⚠️ EXTREME CONTENT WARNING ⚠️
This chapter contains:
• Graphic violence & limb loss
• Intense psychological torment
• Blood, injury, and despair
Reader discretion is **strongly** advised.
Not suitable for sensitive readers.
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Jack stood firm, blood crusting his face, breath shallow, fingers trembling around the jagged fang-blade. The cavern was unnaturally still—airless, as if the world itself had paused to watch.
Then, without warning—a blur.
A beast vanished from sight. Jack barely blinked—until
THUD.
He felt it before he saw it. A numbness in his shoulder... then warmth... then pain, blinding.
His arm. Gone.
It lay on the stone beside him, fingers still twitching, painting the floor with blood.
Laughter rippled through the darkness. Cold. Mocking.
"Not even a scream?" one beast rasped, its fanged grin glinting in the firelight. "Pitiful."
"Did the human crawl all this way... just to die like a dog?" another sneered, its voice grinding like broken iron.
Jack didn't answer.
His eyes stayed low.
Breathing. Bleeding. Standing.
But something ancient stirred behind that silence. Not rage. Not despair.
Resolve.
Like a broken sword still aimed at the heavens.
Their laughter swelled, monstrous and distorted, echoing through the chamber like the voices of devils dancing on graves.
It was the kind of sound that gnawed at the edges of sanity—mocking, merciless, unrelenting.
But Jack didn't scream.
He couldn't.
His body trembled, not from pain—but from something deeper. Something older. A hollow stillness settled in his chest, familiar like an old scar.
Kneeling in blood, breath ragged, head bowed, he whispered to himself—voice hoarse, cracked:
"So this is it... after everything?"
Flashes of memory surged behind his eyes.
His parents' cold glares.
The fists and laughter in the school hallways.
The silent betrayal at the mine.
Granny's lifeless body.
Eight days beneath the earth.
The stone crushing his leg.
The raw flesh he was forced to eat.
The blade made from bone.
The silence.
And now, this—dismembered and humiliated before creatures who saw him as less than prey.
"I didn't crawl through hell just to die like this."
His remaining hand clenched into a trembling fist, blood dripping between his fingers.
The beasts kept laughing, louder, drunk on their cruelty.
His voice trembled—then turned to steel.
"I've suffered... I've bled... I've crawled through hell... I won't die here—not like this. The weak never get a fair death... but I'll make mine count."
Blood soaked through the cloth wrapped around his limbs, dripping into the cold stone beneath him. But still—he rose.
Barely balanced, body shaking, breath ragged. And yet, his eyes... they burned.
One of the beasts tilted its head, amused.
"Does the little human want to beg?" it mocked, voice curling like smoke.
"One last wish before you die?"
Jack looked up, fire roaring behind his gaze.
"I WON'T DIE LIKE THIS!!"
His scream echoed through the chamber, thunder in a tomb of monsters.
But fate answered without mercy.
A beast lunged—too fast for human eyes.
SHRACK!
His left leg was gone. Severed at the thigh. Blood arced through the air.
Before he even hit the ground—
THWIP!
The second leg followed, torn away in a blur of claws and teeth.
THUD. THUD.
Both legs hit the stone, lifeless. Jack's body followed a second later, crashing down like a felled tree, gasping—not in fear, but in defiance. Wide-eyed, still alive. Still refusing to bow.
He crashed against the cold stone floor, flesh torn, bones shattered, the damp rock seeping warmth from his body.
Blood soaked the ground beneath him, a dark mirror for everything he'd become.
"What was I thinking?" he muttered, voice cracked and hollow, tasting like iron. "I forgot... I'm nothing. Weak. Pathetic. A failure."
Tears mingled with his blood, sliding down his cheek like melted sorrow.
"All I ever wanted... was to stand on my own feet..."
His gaze drifted to where his legs once were, gone—hacked off like discarded waste in a pit of monsters.
"...And now even those are gone."
His voice faded into the cavern's silence. He lay there, broken, but the fire in his eyes still burned.
Because even stripped of limbs, stripped of hope...
He refused to surrender.
He didn't stop.
With skin flayed and breath in tatters, Jack dragged his mutilated body forward—inch by agonizing inch. His ribs scraped against jagged stone, each movement tearing fresh wounds, leaving a trail of blood behind him.
Every inch forward was paid in agony so deep, it made him bite through his own tongue. Blood filled his mouth. He didn't spit it out. He swallowed it. Welcomed it.
Maybe death would come. Maybe it would be kind.
But Jack knew better. Mercy had never been part of his story.
The beasts didn't kill him.
They played with him.
They took turns.
One would slash deep across his back—slow, deliberate, laughing as he screamed. Another carved taunting lines into his torso, painting the cave floor red with him. Their laughter echoed like bells in hell.
They treated his pain like sport, like art. And Jack—helpless, half-dead—begged not for survival... but for it to stop.
Then the leader stepped forward.
Towering. Fangs dripping. In his clawed hands, a corrupted, blackened blade, humming with a vile energy that bent the air around it. He raised it above Jack's throat, eyes glowing with cruel finality.
And then—
BOOM.
A shockwave erupted from the earth beneath them. A blinding light exploded outward.
Beasts were flung like dolls, slamming into walls, bones shattering on impact.
Blood misted into the air like red rain.
And at the center of it all, where Jack's broken body lay— A glowing sigil burned itself into the stone.
Deep red. Ancient. Alive.
He didn't scream. He couldn't.
His body arched violently off the stone floor, like a marionette pulled by invisible strings.
His eyes rolled back—then flared open, glowing pure white. Blood streamed from his ears, trailing down his neck in thin, trembling lines.
A sharp crack echoed as his jaw dislocated, forced wide by an unseen pressure building inside his skull.
His cells twisted, spiraled, broke apart. His very essence began to unravel—then reassemble, again and again, as if the laws of nature were being rewritten from within.
Something ancient... something not of this world... was rewriting him.
His heart ruptured in his chest. His breathing stopped. His torso went limp.
And for a moment—
Jack was dead.
Or rather... something greater than Jack was just beginning to wake.
A search team descended into the abyss, their lights flickering against the jagged stone like fading hopes. The mission hadn't come from any guild, nor from government orders.
It had come from Jasmine—funded, organized, and driven by a single unshakable belief: Jack was not dead.
She refused to accept it.
No body had been recovered. No remains, save for the echoes of pain and silence.
But in her heart, something pulsed—an intuition louder than logic. He's still alive.
Deeper into the cave, the team trudged in silence. Then—
"Here!" one of them called out.
The group gathered, and there it was: a bloodied digger, half-buried in gravel, and nearby—Jack's severed left foot, mangled and pale, still pinned beneath the massive boulder that had once trapped him.
The leader of the team crouched, silent for a moment. Then his voice cut through the gloom.
"Two possibilities," he said grimly. "Either a beast took him... or he did the impossible."
He glanced at the rock. At the blood. At the signs of a man who had crawled away.
"He broke himself free."
Rising to his feet, he gave a sharp nod. "We keep going."
Far above, outside the cave's mouth, Jasmine stood beneath a gray sky, the wind tugging at her coat.
Her fingers trembled as she held Jack's scarf close to her chest. But her voice—quiet and sure—did not waver.
"Jack's alive... I know it. He's a survivor."
She stared into the dark horizon.
"He doesn't give up. Not like that."
Hours later, the team emerged from the cave—silent, bloodied, and grim. Their expressions said everything. There was no body. Only a severed foot... Jack's.
A rotting beast's corpse nearby—one that had died long before Jack ever disappeared—and beyond that, a sheer cliff that dropped into the glowing throat of the volcano deep beneath the earth.
The answer was merciless in its simplicity: Jack had fallen. Or jumped. And been swallowed whole by fire.
There would be no remains.
No closure.
Days later, a quiet funeral was held under a colorless sky.
The air was still. No birds sang. No words could ease the weight pressing against their chests. The service ended quickly.
Most mourners left without a word, as if afraid speaking aloud would make the loss more real.
Only Jasmine stayed behind.
She stood alone by the headstone, wind tugging at her coat, her hands resting on the cold granite.
Her eyes were red, but dry. The tears had run out. All that remained was something worse—hope.
"...They said he's gone," she whispered, her voice trembling. "Everyone believes it."
She leaned her forehead against the stone.
"Then why can't I?"
A pause.
"...Why does it still feel like Jack isn't finished yet?"
The wind didn't answer.
But somewhere far below the earth...
Something stirred.