The fist cut through the air with the roar of a gale, slamming into the feline beast's face with brutal, primal force. The crunch of yielding nasal cartilage was sharp a dull snap echoing off the stone walls of the hallway, accompanied by a spray of dark blood splattering across brick and dust-stained floor. The humanoid was hurled back several meters until crashing into a support pillar, yet the cackle that kept bubbling from his throat was not that of a wounded man: it was the warped litany of a creature that found in pain the only true form of ecstasy.
Hayjin stood rooted to the center of the corridor, fist still clenched, the skin of his knuckles raw and coated in red. His eyes two completely black chasms where the sclera had been swallowed by the mark's darkness rolled wildly out of control, while a manic, wheezing, dry laugh forced its way through his lungs. He was ready to pounce again. Ready to rip out that golden mane with his bare hands, to tear him to shreds.
Then, suddenly, the hell inside his head exploded.
It was no gradual pain. It felt as if a white-hot blade, soaked in molten lead and barbed along its edges, had been driven straight into the center of his frontal lobe, hammered deeper in relentless strikes. Hayjin froze mid-step. His laughter died instantly, choked off by a hoarse grunt that twisted his throat in a violent spasm.
The mark on his neck did not merely glow: it began pulsing at a dizzying frequency, expanding and contracting like a black heart embedded in his skin. The purple light, previously spectral, turned into a blinding, toxic glare that seared the flesh around the symbol's edges, sending wisps of smoke from the hem of his clothes.
"N-no..." Hayjin tried to articulate, but his voice slipped away, replaced by a surge of frothy white drool dripping from his chin and staining his chest.
His darkened eyes wobbled violently before the black stain suddenly receded, restoring white sclera, though the remaining pupils shrank to pinpoint specks microscopic dilations of raw terror. His legs gave out. His knees slammed onto the tile with a dull crunch of bone, and Hayjin began contorting on the floor, doubling over, hands clamped to the sides of his skull as if desperately trying to hold the sutures of his head together before it split in two.
An inhuman, broken scream a roar of rage and visceral agony tore from his lungs.
In his mind, the reality of the hallway vanished completely, swallowed by a sequence of hallucinations so vivid and detailed they felt branded onto his corneas with red-hot iron.
He saw Zhilian. Not the injured girl behind him, but a ten-meter-tall version of her, nailed to a titanic cross of black obsidian erected atop a hill of sun-bleached skulls. Her fingers were splayed, pierced by rusted iron spikes as large as daggers, her abdominal skin completely flayed to reveal pulsing viscera hanging downward, devoured by flocks of red-eyed crows. And Zhilian's voice screamed in his ears accusatory, desperate, a melody of pure hatred: "It's your fault, Hayjin! You brought us here! You killed me!"
Another spasm. The vision shifted instantly. Now it was Wren. The young princess lay on the floor in a pool of thick, gelatinous blood, her body severed in half at the waist, her shattered spine protruding from her crushed torso while invisible, formless hands ripped out her hair and mangled her limbs like slaughterhouse meat.
And finally, the capital of Opes. The entire citadel its towering spires, century-old ramparts, parade grounds, and commoners' homes all burned in a single, titanic fireball of purple and orange. The sky had split in two, raining thick blood and glowing ash while the screams of hundreds of thousands were swallowed by the roar of flames consuming stone itself.
"STOP! STOP! GET OUT OF MY HEAD! STOP!" Hayjin shrieked, rolling across the stone, bashing his forehead against the floor until the skin above his brow split open.
Zhilian, still doubled over on the ground from her own illusions and the searing ringing pounding in her brain, heard the boy's desperate screams. With superhuman strength of will, drawing upon every ounce of royal discipline instilled in her since childhood, she bit her tongue until it bled to force her body awake from the induced nightmare. The hot, metallic taste filled her mouth, temporarily breaking the trance.
Her eyes widened as she saw Hayjin contorting on the floor like a possessed man.
"Hayjin!" Zhilian cried, dragging herself on her knees and dust-stained fingers, ignoring the nausea that made the room spin. "Hayjin, look at me! I'm here! It's not real, whatever you're seeing isn't real!"
She reached the boy and seized his shoulders, trying to lift his head, but froze with a shudder of pure terror.
From the corners of Hayjin's eyes, from tear ducts strained by unfathomable intracranial pressure, thick streams of dark blood oozed out. The fluid ran down his cheeks, mingling with the frothy spit coating his lips and chin. His eyeballs had turned entirely red a solid mass of ruptured blood vessels injected with hatred, devoid of any visible iris or pupil.
"I-I can't see... I can't see anything... Zhilian!" Hayjin shrieked, his voice utterly hysterical, fingers grasping blindly in the air for her form as violent tremors wracked his body. "Everything is burning... my head is burning!"
A few paces away, leaning his back against the fluted stone pillar, the feline humanoid watched them. He hadn't made a single move to interfere. With a gloved hand, he lazily wiped away the trickle of blood running from his broken nose, smearing it across his fair cheek. His amber eyes gleamed with amused, wicked light, a sly, arrogant smirk set on his sharp face as he savored every second of the grotesque scene.
"What a delicious spectacle..." the feline whispered in his thin, metallic voice. "Look at you tearing yourself apart from the inside, my dear traveler. The mark is unforgiving, you know? You cannot contain what does not belong to you."
Zhilian felt her rage finally eclipse her fear. She let go of Hayjin and surged to her feet in one fluid motion, drawing her sword with a grip so tight it strained her ligaments. Her golden gaze locked onto the creature.
"You... filthy bastard!" the princess roared.
Without waiting for a response, Zhilian lunged forward. Her light magic, stoked by the desperate need to protect Hayjin, exploded around her like a golden comet. Swift, precise, lethal strikes. The princess attacked with a meticulously calculated flurry of magic-infused slashes, seeking to pierce the feline's throat and chest.
The humanoid evaded the first two blows with swift, elegant sways of his torso, his blonde mane swaying like a predator's crest, but Zhilian gave him no room to breathe. Channeling a wave of luminous mana into her hand, she unleashed a horizontal arc of light slicing through the air. A crescent of pure sacred light erupted from her palms, catching the being off guard as he tried to leap backward.
The light struck him square in the chest, shredding his dark anthracite tunic and searing the flesh beneath. An acrid stench of burned skin drifted down the hallway.
The feline snarled a guttural, wild sound stumbling back a few paces and clutching his seared chest. His arrogant smirk fractured for a moment, replaced by a grimace of dark annoyance. "Insolent little princess... do you truly think yourself equal to this game?"
Before Zhilian could press her advantage and deliver a finishing blow, a series of monstrous roars rumbled behind her, echoing from the ruins of the collapsed ceiling nearby.
Three powerful, disfigured shadows plunged into the gallery with the violence of a hurricane.
It was an aberrant assault pack: a bear of terrifying girth, its skin entirely absent to expose raw bundles of red muscle and bone plates jutting from its back; a wolf with a tripartite jaw and terrifyingly long, double-jointed limbs; and a warped warhorse whose head was a mangled mass of sharp teeth and rusted irons driven directly into empty eye sockets.
The three beasts lunged at Zhilian before she could even complete her pivot.
The wolf struck her left shoulder, its three-part jaws clamping down with tremendous force, piercing Zhilian's dress and sinking fangs deep into live flesh. The bear dealt a colossal swipe to her back, slamming her into the stone floor and shredding her tissue with bone claws across her kidneys. The warped horse crushed her leg under an iron-shod hoof, snapping her tibia with a sickening crunch that wrung a scream of agony from Zhilian.
"AHHH! DAMN YOU!"
Brought down to the floor, bathing in her own blood, Zhilian refused to break. The sight of Hayjin still contorting a few meters away blind and screaming fueled her with an almost frightening surge of adrenaline.
Using her light magic through both bloodstained hands, Zhilian channeled every drop of remaining mana in her body. Her blade radiated light so intense it illuminated the entire corridor like day a solar flare that made the beasts shriek.
With a desperate twist of her torso, Zhilian severed the wolf's head in a single ascending slash of light, parting neck from carcass.
Without pausing, as the bear lunged to crush her neck, she thrust her sword straight into the beast's gaping maw, driving the golden steel blade through its palate into its brain. The bear stiffened and collapsed heavily atop her, crushing her ribs. With one final superhuman effort, Zhilian drew a hunting dagger from her belt and plunged it with blind fury into the warped horse's single remaining socket, twisting the blade until the monster keeled over lifeless.
Zhilian lay amid the corpses of the three beasts, gasping for breath, her vision wavering violently. Her body was a singular locus of agony: her mauled shoulder, shredded back, and broken leg made standing up impossible.
The feline humanoid approached slowly, his padded footsteps making no sound. He surveyed Zhilian with an expression of amusement and disgust intertwined.
"Impressive for a royal worm," the creature said, raising his dark steel dagger. "But your performance ends here."
The creature drove a downward thrust aimed directly at the princess's heart. Driven by pure desperation, Zhilian raised a defensive barrier of light to parry. The impact was violent: the feline's blade slid off Zhilian's barrier, veering slightly off course, but still plunged deeply into the girl's right shoulder, piercing muscle and collarbone.
Zhilian screamed, coughing up a spat of blood onto the creature's garments.
The feline tore out the blade with cruel slowness. Then, gazing at the tip coated in the princess's thick blood, he brought the iron back to his lips and licked the warm fluid with manic deliberation, closing his eyes as a guttural sigh escaped him.
The instant Zhilian's blood touched his tongue, something within the humanoid shifted drastically.
His veins bulged instantly beneath pale skin, turning a greenish-black hue and pulsing like caterpillars beneath flesh. His skeletal structure groaned and reorganized with a horrific crunching sound; his size expanded by a third, shoulder and arm muscles swelling until nearly tearing the sleeves of his dark tunic. Dense, yellowish, foul foam dripped from his jaws, and his amber eyes lost all trace of intellect, transforming into twin spheres of pure, blazing blood-red.
The creature roared a sound devoid of anything human or feline: the bellow of an abject deity.
With a flick of his clawed hand, the snap of his fingers sounded like a sledgehammer striking an anvil.
SNAP!
Across the corridor, in the walls, ceiling, and floor, dozens of dimensional fissures tore open simultaneously black and purple rifts from which hundreds of macabre, disturbing entities swarmed forth.
Skinless horrors, six-legged reptiles with warped human faces, giant rats with human arms sprouting from their backs brandishing rusted blades.
The tide of monsters did not stop in the hallway; it engulfed the entire castle structure like an avalanche of rotting flesh and claws. The creatures stormed through corridors, breaching chamber doors, trampling fleeing guards, servants, and nobles. The air filled instantly with gruesome noises: the crunch of human bone chewed and snapped in two, the wet tear of flesh ripped alive, desperate shrieks of people being dismembered while trying frantically to crawl away, dragging their own guts across hall marble. Castle Opes was being consumed alive from within, its ramparts buckling under the weight of that monstrous force.
The transformed humanoid now a terrifying, beastly giant turned back toward Zhilian, taking a step to crush her head beneath his armored greave.
Zhilian knew she had reached the end.
She felt the weight of death pressing on her eyelids, cold creeping from her chest toward her limbs. Yet her gaze fell on Hayjin. The boy lay a few meters away, face down, blind, covered in blood and drool, wracked by tremors and incoherent screams.
No... you must live... the princess thought.
With one final, desperate, titanic effort of will, Zhilian ignored her broken bones. Using her remaining intact left arm, she dragged her body across bloodied stone until she reached Hayjin. She seized his hand with a desperate grip a vise of fingers chilled by death.
She dragged him toward the edge of the gallery's grand window, previously shattered by collapses, overlooking the void forty meters above the castle inner courtyard.
Hayjin understood nothing, still screaming, red eyes staring into nothingness, his mind scorched by the mark's nightmare. "Zhilian! Zhilian, where are you?! There's fire... fire everywhere!"
Zhilian raised her chest slightly, leaning her back against the stone sill. She gazed at the terror-mangled face of the boy she had learned to love in that hell, and a smile of pure, heartbreaking tenderness bloomed on her blood-smeared lips.
Memories of their conversations flashed through her mind nights spent talking of the future once all this ended.
She thought of the continent of Exilia, its endless expanses of golden grass, cities suspended above crystal waterfalls, ruins of ancient Gods where the sun never set. She wanted to show him all of it. She wanted to walk beside him in a world free of marks, bloody wars, or monsters in the shadows.
"I wanted... I wanted so badly to show you the wonders of Exilia, Hayjin..." Zhilian whispered, her voice a soft murmur choked by blood filling her lungs. "Be strong... please... live."
With one last surge of all her remaining strength, Zhilian heaved her body and launched Hayjin out the window into empty air.
"ZHILIANNN!" Hayjin's scream dissolved into the night as he began plunging downward.
Yet before gravity pulled him too far, a cruel twist of fate allowed the boy's sight to record what unfolded a second later inside the window frame.
The giant humanoid and half a dozen macabre creatures descended upon Zhilian like a swarm of piranhas on helpless prey. It was a scene of total, terrifying, unspeakable violence and sadism.
The feline beast grabbed Zhilian's shoulder and, with inhuman force, ripped her right arm from her torso, spraying scarlet blood against the shattered stained glass. Dozens of monsters swarmed her belly, tearing clothes and flesh with fangs, ripping out internal organs while the princess was still conscious; her shrieks choked on blood pooling in her mouth before one beast bit into her throat, tearing trachea and carotid in a bloody carnage of shredded flesh, exposed guts, and splintered bone jutting from the wound.
Hayjin saw everything. Every single detail of that brutal slaughter burned into his mind with terrifying clarity as the wind howled in his ears during the fall.
"ZHILIIIIIIAN!"
Hayjin's shriek tore through the night before his body slammed violently into the wooden roof of a supply wagon parked in the courtyard below.
The wood gave way with a tremendous crash, partially breaking his fall but fracturing two ribs and dislocating his left shoulder. Hayjin tumbled onto the courtyard stone paving, hitting his head and lying motionless for several long seconds, dazed and winded.
When he finally managed to reopen his eyes, his vision was still hazy and veined with blood from burst tear ducts, but his surroundings made it clear he was no longer in the realm of the living.
Metaphorically and perhaps literally Hayjin stood at the center of hell.
The capital of Opes was destroyed. The outer walls were breached in multiple places by tower-sized behemoths; lower-city homes transformed into infernos casting dense columns of black smoke into the night sky. Everywhere around him, through streets and plazas, people died in atrocious ways. Royal guards were decapitated and bitten in two; mothers attempting to shelter children were impaled by spear-sharp limbs; panic erased all civil order, turning capital streets into an open-air slaughterhouse where piled corpses formed mounds of bloody flesh.
Not far from him, engulfed in the flames of a collapsed bastion, a titanic figure fought with the fury of a primal force.
It was Rheagular. The Dragon "God," in his imposing humanoid form, skin coated in scarlet scales and eyes burning like twin incandescent suns, was sweeping away hordes of monsters with blows of devastating power. With a single hand he seized the jaws of deformed hounds and snapped them in two, while with the other he unleashed slashes of pure draconic energy that reduced dozens of beasts to ash at a time. He was attempting to act as a living shield for fleeing citizens, roaring orders and incinerating any creature that dared approach surviving groups.
A short distance ahead, escorted by a handful of surviving royal guards as he stumbled down temple steps, stood Sage Arkon. The old mage was visibly wounded, his formal robes shredded and soot-covered, yet he remained alive, supported by soldiers.
Having incinerated another beast, Rheagular turned and spotted Arkon's form.
An expression of pure, blind rage painted the Dragon God's face. With a leap that cracked the stone paving beneath his feet, Rheagular crossed the distance and crashed down upon Arkon like an avalanche.
He grabbed the old sage by the collar of his robes with one hand, lifting him half a meter off the ground and shaking him violently enough to make his neck vertebrae pop.
"ARKON!" Rheagular roared, his voice amplified by draconic power that made surrounding building walls quiver. "WHERE IS HAYJIN?! WHERE THE FUCK IS HAYJIN?!"
The royal guard soldiers, panicking at the sight of their sage treated so roughly, instinctively drew their swords, pointing them trembling at Rheagular. "Release him! Lower your hands, creature of..."
"STAND BACK, YOU FOOLS!" Arkon wheezed with every breath left in his lungs, his face flushed purple from Rheagular's choking grip. The sage looked the Dragon God in the eye, reading the promise of imminent slaughter if he failed to provide an answer. Terror gripped his throat, but Arkon lied out of desperation, trying to maintain a shred of control: "Hayjin... Hayjin managed to escape! He's with the princesses! They fled through the north wing secret passage! They're in a safe place, far from the fortress!"
Rheagular clenched his jaw; his grip did not loosen. He closed his eyes for a second, attempting to expand his sensory perception to locate Hayjin's unique mana signature. But the chaos of battle, blood thick in the air, and interference from the Cult's dark magic made tracking impossible. He could not feel the boy's mana anywhere nearby.
"If I find out you're lying to me, Arkon, I will burn what remains of this kingdom..." Rheagular threatened in a low, lethal tone.
The Dragon God released his hold, dropping Arkon to the ground, and braced to take flight toward the north wing to check for himself.
Yet his feet failed to leave the earth.
Suddenly, a surge of dark blue energy dense, heavy, possessing an almost physical, tangible weight descended from the sky over the capital like an invisible hydraulic press.
The impact was catastrophic: already damaged buildings were literally crushed into dust within seconds. The courtyard bedrock sank two meters downward, tearing massive fissures through stone. Rheagular was pinned mid-motion, knees buckling beneath a weight so colossal that even his immense draconic strength struggled against it. The Dragon God roared in frustration, scales creaking beneath the gravitational pressure of dark blue energy wrapping around him like a prison, rendering him completely immobile.
Hayjin, still slumped on the floor a few dozen meters away, witnessed the destruction with a completely hollow, shell-shocked, catatonic stare. His brain was no longer capable of processing the horror surrounding him. He saw people torn apart inches away, tasted dust and blood in his mouth, yet remained anesthetized, suspended in a limbo of pure traumatic numbness.
Then, something struck the stone inches from his feet.
A wet, dull sound. THUD.
Hayjin lowered his gaze slowly, his red pupils fixing on the object that had tumbled from above.
It was Zhilian's severed head.
Her long, light-brown hair was matted with dark blood and masonry dust. Her face, once so proud and beautiful, was disfigured by deep cuts, yet her eyelids remained half-open, her lifeless eyes staring directly at Hayjin with an expression frozen in that sad, desperate smile.
An absolute silence descended upon Hayjin's mind, muting every sound of war, fire, and screaming across the capital.
Slowly, instinctively, Hayjin tilted his head upward, looking toward the wide-open gallery window from which he had been thrown.
Up there, standing on the broken stone ledge, stood the feline humanoid. His robes were drenched in Zhilian's blood, his new giant form wracked by faint spasms. Seeing Hayjin looking up, the creature raised a clawed hand and gave a friendly, playful wave, wiggling his fingers mockingly before stepping back into the castle shadows.
Hayjin remained on the ground, motionless.
Slowly, trembling hands coated in his own blood and hers, Hayjin reached out toward Zhilian's head.
He cradled her cold cheeks gently, lifting it from the ground and pulling it against his chest.
And there, doubled over amid the burning ruins of Opes, Hayjin stared endlessly into the deformed face of the princess as the final sliver of his sanity dissolved forever into darkness.