The rush was intoxicating.
It was a jolt of pure, cold power, a thousand times more potent than the gritty, impure energy he had absorbed from the Crawler.
Michael felt the emptiness inside him fill, the gnawing fatigue and phantom aches vanishing as if they had never been.
His Void Energy reserves surged, the number on his HUD climbing rapidly until the bar was full and humming with a restless, dangerous energy.
[VE: 125/125]
He was strong again.
He felt more than strong.
He felt powerful.
But as the exhilarating rush began to fade, something else took its place.
A cold residue.
A chilling echo that settled deep in his bones.
For a fleeting, horrifying moment, he saw the world not through his own eyes, but through the fractured, static-filled senses of the Cable Hound.
He saw flashes of a dark, hungry existence.
The instinct to hunt.
The scent of ozone on the air.
The taste of rust and bone.
The primal, mindless rage.
He shook his head, the alien memories dissolving like smoke, but the feeling remained.
A piece of the monster was inside him now.
A tiny, corrupted fragment woven into the fabric of his own soul.
He looked up and met Jinx's gaze from across the small, fungi-lit alcove.
The look on her face stopped him cold.
The cynical smirk was gone.
The grudging respect was gone.
All that remained was a wide-eyed, primal fear.
Her hand was resting on the grip of her pistol, her knuckles white.
She wasn't looking at him like a business partner.
She was looking at him like he was the monster in the dark.
"What?" he asked, his voice sounding strange to his own ears. "What's wrong?"
Jinx blinked, her mask of cynical indifference slamming back into place, but it was too late. He had seen the fear.
"Nothing's wrong, kid," she said, her voice a little too sharp, a little too loud. "Just catching my breath."
She turned away from him abruptly, busying herself with one of the sonic alarms she had placed at the entrance to their small haven.
"We need to keep moving," she said, her back still to him. "Can't stay in one place for too long down here. Bad for your health."
She was lying.
She was terrified of him.
A knot of shame and self-loathing tightened in his stomach.
She had seen what he had done.
She had seen what he was becoming.
He sank back down, leaning his head against the cold, damp rock wall, and closed his eyes.
The silence between them was a new kind of enemy, more menacing than any monster.
He needed answers. He needed to understand what was happening to him.
"Warden," he thought, casting his consciousness into the familiar interface of the System.
The ancient, weary voice answered, but its usual tone of dry amusement was gone.
It was replaced by a grave, somber seriousness that chilled him more than Jinx's fear.
"Child," the Warden's voice echoed in his mind. "You are playing with a fire you cannot comprehend."
"I was weak," Michael shot back, his thoughts defensive. "I had to. We would have died."
"There is a difference between using your power and letting it consume you," the Warden warned.
"This place… this Conduit Zero… it is what the Arcana used to call a 'Void Echo'."
"What's a Void Echo?" Michael asked.
"It is a scar on the world," the Warden explained, its voice a low, grim hum. "When the Gate collapsed here sixty years ago, it did not just leave behind monsters. It permanently thinned the veil between this reality and the Void."
"The very air here, the rock, the water… it is saturated with the Void's raw, untamed essence."
A new notification appeared on Michael's HUD, a flashing red warning.
[ENVIRONMENTAL ALERT: YOU ARE CURRENTLY WITHIN A VOID ECHO. ALL VOID-BASED ABILITIES ARE POTENTIATED. SOUL CORRUPTION RATE IS INCREASED BY 500%.]
Michael's blood ran cold. Five hundred percent.
"My powers… they feel stronger here," he thought, remembering the ease with which he had used the Void Tether.
"Of course they do," the Warden replied. "You are a fish that has finally found the ocean. You are closer to the source of your power than you have ever been."
"But that is what makes it so dangerous."
"Using your skills here is one thing. But using Soul Devour… that is another matter entirely."
"Using Soul Devour in a normal environment is like drinking a diluted poison. It is dangerous, but the effects are slow. Manageable."
"Using it here, in a Void Echo… is like drinking the poison pure, straight from the source."
The Warden's voice dropped, becoming a dire, chilling whisper that seemed to echo in the deepest parts of his soul.
"Each time you devour a soul in this Void Echo… you are not just taking its power."
"You are weaving a piece of its raw, primal chaos into your own being."
"You are tainting your soul with its rage, its fear, its mindless hunger."
Another line of text appeared on his HUD, this one glowing with a sickly, corrupted purple light.
[SOUL CORRUPTION: 1.2%]
The number seemed to burn itself into his vision.
"The Void will begin to see you not as its wielder," the Warden's terrible warning continued, the words hitting him with the force of a physical blow.
"But as an empty vessel it wishes to fill."
Michael felt a wave of nausea. He thought of the flash of the hound's memories, the cold, predatory feeling that had settled in his gut.
It wasn't just a feeling. It was a statistical fact. A number on a screen.
He was losing himself, one percentage point at a time.
He was caught in an impossible trap.
To get the truth, to save his father, he needed to break the Seal.
To break the Seal, he needed the Alchemist's serum.
To get the serum, he needed to hunt.
But to hunt, to be strong enough to survive, he needed to use the very power that was now slowly, methodically erasing him.
It was a slow-motion suicide.
He opened his eyes, the gravity of his new reality crashing down on him.
He looked at his hands, at the faint, silvery scar on his arm.
Were these still his hands?
How much of him was still him?
He looked over at Jinx. She was still fidgeting with the alarms, deliberately keeping her distance.
The trust was broken. Maybe forever.
He had to fix this.
He had to say something.
"Jinx, I…" he started, but his words were cut short.
BEEP. BEEP. BEEP.
A high-pitched, insistent beeping echoed through the small alcove.
It was one of her alarms.
Jinx froze, her head snapping up, her eyes wide with fresh terror.
She looked at the alarm, then back at Michael, then to the dark, gaping maw of the tunnel ahead.
Something was coming.
And it was coming fast.