The obsidian blade pressed relentlessly against the soft skin of Zhilian's neck. The Cult Leader smiled, his eyes bloodshot with a lucid, scientific madness as he awaited the reaction of the gray creature that had once been Hayjin. The princess was no longer a conscious human being; she was an envelope of blonde flesh and torn garments, her faint, erratic breathing betraying the total collapse of her psychic defenses.
"So, my god? What does your new nature choose? The logic of the savior or the hunger of the abyss?" The Leader's voice was a melodious whisper, a vibrating note cutting through the air saturated with the stench of viscera and hemoglobin.
Hayjin stood motionless for a fraction of a second. Then, the space around him seemed to contract.
There was no visible movement, nor the classic kinetic boom that accompanied the physical dashes of ordinary warriors. There was only a vacuum of pressure, a draft of cold air that rustled the edges of the Leader's leather coat. Hayjin simply vanished from sight.
The man's smile widened, convinced that the boy had launched a predictable frontal assault. He raised his left arm to activate another fragmentation barrier, but his mind registered a geometric anomaly. His body weight had shifted. The balance of his right shoulder was gone.
Slowly, with an unnatural calm dictated by his state of mystical ecstasy, the Leader lowered his gaze to his right side. His arm was no longer there.
There was no hand, no forearm, no shoulder joint. In place of the dark, leather-clad limb gaped a jagged void reaching all the way to the clavicle. The flesh of the deltoid had been literally torn away by bites and kinetic wrenches; the large blood vessels, severed asymmetrically, pulsed lazily, projecting rhythmic spurts of black blood onto the limp body of Zhilian, who slid to the floor devoid of support. White tendons, ripped from their bony insertions, dangled like strands of wet twine, while the rounded extremity of the humeral head emerged, pristine and gleaming, amidst the scarlet mush.
The Leader did not scream. A gasp of pure, uncontrollable wonder shook his chest.
He slowly rotated his neck to the left.
Less than two meters away, crouched atop a pile of mutilated corpses, Hayjin was already driving his personal banquet forward. He clutched the Leader's severed arm with both clawed hands, his black nails piercing the skin of the forearm until they scraped the periosteum. With his long vampire canines, the boy tore into the brachioradialis muscle, ripping away a twenty-centimeter strip of flesh and chewing it with the dull crunch of shattering cartilage.
"Yes... yes, I am strong..." the insane Hayjin muttered, his voice split, a guttural echo scraping against the walls of the chamber. His lips were coated in a dark serum, and his electric purple eye gleamed with an ecstatic light, while his snow-white eye remained fixed on the horizon.
"Look how fast I am... nobody saw me. Nobody can see me if I walk on the edge of blood. I am perfect. My hands are blades, my teeth are grindstones. Look how I snap this bone... I am incredibly strong, the strongest of all..."
The Cult Leader, ignoring the massive exsanguination emptying his chest, raised his only remaining hand, the left. With a rhythmic, solemn motion, he began to applaud, slapping his left palm against his blood-soaked chest, producing a wet, chilling sound.
CLAP. CLAP. CLAP.
"Splendid... a masterpiece of pure elemental kinetics," the man said, tears of joy continuing to streak his scarred face, mixing with the blood spurting from his destroyed shoulder. "You used no mana. You used no formulas. It is the pure will of the Calamity bending the physics of the dungeon. Thank you... thank you for showing me the end of flesh!"
The man stopped applauding. He raised his face toward the ceiling of the tower, where the invisible barrier continued to float, and his eyes shone with a silver, mystical, profound light.
"Father of the Deep... Architect of Limbo... accept this humble servant... my blood has nourished the Messiah... my flesh has been consecrated by his jaws... I thank you for granting me the honor to"
SCHLITTT.
The man did not have the time to utter the final word of his sacrilegious prayer. Hayjin had lunged at him with the speed of an arachnid predator. His clawed hands clamped around the Leader's shoulders, while his gaping mouth, stretched to the absolute limit of his facial muscles, sank directly into the right side of the man's neck.
With a sharp snap of his head, like a shark ripping flesh from a whale, Hayjin wrenched backward.
The throat and the entire right carotid artery of the Leader were uprooted cleanly. The soft tissues of the larynx, the sternocleidomastoid muscles, and the jugular vein were torn away in a single, monstrous block of bleeding flesh. A geyser of high-pressure arterial blood erupted from the open wound, spraying directly onto Hayjin's face and soaking his ash-gray hair.
The boy did not spit out his prey. He frantically chewed the man's trachea and blood vessels, swallowing large lumps of warm flesh and blood with guttural sounds of pure primordial hunger.
The Leader remained standing for a moment, his destroyed vocal cords emitting only a whistling breath mixed with red bubbles. Despite the absence of a throat, his eyes continued to gleam with that fanatical joy until his very last second.
Hayjin, still unsatisfied, grabbed the man's head by the hair. He imparted a violent, inhuman twist to the left. The sound of the cervical vertebrae snapping was like a volley of whip cracks. With a final wet rip that pulled the white filaments of the nervous system out of the spinal canal, Hayjin completely severed the cultist's head.
Without looking at it, with a gesture of pure animal indifference, he hurled the scarred skull over the edge of the platform, casting it into the absolute void of the abyss surrounding the tower. The Leader's body collapsed forward, an empty trunk joining the mountain of flesh that already carpeted the blue crystal.
As soon as the final enemy was struck down and consumed, the kinetic frenzy that had animated Hayjin's body began to recede. Silence once more descended upon the upper platform a heavy silence, broken only by the rhythmic dripping of blood falling from the crystal columns.
On the back of the boy's neck, the geometric spiderweb of the Brand underwent a sharp thermal inversion. The black and purplish lines, which had previously pulsed to the point of entirely covering his throat, began to shrink. The corrupted ink seemed to retreat beneath the epidermis, sucked back toward its point of origin at the base of the skull.
The dark luminescence faded, losing strength and intensity with each slowing heartbeat. Within a few seconds, the runes diminished to a single, tiny dark dot, before turning completely invisible beneath the skin of his neck.
Alongside the retreat of the Brand, Hayjin's body initiated a process of biological regression.
His long vampire canines retracted, scraping against his injured gums with a dull bony snap, returning to their ordinary human dimensions.
Piece by piece, his ash-gray hair reacquired its original pigmentation, turning back to its dull, raven-black color.
The frightening asymmetry of his eyes vanished: the purple eye of the abyss lost its electric charge, and the snow-white sphere of his right eye regained its expressive, gray pupil.
The boy collapsed to his knees in the middle of the pool of blood, his torso swaying dangerously forward as his muscular structure lost the artificial empowerment that had enabled him to shatter crystal with his bare hands.
Within his mind, in that non-place of absolute darkness, Hayjin's "normal" consciousness felt a seismic shock.
The naked female figure, with her silver and gold veins glowing beneath her lunar skin, was still clutching his chest in that symbiotic embrace. But suddenly, the density of the liquid darkness began to thin. Vast cracks of cold, white light ripped through the ink of Limbo.
The woman's cold hands began to slide away from the boy's chest. Her long black hair, which had previously floated like seaweed around Hayjin's head, dissolved into strands of gray smoke. The woman offered no resistance; she simply allowed herself to glide backward into the receding darkness, her empty eyes fixed upon him in an eternal, mute promise of return.
Hayjin's consciousness detached from that presence. The sense of apathy and sensory deprivation was swept away by a wave of brutal, violent physical stimuli that flooded his nervous system.
Hayjin snapped his eyes open.
A violent cough racked his lungs, forcing him to expel a clump of blood and flesh residue that had remained wedged in his trachea. The taste of iron, copper, and putrid organic matter immediately filled his mouth, triggering a violent wave of nausea that forced him to double over, his hands sinking into the red mush of the floor.
"Ah... f-fuck... ah..."
The boy panted desperately, his wide eyes staring at his own hands. They were filthy. Stained up to the wrists in blood that was not his own. He touched his face: his skin was wet, coated in a lukewarm molasses that smelled of death. His analytical mind, back in full control, tried to recover from the shock and reconstruct what had happened, but the memories of the carnage were blurred, filtered through the distorted lens of an animal hunger that did not belong to him.
"What... what did I do?... What happened to me?" he whispered, his human voice trembling uncontrollably. He looked at the remains of the cultist's arm a few inches from his knees: the marks of his own teeth were visible on the broken bone. The horror of what he had become struck his chest harder than any magical beam.
As he tried to push himself up, bracing on his left arm which trembled from accumulated lactic acid, a strange phenomenon caught his attention.
The corpses of the cultists piled on the platform the heartless elder, the woman with the snapped neck, the youth with the exploded head, and the throatless trunk of the Leader began to undergo a post-mortem mutation. No blood emerged from their open wounds; instead, a series of dense, heatless black flames erupted.
The flames crawled over the torn flesh like hungry parasites. They produced no smoke, nor the typical odor of burning tissue; they emitted only a low, constant magnetic crackle that made the fragments of blue crystal vibrate. Within moments, the dark fire entirely consumed the organic matter: the muscles, the bones, the leather garments, and even the pools of blood covering the floor were entirely dissolved into nothingness, vanishing without leaving behind a single speck of ordinary ash.
Hayjin watched the scene without a word, his gray eye reflecting the flicker of those heretical flames. The dungeon seemed to be wiping its own tracks, erasing the evidence of that ritual slaughter.
When the final black flame extinguished, the upper platform of the tower became visible once more in its bare, blue crystal structure, though still marred by the cracks and kinetic gouges of the battle.
The boy's attention immediately shifted to the left side of the area.
There, freed from the Leader's grip, lay Zhilian.
Hayjin crawled toward her, his legs barely responding, as though his muscles were made of molten lead. Reaching her side, he leaned over her body, examining her with the speed of an analyst trying to quantify damages.
"Zhilian... hey, Zhilian, can you hear me? Wake up, please..."
His left hand touched her pale cheek, leaving a red smudge against the grime on her skin. The princess was still unconscious, motionless in her state of protective catatonia. Her breathing was extremely weak and shallow, and her heartbeat, though regular, was reduced to a minimal frequency, akin to a hibernating animal. Her magic core was silent, locked down by the psionic trauma of the hallucinations she had suffered.
Hayjin gritted his teeth. His inability to use medical magic rendered him useless in this situation. He needed Evelyn.
Right at that moment, the veil of the invisible barrier isolating the tower collapsed entirely, exhausted after the death of the Leader who had maintained its structural stability.
The dull roar of the external battle battered the platform with the force of an acoustic shockwave. Less than three hundred meters away, the crystal wyvern emitted a final, screeching roar of pure pain as Evelyn's gravitational circles clamped around its neck, forcing its snout down against the canyon rock.
Evelyn, whose sensory perception had immediately recalibrated the moment the phase distortion vanished, snapped her head toward the top of the tower. Her blue eyes intercepted the figure of Hayjin kneeling beside Zhilian.
"Hayjin!" The girl's scream sliced through the air with the precision of a steel blade. There was no time for explanations, nor for questions about how they had survived. "He's awake! Move, get over here and help me right now! This monster is trying to force the matrix, I can't maintain the singularity collapse for more than thirty seconds on my own! We need a kinetic vector to shatter the inner core, move!"
Hayjin heard the call. He looked at Evelyn, then looked down at Zhilian's limp body, and finally locked his gaze onto the wyvern still thrashing beneath the blue circles, its mineral scales beginning to emit a new resonance frequency to break free.
"If the wyvern breaks free, Evelyn won't be able to defend both herself and Atlas... and the two of us will be wiped out by the next plasma beam," his logical mind analyzed, reactivating Association survival protocols. "I have to move. I have to use the remnants of the sword to create an opening for Evelyn."
With an immense effort of will, Hayjin pushed off his knees. He managed to straighten his back, standing upright. He took a first step forward, directing himself toward the edge of the platform, ready to throw himself into the canyon to support his companion.
Then, the sudden halt.
There was no enemy attack, nor a collapse of the ground. His body stopped dead, freezing mid-stride as if an invisible wall of concrete had materialized right before his chest.
The muscles of his legs seized in a simultaneous, violent cramp that completely stripped away his motor coordination. His nervous system, overloaded by the distorted energy of the Brand and the physical trauma of the facial mutation, slammed on the emergency brakes. The adrenaline had vanished, leaving an absolute biological void in its wake.
"Ah... n-no... not now..."
Hayjin tried to move his left arm, but the limb hung limp against his side, devoid of any synaptic response. His vision flickered violently: black spots expanded from the edge of his visual field, engulfing the sunlight and Evelyn's figure in a chaotic sway. His heart gave three accelerated, painful thuds, followed by a pause that stole his breath away.
He was too exhausted. His reserve of vital energy had been entirely drained by the feast on the cultists and the regression of the Brand. He had not a single calorie left to burn, not a single electrical impulse left to send to his muscles.
Gravity returned to claim its toll. Without letting out another sound, Hayjin's knees buckled instantly for the second time, and the boy crashed forward onto the blue crystal of the tower, inches away from Zhilian's motionless body, his mind sliding rapidly into unconsciousness while the fate of the battle hung suspended upon Evelyn's outstretched fingers.