The Child narrowed his eyes into two insane slits, while a shudder of pure, sadistic ecstasy rippled through his chitin mantle. His fingers trembled around the hilt. He had won. The Nobody sat motionless, impaled on his massive void-sword. The pitch-black, thick blood dripped warm and hissing over the gleaming, purple metal.
“Finally,” whispered the Child, his voice a foul, triumphant rasp in the deathly silence of the collapsing hall. “Keelhaul the king, and the Nobody dies in the mud. Look at yourself, gaping on my skewer. You are nothing, Silarias. Never were anything, either.”
Until the Nobody slowly lifted his head.
The sound escaping his wide-open lion jaw was no longer a human laugh. It was a wet, gurgling, deep resonance that made the loose stones on the floor vibrate. And then the slurp began.
“Did you think…” Silarias rumbled, his voice sounding like boiling tar. “…that this was enough to break me? MORE! I WANT MORE!”
The solid void-sword sticking straight through his ribcage suddenly began to vibrate violently. The purple-black energy no longer remained solid; its surface dissolved, turned liquid, and pulsed like possessed, viscous quicksilver. With a terrifying, hungry speed, the sword was not driven deeper into his body, but sucked inward.
The gaping wound in Silarias’ chest functioned as a predatory vacuum vortex, dragging the weapon’s entire destructive energy straight into his bloodstream like a heavy IV drip. The Child widened his eyes in horror and tried to release the hilt in a reflex, but his hand was liquidly caked to the lion’s chest. The energy flowed in reverse; he was being drained dry.
“What… what are you doing?! Let go! This is my power! You're stealing it from me!” screamed the Child, as the purple glow began pulling away from his own chitin mantle, straight into Silarias’ chest.
Silarias did not answer with words. His eyes overflowed in a single instant with a pitch-black, boiling oil that streamed over his cheeks. No fire rose from his jaws anymore; he exhaled purely dense, suffocating smoke that rolled across the arena floor in heavy, surging walls, blocking all vision completely.
Outside on the Bastion square, the gigantic, dead projection screen suddenly snapped back on with a loud, hissing static blast. The blown-away cameras inside the arena restored their feed just in time to register the absolute horror.
The crowd that had just been weeping and looking away now froze into a deathly, chilling silence. Nobody understood what they were seeing. This was no longer Silarias. This was nothing that fit within the laws of biology or logic. Miki stopped crying and stared at the pulsating images with an open mouth. Nyx clenched her fists so hard her knuckles turned white.
The Hypeman’s microphone caught his hyperventilating, completely unhinged voice. He screamed out, losing his mind entirely at the sight of the visual escalation on the screen:
“WHAT IS THIS?! BY THE GODS OF THE OVERWORLD, WHAT IS LORD SIL DOING?! THE SWORD… THE SWORD IS BEING CANNIBALIZED! HE IS NOT BLOCKING THE LETHAL BLOW, HE IS EATING IT! EVERYONE LOOK AT THAT CHEST! HE IS NOT HUMAN ANYMORE! WHAT HAS RISEN IN THAT ARENA?! IS THIS A MONSTER OR OUR SALVATION?!”
Around the wound in his chest, his black-flaming fur began scorching away on screen, but no red flesh or white bone appeared in its place. His skin turned completely semi-transparent and glassy right there. Through that thin, translucent layer, the anatomical horror was fully visible to everyone watching outside: his ribs, his lungs, his beating heart… they were gone. Dissolved.
What remained was a pulsating, pitch-black, liquid substance of pure energy and hydraulic muscle tissue moving like a surging ocean beneath his see-through skin. There was nothing left to hit. There were no vital organs left to pierce. He had simply sidelined death.
“My turn,” hissed the liquid entity on the screen.
His mane, which previously consisted of waves of black smoke, began to thicken. The smoke condensed, merged, and transformed into dozens of thin, fleshy, semi-transparent tentacles whipping through the air like blind, hungry snakes, independent of each other. These tentacles no longer carried normal flames; they were charged with microscopic, glowing venom needles that hissed with aggression. The vapor rising from this new mane was so extremely corrosive that the massive stone pillars around them began to hiss and melt purely from the humidity.
The Child recoiled with a chilling jerk, his hand finally ripped free, his psychopathic grin completely wiped away by an ancient, instinctive fear of death.
“Stay away from me! You are a Nobody! You're supposed to be dead! Sobbing on the floor, that is your place!” screeched the Child, stumbling backward, his voice cracking out of pure panic.
“Dead?” Silarias’ voice now echoed from the walls, from the ground, from the air itself. “I have never been so alive. The hunger is only just beginning.”
His bones had completely lost their rigid structure. With an elastic, terrifying brute force, Silarias’ right arm shot forward. His elbow and forearm stretched unnaturally far, meters longer than biologically possible, as if his limbs had turned into liquid hydraulic hoses.
BOOM!
The extended claw grabbed the Child by his neck and slammed him at full speed straight through three massive stone walls. Debris flew in every direction, and the cameras trembled on their foundations.
The Child scrambled up in blind panic among the rubble, his chitin mantle cracked and leaking. With a hysterical scream, he launched a desperate volley of hundreds of razor-sharp void shards that flew straight at Silarias’ neck like a lethal wall.
“DIE THEN! DIE! DISAPPEAR FROM MY SIGHT!” screamed the Child.
But Silarias did not even dodge the attack in a normal way. With a chilling, cracking sound, his own cervical vertebrae deliberately broke, causing his head to drop fluidly to the side, letting the lethal shards pass by a hair's breadth. Before the Child could catch his next breath, Silarias’ head slid straight back into place elastically with a wet, rubbery click.
His pitch-black, smoking eyes fixed on his prey once more. He felt no pain. There were no biological boundaries left. There was only the untamed Curse surging through his liquid veins, screaming for destruction.
As the arena around them began to split apart, on the verge of detonating completely in a nuclear void explosion, the hydrostatic lion raised his transforming, liquid arms. His psychopathic laugh echoed terrifyingly hard through the collapsing walls, drowned out by the panicked screeches of the Child, who realized he was standing face to face with something that simply could not die.
“Let the slaughter begin,” whispered Silarias, and he shot forward.
The two transformed monsters raised their claws at the same time. There was no tactic left, no defense, no mercy. It was a brute, pure slaughter where the laws of physics perished weeping. Silarias’ elastic, semi-transparent arms stretched out at a terrifying hydraulic speed, his claws fluidly warping into razor-sharp hooks that drew deep furrows into the Child’s chitin mantle. The Child screamed out, hissing in pain, but struck back possessed. His fleshy void growths clawed deep into Silarias’ glassy chest, but there were no organs to hit. Every wound the Child inflicted immediately dissolved into a surging, viscous puddle of pitch-black energy that snapped shut elastically within a millisecond.
“You can't die! Why won't you die?! What kind of abomination are you!” screeched the Child, his voice entirely hoarse and frantic from the roaring vapor wafting off Silarias’ nettle mane.
“I am the shadow you summoned yourself!” answered Silarias with a possessed, gurgling roar that cracked the foundations of the Secret Arena.
He stretched his torso unnaturally far, dodged a lethal void strike by letting his own spine snap fluidly backward, and grabbed the Child by his hips with both massive claws. The grip was suffocating, solid, as if two hydraulic presses were closing around the creature. With a brute, upward rotation, he hurled the entity straight into the air, right through the flashing purple mist.
“MORE!” roared the hydrostatic lion.
His split jaws spewed a wall of suffocating, pitch-black smoke as he braced his hind legs on the splintering arena floor. He bent deep through his knees, ready for an all-destroying counter leap to tear the Child to shreds in mid-air once and for all. The black fire on his fur flared meters high; the energy in his chest touched the absolute boiling point. The arena around them was about to detonate in a nuclear void explosion.
Outside on the Bastion square, the entire crowd held their breath, their eyes bloodshot and glued to the gigantic projection screen. They saw Silarias jump, a burning, pitch-black comet shooting into the sky, dragging reality behind it in shreds.
Then the screen went black.
A blinding, white flash consumed the camera feed in a single blow. A fraction of a second later, a deafening, seismic shockwave rolled across the square. The ground beneath the refugees' boots rippled like water. The screen shattered completely with a loud, hissing crackle, pieces of glass flying through the air. The connection was dead. The Secret Arena had exploded.
Inside the walls of hell, halfway through Silarias’ destructive leap, something happened that his raging instincts did not see coming. A blood-red, razor-sharp flash cut horizontally through the tearing void mist. It moved at a speed that slowed down reality itself. Before Silarias could sink his claws into the Child, the red flash struck his neck with surgical precision, right on a visceral pressure point.
The psychopathic laugh in Silarias’ throat died instantly. The pitch-black oil in his eyes retreated with a hissing shock, and his massive, liquid body went limp in a fraction of a second. The Cursed Form collapsed like a dying star, and the Nobody went completely knockout, his limp form falling down through the burning air.
At that exact moment, the arena exploded. An all-consuming, purple-black sea of fire erupted from the core of the building, ready to reduce every molecule in the wide perimeter to ash. The walls split, the heat reached up to the sky.
But the figure that had knocked Silarias out was already moving.
It was a masked swordsman, draped in a heavy cloak flapping through the nuclear heat. His mask gleamed coldly in the destructive light. With a chilling, serene focus, he drew his massive blade from its sheath. The sword sang a terrifying, metallic song that froze the heat of the explosion.
The swordsman took one step forward into the burning air and struck. SLASH. A vertical cut of pure, deep blue slicing energy split the sea of fire mercilessly down the middle. Without stopping, he pivoted on his axis and delivered a second, horizontal blow. SLASH. The gigantic, expanding explosion was literally cut into four perfect pieces with visually overwhelming brute force, its expansion rendered completely paralyzed by the slice.
In the middle of the falling debris, the masked swordsman saw the Child tumbling downward at an awkward angle. With a lightning-fast motion, he struck the Hybrid’s chest with the flat side of his sword, sending the monster flying horizontally through the space at full speed, before slamming his massive blade perpendicularly into the arena floor right up to the hilt with a thundering crash.
The ground shook to the deepest recesses of the city. The swordsman channeled the complete kinetic resonance of the incoming blast straight through the steel of his weapon. The tearing fault lines of the explosion stopped. The purple sea of fire was reversed like an inverted waterfall with astronomical suction power, pulled straight into the steel of the sword, until the room was completely empty, cold, and grey.
With a fluid motion, the masked man pulled his sword from the ground once more, raised it high into the air, and struck down upon the debris with possessed strength. The resulting earthquake shattered the entire back wall of the arena into tiny pieces.
“Too early to die, young lion,” the man muttered behind his mask.
He did not hesitate for a second, slid his sword into its sheath, grabbed Silarias’ unconscious, limp body under his arm, and leaped deep into the shadows with an explosive push-off, away from the collapsing hell, toward a hidden safe zone.
Outside on the Bastion square, the silence was unbearable. The gigantic plume of smoke rising above the rooftops of Cinderpulse City in the distance was the only tangible proof of the catastrophe. The sky was grey and suffocated.
Then the floodgates broke.
The hundreds of people on the square began to scream, yell, and hold each other in pure panic. Women fell to their knees in the mud, men covered their faces with their hands. The bitter realization that their young protector was buried alive in the ruins struck with the force of a hammer.
In the middle of the square, Nyx’s knees buckled. Her boots slid in the wet grass. Her silver eyes stared blankly, utterly broken, at the spot where the screen had just exploded. Tears streamed continuously down her cheeks now, carving a burning trail through the ash on her face. Her whole body trembled from the cold, slicing pain in her chest. Her breathing faltered, suffocated by an intense grief she had never allowed before.
A dark, all-consuming monologue spun inside her head: No. This can't be true. Not him. Why does this world always take away everything I try to protect? I stood there. I left him behind. I let go of his hand when he looked at me. What kind of ally am I if I let him croak in that sea of fire? Silarias… wake up. Please, get up. Don't leave me alone in this rotten city.
“SILARIAS!” she finally screamed out, her voice breaking completely across the square, a raw, possessed cry of despair that cut through everyone's marrow and bone. “SILARIAS, NO! COME BACK!”
Through the broken, crackling speakers of the PA system that had somehow survived the explosion, the Hypeman’s voice suddenly sounded. He was crying shamelessly, his breathing heavy, faltering, and raw with emotion, but he squeezed the final words out of his lungs with pure, possessed pride:
“LONG LIVE THE FIRST GOOD LANDLORD… MY KING SILARIAS!!”
The words triggered something explosive in the crowd. Grief turned into a fierce, honorable rage. Refugees drew their firearms, their flares, and their magical transmitters. As a final, desperate salute, they shot volleys of bright light and thundering fireworks into the dark sky. The sky above the Bastion turned blood-red, deep blue, and bright gold, a stark, painful contrast to the pitch-black smoke that kept rising in the distance.
Nyx barely heard the celebration of death. She forced herself upright through pure willpower, her teeth clenched so hard her jaws strained, as she grabbed Ren and Miki by their cold hands. The two children wept softly, their little faces completely covered in tears. They were still too young to understand the absolute cruelty of this sacrifice, but the heavy, suffocating atmosphere around them terrified them.
Behind them walked Jane, her face pale as a corpse and her eyes fixed strictly on the ground, while Apollo, with a contorted, straining face, carried the heavy, unconscious bodies of Beat, Blitz, and Aurelius over his broad shoulders. Their clanking armor dragged across the stones. Together, the battered group walked with heavy, dragging steps through the massive gates of the Bastion courtyard.
At the entrance of the main hall, Nicola and Lyn stood waiting. Their faces were ash-grey, marked by sickening tension. Tears were already streaming down the corners of Nicola’s eyes when he saw the bloody, battered group walk in. He immediately looked past Apollo, frantically searching the crowd, but the most important, golden-haired figure was missing. There was only emptiness behind them.
Nicola stepped forward, his whole body trembling from the approaching truth. He reached out with a trembling hand toward Jane, his voice nothing more than a hoarse, fragile whisper:
“Where… Where is Sil…? Tell me he's walking behind you. Jane, where is he?!”
Nyx did not look up. Her gaze was frozen. She did not slow her pace by a single millimeter, her silver eyes cold, empty, and dead, staring straight ahead into the darkness of the hallway. She ignored the burning question completely as if Nicola were a ghost, let his outstretched hand pass coldly, and walked right past him with smooth, mechanical, and chilly steps, deeper into the dark, lonely corridors of the Bastion. Leaving a trail of silence behind.