Chapter 10: The Grafted Dead
The castle's inner halls writhed with flesh made architectural. What Gara had initially taken for decorative stonework resolved itself into something far worse as his eyes adjusted to Stormveil's particular brand of interior design. Grafted limbs reached from walls like supplicating branches, corpses melted into load-bearing structures, eyes that still blinked wetly from surfaces that should have been solid stone.
He stopped pretending this was a game and started vomiting in corners.
The retching was violent, productive, and utterly ineffective at purging the images burned into his retinas. His enhanced Constitution helped him recover quickly from the physical effects, but no amount of statistical optimization could process the psychological impact of architecture that had once been people.
"This isn't set dressing," he realized, wiping bile from his lips while his enhanced vision picked out details he wished he couldn't see. "These are real people. Were real people. Godrick didn't just kill them—he incorporated them into the building itself."
A hand twitched in his peripheral vision. Not the random spasms of dead muscle, but purposeful movement. Intentional. Aware.
Some of them were still alive.
The hall stretched before him like a gallery of surgical nightmares, each alcove revealing fresh horrors that challenged his understanding of what constituted human form. Commoners mostly—farmers, merchants, pilgrims who'd sought shelter in Godrick's domain and found themselves conscripted for architectural purposes. Their eyes tracked his movement with desperate intelligence, mouths opening and closing in silent pleas for mercy he couldn't provide.
They were fused to stone, integrated so thoroughly with the castle's structure that separating them would require demolishing walls. Even if he could free them, the grafting process had left most of them as fragments—a torso here, a head there, limbs redistributed according to Godrick's aesthetic preferences rather than biological necessity.
"Please," one of them whispered as he passed, the voice emerging from a face embedded in what had once been a decorative pillar. "Please... kill me..."
The request hit like a physical blow. This wasn't an enemy to defeat or an obstacle to overcome—it was a person begging for the mercy of death, transformed into a living monument to someone else's insanity. The ethical calculus was crystal clear: killing them would be kindness.
But kindness felt like murder when his sword took the speaker's head off with one clean stroke.
Runes flowed into him—a pathetic trickle, barely enough to register on his enhanced senses. Forty-three golden lights, the sum total of a life reduced to statistical improvement. The absorption felt like swallowing screams, like his soul was being stained with every dying breath.
Forty-three runes. That's what a human life converts to when filtered through this system. Forty-three points of power extracted from decades of hopes and dreams and stupid human comedy.
He moved through the gallery methodically, providing requested mercy to those who could still speak, quick deaths to those who could only suffer. Each kill added to his total—sometimes fifty runes, sometimes thirty, sometimes a hundred if the victim had possessed training or talent before grafting claimed them.
By the time he cleared the hall, he'd gained maybe two thousand runes total. Enough for a minor stat increase. Enough to make the mathematics of mercy profitable, if he chose to see it that way.
The thought made him vomit again, more violently this time.
"Two thousand runes from twenty-three mercy kills. I just turned human suffering into experience points. I harvested people like crops and convinced myself it was kindness."
But what was the alternative? Leave them to suffer indefinitely while he pursued his goals? Let them remain conscious decorations in Godrick's house of horrors because killing them felt wrong? The moral framework that had guided his previous life offered no answers for situations where all choices led to tragedy.
A sound from overhead cut through his moral crisis—something large moving across the ceiling with predatory patience. Gara looked up to see a familiar silhouette dropping toward him with gravitational enthusiasm.
Grafted Scion. Not the Scion from the tutorial area, but one of many—mass-produced horrors created from whatever raw materials Godrick's workshops could process. Multiple arms, armored carapace, the same crown of thorns that had killed him forty-three times during his first hour in this world.
Muscle memory activated before conscious thought could interfere. Dodge left, the Scion's claws raking air where his head had been. Strike at the legs while the creature recovered from its landing. Roll away as grafted appendages swept through the space his torso had occupied.
The pattern was identical to his tutorial experience, carved into his reflexes through repetition and trauma. But knowledge couldn't overcome the fundamental inequality of resources—the Scion was faster, stronger, more resilient than anything he could achieve through stat manipulation alone.
Death #80: Grafted Scion. Claws through chest. 3/10 - should have expected the ambush.
He respawned knowing exactly what to expect, adjusting his approach based on perfect recall of the creature's capabilities. Maximum Dexterity for the opening exchange, transition to Strength for the killing blow, enough Endurance to sustain the strategy through multiple exchanges.
Death #81: Grafted Scion. Grabbed and crushed. 2/10 - mistimed the dodge window.
Third attempt. The Scion dropped from its ceiling perch, claws extended, weight and momentum carrying it toward the spot where Gara had been standing. But forty-three tutorial deaths had taught him patience. He waited until the last possible moment before shifting left, letting the creature's own force carry it past his position.
Death #82: Grafted Scion. Tail sweep. 1/10 - forgot about the tail.
The fourth attempt succeeded, but success felt hollow as the Scion dissolved into golden light that tasted of surgical trauma and institutional horror. Because as the creature died, Gara finally understood what he was looking at.
The Grafted Scions weren't constructed from random body parts. They were built from specific people—multiple individuals grafted together into a single functional unit, their combined capabilities creating something stronger than the sum of its parts. This one had been a family, probably. Father, mother, children, melded together screaming until they became something that could serve Godrick's purposes.
He'd been fighting people. Groups of people. Families forced into configurations that let them survive as weapons rather than die as individuals.
The realization broke something in his chest that he hadn't realized was still intact.
Sobs wracked his body while golden runes flowed into him, each absorbed mote carrying memories of the lives it had once sustained. A child's laughter. A mother's lullaby. A father's promises that everything would be alright, made before promises became lies and lies became the foundation for architectural nightmares.
"They're victims too," he thought through tears that felt hot as molten metal. "Every enemy I've killed, every monster I've fought—they were all people once. People who made the mistake of being in the wrong place when Godrick needed raw materials."
The weight of understanding crushed down on him with geological force. He wasn't clearing dungeons filled with monsters—he was navigating mausoleums built from human misery, fighting the transformed remnants of everyone who'd failed to escape before Godrick's madness claimed them.
"You feel their deaths."
Melina's voice cut through his breakdown like starlight through storm clouds. She knelt beside him in the blood-stained hallway, her spectral form providing comfort that transcended the merely physical. No judgment in her expression, no surprise at his tears—just recognition of someone witnessing horror that no soul should have to process.
"Most Tarnished grow numb," she continued, one translucent hand resting gently on his shoulder. "They learn to see enemies as obstacles, victims as resources, suffering as background noise. It's a survival mechanism. Necessary, perhaps, but..."
"But not human," Gara finished, his voice cracked with emotion he hadn't felt since childhood. "I can't grow numb. I remember everything. Forever. Every death I've caused, every life I've ended, every person who dissolved into runes while I calculated whether the experience was worth the effort."
Melina studied him with her single eye, seeing past the tears to something deeper and more troubling. "That's... a terrible gift. To carry the weight of every kill, every choice, every moment where survival demanded cruelty. Most minds would break under such burden."
"Maybe breaking would be mercy."
"Perhaps. But broken minds cannot change the world. And the world desperately needs changing."
She helped him to his feet, supporting weight that was emotional rather than physical. Together they found a hidden Grace site—a pocket of golden peace in Stormveil's catalog of horrors, sanctuary that existed despite rather than because of the surrounding architecture.
The light was warm against his skin, cleansing in ways that went beyond mere physical restoration. But it couldn't wash away knowledge, couldn't unknow what he'd learned about the true nature of his enemies and victims.
"How does Godrick live with himself?" Gara whispered, staring into flames that promised rest he didn't deserve. "How does he sleep at night knowing what he's done to these people?"
Melina's answer chilled him to the core: "He doesn't see them as people anymore. Just materials. Components to be arranged according to his vision. Be careful you don't walk his path, Tarnished. The line between necessity and monstrosity is thinner than most realize."
The warning hit too close to home. Hadn't he been calculating NPC worth in runes? Hadn't he measured the value of mercy kills against their statistical benefit? Hadn't he started seeing the people of the Lands Between as resources to be optimized rather than lives to be preserved?
"Eighty-two deaths," he thought, checking his mental tally with obsessive precision. "Eighty-two lessons in how to be more efficient at violence. Each one carved away another piece of whatever made me human in the first place."
The journal entry that night was shorter than usual, written in handwriting that shook despite his enhanced Dexterity:
Death #80-82: Grafted Scion. Multiple attempts. Final rating: 0/10. Not because of pain or difficulty, but because understanding what it used to be makes victory feel like defeat. Total deaths: 82. Beginning to wonder if the thing that survives this journey will still be me, or just something wearing my face that's learned to be very good at killing.
The Grace light flickered and danced, casting shadows that looked like reaching hands, like supplicating faces, like all the people who'd become building materials for someone else's ambition.
Melina's presence was a comfort, but it couldn't answer the question that kept him awake long past midnight: How many more deaths would it take before he stopped caring about the answers? Before mercy became mathematics and murder became methodology?
Before he became exactly the kind of monster this world seemed designed to create?
The castle groaned around them, settling into configurations that might once have been architectural but now sounded disturbingly organic. In the distance, new screams echoed from Godrick's workshops, fresh materials being processed into tomorrow's horrors.
And somewhere in those screams, Gara heard the echo of his own voice—not as it was, but as it was becoming. Clinical. Efficient. Optimized for a world where the only currency that mattered was power, and power could only be bought with other people's suffering.
The transformation was already underway. The only question was whether he'd recognize the moment when it became complete.
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