James and Orane had watched Leo carve through several more monsters over the next few hours, cutting down twisted creatures of the maze with the same cold precision he'd shown before. But once he finished a salamander-like beast, its molten blood still hissing on the stone, Leo finally exhaled and let his shoulders drop.
"We rest for now," he muttered, before sitting down with visible exhaustion. The strain of holding onto his creation spell earlier still clung to him; even after their last rest, his mana hadn't fully returned. His breathing slowed, his eyes dimmed, and eventually his head lowered as he drifted into sleep.
For a long moment, nothing moved. Then James' eyes narrowed.
He slowly approached Orane, who sat with her back against the salamandar, her hands resting on her staff but her fingers tense.
"This is our chance, Orane," he whispered sharply. His voice trembling not from fear, but from the excitement of a plan finally within reach. "Are you with me… or against me?"
Orane turned her head toward him, then toward Leo's sleeping form. Her expression tightened, suspicion clouding her emerald eyes. The silence stretched until James leaned closer.
"He is weaker right now," he insisted, voice low and urgent. "It's now or never. You know it."
For a heartbeat Orane didn't breathe. Then at last she looked up, jaw set, and nodded.
"Use your strongest lock spell," he said quietly. "And I will cut his throat."
Orane blinked. "You think that will work?"
"We have to be fast," he whispered back, voice barely audible.
She gave a cold smile. "Fine."
Orane lifted her hand, gathering mana, her eyes fixed on Leo.
James inhaled once, deeply, and cast his own spell. His entire figure shimmered, then vanished. His presence, his footsteps, the sound of breathing, all of it blinked out of existence. He was not merely invisible; he was erased from perception.
Silent as death, he slipped behind Leo.
The dagger in his hand darkened with mana, its edge sharpened to kill in a single strike. He raised it, eyes gleaming with hatred and fear twisted into resolve.
Just as he moved, Leo's eyes snapped open.
But Orane's spell triggered that same instant. A shimmering force locked around Leo's body, freezing him for a single second, one fatal heartbeat.
The dagger plunged deep into Leo's throat. Warm blood erupted across James' hand, spraying in a crimson arc. Leo's eyes widened with instinctive shock, his body lurching forward as the spell released a heartbeat too late.
James' grin spread, wider and wider, delight burning in his gaze as he watched the blood run down his arm. Then he started laughing, a raw, hysterical sound breaking the still air of the maze.
He turned to Orane, wiping a streak of blood from his cheek with the back of his hand.
"Well done," he said, breathlessly triumphant. "But…"
His expression twisted, warping into something venomous.
"…now it's your turn."
But Orane didn't move. Not even a flicker of emotion crossed her face. She stood completely still. Unresponsive. Frozen in place, her eyes staring straight ahead.
James stared at Orane, suspicion tightening his expression, then shifted his gaze toward Leo. Leo was sitted utterly motionless, like a carved figure frozen mid-breath. When James reached out to touch him, Leo's body suddenly lost all structure. It collapsed into a wet, collapsing mass, sinking into the soil in thick streaks of mud. Orane, who stood frozen beside him, began to disintegrate the same way, her limbs softening, face sagging, before dissolving into the same murky sludge.
"What…?"
"You've never faced an illusionist, have you?" A voice, Leo's, echoed through the maze passage, directionless and chilling.
James spun, dagger raised. "This… this is an illusion. From when?!"
"From the very beginning," the voice drifted around him, then in a whisper directly beside his right ear. "From the moment you were about to kill Loidon."
James slashed instinctively, but his dagger carved through nothing, only empty air.
Leo materialized several steps away, his expression calm and cold. "When your fire burned his hand, I already knew something was wrong."
James hurled an arrow at him in panic. The arrow passed straight through Leo's chest, his form dissolving instantly into drifting vapor. Then the world around James collapsed into blinding white, swallowing the ground, the walls, even the air. All color vanished.
Through the pale haze, Leo walked forward, each step echoing like a judgment. "You chose the body of someone weak. Someone my illusions can overwhelm without effort."
Behind James, a structure rose from the white emptiness, a wooden cross, crude and rough, shaped like a giant 'X.'
Leo charged.
James swung his dagger at him, but Leo vanished again. Two new Leos appeared at his sides, each grabbing one of his arms with unnatural strength. They dragged him back toward the cross no matter how violently he struggled. His feet scraped against the ground, lungs burning, but they overpowered him with ease.
Two more Leos manifested and in perfect, silent coordination pinned his arms and drove iron nails into his wrists. The sharp cracks of metal sinking into wood mixed with James's raw, tearing screams. They descended to his legs and repeated the same, nails hammered through his feet, fixing him helplessly to the cross.
The copies vanished at once, leaving only a single Leo standing before him, expression carved from stone.
"You gave me a chance," Leo said quietly, studying him like a specimen. "A chance to study you."
James clenched his teeth, eyes burning with hate. "You'll never break me."
Leo raised an eyebrow. "Break you? I don't need to break you."
His hand lifted slowly, palm facing James's chest.
"I can take whatever I want, effortlessly. Obscurae."
Mana erupted from James's body the moment the word left Leo's lips, wrenching itself free in a violent rush.
…
Leo studied the floating words as they spiraled in the air, peeled directly out of James's body by Obscurae. Inside an illusion, they didn't behave like normal. Here, they were solid, luminous characters, shifting and folding like living glyphs. And because this was Leo's illusion, those glyphs revealed their true meaning to him in perfect detail.
The symbols drifted toward his forehead, dissolving into him one by one. With every word absorbed, another piece of information slotted into his mind.
"So," Leo murmured, eyes narrowing as understanding formed. "You're called the Harbinger of Madness. The shell on you real body is extremely resistance to heat and fire." His tone was flat, clinical, like he was reading from a manual.
James's lips twisted, not into his own smile, but into something sharp and feminine. A woman's voice spilled out of him. "You will never defeat me."
Leo blinked at her, expression almost bored. "I already have. Several times, actually."
"You couldn't save them all," she hissed.
"And?" Leo stared back, completely unmoved. "People die. Get over it."
That, more than anything, seemed to genuinely surprise her. The smile faltered before curling into something manic. "So you are already mad."
Leo tilted his head. "I'm not a god. I can't save everyone, yet." He waved the thought away as if it didn't matter. "Anyway… let's continue. You're resistant to most things. Let's see how you handle this."
He didn't raise a hand. He didn't channel mana. He simply spoke, calm and cold.
"Pain."
The scream that tore out of James's body wasn't human, high, distorted, echoing through the illusion like the shriek of something ancient being ripped open. It reverberated against the blank white space, the sound folding over itself again and again as though the illusion refused to let it fade.
Leo watched, eyes unblinking, as the Harbinger's agony filled the air.
There was no pity in him, only focus.
The study had only just begun.
…
Out in the maze, Orane and Loidon stood over James's motionless body. He was frozen mid-movement, kneeling, dagger still clenched in his hand, his face twisted with murderous intent. It was exactly the position he'd been in the moment Leo froze him.
Earlier, Loidon had woken up to find James leaning over him with that same dagger. Panic had ripped through him when he saw the man turned to stone, literally locked in place, by Leo's illusion.
Leo had explained everything with calm efficiency. James was possessed. The same creature they fought had slipped itself into him. And now James was trapped inside Leo's illusion while Leo tried to force the entity out.
That was almost an hour ago. Now they waited.
"How much longer does it take?" Orane whispered, her voice thin from fear and exhaustion. Her fingers tightened around her staff until her knuckles turned white.
Loidon shook his head slowly, eyes fixed on Leo. "I don't know…"
Leo sat on the ground a few steps away, cross-legged, perfectly still except for the faint trembling in his fingers. Sweat ran down his temples, and his breathing was steady but strained, as if every inhale was painful.
Then suddenly, he opened his eyes. A low exhale left him. "It's almost over."
Orane immediately leaned forward. "Is he okay? Is James… still in there?"
Leo's eyes remained half-lidded, his voice calm but heavy. "I don't know. But I'm doing my best."
And with that, he closed his eyes again, slipping back into the illusion realm without another word.
…
Inside the illusion, Leo worked relentlessly, sifting through the stolen fragments of knowledge he had torn from the creature's mind.
The information confirmed the same truth. this thing wasn't merely possessing James, it was burrowed into him, a parasite that latched onto weak hosts, puppeting them from within. Extracting it without killing the host was almost impossible.
But Leo still had an advantage.
Here, in the illusion, the creature's mind had form, trapped, unable to hide behind flesh.
James's borrowed face twisted into a mocking smile. "If you think this is enough to…"
He didn't finish.
Leo lifted his hand, fingers steady, and whispered with absolute authority.
"Mind Control."
The effect was immediate.
James's pupils dilated, then went glassy and hollow, emptied of will, emotion and resistance. His body went perfectly still, like a puppet whose strings had been cut mid-gesture.
Leo stepped closer, eyes cold. "To think you know nothing about an illusionist," he said quietly. "Mind Control is a C-to-B rank spell. It always works on a weak mind. I never had a chance to learn it before… but I suppose I owe that automaton a lot."
His expression hardened.
"Now," he commanded, voice becoming razor-sharp, "get out of this man's body."
…
Outside, in the real maze, James's body jerked violently as if shocked. His muscles seized, his back arched, and then something beneath his skin began writhing, skittering just under the surface like a trapped insect.
Orane and Loidon recoiled as a bulge crawled up James's arm.
Then, rip, the skin split open, and a small, slick, worm-like creature forced itself through the wound, wriggling free.
Before either of them could react, Leo crushed it under his boot, grinding it into the stone floor.
"It's over," he said, breathing out slowly. He turned to Orane. "If you have healing magic, now is the time. I'm not good with that kind of magic."
Orane nodded quickly and knelt beside James's pale face. She raised her hands, whispering a chant, and a soft green glow poured from her palms, enveloping his body in gentle waves of restoration.
Loidon stepped closer to Leo. "Is he really okay now?" he asked, voice heavy with worry.
"I think so," Leo answered honestly.
Loidon bowed his head. "Thank you."
"I only did what any normal man would do," Leo replied with a tired shrug.
Before Loidon could continue, James's fingers twitched, then his hand moved, and slowly, shakily, his eyes opened.
"Where am I? What happened to that monster?"
James's voice was hoarse, barely more than a rasp as his eyelids fluttered open. Confusion clouded his expression and his gaze wandered over the dim walls of the maze like someone waking from a nightmare he couldn't fully remember.
"James…" Orane's voice shook as she whispered his name. Her eyes were glossy with tears that hadn't fallen yet, held back only by relief.
Loidon huffed out a breath and crossed his arms, but the tension in his shoulders eased. "You got us scared, boy."
James blinked several times, trying to piece the shattered fragments of his memory together. He then looked between the three faces staring at him.
"What happened?" His tone turned sharp, like he expected danger to leap out at him the moment someone spoke.
Loidon settled down beside him, resting his forearms on his knees. Slowly, carefully, as if trying to avoid overwhelming him, the dwarf recounted everything, how they found him frozen in place, how Leo discovered he'd been possessed, and finally how the creature was torn out of him.
James listened without interrupting, his expression becoming more and more rigid with each detail. When Loidon finished, James released a heavy exhale. His shoulders sagged as if he had been holding his breath the whole time.
"That creature possessed me?" He shook his head with disbelief. "I… I only remember the fire catching my arm, and then everything went dark." His fingers brushed over the fresh healing marks on his forearm. Then, hesitating for a heartbeat, he looked at Leo. "Thank you, sir."
Leo gave the faintest nod. His expression stayed calm. "It's Leo. And we need to move. This place won't wait for us."
Orane helped steady James while Loidon pulled him fully to his feet. There was still weakness in his posture, but life had returned to his eyes.
With the threat gone but the Maze still pressing from all sides, the four of them gathered their belongings.
No more words needed to be said.
Together, silently, they stepped forward and continued deeper into the maze's endless, living corridors.