The "sun" above answered Erika.
"…Se—laaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa—!!!!"
That harrowing scream was drowned out the exact moment it tore from his throat.
The absolute white light, an annihilation beam composed of high-energy particles and the Sanctum's Purification Matrix, completely engulfed him.
Agony. It was as if tens of thousands of white-hot steel needles had simultaneously plunged directly into his cerebral cortex.
He could smell it—the sickening, pungent stench of his own flesh carbonizing in a fraction of a second. Those red, parasitic "berry" tissues, which had already rooted deep into his pores to nail him to the bulkhead, let out a visceral, living hiss before this pillar of absolute purification.
They boiled. They evaporated. They were violently, brutally stripped and vaporized from the very marrow of Erika's bones!
Crack… crack crack…
Within the blinding, suffocating light, Erika's body convulsed violently, arching backward like a dying fish thrown into a vat of boiling oil.
He should have been vaporized into ash along with the abyssal flesh in a microsecond.
But at that exact moment, the dying Mark on his left arm came alive.
The originally flat, white-gold patterns actually melted through his skin in the extreme heat, physically growing out of his flesh! The Mark transformed into a madly spinning, greedy vortex, opening its maw wide to eagerly meet the descending purification beam.
A cataclysmic flood of energy poured in through his raised left hand, frantically flowing backward along his meridians!
"GAAAAAH—!"
The Purification Matrix rampaged through his blood vessels, his human blood instantly replaced by boiling, liquid white-gold. This immense, inconceivable mass of energy surged into his chest, forcing his heart to pump at over three hundred beats a minute. It battered against his ribs, nearly bursting through.
Severe overload.
Without an outlet, he would detonate as a white-gold bomb of flesh in the next second. The destructive heat, with absolutely nowhere to go, carried extreme rejection. Like a wild, cornered beast, it charged toward the only "gap" in his entire body—
His right shoulder. The stump of his severed right arm, where the flesh and blood had been burnt black and cut clean off.
SHLUCK—!!!
A horrifying, muffled sound of flesh being forcibly, violently torn open.
At the gruesome stump of his right shoulder, a light ten times more blinding than the orbital pillar above exploded outward!
Violent crystals erupted from the stump! But instead of dissipating into the air, they exhibited a chilling, predatory instinct belonging entirely to the abyss.
Those white-gold crystals, acting like clusters of madly growing, razor-sharp thorns, directly pierced the surrounding abyssal flesh—flesh that was still screaming, melting, and far too slow to escape the light!
The crystals pulled. They stitched. They forcibly forged.
Immaculate, sacred crystals violently hijacked the foul, squirming abyssal flesh. The crystals formed a sharp, grotesque skeletal structure, while the semi-translucent red flesh was forcibly pulled along like creeping vines, frantically wrapping, proliferating, and restructuring itself along the new crystalline framework.
"AAAAAAHHHHHH!!!"
In the absolute, transcendent agony of his flesh being remade, Erika threw his head back. His eyes rolled back into his skull, and two thick streaks of blood tears, glowing with mixed golden light, streamed down his ruined face.
The beam's energy finally reached its absolute threshold.
The massive purification apparatus above let out an overwhelmed, metallic groan. The light flickered once before dying completely in a sharp screech of failing electric current.
The chamber floor sank back into dimness. Only large, silent patches of burnt ash drifted downward like black snow in the stagnant air.
On the wall, the tissues that had pinned Erika were completely carbonized. Without their support, the boy's body fell heavily from mid-air like a discarded ragdoll.
THUD.
He crashed onto the scorching steel floor.
Dead silence fell all around. Only the intense residual heat remained, making the air visibly shimmer and warp.
There was no heroic deep breath. No struggling valiantly to rise.
The moment he hit the ground, Erika sprawled out like a heap of overcooked, ruined meat. He collapsed pathetically on the red-hot steel, his entire body convulsing rapidly like he was taking a continuous electric shock.
"HUUUURK—!!!"
He suddenly opened his mouth, violently vomiting a large, thick clot of pitch-black blood mixed with glowing white-gold filaments.
It was too painful.
The pain turned even his basic thoughts into rusted saws, systematically shredding his remaining sanity.
That reconstructed right arm wouldn't obey him. It was far too heavy. The extreme, sacred heat of the crystals and the cold, parasitic nature of the abyssal flesh fought a brutal, agonizing rejection war right in the stump of his shoulder. Every newborn, grotesque nerve, hastily stitching the two diametrically opposed forces together, transmitted pure agony at maximum frequency directly into his brain.
"Ah… ugh…"
He writhed violently on the scorching floor. That single, remaining human left hand dug desperately into the steel. His nails broke and flipped backward from the sheer force, leaving several screeching, bloody scratches etched into the deck.
This was not a divine gift. It was a torment from which there was no escape. The Sanctum's energy forced his cells to rapidly regenerate, while the abyss's mutation forced his body to aggressively deform. Two extreme, opposing rules had made his fragile body their grindstone. He couldn't even pass out; he was forced to bear this torture of not being able to live or die, completely awake, feeling every microscopic tear and fusion.
Tears, cold sweat, and golden bloodstains mixed together, coating half his face in a gruesome mask. In this chamber, now as silent as a tomb, this boy—reeking of burnt flesh and unnatural mutation—convulsed desperately and pitifully, exactly like a stray dog with its spine completely crushed.
Until—
Clack. Clack. Clack. Clack.
A rhythm. One he had heard before, but couldn't place, his mind too riddled with holes by the pain to process it. It came steadily, heavily, from outside the blast door, which had been severely warped by the intense heat of the beam.
Erika weakly closed his eye, the one still weeping blood.
The chamber floor was dead quiet. The fading hisses left by the cataclysmic beam, the weak electric hum of the ruined apparatus above, the faint, dry rustle of carbonized ash falling through the air—all of it seemed to recede into the distance.
The whole world was ebbing away. Only his own heart remained, pumping at over three hundred frantic beats a minute. And in that grotesque right arm—where Sanctum crystals and abyssal flesh were violently stitched together at his severed shoulder—there was another heartbeat.
Extremely dull. Extremely greedy.
Thud… thud…
It was not a human heartbeat. It was the heartbeat of extreme hunger.
Clack. Clack. Clack. Clack.
The heavy bootsteps drew closer. They stopped just outside the warped door. Through that thick metal panel—completely scorched by the beam, its edges still dripping glowing, orange-red molten metal. Through the black snow still falling thickly in the stifling air.
A survival instinct—or perhaps, a pure predatory instinct—violently seized control of this failing, breaking body.
Scrape… scrape…
Erika bit clean through his mangled lower lip. That only remaining left hand clawed desperately at the floor, letting that heavy, grotesque right arm instinctively flex its crystalline claws. Looking exactly like a dying, crippled spider, he dragged his broken body, silently, inch by agonizing inch, slithering into the deepest shadow of the chamber.
The crystalline claws scraped uselessly against the scorching steel, leaving a wet, glaring trail of dark red flesh and white-gold crystal fragments in his wake.
Then, curled tight in the darkness, he held his breath.
ZZZ—CRACK—!
A blinding blade of blue-white, high-energy light ruthlessly pierced the warped blast door. It cut through the thick steel like it was rotten butter, violently carving a circle large enough for entry.
CRASH—!!!
The heavy, cut metal panel was violently kicked inward. Half a ton of steel slammed into the floor, sending up massive clouds of scorching dust and ash.
"Move it!" Outside, a voice filtered through a tactical helmet barked. It was cold, mechanical. But beneath the supposedly calm vocal filter was an undisguised, frantic urgency.
"Readings are scrambled! Damn it… They've locked down the elevators completely! The purification sequence is going to reboot!" Another voice followed, exasperated and panicked, accompanied by the rapid clatter of tactical boots deploying.
"Less talk! Clean it up! Execute the protocol!"
Three tall figures cloaked in black robes stepped through the dust and residual heat. Moving in a perfect, tactical inverted-triangle formation, they violently breached this tomb that should have held no living thing.
HUMMMM—
Three piercing tactical beams, like three gleaming swords, instantly tore through the oppressive darkness of the chamber floor.
The beams, acting like the searching eyes of death, swept quickly over the carbonized walls, over the ruined apparatus above, and finally—
They stopped, with extreme precision, at the corner.
Right at the end of that wet, dark red, horrifying trail.
There, a mass of abyssal flesh, burnt grayish-black and nearly the size of a small adult, lay quietly on the deck. But under the harsh glare of the tactical lights, that lump of flesh let out a hair-raising, wet squelching sound.
Thud… thud…
An extremely dull pulsing echoed ominously in the empty chamber.
It was not the ragged breath of a survivor.
It was the roar of absolute hunger for high-energy sources and fresh flesh, emanating from the freshly awakened, stitched-together monster hidden perfectly in the true darkness of the dead corner.