The blood on Hayjin's skin was beginning to congeal, turning into a dark, sticky, crusted film that pulled at the flesh of his face. His fingers, trembling and numb to any sensation of heat, were buried in the blood-soaked strands of Zhilian's golden hair. The princess's head hung from his hands like a dead weight a macabre relic whose severed neck continued to drip thick strands of venous fluid onto the uneven paving of the courtyard.
Hayjin took a step. Then another. A mechanical, graceless motion, akin to a puppet whose strings were being yanked by an invisible, sadistic puppeteer.
The world around him had lost all logical cohesion. The roar of fires devouring wooden structures, the guttural snarls of aberrant creatures hunting through the alleyways, the agonizing shrieks of soldiers being dismembered a few meters away everything reached his ears filtered through a dense, muffled veil of air, as though he were submerged at the bottom of a pitch-black ocean.
It's not real... it can't be real...
The thought began to turn in his head like a frantic worm, a paranoid spiral threatening to shatter his mind once and for all.
It's the mark. It's the mark torturing me again. I never left my house... I'm still on the floor, my head burning, and this is just another hallucination. Zhilian isn't dead. She can't have died like this. Just a moment ago she was smiling at me, talking to me... and now I'm holding her head in my hands? No. No, no, no. I'm waking up. In a moment I'll open my eyes and I'll still be on Earth, in my bed... or in the palace, waking up...
His feet, wrapped in leather boots frayed and smeared with gunpowder and human flesh, carried him blindly past the threshold of the courtyard of honor, pushing him into the side alleys connecting the royal residence to the citadel's inner gardens.
An acrid stench of spilled viscera and scorched flesh hit his nostrils, so intense and tangible that bile rose in his throat. Yet Hayjin kept walking, red and dilated eyes staring into nothingness, his mind locked in the infinite cycle of his delirious questions.
And what if I'm already dead? What if I died that first time back on Earth, and this entire kingdom, Exilia, the dragons, the princesses... what if it's all just a purgatorial nightmare crafted to punish me?
He rounded the corner of a partially collapsed guard tower. The alley floor was a carpet of rubble, broken arrows, and disfigured bodies.
There, he froze.
Less than five meters away, swarming at the base of a destroyed marble fountain, was a pack of deformed wolves. The beasts were anything but natural: long bodies covered in grey, hairless skin exposed ribs jutting like blades; their jaws, opening in three vertical sections, produced wet crunching and tearing sounds as they fought over what remained of a small body lying on the ground.
Trapped beneath the hooked paws of one monster protruded a scrap of fine fabric a white and light-blue silk gown stained dark red. And just beyond, half-crushed beneath the weight of a downed wolf carcass, lay Princess Wren.
The girl had been mauled without a shred of mercy. Her tiny chest was torn completely open, ribs snapped outward like the petals of a macabre flower, while two of the deformed wolves were literally burying their muzzles in her exposed guts, fighting over her still-warm internal organs. Wren's pale, lifeless face was turned upward; her light eyes, once full of childish, capricious vitality, stared at the ash-choked sky with a horrifying, earthy stillness.
Hayjin looked at her.
His expression didn't change, but something inside his chest shattered with the violence of crushed glass. A dull knot lodged in his throat, choking back any possibility of a scream.
The crying that rose from his chest was a horrific thing not an open wail, but a tight, suffocating sob, a silent gasp of air struggling from his lungs while tears, mingled once more with blood from his damaged tear ducts, carved two dark tracks down his ash-stained face. He brought a hand to his mouth, biting down hard to stop himself from making any sound, as his knees buckled for the umpteenth time.
"Wren..."
Hayjin collapsed onto his knees upon the blood-soaked gravel.
He could no longer stand. His strength had been drained, leaving him only with the crushing realization of his own utter powerlessness. He doubled over, resting his forehead against the cold stone, and clutched Zhilian's head to his chest.
He embraced it with total desperation, pressing the girl's severed face against his neck, staining his skin and shirt with the blood still dripping from the base of her skull.
"I'm sorry..." Hayjin whispered, his voice reduced to a hoarse murmur, broken by internal sobs that wracked his shoulders violently. "I'm sorry, Zhilian... please, I'm sorry..."
His fingers sank into the princess's hair, clutching it as if desperately trying to reattach her to his own body, to give her a shred of his own warmth.
"I promised you... I promised I'd support you... that I'd stay by your side..." Hayjin continued to stammer, choking back words against the corpse's icy cheeks. "I made you believe I was someone... that I was a warrior, a knight capable of protecting you... but I'm nothing. I was never anything. I'm just a coward who watched as they tore you apart... as they ripped the life out of you right in front of my eyes..."
Tears fell in flakes upon Zhilian's closed eyelashes, washing away some of the dust covering her skin.
"I didn't save you... I didn't save Wren... I didn't save anyone..."
"Oh, well, on that point I agree with you completely. You really are a fantastic piece of useless, whining trash."
The voice echoed behind him thin, metallic, drenched in an ostentatious, irritating joviality.
Hayjin didn't move. He didn't even flinch. The roar of his own guilt was too loud to leave room for surprise.
Slowly, padded footsteps approached, stopping a meter away. The feline humanoid, returned to his original dimensions but still coated in the crusts of blood and drool from his earlier transformation, crouched down with the grace of a sated predator, resting his elbows on his knees and looking down at Hayjin.
"Allow me to formally introduce myself, seeing as we were interrupted earlier by your pathetic emotional breakdown," the creature said, tilting his head with a sly grin that revealed sharp fangs. "My name is Karjalan. And, as much as it deeply disgusts me, I am here to make you a proposition."
Hayjin remained on his knees, Zhilian's head still pressed against his chest, red eyes fixed on the puddle of blood on the ground.
Karjalan let out a theatrical sigh, shaking his head. "Listen closely, little worm. My Leader has expressed a strong, inexplicable interest in you. Don't ask me why as far as I'm concerned, you're just a living failure, a weakling who only knows how to shed tears over the corpse of his favorite royal whore. But orders are orders, as I'm sure you understand. The Leader wants you to come with me."
The humanoid extended a gloved hand, clicking his sharp nails against the metal of his guards. "So, here's how things stand: you'd better pick up your miserable ass and come with me now if you care to keep breathing. Alternatively... well, I can always leave you to die here amid this carnage, head back to the Leader, and spin a convincing little tale about how you were reduced to mush before I could intervene. Makes no difference to me. So? What's your choice, worm?"
Silence fell between them once more, broken only by the distant crackle of flames and the chewing sounds of deformed wolves continuing to devour Wren's remains.
Hayjin didn't answer right away. He remained motionless for several seconds, his breathing slow, deep, fading. Then, with an almost unnatural slowness, he pulled Zhilian's head away from his chest and tucked it firmly under his left arm.
He stood up.
His legs, previously trembling, planted firmly into the ground with the stability of stone. His face was still streaked with dark trails of blood and tears, his eyes were two red caverns of pure grief, but his expression of desperation had completely dissolved, replaced by a rigid, cold mask devoid of any trace of fear.
Hayjin locked eyes with Karjalan.
"Go to hell..." Hayjin said. Just three words, spoken in a flat, steady tone a steel blade sharpened in ice.
Karjalan raised an eyebrow, visibly surprised by the shift in attitude. "Really? You'd prefer to end up like your friends?"
Hayjin took a step toward him, not retreating an inch. Tears continued to fall from his bloodshot eyes, but his face was a mask of blind, absolute resolve.
"You won't get away with this," Hayjin said, his voice direct and fiercely serious. "I swear to you... I swear on my life and on the blood of every single person you murdered tonight... that I will make you pay for all of it. Down to the very last corpse. You will pay for Zhilian. You will pay for Wren. You will pay for every life you snuffed out for your own sick entertainment."
Karjalan listened, the smile on his lips widening into an increasingly twisted curve.
"I will make you suffer the worst agonies of hell," Hayjin continued, taking another step, his right hand clenched into a fist so tight his knuckles nearly split the skin. "And above all... I will make you pay for killing me the first time, back on Earth. Did you think I forgot? I will hunt you down. I will find you. And when I have you in my hands, I will give you a death so slow, so painful, and so agonizing that you will beg for the end for days before I grant you permission to close your eyes."
Karjalan froze. For a second, his mouth hung open. Then, a tremor surged through his spine.
The creature brought his hands to his cheeks as a thrill of pure, uncontrollable ecstasy coursed through his entire body, making the fur on his arms stand on end. His amber eyes gleamed with a wild, utterly insane light.
"Oh... oh, Good Lord..." Karjalan whispered, his voice trembling with excitement. "This... this is magnificent! Look at you! That's the look I wanted to see! Please... please, Hayjin! Really promise me! Tell me you'll do it! Tell me you'll rip the skin off my body inch by inch! Make me experience the slowest, most agonizing death you can conceive! Please, let me feel it!"
Hayjin stared at him with disgust and detachment, thinking of how sick, twisted, and irredeemably mad this creature was. There was no logic to leverage, no humanity to appeal to: Karjalan was merely an empty shell filled with perversion and sadism.
Without gracing him with another word, Hayjin lowered his gaze to Zhilian's head cradled in his hands. He gently placed his fingers on her forehead, brushing away a strand of bloodied hair.
Wait for me... he said to her in his mind, speaking directly to the princess's soul. I promise I'll fix everything. I will fix this disaster. When I go back... I'll fix every single thing.
Karjalan, still wracked by that thrill of sick pleasure, offered a deep, theatrical bow. "Then we have a deal, my dear traveler! I can't wait for you to try!"
A second later, before Hayjin could even blink, Karjalan vanished. There was no sound, no plume of smoke: the creature simply dissolved into thin air with absurd, superhuman speed, leaving behind only the emptiness of the desolate alley.
Hayjin stood alone.
With the monster's departure, the veil of cold determination that had sustained him fractured instantly. The weight of reality slammed back into his chest with the force of a sledgehammer.
He thought of Isabelle, lying somewhere inside the fortress, slumped in a pool of her own blood, dead from the wound sustained in the early stages of the attack without anyone able to save her. He thought of Wren, whose remains were still being devoured a few steps away.
"Forgive me..." Hayjin screamed toward the sky, collapsing completely. "Wren... Isabelle... Zhilian... forgive me! It's my fault! It's all my fault!"
His weeping erupted uncontrollably a desperate, chaotic torrent of tears and sobs tearing at his throat as he continued to clutch Zhilian's head to his chest like a frightened child.
Meanwhile, across the rest of Opes' capital, the slaughter reached its tragic climax.
Sage Arkon, escorted by a handful of royal guards with armor in ribbons and faces pale with terror, fled desperately through the citadel's subterranean passages. The old sage kept looking back, hearing the screams of soldiers caught and mauled in the dark tunnels by hunting beasts. There was no glory, no dignity in his flight: only the blind urge to survive a massacre that had destroyed centuries of the kingdom's history in a matter of hours.
Outside, in the main plaza, Rheagular was still roaring against the dark blue energy barrier trapping him. The Dragon God channeled all his divine power, his fangs flashing with sacred flames and his mighty arms straining against the invisible gravitational pressure, cracking the ground beneath. Yet the dark magic was too dense, too concentrated: every effort to break free and reach Hayjin proved futile, forcing him to watch helplessly as the city was undone.
In the citadel streets, the populace had been abandoned entirely to their fate. Knights in golden armor were pulled from their mounts and torn apart by multi-limbed abominations; women and children were hunted through alleys and eaten alive, their shrieks drowned out by the crunch of chewed flesh and snapping bones echoing between burning homes. The capital had become an open-air abattoir, a graveyard without graves where death reigned supreme.
And then, the final breaking point arrived.
The immense royal castle of Opes its foundations severely compromised by the explosion of dimensional rifts and the weight of dark energy crashing from the sky began to buckle.
A titanic roar, the sound of rock splitting along miles of masonry, shook the earth. The towering central spires began to tilt sideways, snapping in half. Titanic blocks of granite as large as houses, finely carved cornices, stone gargoyles, and entire sections of ceiling tore free from the heights of the fortress, plunging downward with the devastating force of an avalanche.
Hayjin was still there, kneeling in the alley below, completely unable to move. He didn't even look up when the castle's gigantic shadow eclipsed the dim light of the fires. He kept sobbing uncontrollably, clutching Zhilian's head against his heart, his lips moving continuously to whisper the names of everyone he had failed to save.
"I'm coming..." Hayjin murmured through his sobs. "I'm coming..."
The mass of thousands of tons of granite and marble crashed directly upon him.
The impact was indescribably violent a scene of pure, visceral devastation.
A titanic block of carved stone struck Hayjin square in the torso, instantly snapping his spine and crushing his ribcage like thin paper. The human animal's internal organs exploded under the terrifying pressure, spraying dark blood and torn tissue across the rubble's fissures. His legs were mangled into a shapeless pulp of shredded muscle and white bone splinters piercing skin as the stone continued its destructive path.
Zhilian's head, torn from his grip during the impact, was crushed a second later by a falling column, reduced to a red stain and brain matter smeared across the ground.
Finally, a three-ton cornerstone plummeted directly onto Hayjin's skull. The sound of his skull giving way was a sharp, wet pop: facial bones shattered inward, eyes burst from their sockets and splattered against rock, and brain matter mingled with blood and dust into a final, horrific pulp soaking the base of the ruins.
The royal castle of Opes finished its collapse, burying the entire alley beneath a mountain of smoking, pulverized rubble.
Beneath hundreds of tons of stone and shattered flesh, Hayjin ceased to breathe, swallowed by the total darkness of death.