You Shouldn't Have Turned Your Back
Chapter 18
"You shouldn't have turned your back..."
The voice was faint at first-like a whisper crawling through the dust.
"You shouldn't have turned your back..."
The words echoed again.
Then again.
And again.
Until the entire coliseum vibrated with that single sentence repeating endlessly, twisting through the air like a curse.
Eidolon's smile widened-unnaturally wide-so stretched it looked painful, yet somehow he seemed to be feeling a pleasure so deep it was almost inhuman.
Steam burst upward from his skin, rising like smoke from fresh magma.
Heat flooded the coliseum.
The sand glowed orange.
The stone walls cracked.
The temperature spiked so violently that even the air shimmered.
Nothing should have been able to survive that heat.
Eidolon's burned and ragged clothes suddenly ignited-erupting into flames that wrapped around his body before crumbling to ash. His bare skin was exposed... but something was horribly wrong.
Strange letters-ancient, jagged, alive-covered him.
They pulsed.
They throbbed.
They breathed like a beating heart.
Each symbol lit up with a red glow, then dimmed, then lit again in a rhythm that didn't belong to anything human.
Eidolon dropped from midair, his body falling like a dead weight-
-but the moment his foot touched the ground, the sand beneath him melted.
A burnt, red-hot footprint was left behind.
Then another.
And another.
Each step he took scarred the earth, turning sand into molten glass.
The letters on his body writhed, shifting position, screeching loudly as if something inside them wanted to escape. They pulsed violently-angry, restless, starving.
Steam poured from Eidolon's smiling mouth with every breath.
His eyes-those blood-drenched, glowing red eyes-streamed tears of crimson that evaporated as they fell.
He walked slowly, one step at a time, straight toward the old man.
And for the first time-
the old man didn't move.
He didn't attack.
He didn't speak.
He didn't breathe.
He just stood there, eyes wide, frozen in a shock so deep it cracked the composure he had held for centuries.
Eidolon's smile widened further as he approached.
"You shouldn't..."
step
"...have turned..."
step
"...your back."
The old man finally swallowed.
He was looking at something he did not understand.
Something he did not expect.
Something he could no longer control.
And Eidolon kept walking, steam rising behind him like the smoke of a newborn demon.
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