What does one think about when time stops?
If one could extract the thoughts of every esteemed reader at such a moment, they could likely be compiled into a book. In fact, such a book already exists in the real world. It's called the criminal code.
The truth is, when time stops, you can't think at all.
Consciousness is tethered to existence, and the essence of *existence* is *time*.
When time congeals, existence ceases, consciousness fails to recognize itself, and a person loses all thought, becoming a statue of flesh and blood. The experience is terrifying. A person trapped in suspended time might feel they have already died. Yet, it might also be less terrifying than imagined, for that person likely wouldn't even be aware they were trapped in stasis.
No one knew how long it lasted. For Chen and the others, it might have been an instant. For the Terrorfiends, it might have been a lifetime…
The effect of the regional fast-forward slowly dissipated. Song, who had been cowering behind Chen, felt his consciousness gradually sharpen. The moment his capacity for thought returned, he was greeted by the ultimate blossoming of death.
The corpses of Terrorfiends from above began to rain down. Bloodless, pulped flesh and countless thrashing tentacles flooded into the small pocket of clean space they occupied. The aura of the dead washed over them—thick, cloying, a gelatinous miasma that made Song's spirit tremble from the depths of his soul.
*What tier of death-domain is this? Can a death-domain of this magnitude even exist? If this thing goes full-scale, wouldn't it summon the true Entity of Death itself?!*
After this rapid-fire trio of horrified questions, Song wasted not a second more. He remembered Chen's words clearly: his one strike would be the key to their salvation.
Watching the tentacled horrors, now devoid of flesh to consume, begin to writhe and surge madly toward their group of six, Song took a deep, shuddering breath. His eyes turned pitch black, voids where irises should be.
Reaping State: Activated.
He raised his own hands, fingers curling with unnatural strength, and clamped them around his own throat. A sickening *CRACK* echoed in the sudden silence—the sound of his own spine severing under his ruthless grip. His body went rigid, then slack, yet it did not fall. Instead, the standing corpse of Song began to dissolve, fading like smoke.
The surrounding death-energies, already dense, erupted into a violent boil. A spectral wind howled, tearing at the remnants of clothing and stirring the foul air. A sickly, pulsating green luminescence swelled, blinding in its intensity. In the time it takes to blink, a colossal black scythe materialized above them, hanging in the air with a presence that spoke of cataclysm and oblivion.
Chen and the others, their minds just catching up to the resumed flow of time, looked up. Their breath hitched in unison.
It was immense.
None had ever witnessed a Death Scythe of such terrifying scale. Even the small, decorative skull at the very end of the haft looked like a gargantuan sculpture carved from a mountain. The blade itself, shimmering with that eerie verdant light, appeared less like a tool for harvesting souls and more like a keen edge forged to slice planets asunder. Chen, even having witnessed the high-stakes games of the 2100s, had never seen a Reaping implement of this magnitude.
A single, primal thought crystallized in his mind: *Pray that Song hasn't lost his mind completely and decides to send us all along for the ride.*
A chant, half-heard and half-felt, more a vibration in the fabric of reality than a sound, thrummed through the air. It was a dirge for souls, a hymn for life's end.
**"Souls to slumber, lives to sever. Funeral rites, now and forever. REAP!"**
The colossal scythe descended. It did not move with blinding speed, but with an inevitable, gravitational finality. It was sheathed in the whispers of ten thousand dead, a chorus of lost regrets and final sighs.
The world… fractured.
Everywhere except the tiny island of ground upon which the six Believers stood, the entire visible ruin *cracked*. It was as if a giant pane of glass had been struck at its center. A spiderweb of fissures, glowing with the same sickly green, raced through stone, metal, and flesh. The very air seemed to splinter.
Then followed the sound.
It was not a scream, nor an explosion. It was a sigh. A vast, collective exhalation of release, of surrender, that rose from countless points all around them. It swelled into a chorus that echoed against the broken sky, a haunting melody of finality.
The mammoth Terrorfiends, their tentacles still twitching with mindless hunger, simply… stilled. Their myriad eyes, black and depthless, closed in unison. Not in pain, not in shock, but in a profound, sudden peace. As if answering a long-awaited call to rest.
Death, in its purest form, is not a cataclysm. It is a quiet closing of a door. The extinguishing of a flame without smoke. As the scythe passed through the space they occupied, the raging fires of their alien lives were snuffed out. Silently. Completely.
The scythe vanished as suddenly as it appeared.
The entire event had lasted mere seconds.
But the atmosphere remained charged, thick with the unspent power of death. The swirling, oppressive aura of the deceased did not dissipate. Instead, it churned and coalesced, drawing inward like a reverse explosion. From the vortex of necrotic energy, a form condensed, solidified, and dropped gracelessly to the blood-slicked ground.
It was Song. Gasping, drenched in a cold sweat that had nothing to do with the ambient heat, he landed in a heap. His body convulsed violently, limbs twitching without rhythm.
Nangong, driven by a healer's instinct, was the closest. She lunged forward, her hand reaching for Song's wrist to check his pulse, to pour stabilizing energy into him. Her fingers touched his skin. And she froze.
His body wasn't failing. It wasn't drained or broken from channeling such impossible power.
It was *vibrant*. Overflowing with vitality. His life-force burned brighter and steadier than she'd ever felt it, even at his peak. The convulsions wracking his frame weren't the spasms of exhaustion.
They were the tremors of ecstatic, overwhelming euphoria.
"Fucking… *hell*—" he wheezed, the words bubbling up through ragged breaths and hysterical laughter. "That was… oh, fuck me, that was…"
He struggled to push himself up onto his elbows, his limbs still jerking erratically. His eyes, back to their normal color, were wide with a kind of religious rapture.
"I saw it… I think I saw *Him*. My Patron. Seated on a throne of bleached bone… and He… He *handed* me that scythe. He *let me hold it*." A tear, clear and incongruous, traced a path through the grime on his cheek. "Fucking. Hell."
He turned his awestruck, manic gaze toward Chen, who was slowly getting to his feet, assessing the sudden, ringing silence that had replaced the cacophony of feeding horrors. Mountains of inert tentacled flesh now surrounded them, a grotesque new landscape.
"Chen! You glorious, insane bastard!" Song cried out, his voice hoarse but fervent. "Do you have any idea what you just made me do? Any idea what that *felt* like? That one swing… that one, perfect, world-cutting swing… I could die right now. My Path is complete. I have *lived*."
Hunter, wiping gore from his short blade, let out a low whistle. "Damn, preacher. Save some piety for the rest of us." But there was a newfound respect in his eyes as he surveyed the carnage. The sheer, silent scale of the annihilation was sobering.
Fiona helped a pale-but-composed Misty to her feet. Summer simply stared at Song, her analytical mind clearly struggling to process the metaphysical logistics of what she'd just witnessed.
Chen walked over to Song, his expression unreadable. He looked down at the ecstatic, twitching Reaper. "Can you stand? We're not out of this yet. The *Faith Game* doesn't award points for style. Only survival."
Song's laughter subsided into choked giggles. "Right. Right. The *Trials*." He took Chen's offered hand, his grip surprisingly strong. As he was hauled upright, he leaned in, his voice dropping to a fervent whisper only Chen could hear. "You orchestrated that. You knew the fast-forward would concentrate the death-essence. You knew it would supercharge my connection to my *Path*. That wasn't just a tactic. That was… an offering. A prayer made manifest." He shook his head, wonder still drowning his features. "Who *are* you?"
Chen didn't answer. He simply clapped Song on the shoulder—a gesture that was both acknowledgment and dismissal—and turned to address the group. The brief moment of post-victory shock was over. The atmosphere, while clear of immediate threats, still hummed with wrongness. The labyrinth of the Sunken Mall awaited.
"We move. Now," Chen said, his voice cutting through the lingering echoes of death. "That display was a beacon. Everything left in this ruin that hunts by sensing energy, by tracking life or death, will be converging here. We use the silence. We find the core of this place before the next wave finds us."
He glanced at the towering, silent mounds of Terrorfiend flesh. The Reaping had been clean, but it had also created a monument. A challenge. In the games of The Entities, silence was never a reward. It was an invitation.
As the group formed up again, picking their way through the new forest of corpses, the stench of ozone and decay mixing in their nostrils, each was left with their own thoughts.
Hunter checked his ammunition, his mind on practicalities: angles of fire, choke points, escape routes. The display of power was impressive, but it didn't kill what was coming next.
Fiona held her staff tightly, her senses extended, feeling for the tremors in the world's fabric, for the next twist in the *Trial*. She wondered what Entity presided over such a place of decay and sudden, absolute endings.
Misty moved with a quiet grace, her eyes missing nothing. She noted the way the green fissures in the ground were already fading, the death-energy leaching back into the earth. She filed the image of the scythe away—its scale, its aesthetic. It was data. A clue to the nature of Song's *Path*, and by extension, the *Entity* he served.
Summer was calculating. The energy output, the area of effect, the conversion rate of ambient death-essence into a weaponized form. It defied the crude stat-based logic she was accustomed to in the *Faith Game*. This was artistry. Or heresy. Perhaps both.
Nangong stayed close to Song, monitoring his vitals out of habit, even though he glowed with obscene health. She pondered the cost. Such power never came freely. What had he truly spent in that moment? Not mana, not stamina. Something more fundamental.
And Song… Song walked on clouds of grim glory. Every step was a prayer of thanks. The memory of that power—cold, infinite, and merciful—was etched into his very soul. He had been a conduit for a fraction of his Patron's domain. It was the closest thing to a *Divine Blessing* he had ever experienced. He glanced at Chen's back with something bordering on zealotry. This man, this strategist, had not just saved them. He had granted a revelation.
Chen led them forward, his mind a cold engine of analysis. The fast-forward had been a risk. Concentrating the Terrorfiends had been necessary to trigger Song's maximum potential Reaping, but it had also confirmed a hypothesis: this *Trial* was not just about survival against monsters. It was manipulating environmental conditions, playing with the very rules of the dungeon. *Time* had been used as a weapon, first by the mall, then by them. What other variables could be tweaked? *Order? Chaos?* The *Faith Game* was a puzzle box, and they had just forced one piece into place with a sledgehammer.
The corridor ahead sloped downwards, the chewed-up tile giving way to damp, exposed concrete. The air grew colder, carrying a new smell—not decay, but a stale, metallic dampness, like a long-sealed basement. The luminescent fungi on the walls grew sparser, their light more feeble, casting long, dancing shadows that seemed to move just out of sync with their footsteps.
The silence was profound, broken only by the squelch of their boots, the drip of distant water, and the ragged rhythm of their own breathing. It was a silence that pressed on the eardrums, a vacuum begging to be filled.
Then, from the darkness ahead, a new sound emerged.
It was soft at first. A rhythmic, wet, pulsing sound.
*Thump-slosh. Thump-slosh.*
It grew steadily louder as they descended, each beat echoing up the corridor to meet them. It was the sound of a giant, diseased heart beating in the depths of the earth.
Chen raised a fist, bringing the column to a halt. He peered into the gloom, his every sense straining. The *Thump-slosh* was now accompanied by a low, sub-auditory vibration they could feel in their teeth and bones.
"Final boss or welcome committee?" Hunter muttered, his rifle coming up to his shoulder, the scope piercing the darkness.
"It's not attacking," Fiona whispered, her knuckles white on her staff. "It's… waiting. It knows we're here."
Misty closed her eyes for a second, then opened them, her gaze sharp. "The sound… it's not coming from one point. It's all around the chamber ahead. It's the room itself."
Chen nodded slowly. The *Trial* was presenting its bill. The silent reaping of the Terrorfiends had been phase one. This was the consequence. The response. The *Faith Game* demanded balance. You could not unleash a fraction of an *Entity's* power without drawing the attention of other forces dwelling in the same conceptual space.
"Prepare yourselves," Chen said, his voice low and steady. "The easy part is over."
He took the first step forward, crossing the threshold from the corridor into the vast, pulsating darkness of the chamber beyond. The others followed, their weapons ready, their breaths held, stepping from the silence of the grave into the beating heart of the abyss.
The chapter had begun with a stop in time. It would end in a place where time itself seemed to curdle and flow like the blood through a monstrous, waiting vein. The *Wish Trials* of the Sunken Mall were far from finished. They were just beginning to reveal their true nature.