The black lightning tore upward like a spear hurled by a dying god.
It ripped through the Dark Forest canopy, scattering corrupted leaves in a whirlwind of scorched ash. The sky blinked black for a heartbeat, then the blade of lightning curved toward its quarry the two fleeing figures who thought they could outrun consequence.
The lightning-user carried his brother on his back, both of them bleeding mist from the earlier invisible strikes. Desperation clung to them like a second skin.
They were fast.
But black lightning born from corruption…
…was faster.
The wind-user felt it first a pressure folding the world behind him, a silence too sharp to be natural. His instincts screamed.
He turned.
And saw death.
A black blade of thunder, a streak of night bent into a line, tearing through the sky toward them.
His pupils shrank.
"MOVE!"
Wind detonated around his body. He grabbed the lightning-user by the shoulder and pulled with every thread of world-energy he possessed.
For a moment, their bodies blurred.
wind twisting, lightning cracking and the two brothers flung sideways by pure instinct.
The black lightning shot past them so close it carved a line through the air, slicing through wind itself.
The world inhaled.
BOOM.
The explosion slammed into the forest like a meteor made of night.
The ground tore open, soil flung into the air in heaving chunks.
Trees splintered into blackened halves.
A crater bloomed where the lightning struck a wound in the world spreading corruption like spilled ink.
Ray felt the blast from afar.
Catalina did too.
They exchanged no words.
Their bodies were already moving.
They ran.
Through twisting trees.
Over roots like skeletal hands.
Across ground shifting under the weight of the forest's own corruption.
The two fugitives had barely landed when the chase resumed.
The brothers sprinted deeper into the Dark Forest, their movements frantic, desperate. Blood dripped from the wind-user's mouth; the lightning-user limped from the earlier impact. But fear powered their legs with a strength that world-energy could not grant.
Behind them, Ray's footsteps thundered.
Catalina's mist drifted ahead like spreading frost.
And high above, the echo of the black lightning blast traveled deeper,
deeper.
deeper.
…into the forbidden heart of the Dark Forest.
There, beneath twisted roots and ancient bones, something enormous stirred.
A beast whose sleep was a curse.
Whose waking was a calamity.
Whose flesh was older than the forest itself.
The echo reached it like a tap on a coffin lid.
Its eyes opened.
Two.
No— six.
Each reflecting a different shade of hunger.
Its breath thickened the air.
Its heartbeat made the ground shudder.
The forest's corruption curled toward it like worship.
Something… was coming awake.
But that awakening belonged to a later moment.
For now, the forest only trembled.
Inside the Trial of Gods
Far above the waking behemoth, beyond the torn canopy and stretching sky, the realm of the trial shifted into a deeper nightmare.
Kai stood before the mirror door, still locked, still mute, still impossible to decipher. The palace around him gleamed with blue-gold reflections a world made of fractured images and silent warnings.
But the true horror lay below.
The ocean that should have been water…
…was no longer anything that deserved the name "ocean."
Kai stared through the shattered mirror sky at what churned beneath it.
A sea of flesh.
Pulsing.
Quivering.
Alive.
Skin folded like waves.
Veins coursed like currents.
And tentacles thick, pale, wet writhed across the surface in slow, searching arcs.
Kai felt his stomach clench.
Is it even called an ocean anymore…?
Liquid makes an ocean.
Water makes an ocean.
But flesh?
What does repeating, multiplying, breathing flesh make?
His mind refused to form an answer.
Something moved in the depths.
No many things.
Kai's crimson eyes flared open, and the world below sharpened.
Thousands.
Thousands of small fish-like shapes drifted through the flesh sea. Their bodies were pale and pulsing, veins visible beneath transparent skin. Their tails were not tails more like fleshy ribbons. Their eyes were blank and pitifully wrong.
They swam through skin as though it were water.
Kai exhaled slowly, jaw tightening.
The beast wasn't supposed to multiply. It was supposed to evolve.
Yet here they were.
A swarm.
A mass.
An ungodly choir of flesh-born puppets.
He leaned forward slightly, crimson gaze narrowing.
At first glance, they all carried corruption—
but when he looked deeper…
No.
They were empty.
Hollow.
Like bodies without cores.
Puppets without purpose.
And all of them orbited a single point beneath the flesh sea.
a still, unmoving mass of corruption at the center.
Kai's eyes focused, piercing layer after layer.
There.
The core.
The original beast.
Or what remained of it.
Corruption wrapped its core like barbed wire, twisting, refining, reshaping.
Grey sludge pulsed around it like a heart trying to remember how to beat.
The fish had not evolved.
The core had.
It was no longer a Tainted Ravager.
Its aura was stronger, deeper, sharper corruption affinity condensed into a higher, more malignant form.
A Blighted Ravager.
Kai's breath tightened.
Of course.
When beasts refine their own corrupted cores…
they mutate.
They change.
Their affinity skyrockets.
And something wrong is born.
Kai's crimson eyes dimmed, withdrawing from the sight before they burned themselves out. The smell of corrupted flesh drifted upward, faint but nauseating.
He turned away from the abyss below and faced the mirror door again.
It remained locked.
Unmoving.
Silent.
As if none of the horrors behind him mattered to it.
Kai let out a quiet exhale, rubbing the back of his neck.
"No key. No handle. No answer. Perfect."
The flesh ocean below churned louder.
Tentacles slapped against the shattered mirror sky, trying to climb, to reach, to escape.
Kai didn't look.
He already knew what he'd see.
He already knew what waited beneath.
And he already understood one thing with painful clarity:
This trial was far more than a test.
It was a grave.
And something inside it was still trying to dig its way out.