Hollow-blooded. Uncrowned. Inherit the chain. Kneel and I will spare your breath."
Asta bared his teeth. "I'm fresh out of kneels."
He flicked two fingers. The nearest corpse lurched to its feet and rushed the fissure like a drunken battering ram. The Warden didn't bother to move; its cloak flowed forward, drank the corpse's motion, and spat it back out as stillness. The thrall froze mid-charge, hung a heartbeat between falling and not, and then the cloak set it gently aside like a child put back to bed.
Asta swallowed. "Right. Not that."
[Skill Hint: Shadow Bind can attach to Anchors when weakened.]
[Condition: Anchor must split its own shade.]
"How do I make that split?" Asta muttered.
The Warden cocked its empty head. "You speak to yourself like damaged things do. Heir. Heir. Serve, and I will call you 'Prince.'"
"Serve," Asta said, and spat blood onto the stone, "and I'd be lunch with a title."
The Warden lifted its crown of floating knives. Their edges sang against one another, chiming clear and hungry. "Then bleed properly."
It moved.
No lunge. Just an edit. The space between Asta and the Warden shortened, and the world agreed to have always been that way. The first knife of its crown flicked; air parted; Asta raised his chipped blade and knew it would not be enough.
"Arm me," he barked to the knight within.
[Shadow Armament: Partial]
[Gauntlet, Right: Manifest]
[Essence Drain: Minor]
Darkness clamped around his forearm like cooled metal poured directly onto nerve. A black gauntlet formed from elbow to knuckles, each finger crested with a knuckle-spur like a row of small moons. The first knife struck; sparks scrawled a constellation across the gauntlet instead of his face.
The Warden's crown spun; two knives broke orbit and drilled in. Asta stepped into them, not away, up under their arc like he was dodging rain under an eave, and slammed the shadow-gauntlet into the Warden's cloak. It gave with the resistance of dream-stuff made resentful; the sideways eye pinched in irritation.
"More," Asta hissed.
[Greave, Left: Manifest]
[Visor, Transient: Manifest]
Dark metal sheathed his left shin; a slim visor of shadow bled down over his eyes, narrowing the world to a dark-silver tunnel. The Warden adjusted, knives juking wide; Asta spun on the greave-shod heel and let the gauntlet catch another blade with a ringing clang that the chamber swallowed greedily.
"Shadows, hold," he snapped. The bound dead braced, bone and darkness straining like a breached dam.
The Warden grew impatient. Its cloak rose like a wing and then fell with the deliberate certainty of a judge's hand. The wave hit his thralls and smashed them into the stone, cracking skulls like dishes. Shadows guttered; he felt the bindings loosen and snarled, lashing his will through them like rope over burning hands.
"Up," he told them, and then to the knight: "All of it."
[Shadow Armament: Unsafe]
[Whole Helm Manifest, Denied]
[Fragment Manifest, Shoulder, Hip, Spine]
[Essence Drain: Moderate]
Plate formed in jagged crescents along his shoulder and across his hip; a ridge of overlapping scales uncoiled up his spine. He moved differently now—heavier but inevitable. The chipped blade felt smaller; his shadow-gauntlet felt like truth.
The Warden's sideways eye widened. A second crack split open. Overload accelerated: the floor buckling in a slow nightmare.
"Hold the line," Asta told the corpses. They obeyed, one dragged a broken leg behind it and still reached for the fissure, using its body as a brace against the widening jaws.
The Warden laughed. It sounded like a jar of beads shaken in a tomb. "You would prop the world with meat."
"I'll prop it with me if I have to," Asta shot back, and threw himself into the space where the Warden wasn't yet but was about to be. He met the future with the gauntlet and shoved it into the present, slamming that gauntlet knuckle-deep into the sideways eye.
Black light spilled out, cold and screaming soft. The Warden recoiled.
[Anchor Shade Integrity: Fractured]
[Condition approaching: Split]
"Break," Asta growled, hauling his arm free, chunks of light scattering like sleet. "Break, so I can bind you."
The Warden agreed to be angry.
Its crown blossomed into twenty knives; the air filled with geometry and consequence. Asta ducked; the visor flashed warnings he could not read fast enough; the shadow-knight leaned out of his own silhouette and raised a mirror-sword, blocking three blades with the sound of brief thunder.
A knife slipped under the visor's edge. It kissed his cheek and wrote a line of cold across it. He staggered. Another glanced his greave; cracks spidered.
[Essence Low]
[Warning: Armament collapse imminent]
"Not yet," he snarled, and pressed forward, because retreat didn't exist on maps he could bear to look at.
The Warden held up a hand. The knives froze, glittering mid-hunger.
"Tithe," it said. The sideways eye dilated like a throat swallowing. "One soul. Yours, a fragment. Or theirs, all."
A new pane flickered:
[Opportunity: Tithe Accepted]
[Benefit: Temporary Ascension, +Force, +Bind Strength]
[Cost Options: Sacrifice 1 bound thrall / Sacrifice 10% Vessel-soul / Sacrifice Pain Equivalent]
Asta stared. "Pain equivalent?"
[Definition: Convert endured pain to essence. Warning: requires immediate suffering. Source: self-inflicted or accepted.]
The Warden tilted the empty head. "Do not play with ledgers, Heir. Give what is easy, and you will be spared lessons."
Asta looked at his kneeling dead. In life, they had elbowed him aside, called him Hollow, sent him to carry bags. In death, they answered when he spoke, and that obedience had felt like a drink in a desert.
He lifted the gauntlet to his face and tore the visor off with a savage yank.
Shadow peeled from his skin like a second eyelid torn away. Air burned his eyes. He raised the gauntlet's sharp ridges to his shoulder wound and pressed.
White exploded. He bit down on his own cry and forced himself to breathe through it, to widen it, to invite it. He dragged the gauntlet over the gash, grinding plate on flesh until the world shrank to a needle tunneling his nerves.
"Take it," he rasped to the System. "Eat it."
[Pain Tithe: Accepted]
[Conversion: +Essence Surge]
[Side Effect: Stamina Shock]
His knees buckled; the shadow-hound shoved under his thigh to keep him upright.
The Warden watched, curious as a scientist. "Heir chooses to be the altar."
"Better me than them," Asta spat, blood stringing his words. "I don't waste my soldiers."
[Armament Stabilized (Short)]
[Bind Strength: Increased]
"Good," he breathed, and looked at the sideways eye until it had to look back. "Split."
He lunged.
The gauntlet slammed into the sideways eye again, this time with his pain burning inside it like stolen fuel. The eye tore down the middle with a sound like silk forced to remember it used to be skin.
[Anchor Shade Integrity: SPLIT]
[Window: 00:05 — Bindable state]
"Now!" Asta shouted, and his voice snapped the leash tight on every shadow in the room. "All of you, RISE!"
The bound corpses' darkness surged, spilling from their feet as thick cords that lashed the Warden's legs. The shadow-hound leapt, jaws widening impossibly, and clamped onto the trailing edge of the cloak. The Black Knight stepped through Asta's shadow, half-emerged, its sword a slab of winter, and pinned one of the orbiting knives to the stone like a butterfly on black velvet.
"Bind," Asta said, and the word did not come from his mouth so much as from the hollow of his bones.
[Shadow Bind: Attempting Anchor Claim]
[Contestant: Crownless Warden]
[Opposition: Strong]
The crack yawned wider in protest. Cold wind blew up from it, except it wasn't wind; it was the absence of air making room for something else to breathe.
"Hold the seam!" Asta barked to his thralls. They obeyed without hesitation, piling their ruined bodies along the fissure's lip, jamming limbs into the widening maw to slow its hunger. Bone snapped. Shadows screamed silently and held.
The Warden tried to dissolve into cloak and not-being. The split eye betrayed it—half wanted to flee, half wanted to remain to save face. That contradiction bled shadow like a wound.
Asta stepped into the bleed. He drove his right hand, the gauntlet, down into the pooled dark up to the wrist, then deeper, elbow, shoulder, until the stone met his chest and would admit no more of him without taking the rest.
[Warning: Crossing Threshold]
[Benefit: Direct Access to Anchor Shade]
[Risk: Vessel Displacement]
"Knight," he rasped. "Anchor me."
The Black Knight's silhouette planted its sword across Asta's back like a bar set on a door about to be kicked in. The pressure bit his spine, painful, perfect.
Inside the crack, the dark throbbed in time with the Warden's fury. "Bold," it said, voice suddenly close, at his ear inside the stone. "Erasing lines is how kings drown."
Asta's mouth curled. "Good thing I'm not planning to drown."
He opened his fist inside the shadow and found, resistance. Not a hand. A rope of cold, running away from him into a deeper place.
[Bind Link Located]
[Sever? Y/N]
"Not sever," he snarled. "Steal."
[Illegal operation.]
[Override: Heir Clause?]
[—Clause not recognized in Vessel state.]
"Then I'll fake it."
He wrapped his gauntleted fingers around the rope and yanked. The Warden jerked, crown-knives wobbling off their smooth orbits.
The chamber ceiling groaned. A slab of concrete tore loose and crashed yards away, spraying chips. The thralls held. The shadow-hound dug in. The Knight's sword pressed harder across his spine; vertebrae complained.
Asta pulled again.
The rope screamed. Not sound. Temperature. The world dropped a few degrees in a blink.
Then—from inside the crack, past the edge of cold, past the scraping whisper of knives—another sound came.
A voice. Human. Frayed by distance and static, but undeniably alive.
"…If, anyone, reading this, Don't-get-pulled-" A gasp. A cough. Then clearer, sudden, like a channel locking in: "Hey! Whoever you are—don't let it take your name! Hold onto something real!"
Female. Sharp. Command in it, not used to being ignored.
Asta's mind snatched stupidly at the first real thing it could find. "Asta," he hissed, teeth bared, fingers locked around the Warden's shadow-rope. "My name is Asta."
Silence from the crack. Then the Warden, the crownless thing, growled like a door refusing to open.
The voice from beyond came again, nearer, hurried: "Listen. When it splits, you can split too. Leave a piece. Otherwise it..."
The stone groaned. The rope yanked hard the other way. Asta slid forward, chest grinding against the fissure's edge. Blood slicked the black crystal. His bound dead wailed without throats and leaned harder into the seam.
"Asta," the voice said, urgent and very close. "Repeat after me—bind half. Leave half."
He didn't know her. He didn't know if she was bait or salvation. He only knew that he had chosen Slay and this, right here, was the cliff where that choice lived or died.
He locked his jaw, split his will like a coin split on an anvil, half to hold himself in the world that loved gravity, half to snake down his arm into the world that loved rules more than breath.
"Bind half," Asta growled into the crack. "Leave half."
[Bind Protocol: Partition]
[Acknowledged.]
[Attempting Partial Claim…]
[3… 2… 1…]
The rope snapped like a tendon.
Black light geysered up the fissure in a column, erasing color from the world. The Warden's crown blew apart into shrapnel of night. The Black Knight braced him—barely. The shadow-hound dug in until its paws vanished into the stone.
Asta wrenched his arm free, something heavy and furious bucking inside his gauntlet like a trapped animal trying to learn the shape of his bones.
[Acquired: Crownless Fragment (Bound)]
[Status: Partial]
[New Passive: Sovereign Pressure (Minor)]
The Warden reeled, listing, half its cloak now a ragged absence. It turned the sideways mouth-eye toward him, more hateful now, more afraid.
From the crack, the female voice—breathless, laughing in shock—spilled out. "You actually did it. Okay—okay. Now you run—"
The floor answered for them, splitting wider. The chamber pitched. The ceiling rained dust and knives and the idea of falling forever.
Asta didn't run.
He looked at his dead, at his hound, at the Knight, at the enemy that would follow him out if he fled, and at the crack that had just offered him a name he didn't know in a voice he wanted to meet.
"Hold," he said to the dead.
"Guard," he said to the Knight.
"Track," he told the hound, pointing into the fissure.
Then he leaned forward, used his greave to wedge the seam open a fraction more, and shoved his arm—the one holding the furious new fragment—back into the dark as the world tore around him.
"Show me who you are," he said to the unseen voice.
The crack swallowed his hand to the shoulder, and something warm and human clasped his blood-slick gauntlet in return.
The Warden screamed.
And the chapter broke open with it.