"Good answer."
The words did not dissipate. They hung in the stale, dead air of the Rift, vibrating with a resonance that rattled Kazimir's shattered teeth. It was a voice that sounded like it had been waiting in the dark for an eternity, gathering weight and dust.
Then, the world ended. Or at least, the silence did.
The amber prison encasing the woman didn't just break; it detonated.
There was a sound like a thunderclap trapped inside a coffin. A shockwave of pure, condensed mana exploded outward, slamming into the walls of the abyss with the force of a bomb. The mountain of bones beneath Kazimir shifted violently, thousands of skeletons rattling in a macabre applause as the pressure wave hit them.
Kazimir couldn't even flinch. His spine was severed, his ribs were pulverized, and his lungs were slowly filling with blood. He could only watch, his vision blurring at the edges, as the ancient resin disintegrated into a million glittering shards of orange light.
The pressure that followed was not the holy aura of a savior. It was the crushing gravity of a singularity.
The air in the cavern instantly became heavy, thick, and suffocating. It smelled of ozone, old blood, and something metallic—like the taste of a battery on the tongue. It was the smell of a time before the Tri-Union, a time when magic was raw and uncontrolled.
From the dissolving mist of the amber, the figure stood.
She was colossal. Even from his prone, broken position, Kazimir could tell she stood well over six feet tall, her silhouette broadened by the jagged, blackened steel of her plate armor. The armor was a nightmare of craftsmanship—a forgotten fusion of German engineering and Egyptian brutality. The pauldrons were shaped like snarling jackals, and the breastplate was etched with runic scripts that glowed with a hateful, crimson light.
Clank.
She took a step down from her obsidian throne.
Crunch.
Her sabatons crushed a human skull into powder.
Kazimir felt a primal, lizard-brain terror spike through his dying body. This was not a human. This was a calamity that had been given a shape. Every instinct he had left was screaming at him to run, to hide, to burrow into the piles of calcium and rot.
But he couldn't move. He was a broken doll discarded in the dark.
Clank. Crunch. Clank. Crunch.
She descended the dais of skulls, her movements slow, deliberate, and terrifyingly fluid. The liquid silver hair floating around her head settled onto her shoulders like a heavy cloak of moonlight, defying the lack of wind in the dungeon.
She stopped directly over him.
Kazimir stared up, his breath rattling wetly in his throat. Up close, she was even more terrifying. Her skin was the color of burnished bronze, flawless and hard as stone. Her eyes were vertical slits of burning magma, devoid of any human warmth. There was no pity in them. There was only clinical curiosity.
She didn't kneel. She didn't offer a healing potion. She simply bent at the waist, reaching down with a gauntlet that looked capable of crushing a tank.
Her fingers, cold and hard as iron, clamped around Kazimir's jaw.
She wrenched his head up, twisting his face from side to side to inspect him. The movement sent bolts of white-hot agony shooting through his neck, causing his vision to white out for a second, but Kazimir was too weak to scream. He could only whimper, a pathetic, wet sound that shamed him.
"Pathetic," she murmured. Her voice was deep, a contralto that resonated in his chest cavity. "Three bloodlines fighting for dominance in a vessel made of glass. Your mana channels are not just knotted, boy. They are strangling each other."
She released his jaw, letting his head drop back onto the sharp ribs of a long-dead beast.
"The Iron Principalities would call you a defect," she mused, straightening up and looking around the dark abyss as if bored. "The Frost Tzardom would leave you on the ice to freeze. And the Sun Sands... well, they evidently decided to throw you in the trash."
She looked back down at him, her lips curling into a smirk that was all teeth.
"But I do not care what the blind think. I have seen the 'perfect' Purebloods rise and fall a hundred times. I have seen the Golden Princes and the Steel Dukes try to save this world." Her eyes narrowed, the red glow intensifying like a stoke fire. "They always fail. Order is stagnation. Purity is weakness. I have watched their shiny empires crumble into dust more times than you have drawn breath."
She leaned in closer, her face inches from his. The heat radiating off her was intense, like opening the door to a furnace.
"I am tired of perfection, little mongrel. I require... a glitch."
Kazimir tried to focus on her words, but the darkness was creeping in. His heart was stuttering. Thump... thump... silence... thump.
"Am I... dying?" he wheezed, blood bubbling past his lips.
"Obviously," Zarya replied, her tone dry. "Your left lung is punctured. Your T4 and T5 vertebrae are dust. Your liver is ruptured. You have approximately ninety seconds before your brain shuts down from oxygen deprivation."
She tilted her head, watching the light fade from his amber eyes.
"The question is not if you are dying. The question is: Is your hate strong enough to survive the cure?"
Suddenly, the pressure in the room spiked.
It wasn't physical gravity this time. It was Killing Intent. Pure, distilled malice directed solely at him. It felt like being submerged in freezing water. The darkness of the Rift seemed to recoil from her, terrified of the predator in its midst.
"Look at me," she commanded.
Kazimir forced his heavy eyelids open. It took every ounce of strength he had left.
"They spat on you," she whispered, her voice sliding into his mind like a venomous serpent. "That golden whore used you like a potion and threw away the bottle. The Prince broke your bones for sport. They are up there right now, drinking wine, listening to the waltz, laughing about the sound you made when you hit the floor. Can you hear them?"
Kazimir's fingers twitched against the bone pile. He could see it. He could see Elara's bored face. He could feel the weight of Viktor's boot. He could hear the tittering laughter of the court.
"Yes," he rasped.
"Do you want peace?" Zarya asked softly. "I can let you die. It is warm in the dark. No more pain. No more mockery. You can sleep here, with the rest of the refuse."
Kazimir thought about it. It would be so easy to let go. To fade away into the pile of bones and become just another nameless skeleton in the Dungeon of the Discarded.
Then, he remembered the announcement. I pledge myself to Crown Prince Viktor.
A spark ignited in the cold coal of his heart. It wasn't a noble spark. It was dirty, oily, and black. It was the spite of a dying animal that wanted to bite the hand that beat it.
"No," Kazimir choked out, blood spraying from his lips. "No peace."
"Then what?"
Kazimir stared into the burning eyes of the Empress. He didn't see a monster anymore. He saw a weapon. The only weapon big enough to hurt the people who had destroyed him.
"I want..." Kazimir swallowed a mouthful of blood, tasting the iron. "I want to drag them down here. I want them to scream."
Zarya Sekhmet threw her head back and laughed. It was a harsh, barking sound, terrifying in its delight. It echoed off the cavern walls, shaking dust from the ceiling.
"Excellent," she purred. "A vengeful spirit. A broken toy that wants to bite back."
She raised her right hand. The gauntlet retracted with a hiss of steam, revealing a hand that was surprisingly elegant, though the skin was dark bronze and tipped with sharp, black fingernails.
"I do not run a charity, Mongrel. I am Zarya Sekhmet, the Twilight Empress, the breaker of the Great Cycle. I do not save people. I own them."
She held her hand over his face. The threat was palpable.
"I will fix your broken body. I will untie the knots in your blood. I will turn you into a monster that makes the Purebloods tremble in their beds."
Her eyes bored into his, demanding absolute submission.
"But the price is your existence. You will be my shield when I command it. You will be my sword when I point. You will bleed for me, kill for me, and if I deem it necessary, you will die for me without hesitation. Your soul is no longer yours. It belongs to the Throne."
"Do you accept the collar?"
The Voice of Command slammed into his mind, bypassing his ears. It was an order, a compulsion, a weight that demanded a kneel.
Kazimir didn't hesitate. He had nothing left to lose. His name was gone. His dignity was gone. He was already dead; this was just selling the corpse.
"I accept," he whispered. "My soul... is yours."
"Good."
Zarya brought her thumb to her mouth. Her teeth glinted in the gloom—canines that were too long, too sharp. She bit down.
She didn't bleed red.
A single drop of liquid welled up on her thumb. It was black, swirled with veins of glowing gold. It looked heavy, viscous like mercury. It radiated a terrifying heat that distorted the air around her hand.
It fell in slow motion.
Kazimir opened his mouth.
The drop hit his tongue.
For a second, there was nothing. No taste. No sensation.
Then, Kazimir von Ra started to scream.
It wasn't heat. Heat was too simple a word.
It felt as though he had swallowed a star.
The drop of blood didn't slide down his throat; it burned through it. It hit his stomach and exploded, sending tendrils of liquid fire racing through his veins like pressurized magma.
Kazimir's body arched off the pile of bones, his back bowing in an impossible angle.
CRACK.
His spine snapped back into place.
The sound was sickeningly loud in the quiet dungeon. It wasn't a gentle knitting of bone; it was a violent, jagged realignment. The vertebrae ground against each other, fusing with a speed that defied nature.
[SYSTEM ERROR: FOREIGN ADMIN ACCESS DETECTED.]
A blue text box flickered in his vision, jagged and glitching. The font was distorted, shaking as if the system itself was afraid.
[SOURCE: APOCALYPSE EMPRESS.]
[OVERRIDING SECURITY PROTOCOLS...]
[PROTOCOL: FORCED EVOLUTION.]
Kazimir thrashed, his heels drumming against the skulls beneath him. He clawed at his throat, tearing the skin, trying to get the fire out. He felt his ribs expanding, knitting together, then hardening.
"Endure it!" Zarya's voice roared over his screams. She placed a heavy boot on his chest to hold him down. "Do not faint! If you lose consciousness, the reconstruction will fail and you will be a pile of sludge!"
The fire reached his mana channels—the source of his lifelong agony.
For twenty years, the German Steel, Russian Frost, and Egyptian Sun had fought inside him. They were three armies in a trench war, tearing his body apart from the inside.
Zarya's blood didn't negotiate with them. It conquered them.
The black-and-gold liquid surged into the knots, dissolving the blockages with acid-like efficiency. It was a tyrant subjugating a rebellion. It forced the Steel to harden his bones until they were denser than iron. It forced the Frost to cool his overheating brain, preserving his sanity. It forced the Sun to pump his heart with nuclear rhythm.
[BLOODLINE CONFLICT DETECTED.]
[INITIATING FORCED FUSION.]
[TRI-UNION GENOME UNLOCKED.]
Steam began to rise from Kazimir's skin. His clothes—the tattered remnants of his noble coat—began to smoke and char from the heat radiating off his body. The scars on his wrists vanished. The bruises from the Prince's boots faded, replaced by skin that looked polished and dense.
The pain was transcendent. It went beyond the physical and tore at his mind. He saw flashes of memories that weren't his. A burning city made of glass. A sky tearing open to reveal an eye. Zarya dying on a throne of ice. Zarya dying in a pit of fire. Zarya dying, dying, dying.
"Focus on the hate!" Zarya commanded. She grabbed his shoulder, her fingers digging in deep enough to draw blood, grounding him in the physical world. "Use it as an anchor! Remember their faces!"
Kazimir gritted his teeth so hard they shattered, only to regrow seconds later, sharper than before.
Elara.
Viktor.
The laughter.
The trash.
He grabbed onto the image of Viktor's face. He visualized driving a blade through that arrogant smile. He held onto that image as the fire consumed him, reconstructed him, and forged him anew.
The screaming stopped.
The convulsions ceased.
Kazimir lay panting on the bones, steam rolling off his body in thick, grey waves. His heart was beating slowly, heavily, like a war drum. Thud-thud. Thud-thud.
A new window appeared in his vision. This one wasn't the standard blue of the Imperial System. It was a deep, blood red, with borders of gold.
[SYSTEM INITIALIZATION COMPLETE.]
[Subject: Kazimir von Ra]
[Race: Human (Variant: Chimera)]
[Class: The Empress's Hound (Locked) -> CHIMERA TANK]
[Level: 1]
[Attributes:]
[Strength: 15 (previously 3)]
[Agility: 12 (previously 2)]
[Endurance: 25 (previously 1)]
[Mana: UNSTABLE (Dissonance Source)]
[Unique Trait Acquired: PAIN CONVERSION]
Description: You are a vessel of suffering. Damage taken is converted into temporary Mana and permanent Experience. The more you hurt, the stronger you become.
Kazimir stared at the words floating in the darkness.
Pain Conversion. It was a mockery. A cruel joke. His entire life had been pain, and now his power was... more pain?
"Stand up," Zarya said.
It wasn't a question.
Kazimir placed his hands on the bone pile. He pushed.
He flew upward.
He had intended to simply stand, but he used too much force. His body was light, terrifyingly strong. He launched himself to his feet, stumbling slightly as he adjusted to the new center of gravity.
He looked at his hands.
They were no longer pale and trembling. They were scarred, yes, but the skin looked tough, like cured leather. His fingernails were slightly darker, hinting at the monster's blood now coursing through him. He took a deep breath, and his lungs expanded fully without pain.
He felt... full. For the first time in his life, he didn't feel the hollow ache of mana deficiency. He felt like a loaded gun with the safety off.
He looked up at Zarya.
She was watching him with a critical eye, scanning him from head to toe. She nodded, seemingly satisfied with her handiwork.
"You are ugly," she stated flatly. "But functional. The fusion held."
Kazimir ran a hand through his hair. It was matted with sweat and blood. He looked at the Empress, the woman who had just tortured him back to life. He felt a strange tether connecting them now—a hum in his blood that resonated with hers.
"What... what are you?" he asked, his voice rasped but steady.
Zarya turned away from him, her cape of liquid silver swirling. She began walking toward the sheer cliff wall of the Rift, where a narrow, treacherous path wound upwards into the shadows.
"I am the ending of the story," she said, her voice echoing in the gloom. "And you are the plot twist."
She paused and looked back over her shoulder. Her glowing red eyes pierced the darkness, burning brighter than any torch.
"Walk, Mongrel. We have an Empire to burn."
Kazimir looked at her back, then at the system window still floating in his vision: [Pain Conversion: Active].
He clenched his fists, feeling the power surge in his forearms. He looked up toward the distant, unseen ceiling of the dungeon—toward the castle, toward the ballroom, toward them.
He took a step. The bones crunched beneath his feet.
"Yes, My Empress," Kazimir whispered into the dark.
He followed her into the abyss.