While Dex's shattered body lay across the carpet of pale blue glowing moss in the heart of the "Hidden Sanctuary," and as his ragged breaths quickened in an instinctive, desperate attempt to cling to the fragile threads of life, something strange happened to his perception. Time suddenly stopped in his fading consciousness. The sounds of his own panting vanished, the echo of Lumia's panicked screams ringing in his ears faded away, and the smell of sulfurous smoke and burning magical ash that enveloped his body dissipated.
In their place came an ancient sound, a monotonous and desolate rhythm, a sound Dex thought he had buried forever beneath thick layers of fire and ash in the folds of his soul: the sound of heavy raindrops striking a cold, rusty metal roof.
Dex opened his eyes, but he did not see the towering white trunks of the World Tree, nor did he see the sky of the Sacred Forest. He found himself sitting, bound and trapped, inside the damned prison transport bus.
In that moment, he was not a superhero with the mythical "Phoenix Core" in his chest, nor was he the confident young man of the "Williams" family planning to challenge the gods of this magical world. He was just an ordinary human boy, barely twenty years old. He wore a thin, coarse linen shirt, stained with the grime of temporary holding cells and the sweat of fear. His hands were bound in front of him by heavy, cold, and cruel iron shackles, their unpolished edges cutting into his slender wrists with every violent jolt of the dilapidated bus as it traveled over the unpaved road.
The atmosphere outside the small windows, fortified by a dense grid of intersecting steel bars, was utterly bleak and oppressive. The sky wasn't just raining; it was a flat gray canvas, devoid of any gradient that might inspire hope. The dark clouds hung so low and heavy that they looked like the roof of a cosmic dungeon closing in on the entire world, suffocating breaths and blocking out the sunlight forever. The rain did not fall gently or mercifully like a life-giving shower; it poured down like sharp blades, like the spiteful tears of angry gods, striking the bus windows with a sharp cruelty that made one feel nature itself was conspiring against him, participating in his unjust, theatrical trial.
Dex turned his burden-heavy head to look out the window at the bare trees fleeing backward like deformed ghosts. On the surface of the cold glass, fogged by the prisoners' breaths, he saw his own reflection. He stared at it as if looking at a stranger. It was the face of an innocent youth, its features soft, not yet tainted by the cruelty of the real world, untouched by the trenches of scars. But, deep within his blue eyes, there was a terrifying brokenness, a dark void whose depth no physical wound, no matter how gruesome, could ever match.
He had just been sentenced to twenty years. Twenty full orbits around the sun, twenty years of the spring of his youth, of his ambitions, of his natural right to love, to live, and to discover himself... all of it would be lost, would rot and turn to dust behind the walls of "Black Rock Prison." It was the most dangerous, hideous, and isolated prison in the entire country. And this sentence wasn't the result of some heinous crime he had committed, but simply because he was the weakest piece on a dirty political chessboard, the victim of blind vengeance and a despicable settling of scores against his father.
At that exact moment, inside that dark bus reeking of sweat, cheap tobacco, and despair, Dex's mind was a grueling, destructive battlefield. A dual psychological struggle was tearing at his very being, threatening to drive him mad.
On one hand, his heart erupted with a volcano of pure rage. A searing, stinging anger boiling in his veins like molten lead against everyone who had a hand in destroying his life. He raged against the old judge with the sagging face, who had read the harsh sentence without bothering to look into Dex's eyes for even a second, as if reading a grocery list rather than a decree executing a human being's future. He raged against the traitorous lawyer, who claimed to defend him, only to sell him out without a shred of remorse for a handful of green banknotes and the promise of a petty promotion, handing him over to the guillotine with a sickly smile. He raged against the entire system, the rotting structure of justice that had stripped him of his freedom with the strike of a stupid wooden gavel. Dex wanted to stand up, to scream until his throat tore, to smash the walls of the bus with his skull, to burn the world and everyone in it. "I didn't do anything!" he screamed in the dark cellar of his mind, a silent scream that made his soul bleed. "Why me? Why are they taking my right to breathe under the sun when I haven't hurt an ant in my life?"
But, on the other hand, running parallel to this incinerating anger, was terror. A black, viscous terror, cold as graveyard ice, creeping maliciously from the tips of his bare feet upward to grip his heart muscle. He knew the reputation of "Black Rock" all too well. Every child trembled at the sound of its name. It wasn't just a prison; it was a slaughterhouse for souls. A place entered only by hardened criminals and human monsters who had lost all connection to humanity, a place where it was said the gods themselves turned a blind eye in forgetfulness or disgust. There, brute, savage force was the only law, and the weak, the innocent like him, were nothing but currency to be traded, toys to be broken for the amusement of monsters, or food for blood-starved souls.