A contract sealed between Rhys and Lenny in the shadow of impossibility.
And for the first time since finding himself in this fractured reality, Rhys felt the weight of helplessness begin to lift from his shoulders somewhat. He moved forward not because cosmic forces shoved him along a predetermined path, but because he had chosen to take the step himself.
His situation was still less than favourable, but you work with what you got.
"We should prepare," Lenny said, suddenly all business. He moved to the back of the cave where Rhys now noticed various items had been carefully arranged—weapons, containers, what might have been clothing.
'Oh, we're just gonna get straight to it then.'
"The final tower isn't like the others."
Rhys followed him into the deeper recesses of the cave, where the light from the twin suns barely penetrated, casting everything in a twilight gloom that made the boy's silhouette seem more ominous than it should.
"What about it makes it so different from the others?"
Lenny's expression darkened.
"It changes. Every time I enter, the floors are different. The monsters are different."
He reached for what looked like a crude map etched into a piece of hide.
"It's like it's… learning from my victories and failures."
"An adaptive trial," Rhys murmured, the irony not lost on him. "Designed to counter an adaptive Aspect."
Lenny glanced up sharply. "You understand quickly."
Something like respect flickered across the boy's features, or perhaps Rhys was simply projecting humanity onto a creature that had long since abandoned such sentiments.
"I've had practice being thrown into crappy situations lately," Rhys replied dryly,
"So, do you have a plan of action?"
For the first time, Lenny's expression showed something approaching excitement—or perhaps it was simply the prospect of not facing the nightmare alone again.
"First," he said, reaching for a wicked-looking blade that gleamed with an unnatural light, "we need to figure out what your Aspect can really do. Because mine clearly isn't enough."
Rhys looked down at his hands; hands that had been severed and regrown, hands that had felt the tug of opposing forces in the 'in-between.' What was he capable of? What was the true nature of his power in this place where reality itself seemed malleable?
Rhys reached for the blade Lenny offered, feeling its strange weight in his hand. It was shorter than he expected, more dagger than sword, with an edge that gleamed with cold silver radiance.
He focused on the weapon, trying to recall the same feeling he had when he fought the Eshe user back in Gehenna. That sense of power flowing through him, of transformation waiting just beneath his skin. His mark flared in response, heat spreading up his arm as a flame of pure black began to envelop the blade. This time, though, it didn't have that same cocktail flicker of violet and crimson that had characterized his previous manifestation.
'Weird.'
Just then, the flame dissipated with a soft hiss, and the blade simply disappeared from Rhys's grasp. Not dropped, not transformed. Just gone, as if it had never existed. He looked up to see that he and Lenny shared identical expressions of dumbfounded surprise.
"Uh-huh, I don't know what that was. Let me try something else."
"Uh…please do."
Rhys focused again, this time without a weapon in hand. The flame crawled from his mark and appeared in his palms once again, materializing from nothing like a magician's trick. This time, its usual hue returned—almost.
The violet and crimson danced together in hypnotic patterns, but the black embers that had always accompanied them were noticeably absent.
This fire, though, felt different from the other one. The black flame reminded him of the empty feeling he felt when he stared at the hollow. This one was more like the blaze in the in-between. Defiant in nature, so much so that it moved even against gravity.
He dismissed the fires and turned to Lenny, who was watching him with the analytical gaze of a scientist observing an experiment.
"I guess we'll find out what I can do together."
"Okay, then. After some preparations, we're going to clear the tower."
The simplicity of the statement belied the enormity of the task—like saying "we'll just defeat this army" or "we'll just climb this mountain." Decades of failure condensed into a single, determined declaration.
"If we clear the tower?" Rhys asked. "What happens then?"
Lenny's expression turned distant, almost wistful.
"I don't know. Go home, maybe. Or move on to whatever comes next."
Home. The word evoked images of Rhys's apartment, his mundane life before all this began—a life that now seemed as distant and unreal as a half-remembered dream. What was it going to take to find his way back?
The twin suns continued their eternal vigil over the Abyss as predator and prey became unlikely allies, bound by a common purpose in a realm where nothing was certain except the next trial—and the increasingly blurred line between monster and man.
***
Both Rhys and Lenny stood at the mouth of the cave, their silhouettes stark against the unusually hued horizon. The twin suns hung lower now, casting long shadows across the barren landscape. Rhys adjusted the strap on his shoulders, carrying the weapons Lenny had lent him—accumulated over what must have been decades of survival in this twisted realm.
"How far is the tower?" Rhys asked.
He squinted at the distant structures that punctuated the skyline.
"About a three day's walk."
Lenny pointed to the furthest silhouette; a structure that, unlike its fallen brethren, stood perfectly straight.
"There he is, the last man standing."
Rhys studied carefully. Even from this distance, there was something unsettling about its verticality. Protruding like a middle finger aimed at him.
"You speak like you named it or something."
Lenny's face remained impassive as he replied.
"I did, actually. After a level from a game I played before…"
He took a deliberately dramatic pause before continuing:
"Tartarus."
With that simple declaration, the boy stepped forward, beginning their journey across the desolate terrain. Rhys followed closely behind. The last time this same situation happened, it didn't play out well for Rhys. He shuddered at the memory.
The landscape before them was a nightmare of geological impossibilities. Jagged rock formations jutted from the earth in ways that were unnatural. The sounds of their footsteps were swallowed by the ground, a detail that remained constant from the last time Rhys was here.
Further away from the cave, crystalline structures erupted from the ground in clusters, their surfaces refracting the twin sun's light into kaleidoscopic patterns that danced across the rocky terrain.
After they had walked for perhaps an hour, Lenny stopped and turned back to face Rhys.
"Before I forget, the closer we get to Tartarus, the more things get…weird. To say the least. So be ready for that."
'Wish you could be more specific but, alright.'
Rhys wondered what could possibly qualify as "weird" in a place where reality already seemed to be held together by nothing stronger than suggestion and habit. He silently nodded in agreement. They started walking, but the kid suddenly stopped again. This time, he didn't turn to face his companion.
"Is there anything else?" Rhys asked, raising his eyebrow slightly.
"I wasn't sent here alone."
That sounded more ominous than it needed to be.
"There were thousands of us. I was visiting Tokyo with my father when it happened."
The words struck a chord of recognition in Rhys's memory. He had seen something on the news that corroborated Lenny's story—a catastrophic event that had dominated headlines for months. In the year 2030, an Abyssal zone appeared without warning in Japan, now part of the Eastern Continent. It had swallowed twelve city blocks in an instant, taking with it thousands of civilians who had simply vanished from existence. The incident was dubbed the 'Tokyo Blackout' by media outlets desperate to put a name to an inexplicable horror.
Rhys continued to listen in silence as Lenny explained the situation to him:
"Out of the thousands that were swallowed, I'm the only one who remained 'me'. A few changed into scary monsters, but most could not handle the mutation and died instantly."
'Like those poor medics in the ambulance.'
"Some people, like my father, managed to fight off the mutation for a bit. But even he…"
The boy stopped himself from continuing, but Rhys could tell that Lenny was forced to make a tough decision.
He pointed towards the rune-like tattoo on his face.
"I, on the other hand, got this mark on my face. With it came my Aspect and the knowledge of what my trial was."
Rhys digested all this information, fitting it into the growing puzzle of the Abyss and its inexplicable rules. One conclusion seemed inescapable:
"So there are monsters roaming around out there."
"Yeah."
Rhys looked out across the bizarre landscape stretching before them—beautiful, deadly, and potentially populated by creatures that had once been people like him, now warped beyond recognition.
"That seems to be the norm these days. What else is new?"
The corner of Lenny's mouth twitched upward in what might almost have been a smirk, appreciation for Rhys's sarcastic attempt to normalize the utterly abnormal. He didn't say anything else, but as he turned to continue their journey toward Tartarus, his posture seemed marginally less burdened.
They walked on in silence, two figures dwarfed by the vastness of the Abyss—a man and a boy-shaped enigma, making their way toward a tower that had defied all attempts to conquer it.
Behind them, their footprints remained visible for only moments before the ground swallowed all evidence of their passing, as if the Abyss itself was erasing their presence step by step.