The room swallowed him whole.
For a moment, Elias could see nothing at all, not the floor, not the walls, not even his own hands, only a dense and suffocating darkness that seemed to press in from every corner of the room.
Behind him, the door stood somewhere in the dark, but even that was only a memory now, a shape his mind was trying to preserve before the dark erased it.
Then, slowly, a faint light revealed itself near the far side of the room.
Not enough to illuminate the room, but enough to confirm that it existed.
A broken window stood high above, and through it, pale, diluted light seeped in. It spread across a small section of the room, just enough to outline the closest objects.
Elias did not move.
He lay low against the floor, with one hand clamped over his mouth and his chest rising and falling in uneven pulses. Every breath felt too loud and every swallow too sharp. He could hear the monster somewhere just outside, creeping close to the doorway he had just slammed shut, and somehow the thing was quieter now. That made it even worse.
There was no crashing. No shrieking.
Only the faint, wet sound of it breathing.
Sniffing.
Listening.
The creature's presence scraped against the edges of the room like a blade dragged across stone. Elias could hear the slow, deliberate pace of something that knew he was near, and had all the time in the world to find him.
Elias kept still.
The smell in the room was stale, heavy with old cloth and cold wood, and beneath it all was a faint iron tang that made his throat tighten.
He tried to slow his breathing further.
In.
Out.
In.
Out.
The room answered with silence.
Then, something touched the back of his hand.
Elias stiffened.
It moved again, skittering across his skin.
His first instinct was to yank his hand away, and when he did, it struck the door with a loud bang that echoed through the castle.
For one terrible second, he just stared at it.
Then, he looked down.
It was an ant, blood red.
It was the size of a fingernail and shone wetly in the dim light, its segmented body jerking with speed as it scrambled away from his hand.
Elias stared at it.
Of all the things that could have touched him.
Of all the things that could have made that sound.
He let out the tiniest, strangled breath.
Then, the room changed.
The silence outside the door vanished.
A sound hit the other side with violent force.
The monster had heard.
The door exploded inward.
Elias rolled hard to the right just as the creature charged through the entrance with no hesitation. The impact of its body against the frame sent splinters and dust scattering into the dark, and for an instant, the light from the broken window flashed across its terrible face.
Its mouth gaped open with ragged, uneven flesh hanging around it. The loosened flesh around its jaw had not fully returned after the sigil's burn. His sword was still stuck in one of its eyes while the other was barely hanging onto its socket.
The monster entered the room like a collapsing wall.
Elias scrambled backward on instinct, his shoulder slamming into something hard and upright behind him.
The monster missed him by mere inches.
It struck the floor with enough force to send a wave of dust through the room, then turned immediately towards the sound of his breathing. Elias clamped a hand to his mouth again, but the moment he tried to suppress the cough, a harsh, involuntary sound escaped him.
The creature snapped its head in his direction.
Then, it moved.
Elias got to his feet quickly and backed away into the darkness. He could not see the room clearly, only shapes and shadows formed by the fine broken line of light above. But he could tell now that there were chairs.
Rows of them.
On both sides of a carpet that stretched deeper into the room, lined like a path towards some raised place at the far end. He could make out the shape of a platform or a dais ahead. But the darkness swallowed most of its details before he could process them.
Elias, however, had bigger issues at hand.
The creature came again.
Elias moved sideways, then back. His shoulders brushed against a chair that scraped loudly across the floor.
The sound was enough.
The monster lunged towards him with a wet, hungry snarl.
He stumbled around the end of the first row of chairs and ran down the carpeted center. The room was way longer than he had hoped.
The monster crashed behind him, striking a chair and sending it toppling over.
Elias needed space. He needed something.
The sigil pulsed weakly in his chest, still healing, but far from enough to make him feel strong. His legs were already burning with accumulated fatigue as the lactic acid rose faster and faster the harder he pushed himself.
He could feel it in his calves, in his thighs, in the strained ache of his back.
The monster was closer than before.
Elias reached the far end of the carpet and stopped short.
Dead end. There was no space to move, as a row of pillars blocked the path.
The room had closed in on him.
For one breathless second, he simply stared.
The monster's shadow spilled across the carpet behind him.
"System," Elias whispered through clenched teeth. "Please tell me you've got some brilliant plan."
The answer came immediately.
[ Yes I have. ]
Elias' nearly sighed in relief.
"You do?"
[ Correct. ]
"Finally… what is it?"
The monster's growling echoed from somewhere deep within the darkness.
The system answered without hesitation.
[ Engage the hostile entity. ]
Elias blinked.
Silence followed.
"…That's not exactly a plan."
[ It is the only plan. ]
Elias let out a long sigh.
"I walked right into that one, didn't I?"
[ Correct. ]
The monster smashed into a few chairs, leaving splintered wood scattered across the room.
Elias tried to run.
But something grabbed his leg.
The monster's arm shot through the broken remains and caught him by the ankle, its claws sinking in with extreme force. Elias fell forward with a shout.
Elias reached for the remaining sword on his back, but the movement was clumsy, slowed by the panic and pain of being dragged across the floor.
The creature pulled harder.
Then, Elias remembered. The way it had recoiled when the sigil burned, the way it had jumped back.
The problem, of course, was that the sigil was not a weapon he could use freely. It only flared while healing him. And exhausted his strength greatly.
If the monster tore him apart quickly and with enough force, if it killed him outright, the sigil would stop, and then he would just become a meal.
Elias knew that.
And so did the creature.
He forced his arm back and yanked the remaining sword free.
The monster let go of his ankle and lunged straight at him.
But Elias struck first. With every last ounce of strength left in him.
The blade cut into its side, cutting deeply into its side. The creature howled and reared backward. Its body jerked away from the slash, and in that instant Elias saw it.
The sword remained lodged in its side as the creature stumbled back, taking the weapon with it, clutching at the wound.
Beneath the torn flesh, something dark glinted.
"What… is that?"
[ Core detected. That is the primary source of the dissonance. ]
The monster's growl deepened.
[ Destruction of the core may finally defeat this entity. ]
Elias swallowed.
"…So that's… the kill switch."
But Elias was now unarmed.
His stomach turned violently again, and the nausea nearly dropped him to his knees as he threw up on the carpet below. His legs felt useless now. His muscles tightened and struggled to move.
The monster groaned.
Louder this time.
Elias barely had time to brace before it hit him.
The impact sent him flying into one of the room's pillars hard enough that he heard something crack. His shoulder exploded with pain. His hand struck the floor at a bad angle, and when he tried to move it, a sharp, grinding sensation ran straight up the bones.
It was fractured. Maybe broken.
He had no time to tell.
The monster was on him again before the pain had even finished registering. It caught him by the chest, lifted, and slammed him back down. Elias' teeth struck hard enough that he felt one crack, then another. A horrible metallic taste flooded his mouth as blood poured out across his tongue.
It struck him again.
His nose burst under the impact.
Warm blood ran immediately, and his eyes watered with the force of the blow. He couldn't tell what was tears and what was blood anymore. His vision flooded red at the edges, then blurred as the fluid in his eyes made everything glossy and bright.
He tried to crawl away.
The monster kicked him across the floor.
The world spun.
His mouth filled with blood again as he coughed, and the sound was wet and ugly. He felt blood at the corner of his lips, under his chin, running down the side of his face into his collar. His body hurt everywhere.
Then, he felt the monster above him again.
Too close.
The nausea took over. The room was spinning. His ears rang. He could barely think straight.
The creature's dangling eye stared down at him with horrible, determined focus.
But deep within the bright blue eye, Elias could see it – something trapped, something struggling to escape. It clawed at the surface of that gaze like a drowning person pounding against frozen ice, desperate to be seen, to be heard.
Help me.
The words were never spoken. Yet Elias felt them all the same.
His stomach twisted.
The creature took a small step forward.
But the eye kept staring.
And suddenly Elias felt afraid, not of the monster, but of what it was making him feel.
"No."
The word escaped before he realized he'd spoken.
Elias backed away. His voice cracked.
"Don't… don't look at me… like that…"
The thing tilted its head.
That pleading look remained. Something inside it was still reaching out.
"Stop it!"
Elias shouted.
"DON'T FUCKING LOOK AT ME THAT WAY!"
Elias' hand closed around the loose, bloody eyeball. His fingers plunged into the ruined socket. And then, he pulled.
The eye tore free, coming right out of the socket it was dangling from with a horrible screeching sound.
For a moment, it remained in his hand, the blue iris shaking violently as it dangled in the air. Fluid burst across his fingers, and the monster let out a scream that shook the entire room.
The monster reeled back, shrieking in blind agony.
But Elias could not enjoy the victory yet.
He scrambled backward, forcing his battered body to move.
But the monster reacted quickly. Elias barely had time to turn before the creature crashed into him.
The impact drove him to the floor.
It slammed down on him again, pinning him down beneath its very weight. Its claws dug into him as it forced itself over his body, and Elias felt a final, terrible clarity settle over him.
It was going to kill him.
He knew it.
The monster knew it.
The castle knew it.
And still, he would not stop moving.
Somewhere under all the pain, a thought began to form in his mind.
The monster pressed harder.
Elias felt another crack somewhere in his ribs.
"…System…"
His voice barely worked anymore.
"The sigil…"
He coughed.
"…Can I force it out?"
He had always thought of it as something to be kept safe inside him, protected so that it could protect him in return. But now he needed the opposite. He needed it to escape. To flow outward. To become something he could use before the monster finished him.
Silence followed.
But then:
[ Warning: Unsupervised sigil release is not recommended. Forced externalization may result in sigil corruption, and severe damage to the host. ]
Elias laughed through the blood.
The sound that came out of him was tired more than anything else.
"You know…"
He coughed.
"I'm already half-broken…"
The monster's claws dug deeper into his chest; nausea started to weigh even deeper on his chest.
"What exactly are you threatening me with?"
[ Warning: Host does not appear to understand the severity of the situation. ]
"…The host… doesn't fucking… care…"
Elias looked up at the monster looming over him.
And forced himself to focus.
The pain sharpened instantly.
His entire body seemed to seize as he tried to push the sigil outward.
Instead of letting the sigil sink into the wounds, he imagined every fracture, every cut, every torn muscle as an opening.
A path out.
The pressure inside him intensified immediately.
It felt as though something living had been trapped beneath his skin, and was now throwing itself against his ribs, searching desperately for a way to escape.
The warmth that usually gathered around his injuries pooled in his chest instead, compressing tighter and tighter until he thought his sternum might crack.
He pushed again.
The sigil slowly surged upward.
For a brief moment, Elias felt every wound in his body simultaneously. The broken teeth. The fractured hand. The torn muscles. The bruised ribs. The cut across his skin.
It felt like being peeled open from the inside.
Then his vision fractured.
For a heartbeat, he saw roots, branches.
A hallucination blooming from his chest in the middle of the pain, as he lay beneath the monster, half-dead.
Dark roots forced themselves outward through his body, then turned silver under the strange glow of the sigil. Branches erupted from his chest in a burst of pale light, elegant and terrible at once.
Roots curled around the monster's arms.
Branches wrapped its torso.
The whole vision seemed to bloom from Elias himself, as if some hidden forest had been waiting inside him all along and had finally found a way to breathe.
The branches passed through his skin as the trunk split from his chest.
Elias could feel them – real and solid – wrapped around the monster's limbs
The monster screeched as it strained against the tightening branches.
Elias could barely understand what he was seeing.
His body no longer felt like his own. Every nerve had long since passed pain and entered something stranger, a state of numbness.
The branches held.
The monster struggled.
And somewhere within the haze, a single thought surfaced.
NOW.
His consciousness lurched awake just enough to understand.
His hand grabbed the Vincatrium dagger.
[ HOST VITALS CRITICAL! IMMEDIATE TERMINATION RISK. ]
The blade was cold.
Blood made the handle slippery.
His fingers barely obeyed him.
But he gripped it, slowly and painfully.
The roots groaned.
Elias dragged himself forward.
Every movement felt impossible.
His vision blurred.
The monster's exposed core flickered in and out of focus.
The creature turned towards him.
With the last strength remaining in his broken body, Elias drove the dagger upward.
Straight into the core.
[ WARNING. ]
[ WARNING - ]
The world shattered into a bright white light.
And for a single heartbeat, everything fell silent.