The walls of the fourth vein were slick with a prehistoric condensation that smelled of wet iron. Below, the floor was a graveyard of liquid silt—a mud so thick and black it looked like boiling pitch. It didn't just sit there; it heaved, a slow, rhythmic churn that suggested a collective of a million segmented bodies shifting in the dark.
Scorpions. They carpeted the sub-strata in a moving sea of chitin and venom.
Kenjiro didn't look down. He pressed the soles of his boots against a jagged obsidian protrusion and launched. His body was a red blur, a needle threading the narrow space between the vertical rock faces. He hit the opposite wall, his mana-coated fingers digging into the stone like iron claws.
He didn't linger. The rocks here were rigged with thermal pressure.
Click.
The sound was a dry, mechanical snap beneath his right boot.
The rock didn't just crack; it detonated. A concussive wave of heat and shrapnel slammed into his side, hurling him away from the wall. The pillars around him groaned, the ceiling shedding tons of shale. Mid-air, Kenjiro twisted his torso, the red mythic blade humming as he drove it into the side of a falling monolith. He used the momentum to slide, the steel throwing a curtain of sparks, before boosting himself toward a high ledge.
"So close," he spat, wiping grit from his teeth.
He didn't wait for the dust to settle. He jumped, clearing the final chasm of mud, and landed before a wooden gate that looked older than the mountain itself. It was massive—bolted with rusted iron and etched with seals that had begun to bleed black ink.
Kenjiro didn't reach for the handle. He planted his lead foot and drove his heel into the center of the wood.
The gate didn't swing; it disintegrated.
The air on the other side hit him like a physical wall. It wasn't just wind; it was a pressurized vacuum, a screaming vortex of grit and ice that roared through the hall with enough force to lift a tank. Kenjiro was driven back two steps, his boots carving deep furrows into the stone floor. He drove the point of his sword into the ground, leaning his weight against the hilt to stay anchored.
"I have to conserve," he muttered, his voice stripped away by the gale. "The Twin Cinders took too much. The pool is shallow."
He looked into the white-out of the wind. He could see nothing. No floor, no ceiling, only the roar.
Then the roar changed. It became a rhythmic, guttural whistle.
[ System Alert: Entrance to the Fifth Vein - The Gale of the Damned ]
[ Entity Identified: The Bone-Eater Chimaera ]
[ Rank: Near-God ]
[ Warning: Physical form is intangible in high-velocity environments ]
Something hit him.
It wasn't a punch. It was a mass of cold, solid muscle that moved within the wind itself. Kenjiro was lifted off his feet and slammed into the stone ceiling. Before he could recover, he was dragged across the jagged rafters and hurled back into the floor.
He coughed, blood splattering the inside of his hood. He stood, his vision swimming.
"Void Pulse: Solar Flare."
He didn't go for the explosion. He kept the blue flames tight, a thin veneer of cerulean heat around his body to act as a sensor. The moment the wind broke around a solid object, he saw it.
It was a nightmare of mismatched anatomy. A torso of a man-ape, arms like gnarled oak roots, and a head that was a fused mass of three different predators—wolf, hawk, and something with too many teeth. Its fur was grey and wiry, shedding needles of bone as it moved.
The Chimaera lunged.
Kenjiro met it.
Clang.
The creature's claws, long and curved like sickles, clashed with the red blade. The vibration traveled through Kenjiro's marrow, nearly numbing his grip. He spun, attempting a Severing Thread, but the creature dissolved into the wind, the blade passing through nothing but air.
He felt a searing pain in his shoulder. Three deep gashes opened, the blood instantly flash-freezing in the gale.
"Time Dilation."
The grey sludge settled over the hall. The wind slowed to a crawl, the dust motes hanging like lead shot. Kenjiro saw the Chimaera mid-shift, its body half-vapor, half-flesh. He stepped inside its guard, his knuckles glowing with the dark green of the Necromancer.
He delivered a sequence of fluid, heavy punches into the creature's ribcage. Thud. Thud. Thud. The dilation snapped.
The Chimaera shrieked, the impact of the hits landing all at once, but it didn't fall. It swung a massive, bone-encrusted arm, catching Kenjiro in the temple.
The world went white.
The fight didn't last minutes. It lasted days.
Time in the Sepulcher was a fractured thing. By the end of the second day, the hall was a ruin. The pillars had been reduced to gravel. The air was thick with the smell of Kenjiro's blood and the black, oily discharge of the beast.
Kenjiro was panting, his red hood torn to ribbons, his tunic soaked through. One eye was swollen shut. He leaned on his sword, his breath coming in ragged, wet hitches.
The Chimaera was worse. Its hawk-head was a mangled mess of bone, and its movements were sluggish, the ice-veins in its chest glowing a dull, dying purple.
"I'm done... with this," Kenjiro whispered.
He let go of the sword. It clattered to the floor, the sound heavy and final.
The Chimaera sensed the opening. It gathered the remains of the gale into its lungs, its entire body glowing with a terminal, necrotic energy. It launched, a spear of bone and wind aimed directly at Kenjiro's heart.
Kenjiro didn't move. He didn't blink. He raised his left hand, the thumb and middle finger touching in the air.
"Nirvana."
The word was a soft, jagged exhale.
The wind died instantly. The hall, the ruins, the mountain—it all stripped away.
The Chimaera found itself suspended in the absolute, silent white of Kenjiro's personal void. It tried to howl, but there was no air to carry the sound.
Kenjiro stood before it. He looked older. He looked like the King who had stood in the Kyoto intersection twelve years—and five hundred years—ago. He didn't look like a boy. He looked like the end of the world.
He walked to the creature, his boots making no sound on the non-existent floor. He placed his palm against the Chimaera's shivering chest.
"Atom."
The white space turned into a pressurized furnace. The horizon rushed inward with the speed of a collapsing star. The Chimaera's bones began to shatter into dust. Its skin peeled away in microscopic layers. It didn't just die; it was dismantled at the atomic level.
Then came the flash.
A silent, absolute detonation of pure mana that consumed the white.
Kenjiro stood in the center of the hall.
The wind was gone. The silence was so heavy it felt like a weight on his shoulders. From the ceiling, a fine rain of black soot and grey bone-meal began to fall, coating his hair and the ruins of his clothes.
He fell to one knee, his lungs burning. Every cell in his body felt like it had been scraped with a wire brush. The mana pool was empty. He was running on the fumes of his own soul.
[ System Alert: Fifth Guardian Subjugated ]
[ Final Seal of the Glacial Sepulcher: Broken ]
[ Level Up! ]
[ Level Up! ]
[ Level Up! ]
[ Current Level: 25 ]
Kenjiro looked up. The Chimaera's soul orb was there, a massive, jagged sphere of violet and grey light, pulsing with a wild, untamed energy.
He reached out. His fingers were shaking, but his gaze was iron.
"Arise," he commanded.
The shadow beneath him didn't just move; it exploded outward, a lake of black ink that swallowed the ruins. The violet orb was pulled into the depths.
"Kneel under my command!"
The shadow coalesced. A massive, spectral version of the Chimaera rose behind him, its three heads bowing low until they touched the shattered floor. It was no longer a beast of the mountain; it was a soldier of the Abyss.
[ Soul Extracted: Bone-Eater Chimaera (Rank: Near-God) ]
[ Title Acquired: Master of the Sepulcher ]
Kenjiro leaned back against a piece of fallen pillar. He closed his eyes.
"One year," he whispered. "One year until the clock hits zero."
Deep in the heart of the temple, the final door began to groan. The Frost-Bound Monarch was waking up, and he was hungry.