For a moment, there was silence.
And me, of course—hanging in the air, suspended, as though even gravity needed a second to process what had just happened. Then I fell, graceless, crashing into the shallow water with a ragged groan.
Callow lay broken before me. The grotesque architecture of his body collapsed into a heap, like the carcass of a dream gone rancid. His skull was buried in the murk, his limbs twitching spasmodically—like a puppet with severed strings still trying to obey its master. Unconscious. Defeated. Nothing left but a ruin of ambition.
My dagger trembled in my hand. My fingers had gone numb, but I clung to it anyway—like a starving sailor clutching driftwood in the middle of a storm. My chest heaved, ribs rattling, each breath a blade dragged across my lungs.
And then I saw it—steam rising from my skin, curling in lazy, ghostly tendrils, writhing like smoke-born serpents over the taut planes of my arms. I froze for a heartbeat, entranced, fascinated.
Then came the pain.
A burning ache carved itself into my shoulders and spine, jagged and raw, as though molten iron had been hammered into bone. I clenched my teeth until they creaked, until the taste of blood pooled copper against my tongue. My body screamed. My mind screamed louder.
"Did I… did I just do that?" The words stumbled from me. Saying them aloud felt like tossing an anchor into the abyss, desperate for something solid to tether me back to sanity.
Salem was stirring, dragging himself upright against the wall. His iron composure cracked just enough for his eyes to widen. "You… you actually…" He faltered for a heartbeat. "I've never seen anything like that before."
Rodrick coughed a laugh, spitting blood into the water. "Well. That was… effective."
Even the knight managed a half-conscious chuckle. "Gods, my lady… if your legs are any indication, I shudder to think what you'd do in bed!"
That ripped a laugh out of me, wild and cracked, breaking apart halfway like dry kindling. "What—you wanna find out?"
We laughed together then. Or rather we tried. It came in splintered fragments, but it was laughter nonetheless. A brittle miracle hidden within the wake of ruin.
And then the miracle died as quickly as it came.
Because something moved.
At first it was no more than a stirring beneath the slumped corpse. A shifting, a ripple in the ruined flesh. Then it pushed outward, slow at first, then faster—too fast—like the body had never been a body at all but a chrysalis, splitting open to release something fouler.
Flesh tore. Ichor spilled black across the water. The sound was wet and obscene, each crack of bone peeling against itself like firewood snapping into a twisted hearth.
What broke free nearly made my heart drop to my stomach.
It was Callow again. Of course. Because why wouldn't the universe hand me a back to back rematch with a man who refuses to stay dead?
However, what emerged was not a man at all, not anymore, rather it was the echo of one—tall, pale, bare as marble, skin stretched thin and perfect over a frame that gleamed with sickly light. He spread his arms like he'd been reborn, like he was unveiling a masterpiece only he could appreciate.
"You thought that would kill me?!" he crowed, his voice echoing with a resonance that wasn't entirely his own. "Don't you see the future I've carved from rot and sacrifice?! The culmination of every theory, every equation of flesh? My brilliance incarnate!"
I wanted to respond. I really did. Something witty, something sharp enough to puncture his overblown ego. But the truth was a lot more simple, and far less noble.
I was exhausted.
My body trembled on the edge of collapse, the last fumes of that impossible burst having stripped every shred of strength from my marrow. My knees buckled, the dagger nearly slipping from my hand. Only Rodrick's blood-soaked arm bracing me kept me from face-planting into the filth.
"Stay up," he rasped, his voice a wheeze but firm. "Don't let him see you break."
"Too late," I croaked, my lips trying for a smile and only managing something between a grimace and a twitch.
Salem, naturally, didn't so much as blink. He was already standing tall, his blade raised, his mouth curled in the faintest smile as though this whole apocalypse were an amusing puzzle for him to piece together.
"It's my turn now," he said.
The words didn't just land—they lingered. Hung in the dank air with the arrogance of prophecy, with the promise of something decisive.
For a moment, I let myself cling to them, to the steadiness in his tone, to the faint smirk on his lips that made him look less like a man preparing to fight and more like a man preparing to solve a riddle.
But then—
The air snapped.
And I don't mean that metaphorically either. I mean the air itself—whatever invisible skin wrapped reality together—shattered like glass under a hammer.
A pressure descended upon us, weightless yet suffocating, so immense that even the walls seemed to groan like living things whipped into agony. The shallow water churned in frantic ripples, black waves lapping at my ankles with a rhythm that wasn't natural.
My lungs compressed. My vision narrowed. What I was feeling wasn't just presence—it was annihilation wearing the mask of existence.
Then came a sound. A single step. That was all.
Just one simple footfall.
And it came from behind Callow.
It was then that he appeared. No, rather it appeared. A figure dressed entirely in armor so black it seemed to warp the light around it, obsidian plates covering every inch of his body with sharp, alien precision.
A tassel of deep violet spilled from behind his helmet, shifting as though stirred by currents that didn't exist in this room. He didn't walk. He didn't posture. He simply was, and that was enough to grind the world into silence.
Callow straightened at once, the mania in his eyes faltering into something colder. He turned, or rather he tried to, but the figure was already on him. Gauntleted hands, black as night, reached forward and wrapped around Callow's head with the tenderness of a lover's caress.
And then they squeezed.
The transformation of Callow was instantaneous and obscene. The mad doctor, the self-proclaimed genius, the newly reborn godling, folded like wet parchment. His arrogance dissolved in a breath, his body trembling, knees buckling under that iron grip.
"Wait—wait, please!" he stammered, his words spilling in a rush, frantic, pathetic. "You don't understand—I can help you—I can serve you! My brilliance, I am indispensable, I—"
The figure squeezed harder.
Callow's pleas broke into screams, high and wet, his fingers clawing helplessly at the gauntlets crushing his skull. Blood began streaming from his eyes, his nose, his mouth. His legs kicked like a cornered animal, splashing the water in pathetic arcs. He begged, he sobbed, his voice cracking into a child's wail, every ounce of superiority stripped away.
And then, without warning—
His head burst.
The sound was obscene, like a melon dropped from a height, like a bubble of blood and bone popping in the throat of silence. Fragments spattered across the water, the pillars, my boots. His body collapsed like a marionette with its strings cut, headless, meaningless, twitching once before going still.
I wanted to scream. Or cry. Or laugh hysterically until my lungs shredded. Anything but this paralysis. My body was frozen, not by fear alone, but by the exhaustion that weighed me like lead. I had nothing left to give, no fight, no resistance. All I could do was stare as my mind repeated one simple phrase: Not human. Not human. Not human.
And then I saw it. On his arm, wrapped tightly against the obsidian plate, was a band of purple.
The signification of a King-Class mage.
For a heartbeat my brain refused to process it, like it had politely decided to protect me by filing the sight away as a hallucination.A King-Class mage?! Here? In the sewers? Standing casually over the corpse of a man whose head he had just popped like a grape?
No. Absolutely not.
The math didn't add up. The world didn't add up. There had to be a misprint somewhere in reality, because otherwise I was standing ten feet from something that should, by all accounts, have been far too busy conquering nations or rewriting the laws of existence to be wasting time in this filth.
Why was he here? Why now?! Was this some kind of cosmic joke at my expense, some divine comedy in which the punchline was my ragged corpse?
My thoughts spiraled, looping faster and faster, every possible explanation worse than the last, until the sheer absurdity of it made me want to laugh just to keep from screaming.
The figure moved slowly then, deliberately. From his back he drew a sword—a greatsword forged of the same obsidian as his armor, wicked in its geometry, with angles that seemed to split the eye if I stared too long.
Its edge hummed with violence, vibrating the air with a frequency that made my bones ache. He lifted it with casual grace, as though it weighed nothing, though I was sure it carried the weight of nations.
And then—he was gone.
One moment he stood across the chamber. The next, he was before me. His greatsword hovered centimeters—no, less—millimeters from my face. The sheer presence of it split the air, the pressure slicing shallow cuts across my skin without even touching me.
My body refused to move. My muscles wouldn't obey. This was it. This was where it ended.
But then—steel rang.
Salem appeared between us like a nightmare made flesh, his blade intercepting the tip of the greatsword. The sound that followed was not a clash, but an explosion, an impact so violent the chamber itself seemed to recoil under the weight of its brilliance.
Air buckled. Water exploded outward. My ears screamed. The speed, the ferocity of it all, threatening collapse.
For a heartbeat, he held.
For a heartbeat, he stood tall, eyes blazing, teeth grit, his sword pressed against the edge of annihilation.
And then—his blade shattered.
Shards flew, glinting in the half-light, vanishing into the water like lost stars. Salem's eyes widened, the iron mask of his composure fracturing into something raw, something I had never seen before.
Pure...unfiltered...terror.
The figure pivoted. Faster than physics, faster than thought, faster than any mortal, or otherwise, should be able to move. His greatsword turned, curved, and then drove forward with the inevitability of an executioner's axe.
The blade speared straight through Salem's chest.