The familiar whispers began to creep into Eliot's mind the moment the strange scythe-like Memory settled in his trembling left hand. At first, they were quiet enough to ignore, nothing more than faint murmurs drowned beneath his ragged breathing, the crunching steps of stone golems, and the thunderous beating of his own heart. But with every passing second, they grew clearer. They still did not form proper words, at least not in any language Eliot knew, but their meaning crawled into his thoughts all the same.
Cut. Split. Crush. Break.
They wanted him to move, to stop thinking, to let the blade in his hand take over.
His right arm hung uselessly from his shoulder, dark blood soaking his sleeve and dripping down his fingers in uneven drops, but compared to the voices pushing against the inside of his skull, the pain almost felt distant.
'This is bad,' Eliot thought, clenching his teeth as his stomach twisted with fear, 'This is really, really bad.'
Raijin was only a few steps ahead of him, but even that short distance felt impossible to cross with the golems closing in from all sides. The azure-haired boy spun his spear around his waist and thrust forward with a sharp shout, bright blue lightning exploding from the triangular blade as it pierced into the chest of one of the stone creatures.
Cracks spread through the golem's torso, and for a brief moment, Eliot thought the attack had actually finished it off. But then the broken pieces twitched, the cracks sealed, and the lanky creature continued stumbling forward as if nothing had happened.
Raijin cursed loudly and kicked it away before twisting his body to avoid a claw aimed at his throat.
He was still fast, sharp and dangerous, but Eliot could see how heavily he was breathing. His face was pale, his hair stuck to his forehead with sweat, and even the lightning coiling around his spear seemed weaker than before. The bastard was reaching his limit.
"Stop staring and do something!" Raijin shouted, his voice sharp with frustration as he ducked under another stone limb and drove the butt of his spear into a golem's knee. The joint cracked loudly, forcing the creature to stumble, but instead of falling apart completely, it slammed one hand into the ground and kept crawling forward. "I swear, if you die while doing nothing, I'm going to find your corpse later and beat it up myself!"
"I'm trying!" Eliot shouted back, though his voice cracked embarrassingly halfway through the sentence.
He forced himself to move despite the pain tearing through his arm and chest, stepping forward just as one of the golems lunged at Raijin from the side. The whispers hissed louder inside his head, and for a split second his body moved before his fear could stop him.
The scythe flashed through the cold air in a wide arc, the dark metal edge biting into stone with a shriek that made his teeth hurt.
The golem's arm did not merely crack this time. It shattered, exploding into jagged fragments that sprayed across the frozen ground and bounced off the surrounding monoliths. Eliot froze for half a heartbeat, eyes widening as he stared at the result.
That strike had been too clean and way too strong for him. It had felt as if the weapon had known exactly where to cut and how much pressure to apply.
Raijin noticed it too, but he had no time to comment.
Two more golems stepped out from the surrounding monoliths, their forms peeling away from the black stone like corpses crawling out of walls.
Some of them looked almost human, thin and tall, with cracked torsos and long arms that dragged against the ground. Others were malformed, one possessing four legs and a twisted upper body, another with three arms on one side and none on the other.
None of them had faces, yet Eliot could still feel their attention on him, cold and empty and utterly inhuman. 'There are too many,' he thought, struggling to breathe evenly as he raised the scythe again. 'We can't beat them. Even if we break them, they just put themselves back together. We're going to die here because we wanted to find some damn food,' he nearly whimpered.
Another golem rushed them, and Raijin moved first. His body blurred, blue sparks bursting around his legs as he shot forward and planted one foot against the creature's chest. Instead of kicking it back, he used the golem as a stepping stone, pushing off its torso and spinning above its reach while his spear came down in a brutal descending strike.
The blade split the stone head in half and drove into the chest beneath, but the golem's hands still rose toward him, forcing Raijin to twist his body midair and push off the spear's shaft before the creature could grab his ankle.
He landed badly, nearly slipping on a patch of frost, and Eliot's heart jumped as another golem immediately reached for him.
Without thinking, Eliot lashed the scythe out again. The curved blade caught the creature's wrist and tore through it, though the motion pulled on his injured shoulder so violently that a strangled groan escaped his mouth.
For a few seconds, they managed to hold the line. Raijin moved like a streak of blue light between the golems, never staying still long enough for them to close their hands around him, while Eliot covered the openings as best as he could with his weapon.
It was not teamwork born from trust or practice, but from panic and fear of dying. Raijin would stumble back, Eliot would cut whatever followed him. Eliot would lose his balance, Raijin would shove a spear through the thing trying to take advantage.
Neither of them said thank you, because neither had the breath for it. Their weapons scraped, cracked and thundered against the stone bodies, filling the Monolith Forest with sharp echoes that bounced between the colossal pillars.
Then the golems stopped.
All of them.
One moment Raijin was about to throw his spear at a creature dragging itself toward Eliot's blind side, and the next the monster simply froze with its claws still raised.
Another golem halted halfway through stepping out of a nearby monolith, half of its body still fused with the stone.
Even the pieces of a shattered creature crawling across the ground stopped moving, each fragment lying still as if some invisible command had passed through the entire forest.
Raijin's grip on his spear tightened until his knuckles turned white. His instincts screamed that this was not good.
These things had not stopped because they were tired or afraid of the two Sleepers. They had been slowly overwhelming them without any trouble. Something else had changed, something neither he nor Eliot had noticed until the silence swallowed the battlefield.
Eliot swallowed loudly, his face even paler than before. "Why did they stop?"
Raijin did not answer immediately. His eyes moved from one golem to another, searching for any twitch, any sign that they were preparing to attack again. But the creatures were no longer looking at them.
Every single one of them, even the ones without faces, had turned slightly toward the deeper parts of the forest. Slowly, almost carefully, the golem closest to Raijin lowered its arm and took a step back.
Then another did the same. And then another again.
The sight made something cold settle in Raijin's stomach. They were retreating.
'Oh, that's just perfect,' he thought, sweat running down the side of his face despite the freezing air. 'We are so fucked...'
The whispers inside Eliot's mind changed at the same time.
They had been urging him to attack, pushing him to cut and split and break everything in front of him, but now their tone became frantic and layered with something that almost resembled fear.
The voices clashed with one another, some telling him to run, others telling him to fight, and a few whispering things that made no sense at all.
His fingers tightened around the scythe until the handle creaked softly beneath his grip. He did not want to look toward the darkness between the monoliths, because a part of him already knew what he would see there.
The thing that had been watching them since they entered this cursed forest had finally decided to stop hiding.
Far ahead, between two colossal monoliths that rose into the pale sky like the bones of some dead god, a figure stood motionless.
At first glance, it seemed human. Tall, narrow-shouldered, draped in long dark robes that did not belong to this frozen region at all. The fabric was layered and heavy, almost ceremonial, with faint crimson patterns running along the edges like dried blood burned into the cloth.
Pieces of armor covered parts of its body, but they looked unlike anything Raijin had seen from the Guild or any human clan. The metal was too dark, almost black, yet warm golden lines pulsed faintly across it as if molten light flowed somewhere underneath.
Around the figure's head rested something that might have been a crown or a broken halo, a thin ring of jagged metal hovering unnaturally close to the skull. Its face was hidden behind a smooth pale mask with no visible mouth, though two narrow vertical slits glowed with a deep ember-red light.
Raijin felt his mouth go dry. "That's the thing that was watching us…"
Eliot nodded weakly, unable to tear his eyes away from the distant figure.