The air inside the shrinking dome of light tasted of ozone and desperation—a metallic tang that coated the tongue and thickened with every ragged breath. Golden luminescence pulsed from the translucent walls of Hunter's Holy Barrier, casting long, trembling shadows across the blood-slicked cobblestones of the ancient plaza. With each pulse, the light dimmed, the barrier thinning like aged parchment held too close to flame.
Outside, the world had become a nightmare of chitin and hunger.
Hundreds of them. Thousands, perhaps. The Corruptors—*Kongmo*, the locals called them, "Fear-Demons"—clawed and scrabbled against the failing light. They were a tide of obsidian carapaces and needle-sharp limbs, their forms a blasphemous fusion of insect and shadow. Compound eyes, faceted and empty, reflected the dying glow of the barrier with mindless hunger. The sound was a ceaseless, grating chorus: the skitter of countless legs on stone, the wet tear of mandibles, the low, resonant hum of their collective malice. It vibrated in the teeth, in the bones.
Hunter stood at the barrier's edge, his broad back to the group, every muscle corded with strain. Sweat traced rivulets through the grime and dried blood on his neck, plastering his dark hair to his scalp. His hands, clenched into white-knuckled fists, trembled slightly—not from fear, but from the immense, continuous drain of sustaining the **Holy Barrier**. The skill was a cornerstone of the **Path of Order**, a declaration of absolute defense, but even the most steadfast wall could be worn down by an endless sea.
His reflection, warped and grim, stared back at him from the concave inner surface of the golden dome. The face he saw wasn't that of the confident vanguard, the unbreakable shield. It was the face of a man watching his hourglass empty, grain by irrecoverable grain.
"Two minutes left on the clock," Hunter growled, his voice a low rumble that cut through the demonic cacophony. He didn't turn, his eyes fixed on the seething darkness beyond. "Priest, get ready to channel a **Divine Blessing** my way. A full mental restoration. If we don't pull a miracle out of our asses in the next 120 seconds, this wall comes down. And when it does, we break out. A frontal charge, nothing fancy."
He finally glanced over his shoulder, his gaze sweeping the huddled forms of his fellow **Believers**. His eyes, usually sharp with command, were shadowed with a grim resignation. "Assassin, fall back to my position. When I go, I'll smash a path straight ahead. You stick to my shadow and clear the trash that tries to swarm our backs. Mage—" his eyes found Three, who was hunched over, hands pressed to his temples, "—be ready to cast **Haste**. The moment the barrier drops, you blanket the forward vector. We run like hell itself is on our heels, because it will be."
Three unclenched his hands, pale fingers leaving red marks on his own skin. He opened his mouth, a protest or a plea forming on his lips, but before a sound could escape—
Chen stood up.
The movement was calm, deliberate, utterly at odds with the panic thrumming through the air. He didn't look at Hunter, didn't acknowledge the impending doom. Instead, his eyes, cool and analytical behind his simple glasses, found Nangong, who was kneeling quietly, her face obscured by the high collar of her black shirt.
"Nangong," Chen said, his voice devoid of tremor. It was the tone of a man discussing a complex equation. "Do you know the technique 'Overload Healing'?"
The question hung in the stifling air. All eyes swiveled to Chen. Summer's breath hitched. Fiona, who had been methodically checking the fletching on her last few arrows, paused. Even Hunter's relentless focus wavered for a split second, his head turning slightly.
A spark, fragile as a candle flame in a gale, ignited in the pit of Three's stomach. *He has a plan. The analyst has a plan.* He surged forward, his voice tight with sudden, desperate hope. "Forget Overload Healing! You don't need that! Just get my mental reserves back to full! I have 'Overload Casting'! I can do it!"
**Overload**. The word itself tasted of risk and ruin. It was a gambler's last throw, a technique that allowed a **Believer** to mortgage their future potential to empower a present spell. It borrowed from time yet to come, draining vitality, mental acuity, sometimes even memories, to elevate a single act of will beyond its normal limits. The backlash was brutal, often leaving the caster a drained husk for hours, even days.
Chen glanced at Three, a flicker of something akin to approval in his gaze. *1900 points on the **Leaderboard**. Not just raw power, but the instinct to use it. Good.* But he shook his head, a slow, measured movement. "It might not be enough. I need a truly massive area of effect. A city block, at least. Nangong." He addressed her again, his tone leaving no room for ambiguity. "Can you do it?"
Nangong's eyes, dark and depthless, lifted from the ground. She stared past Chen, through the shimmering barrier, at the endless sea of Corruptors. The golden light played over her features, highlighting the tightness around her mouth, the faint tremor in her jaw. She was calculating, weighing the certainty of a gruesome death now against the crippling debt of an Overload later.
*No more holding back,* she thought, the words a cold stone in her mind. *Keep a hidden card now, and you'll never get a chance to play it.*
She gave a single, sharp nod.
"Now?" she asked, her voice barely a whisper, yet it carried in the sudden quiet.
"Now," Chen confirmed, the word final as a tombstone sealing shut.
**Overload Healing** was a perverse art. It didn't just restore; it forcibly expanded the recipient's capacity, like over-inflating a lung. It drew upon the healer's own life essence, their future vitality, and transfused it into the target, temporarily boosting their mental and physical thresholds. In a dead-end scenario, it could turn a weary fighter into a temporary demigod. Or burn out the healer's own flame in the process.
Nangong took a deep, shuddering breath that seemed to draw in the very fear around her. With a resolve that felt like stepping off a cliff, she rose to her feet. Her movements were stiff, ritualistic. She ignored the questioning, hopeful, fearful stares of the others and brought her hands to the top button of her high-collared black shirt.
Her fingers, slender and surprisingly steady, worked their way down. One button. Two. With each release, a sliver of pale skin was revealed. A heavy, expectant silence fell, broken only by the ever-present skittering beyond the light. The **Holy Barrier** flickered again, the pulse weaker, the shadows longer.
When the last button was freed, Nangong shrugged the shirt off her shoulders. It pooled at her feet like a shed skin.
A collective, sharp intake of breath hissed through the group.
Summer's hand flew to her mouth, her eyes wide with horror. Three's confident posture crumpled, his pupils contracting to pinpricks. Fiona's professional detachment shattered, a wave of nausea twisting her stomach.
From the delicate line of her throat, down across her collarbones, over the swell of her chest and the flat plane of her stomach, to her arms and beyond—Nangong's body was a canvas of ruin. A grotesque tapestry of scars, thick and ropy and pale against her skin, crisscrossed her flesh. They were not the clean lines of surgical incisions or the ragged tears of battle wounds. These were deliberate, savage furrows, twisted and knotted like ancient roots or the legs of a centipede frozen in agony. They overlapped, webbed, and converged, a map of perpetual suffering etched into her very being.
Chen's eyebrows lifted slightly, not in shock, but in recognition. The puzzle piece clicked into place. The quiet demeanor, the concealed body, the willingness to employ a sacrificial healing art.
*She's a believer of **Decay**.*
"A Blood-Swap Cleric?!" Hunter blurted out, the tactical commander in him momentarily overridden by sheer, visceral surprise.
**Decay** was the second **Entity** on the **Path of Abyss**. If **Abyss** was the fall into darkness, **Decay** was the slow, inevitable rot at the bottom. It was the climax of corruption, the universe's final, silent tomb. Its **Divine Mandate** was the acceleration of entropy, the hastening of all things toward their end. To fulfill this mandate, to draw power from their patron, its **Believers** practiced a harrowing creed: self-mutilation. The faster they themselves decayed—the more willingly they embraced dissolution—the greater the **divine** power that flowed back into them.
It was a horrific economy of flesh and faith. Their wounds were not just injuries; they were offerings, prayers in blood and pain. The more grievous their state, the more potent their healing became for others. They literally traded their own life force, their own wholeness, for that of their allies. Hence the grim nickname: Blood-Swap Clerics. They were walking triage units, their efficacy measured in pints of their own blood spilled.
The central, terrifying paradox of their existence was the balance. How far could you cut before you cut the thread of your own life? How much could you decay before you crossed the line from useful vessel to empty corpse? It was a debate that consumed every follower of **Decay**—a macabre calculus of suicide and salvation.
Nangong wasted no time on explanations or pity. Her brow was furrowed in intense concentration, her teeth gritted so hard the muscles in her jaw stood out like cables. From a sheath at her waist, she drew not a surgeon's scalpel, but a brutal-looking dagger, its blade serrated with vicious barbs. The metal gleamed dully in the fading light.
She did not hesitate.
With a swift, practiced motion, she drew the blade across her lower abdomen. The sound was a wet, terrible whisper. A line of crimson welled up instantly, beading and then overflowing. She didn't flinch. Her breath hissed out between her teeth, but her hands remained steady.
Second cut. Between the ribs, a shallow, precise slice that opened a window to the agony beneath. Blood, darker now, flowed freely.
Third cut. This one followed the path of a particularly grotesque, centipede-like scar that ran along her clavicle. She reopened the old wound, deepening it, letting the barbed edge catch and tear. The blood here was almost black.
Three Offerings. The ritual minimum.
As the third wound bloomed, she let out a soft, shuddering sigh that was part pain, part release. Her lips moved, forming the prayer of her **Path**, the words a chilling contrast to the life-giving act she was attempting:
"All that lives shall fester. All that is shall crumble to dust."
For a moment, nothing happened. Then, from the three fresh wounds, a light began to emanate. But it was not the clean, golden radiance of Hunter's **Order**. This was a sickly, greenish-gold luminescence, the color of pus and tarnished brass. It smelled of damp soil, of forgotten graves, of sweet, overripe fruit on the verge of collapse. The **Divine Blessing** of **Decay**.
The light didn't just glow; it *poured*. It streamed from her body like liquid emerald fire, coalescing in the air before her into a swirling, serpentine rivulet. With a sound like a sighing wind through dead leaves, the stream of corrupt vitality shot across the short distance and slammed into Three's chest.
He gasped, staggering back a step as the power invaded him. It was not a gentle infusion. It was a violent, overwhelming flood. He felt his mental exhaustion vaporize, replaced by a buzzing, hyper-alert fullness that bordered on pain. His physical fatigue melted away, muscles thrumming with stolen vitality. His senses sharpened to an almost unbearable degree—he could count the individual facets in a Corruptor's eye thirty feet away, could hear the separate skittering of each of its countless legs. Power, raw and slightly rancid, coursed through his veins. He felt invincible, manic, *alive*.
The confidence that had been crushed by the endless horde began to seep back. But it was a brittle confidence, undercut by the terrible cost he was about to pay and the looming question of what came next.
He turned to Chen, his face solemn. The manic energy in his eyes was tempered by dread. "I can do it," he said, each word weighted. "I can Overload **Haste** and cover an area this size. But after I do… I'll be a liability. A dead weight. My mind will be scraped hollow. It'll take at least twelve hours for me to even *think* straight again." He locked eyes with Chen, the unspoken question hanging between them like a guillotine blade. "Chen. Can we survive for twelve hours with me like that?"
A faint, almost imperceptible smile touched Chen's lips. It wasn't a smile of warmth, but of cold, absolute certainty. "I have no intention of dying," he said simply. "And I don't plan on letting death have any of you today."
The calm assurance in his voice was a spark in tinder. Hunter, whose nerves were stretched to their breaking point by the sight of the mutilation and the esoteric planning, finally snapped. He whirled around, the golden light of the barrier casting his face in a mask of fury and frustration.
"Enough of the cryptic bullshit!" he roared, the command in his voice cracking under the strain. "Save the grandstanding for your fucking eulogy! We have *seconds*! Priest, if you've got a miracle, now's the time! Spit it out!"
Chen didn't react to the outburst. He adjusted his glasses, a habitual gesture that seemed to order his thoughts. His gaze swept over the group: the bleeding cleric, the overcharged mage, the furious vanguard, the horrified archer, the pale strategist. He saw not just individuals, but pieces on a board. A terrible, desperate board.
"Hunter's right about one thing," Chen began, his voice cutting through Hunter's anger with its quiet clarity. "A frontal charge into that," he gestured with his chin toward the wall of chitin, "is suicide. Even with an area **Haste**, they'll swamp us before we make it twenty paces. Their numbers are essentially infinite for our purposes. We can't fight the tide."
"So what?" Summer cried out, her voice trembling. "We just wait here to be eaten?"
"No," Chen said. "We change the game." He turned fully to face them now, and in his eyes, they saw not panic, but the intense focus of a master player who has seen a path—a terrible, audacious path—through checkmate. "The **Faith Game** isn't about killing every monster. It's about surviving the **Trials**. This horde isn't a random event; it's a pressure mechanism. A test of resource management, teamwork, and… ingenuity under absolute duress."
He paused, letting the concept sink in. The **Holy Barrier** gave another violent shudder, a long crack like lightning forking across its surface. The Corruptors on the other side redoubled their efforts, sensing the imminent collapse.
"We can't outrun them. We can't outfight them," Chen continued, his words coming faster now. "So we have to out-*think* them. We have to give them a problem more compelling than we are."
Fiona nocked an arrow, her hands steady despite the fear in her eyes. "What problem could possibly be more compelling than fresh meat to a pack of mindless horrors?"
Chen's smile returned, wider this time, and in the sickly, pulsing light, it looked genuinely unsettling. "Their own survival," he said.
He pointed at the ground beneath their feet, at the intricate, worn patterns on the cobblestones of the plaza. "Look at their behavior. They're not just attacking randomly. They're *herding* us. Pushing us toward the center. They avoid the old braziers, even though they're cold. They flinch from the specific glyphs carved into the western archway. They're instinctual, but those instincts are tied to this place. To its rules."
His mind was racing, connecting disparate observations from the moment they'd been dumped into this **Trial**. The architecture, the residual magic in the stones, the specific type of Corruptor—a burrowing, hive-minded variant. The answer, horrifying and perfect, clicked into place.
"Three," Chen said, his voice dropping into a tone of absolute command. "You're not going to cast **Haste** on *us*."
Three blinked, the surging power within him stuttering in confusion. "What?"
"You're going to cast it on *them*," Chen said, gesturing to the horde beyond the barrier.
Silence. Profound, utter silence, broken only by the creeping sound of cracking light.
"Have you lost your mind?!" Hunter exploded. "You want to make them *faster*?!"
"Not faster," Chen said, his eyes gleaming. "*Hungrier*. And more competitive." He spoke quickly now, the plan unfolding in his mind with terrifying clarity. "These are hive creatures. They operate on a simple hierarchy: consume, grow, feed the core. An area **Haste** will supercharge their metabolisms. Their hunger will become an immediate, all-consuming agony. But the food source—us—is limited, protected by this last bit of light."
He took a step toward the fading barrier, as if addressing the monsters beyond. "So what happens when you have a thousand starving beasts and only one tiny morsel? They turn on each other. They compete. The stronger ones will start consuming the weaker ones to sate their own accelerated hunger. It will trigger a cascade. A frenzy."
Summer stared at him, comprehension dawning with dawning horror. "You want to… make them eat each other?"
"I want to give them a new objective," Chen corrected. "A self-regulating problem. A child of their own making—a cannibalistic frenzy that will hopefully thin their numbers, or at least distract them long enough for us to find the real way out of this **Trial**."
Nangong, clutching her bleeding stomach, stared at Chen with new eyes. The cold analyst was gone. In his place was something far more dangerous: a gambler willing to bet their lives on a theory of monstrous psychology.
"It's a hell of a risk," Three whispered, the weight of his role crushing down on him. "If it doesn't work… if they just get faster and break through immediately…"
"Then we die a few seconds sooner," Chen said flatly. "The outcome if we do nothing is certain. This has a variable. A chance. And it plays into the true nature of the **Faith Game**." He looked at each of them. "The **Entities** don't want mindless slaughter. They want drama. They want ingenuity. They want **Believers** who use the rules of the **Path**, even the rules of their enemies, against them. This," he said, pointing at the horde, "isn't just a monster swarm. It's a puzzle. And the solution isn't a sword or a shield. It's a catalyst."
Hunter looked from Chen's calm face to the disintegrating barrier, to the pale, determined faces of his team. He hated it. He hated the passivity, the reliance on a trick rather than strength. But the tactician in him, buried under the vanguard's pride, saw the brutal logic. A charge was a 0% chance. This… this was something else.
"Goddamn it," he swore, the fight going out of his voice, replaced by exhausted acceptance. "Do it."
The **Holy Barrier** flickered wildly. The crack spread, webbing across the dome. The golden light was now a dim, dying amber.
"Now, Three!" Chen commanded.
Three closed his eyes. He reached inward, to the overflowing well of power Nangong had given him—power that smelled of decay and desperation. He touched the core of his being, the connection to his **Path**, and then he reached *beyond* it. He invoked **Overload Casting**.
It felt like tearing his own soul in half.
The world narrowed to a single point of intention. He wasn't casting a spell on the air, on his allies. He was imposing a concept—**ACCELERATION**—upon a swath of reality containing hundreds of alien, hateful minds. He funneled every ounce of his boosted mental power, every shred of his future potential, into this one, grotesque act.
He didn't shout an incantation. A low, pained moan escaped his lips as greenish-gold energy, mirroring Nangong's corrupt blessing, erupted from his hands. It didn't shoot forward in a beam. It *bloomed*. A silent, expanding sphere of warped time and heightened hunger pulsed out from him, passing through the **Holy Barrier** as if it weren't there.
For a heartbeat, nothing changed.
Then, the world outside exploded into a new kind of hell.
The skittering noise rose into a shrieking, chittering crescendo. The Corruptors didn't just move faster; they became blurs of obsidian violence. But their coordinated push against the barrier ceased instantly. The supercharged hunger, an itch turned into a burning inferno in their primitive ganglia, redirected instantly.
The closest Corruptor turned on its neighbor, mandibles snapping not at the fading light, but at the joint between the other's thorax and abdomen. Dark, viscous fluid sprayed. The victim writhed, then retaliated. The infection of frenzy spread faster than any plague. Within seconds, the orderly siege collapsed into a seething, churning maelstrom of cannibalism. Claws meant for the **Believers** ripped into chitinous hides. Mandibles tore limbs from sockets. The air, already thick with the smell of ozone and fear, was now choked with the acrid stench of alien blood and ruptured ichor.
Inside the barrier, the **Believers** watched, stunned into silence. The immediate pressure was gone. The wall of bodies pressing against the light had dissolved into a chaotic, self-consuming orgy of violence.
Three let out a choked gasp and collapsed to his knees. The vibrant power was gone, leaving a void so absolute it felt like death. His mind was a numb, echoing cavern. He couldn't remember the spell he just cast. He could barely remember his own name. He stared blankly at the blood on his hands, unaware it was from Nangong's earlier blessing.
Hunter let the **Holy Barrier** fall. The last of the golden light winked out, but no Corruptors surged in. They were too busy devouring each other.
The group stood in the center of the ancient plaza, an island of stunned silence in a sea of monstrous fratricide. The sounds of tearing chitin and shrieking clicks were horrific, but they were the sounds of a problem solving itself.
Chen walked over to the edge of their small circle, watching his plan unfold with the detached interest of a scientist observing a successful experiment. He had gambled their lives on a hypothesis about hunger and hierarchy.
And he had won. For now.
He turned back to the group. Hunter was staring at the frenzy, his sword hanging loosely at his side. Fiona slowly lowered her bow. Summer helped a trembling Nangong apply a basic bandage to her self-inflicted wounds. Three sat in a daze, utterly spent.
"The frenzy will last as long as the **Haste** effect, or until they exhaust their own numbers," Chen said, his voice quiet but carrying. "We have a window. Not twelve hours. Maybe thirty minutes. Maybe an hour. We use it not to run, but to find the real exit. This plaza is the **Trial** arena. The answer is here."
He looked down at the intricate glyphs on the cobblestones, now slick with spilled ichor that was slowly seeping between the cracks. "We stopped playing their game of survival," he said, almost to himself. "And started playing our own. Let's see what the **Entities** think of that."
Above them, unseen, in the layers of reality where the **Entities** observed their **Faith Game**, a ripple of something—perhaps interest, perhaps amusement—passed through the void. The **Trial** was not over. It had simply become more interesting.
The cannibal storm raged around them, a temporary shield of their own making. The clock was still ticking, but the countdown had changed. It was no longer a countdown to being eaten.
It was a countdown to discovering what came next.