The dust falling from the sanctuary's ceiling felt like a firing squad closing in every time the Herald struck his staff against the ground. The scent of the black snow from outside was now stinging our nostrils—a mixture of burnt paper and metallic rust. Elian knelt at the threshold, wheezing through his blackened armor. The once invincible Head Guard now looked like nothing more than a broken toy.
"Hyoga," Elian said, his voice sounding muffled and bloody beneath his helm. "You... you can't stop him. Everything in that tower... it... it is the system itself."
The Herald chuckled softly behind his mask. His golden eyes glowed like two small suns in the damp darkness of the cave. "Elian still believes in the old fairy tales," the Herald said, taking another step toward me. "The system is not a monster, Hyoga. The system is a cleaner. And right now, this room is the filthiest corner that needs to be scrubbed."
"We are not the ones who are filthy," I said, clenching the seal on my right hand. The purple sparks leaking from it created tiny explosions in the air as they collided with the Herald's golden light. "The filth is that tower using us like batteries. If the world is being erased, it's not because of our existence—it's because you imprisoned it in a cage."
"Well spoken," Kagetsu said. His voice came from the deepest part of my mind this time, almost like a whisper. "But words won't stop that staff. Remember the 'Hunger' inside you, Hyoga. Remember how it melted that silver. Now, it's time to melt the gold."
The Herald raised his staff into the air. The light radiating from the crystal focused on me, using the crystals on the cavern ceiling like lenses. "I gave you a chance. You could have been a sacrifice by your own will. But since you choose to resist, I will tear you apart and carry you to the tower piece by piece."
When the pillar of light descended upon me, the searing pain I expected didn't come. Instead, I felt my soul being squeezed by a vice. The Herald wasn't draining my energy; he was directly rejecting my 'existence.' He was trying to undo the bonds between my atoms as if I had never existed in this world.
"Hyoga!" Ren shouted. He hurled his rusty knife at the Herald, but the blade evaporated the moment it hit the golden aura surrounding the man.
"Ren, run!" I groaned. My knees were about to hit the ground.
At that exact moment, Elian lunged forward. Despite his blackened, heavy armor, he threw himself at the Herald with incredible speed. His sword no longer glowed, but the black runes upon it let out a horrific sizzle as they struck the Herald's golden shield.
"You... you are a deviation, Elian!" the Herald said, turning his staff toward Elian. "The system erased you long ago!"
"Then a deleted person has nothing left to lose!" Elian roared.
The few seconds of distraction Elian provided allowed me to breathe. The piece of the First Deviation inside me had gone wild upon contact with the Herald's golden light. These two energies were opposites: one was absolute order, the other absolute chaos.
"Kagetsu," I said, calling out to the darkness within. "I won't give you control. But I will burn alongside you. Are you ready?"
"I've been waiting for this moment for a thousand years, kid," Kagetsu said.
The seal on my hand suddenly exploded. But it wasn't an outward explosion; it was inward. All the black smoke in the cave, all the damp air, and even the rusty water on the ground began to be sucked into my seal. My right arm turned completely black; my skin hardened as if carved from stone.
I stood up. The Herald had thrown Elian against the wall with a single strike of his staff, but he stopped when he saw me. His golden eyes narrowed for the first time.
"This is impossible," the Herald said. "You cannot control that energy. It will consume you."
"Let it," I said, my voice now sounding like thousands of people speaking at once. "Everything is being erased anyway, right? Then at least I'll leave nothing behind."
I lunged forward. My speed was so great that I left a black trail in my wake. The Herald brought his staff into a defensive position, but I caught the staff with my right hand, right where the crystal was.
The collision of gold and black filled the cavern with a blinding white light. The Herald's staff vibrated in my hand, glowing with all its might to turn me to ash. But I didn't let go. I squeezed harder. The black veins emerging from my seal began to seep into the staff's crystal. Like a virus, it was corrupting that pure light.
"What... what are you?" the Herald asked, as the mask on his face began to crack.
"I am the mistake you forgot," I said.
The crystal shattered into a thousand pieces in my hand.
The Herald was thrown backward, his mask splintering and falling to the ground. The face beneath it didn't look human; it was like a mirror shattered into a thousand shards. It had no fixed image. It was a void constantly shifting, carrying the likenesses of thousands of different people.
The cavern began to collapse. Large chunks of the ceiling were crashing to the ground.
"Don't think it's over, Hyoga," the Herald said, his body gradually becoming translucent. "The tower has seen you. And the tower never leaves anything it has seen unfinished."
The Herald vanished into the air as a beam of light. The golden weight in the cavern was gone, but it was replaced by a greater danger: physical destruction.
"We have to get out of here!" Ren shouted. He went over to Elian and grabbed his arm.
Elian was half-conscious. "Leave me... I've already been erased..."
"Stop talking nonsense!" I said, going over to them. I grabbed Elian's shoulder with my right hand. In that moment, I saw some of the black energy from my seal flow into Elian's armor. The black runes glowed for a second, and the dull gray color in Elian's eyes vanished.
"Hyoga... what did you do?"
"I reconnected you to the system," I said. "But not their system—mine."
The three of us ran together toward the narrow exit of the collapsing cave. Behind us, the false paradise the Herald had brought was being leveled. The sight we encountered when we stepped outside was far more terrifying than what was inside the tunnel.
The Misty Mountains were no longer misty. The sky was entirely pitch-black, and that massive eye was directly above us, watching us with a blood-red ring. The black snow reached our knees. The forest was completely withered, the trees turned into charcoal statues.
But the worst was the distant Academy tower. The tower was no longer just a building. It looked like a massive arm made of flesh and metal stretching into the sky. And that arm had gripped the world like an apple and was squeezing.
"Where will we go?" Ren asked. His voice was getting lost in the wind.
"To the tower," I said, looking at the seal on my hand. The seal no longer faded. It was throbbing like a constant pulse.
"Are you crazy?" Elian said. "Going there would be suicide."
"We're already dying, Elian. Look around you. The black snow is erasing everything. There's nowhere left to run. If we're going to stop this process, we must go to the heart of the tower. There, where it all began."
Just then, a hum rose from behind the snowy hills. Not one, not hundreds, but thousands... the 'Rusted.' But they weren't just groaning anymore. They were all looking toward the tower, walking in a kind of trance. They were no longer human; they were pawns in the massive energy flow going to the tower.
"We will follow them," I said. "We will blend in among them. The Herald will be waiting for us there."
"Be careful," Kagetsu said. "The voices you hear in that tower won't just be your own; they will be the screams of the entire world. You have only one thing to keep you from losing yourself."
"What's that?"
"The memory of that single moment when you were human."
I thought of my first day at the Academy. The silver-sealed paper Ardent had given me. That moment when no one knew me, yet I believed I could achieve anything. I tucked that memory into the deepest part of my mind.
"We're going," I said.
We plunged into the darkness, among the black snow and thousands of living dead. Our steps were heavy but determined. That massive eye in the sky blinked, and a beam of light fell right in front of us.
This wasn't an attack. This was a 'path.'
The tower was calling us.