The exit from the spatial tear was far from a painless transition. The air of the Opes castle's immense garden struck the lungs of the survivors with the icy sharpness of an iron blade. Behind them, the magnetic hum of the portal died out with a metallic hiss, giving way to a frantic din of hurried footsteps, barked commands, and the rhythmic clicking of crystal-powered medical instruments.
"Medical team, over here! Now!" Adeline's voice echoed beneath the stone vault, entirely stripped of her usual formal composure. "We have an A-Class psionic collapse and structural compression trauma. Move!"
In an instant, a dozen healing mages clad in white robes bordered with desacralized silver surrounded the group. Their hands, already shrouded in a pale green and silver luminescence, began tracing thermal diagnosis micro-matrices directly into the air, scanning the youths' bodies before they could even take another step.
The litter of azure light carrying Zhilian was deposited at the center of a raised platform. Three elder priestesses immediately bent over her, placing green tourmaline prisms upon her forehead and chest, right where her royal mana continued to fluctuate dangerously close to biological zero.
"The core is intact, but the synaptic channels are blocked by a residual hallucination barrier," one of the healers explained, her fingers trembling slightly as she adjusted the influx of soothing energy. "It is as if her mind sealed itself from the inside to prevent soul fragmentation. We must induce a deep therapeutic sleep. If she wakes now, the rejection of her own mana could destroy her cerebral vessels."
A few meters away, Atlas was forced to sit on a stone bench. Two mages helped him slide off the remnants of his leather armor, which had literally bonded to his skin due to clotted blood and thermal sweat. The warrior let out a grunt of repressed anger as a guaritore applied a hydro-magnetic solution to his right shoulder to reduce the muscular hematoma.
"I appreciate it, but I'm fine," Atlas hissed, trying to swat the mage's hand away, though the violent tremor in his right arm belied his every word. "Focus on her. I only need ten minutes to recalibrate my core. That damned wyvern only cracked the outer plate..."
"Stay still, boy," the healer interrupted in a firm, bureaucratic tone. "Your bone density has suffered a longitudinal micro-fracture along the humerus. If we don't stabilize the mineral frequency now, your arm will never support the weight of a sword again. Quiet down and let me work."
Evelyn, though utterly exhausted and her uniform still damp from the water of her own titanic spell, refused a litter. She remained standing beside Rhaegalur, allowing a healer to apply a minor magical poultice to her neck to stabilize her blood pressure. Her eyes, however, did not drift for a single second from the platform where Zhilian was undergoing emergency treatment.
In the midst of that chaos of screams, orders, and flares of green mana, Hayjin remained standing, completely isolated from everything and everyone. The healers had tried to approach him too, but the boy had rejected all contact with a sharp wave of his hand, preferring to sit and rest against a corner column, deep in the shadow cast by the large silver conductors.
Nobody insisted overmuch. To their eyes, Hayjin was merely an F-Class novice without a shred of mana a lucky survivor who had managed to avoid being crushed by the rubble of the tower thanks to Evelyn's timely intervention. They could not know. They could not even conceive of the horror hiding beneath his skin.
Hayjin looked down at his hands. They were clean now, washed by the waters of Evelyn's golden dragon and the rushing wind of the portal, yet his mind still perceived the slimy, warm, iron-laced sensation of the Cult Leader's blood. The taste of raw flesh, of a trachea torn away by his own teeth, still pressed against the back of his tongue, triggering rhythmic gastric spasms that he fought hard to control.
What happened to me in there? he asked himself, his eyes staring blankly at the slate floor.
What the hell was that thing? How did I become... that?
He tried to reconstruct the details of the mutation, but his physical memories were filtered through a thick mist of pure animal violence. He remembered the sensation of his canines elongating, the grinding bone sound of his skull modifying itself to accommodate that asymmetric hunger, and above all, those strange words his own split, wet, corrupted voice had uttered in the very heart of the feast:
"Yes... I am strong... look how fast I am... nobody saw me..."
He remembered complimenting himself, like a narcissistic predator exhilarated by the ease with which he had shredded the flesh of his enemies. It had been disgusting behavior, utterly devoid of any analytical logic or the Earthly prudence that had always guided him since the day of his reincarnation. And yet, in that moment of distorted ecstasy, it had felt like the most natural thing in the world.
A shiver of anticipation and repulsion rippled through his chest. But then, the boy's gaze shifted to the litter where Zhilian was finally breathing with greater regularity, her face shielded by the soft green light of the prisms.
"It doesn't matter," Hayjin concluded, clenching his fists until his fingernails bit into his palms. A cold, pragmatic cynicism took over his moral fears. "Despite the horror, despite the madness... that thing was necessary to save her. If I had remained the same weakling I've always been, the Cult Leader would have driven that blade into her throat before Atlas could even take a step. Wherever that strength comes from, whether it's a curse of the Brand... I don't care. It gave me the speed required to rewrite a destiny that was already sealed. That is the only thing that matters."
"You look terrible, Hayjin."
The voice was calm, deep, and utterly devoid of the frantic modulations that characterized the rest of the courtyard. There was no need to turn around to know who it belonged to. Rhaegalur, the dragon god who to the outside world was merely a father worried for his son, stood there. His crimson eyes, deep as oceanic abysses, stared down at Hayjin with a penetration that seemed intent on flaying the secrets protected beneath the boy's epidermis.
Hayjin slowly raised his eyes, straightening his back as much as his aching muscles allowed. He kept his expression perfectly neutral, the mask of the Earthly analyst seamlessly snapped back into place.
"I'm fine, father," Hayjin said, his voice steady, though slightly raspy from the dryness of his throat. "It's just accumulated fatigue. The collapse of the tower generated an air displacement that tested my physical endurance, but I didn't suffer any severe injuries. You can rest assured."
Rhaegalur did not avert his gaze. He stood motionless for a few seconds, analyzing the boy's heartbeat and the thermal layout of his body.
"Your biological frequency is altered, Hayjin. There is an energy void in your nervous system that does not correspond to the simple exertion of a flight. But if you say all is well, I will take your analysis... for now."
Hayjin lowered his head slightly, his gaze drifting back toward the princess's litter. "I am only sorry that Zhilian suffered so much. I failed to protect her as I had promised... If I had been faster... perhaps her mind wouldn't have been reduced to this state."
The dragon god emitted a low, guttural sound, a vibration that caused the silver conductors of the courtyard to hum in response.
"Do not attribute blame to yourself that does not belong to you, boy. The protection of a royal lineage falls to the A-Class warriors accompanying her, not a child whose only task was to provide support. You did more than your body required just by remaining alive in that dungeon."
Rhaegalur took a step closer, his towering figure completely blotting out the green light emanating from Zhilian's medical station. His tone dropped even lower, veining itself with a gravity that Hayjin knew all too well: it was the tone of someone examining an anomaly that threatened the very order of things.
"However, something does not add up in this equation," Rhaegalur said, his eyes narrowing into two gleaming slits. "I examined the remains of the crystal wyvern before the portal closed. Evelyn did an excellent job bringing that beast down, but the structure of that monster presented alterations that cannot be explained by the simple natural evolution of the dungeon. And above all, look at that girl." He indicated Zhilian with an imperceptible nod.
"The psionic catatonia that struck the princess is not the result of the physical trauma of a collapse, nor the terror of a plasma beam. It is a targeted compression, a spiritual frequency inversion that requires a conscious will a malevolent intelligence that actively operated to destroy her defenses from within. A crystal wyvern, however dangerous, remains nothing more than a very angry mass of mineral flesh. It could never have caused that to Zhilian. Never."
The man stared at Hayjin with a renewed intensity, as if searching for confirmation of a suspicion he had harbored ever since he forced the sector's barrier.
"What really happened to you in there, Hayjin? How could you be reduced to this state? And above all, how could an ordinary training exercise turn into a manhunt where you risked your lives in this manner? There was something else on that tower before it collapsed, wasn't there?"
Hayjin felt the crushing psychological pressure of his adoptive father's words. The temptation to reveal everything, to dump the crushing weight of that horror onto the shoulders of the dragon god, was immensely powerful. He knew that Rhaegalur could protect him, that his divine strength could obliterate any sect or cult that dared touch his bloodline.
The boy opened his mouth, the muscles of his throat tensing to pronounce the fateful words: "It was the Cult of the Brand. There were men on the upper platform, they were performing a ritual"
The words never came out.
The exact moment the first syllable was about to pass the barrier of his teeth, Hayjin felt a strange, incredibly violent sensation at the center of his nape right at the exact spot where the Brand had retreated beneath his epidermis. It was not ordinary physical pain; it felt as though an needle of absolute ice had been driven directly into his medulla oblongata, instantly severing every synaptic connection between his brain and his mouth.
His heartbeat, which up until a second prior had stabilized at 60 bpm, slowed abruptly, skipping two pulses in a row.
"W-what..."
Hayjin tried to breathe, but his lungs locked up in a rigid, tetanic cramp. Before his eyes, the surrounding world began to undergo a terrifying chromatic deceleration. The green light of the healers lost its intensity, fading into a dull, washed-out gray. The frantic sounds of the medical courtyard Adeline's shouts, Atlas's grunts, the buzzing of the instruments began to drift away, distorting as if transmitted through a radio channel choked by thousands of points of interference.
In front of him, Rhaegalur continued to move his lips, his expression shifting rapidly from suspicion to alarm upon seeing his son's face suddenly turn ashen, but no sound reached the boy's ears anymore.
Without him even realizing it, without a chance to utter a cry or grip the stone column for support, the three-dimensional space of the emergency courtyard cracked in two. There was no visible spatial tear like the mages' portal; there was a structural collapse of his own visual perception. The lawn vanished beneath his boots, the stone walls of the fortress dissolved like mist in the sun, and the entire figure of Rhaegalur was swallowed by a wave of absolute void.
Hayjin found himself once again catapulted into nothingness.
The transition was instantaneous, entirely devoid of any kinetic movement vector. One millisecond before, he was a clothed body, leaning against a stone column in the middle of a hundred people; a millisecond later, reality had completely reset.
Hayjin opened his eyes or rather, his consciousness registered the act of opening them and found himself back within that strange, utterly empty dimension he had experienced during the acute phase of the dungeon.
There was no floor. There was no ceiling. There were no blue crystal walls, no rubble, and no traces of blood. There was only an infinite, absolute space, dominated by a total absence of light that was not ordinary darkness, but a chromatic density reminiscent of liquid ink before it is spread onto paper.
The boy looked down at his body. He found himself floating completely naked in the dead center of that nothingness, leaving his epidermis exposed to an absence of temperature that was neither hot nor cold, but simply devoid of thermal conduction. His skin appeared incredibly white in that context, almost luminescent, entirely free of any trace of the previous mutation: his hands had returned to their human form, his fingernails short and regular, his muscles stripped of that kinetic empowerment that had allowed him to shatter the Cult Leader's bones.
Again... here again? His voice resonated inside his own head, but no displacement of air escaped his lips. In this dimension, the physics of acoustics did not exist. Words were pure thought floating in the void.
Hayjin tried to move his arms and legs to find some sense of orientation, a vector of buoyancy, but every movement was utterly futile. There was no gravity, no friction, no up or down. It was a condition of total sensory isolation, a logical prison where the only surviving variable was his own self-awareness.
"Why am I back here?" The boy's mind began to calculate probabilities with desperate frenzy, fighting to maintain control despite the ancestral terror of that nothingness. "The Brand is dormant. The Cult Leader is dead. Then why have I been sucked back into this limbo? What triggered it this time?"
As he sought to formulate a hypothesis based on theorems of dimensional stability, Hayjin registered a presence.
It was not the embrace of the naked female figure with the veins of gold and silver. This time, the density of the liquid ink behind him began to shift, creating a series of invisible micro-currents that began to wrap around his bare legs, slowly winding their way up toward his torso like the filaments of an arachnid web waiting for the perfect moment to tighten and claim definitive control over his soul.
Hayjin understood, with a terrifying clarity, that the dungeon had never been the true danger. The true danger was this dimension this void that had never truly freed him, but had remained latent inside his being, primed to drag him back the moment he attempted to reveal the truth to the outside world. With his eyes wide open in the nothingness, the boy prepared to face the abyss for the second time, painfully aware that this time there would be no Evelyn and no golden dragon to wrench him from the fall.
I am losing control... he thought, as his abstract vision of that nothingness began to fade into a vitreous gray.
In the real world, the collapse of his physical body was blindingly obvious to anyone capable of reading biological signs. Hayjin, still leaning against the slate column, suddenly stopped breathing. His chest remained locked in an incomplete exhalation. His jaw clenched with such sudden, structural force that his back teeth ground together, producing a sinister sound of cracking enamel.
Rhaegalur, whose eyes were locked onto his son's face, perceived the exact instant the boy's vital frequency underwent a violent inversion of polarity. Hayjin's ordinary aura weak, almost imperceptible was instantly replaced by a dense, freezing vibration emanating directly from the base of his skull.
"Hayjin?" The dragon god's voice lost every shred of its aristocratic detachment, dropping a full octave. He stepped forward, extending his right hand toward the boy's shoulder. "Hayjin, look at me. Answer me immediately. What is happening to you?"
The boy did not answer. Slowly, his eyes began to roll back. His pupils vanished beneath his upper eyelids, revealing only the white sclerae, which were suddenly shot through by a web of swelling capillaries, saturating with an unusually dark, almost purplish blood. A thin line of dark serum began to trickle from his left nostril, sliding over his upper lip and dripping onto the wet floor.
Within the limbo, Hayjin watched the dark tendrils converge simultaneously toward the center of his spiritual face. There was no pain only the sound of something snapping definitively in the deepest recesses of his being.
Ah... it's over.
In the real world, there was no time for a final breath, nor for a cry of agony.
SPLAT-BOOM.
Without a single warning sign, Hayjin's head violently detonated.
The entire upper portion of the boy's body was utterly disintegrated in a fraction of a second.
The white fragments of his frontal and parietal bones were launched in every direction with the raw violence of grenade shrapnel, embedding themselves deeply into the slate walls of the courtyard and shattering the medical monitoring crystals hanging from the ceiling.
His brain matter the frontal lobes, the cerebellum, the brainstem was instantaneously reduced to a gray and pink mush that splattered violently across the vaulted ceiling of the chamber, before slowly dripping down in long, viscous filaments.
His eyeballs were projected forward by the sheer pressure, his optic nerves torn away like burnt electrical wires, before disintegrating entirely against the stone floor.
The shockwave of blood and viscera slammed full-force into those standing closest. Rhaegalur, who was less than a meter away, was completely painted by the slaughter. His imposing face, his long crimson hair, and his aristocratic robes were instantly drenched by a geyser of arterial blood warm, ferrous, and thick with lumps of brain tissue and fragments of nasal cartilage.
The dragon god stood frozen, his eyes wide, staring blankly into the empty void where, a millisecond prior, Hayjin's head had been.
Hayjin was dead, his head erased from existence, and the secret of the Cult of the Brand remained safely buried in the absolute silence of his destroyed flesh.