The reverberation of their footsteps in the stone hallway was a rhythmic pounding that failed to drown out Zhilian's choked sobs or the sound of their ragged breaths. Hayjin ran. His feet struck the dust-and-debris-strewn floor with a dull, almost alien mechanics, but within him, behind pupils constricted and burning with fatigue, lay only an abyssal void.
He didn't know what to feel. He couldn't anchor himself to a single definite emotion. There had been the visceral terror of dying in Riko's room, then the rush of adrenaline as the trap sprung, and finally the carnage in the dungeons Wilder's desperate, bloody confession, that severed arm, that gouged eye weeping red. A tangled mass of shock, pity, rage, and an exhaustion so deep it felt like molten lead injected into his veins.
He's dead, Hayjin kept repeating to himself as the dark belly of the corridor streaked past him, broken by the flicker of shattered lanterns. Wilder is dead. The man who was supposed to kill me... died to save us. Or perhaps to save himself from what he was becoming.
"Hayjin!" Zhilian's voice broke into his mind, sharp, cracked, yet charged with a desperate resolve that attempted to mask her terror. Sprinting at his side, the princess cast a sidelong glance at him; her cheeks were still streaked with glistening tear trails that the dust from the collapsed masonry was turning into dark mud. "Hayjin, damn it, wake up! Pull yourself together! Run faster! If we stop or space out now, everything Wilder did will be for nothing!"
Hayjin clenched his jaw with a crunch of teeth, forcing his legs to drive harder against the uneven stone. "I am running, Zhilian! I'm running!"
All around them, Castle Opes had descended into a theater of fragmented, brutal skirmishes. The echoes of battle rose from the inner courtyards and upper walkways, mingling with the somber knell of alarm bells. Royal guards, covered in soot with their steel breastplates dented by impacts, were locked in desperate clashes against the beasts that had emerged from the shadow rifts.
Just ahead, at the junction of two hall corridors, royal guards formed an improvised phalanx to hold back deformed wolves the size of horses. One veteran rallied his comrades with a roar, driving his pike directly into the gaping maw of one beast; the iron pierced soft flesh until it tore out the back of its neck, spraying a high-pressure jet of thick black blood against the wall tapestries, rotting the fabric on contact. Yet for every victory, the reality of the slaughter exacted a horrific toll: a third monster, resembling a flayed bear with multiple rows of fangs along its shoulders, plunged from the ceiling onto the rear guard. The soldier was seized by his chest plate and snapped in two with a sickening crunch of breaking vertebrae and yielding metal. His screams were choked out as air rushed from his collapsing lungs before the creature dragged him into the darkness to consume him.
Zhilian yanked her gaze away, a violent shudder traveling up her spine to the nape of her neck. The sight of torn flesh and blood dripping down the grooves of the stone hooked like cold iron into her darkest, buried memories.
The dungeon corridors... The princess's mind swayed dangerously, dragged backward through time. She smelled the suffocating dampness and mold of that subterranean abyss again. She remembered nights waking with her heart in her throat, completely smothered by unseen panic attacks, sheets soaked in cold sweat, skin crawling as memories of monster-mutilated faces devoured her sanity.
No. Not now. Not here... Zhilian commanded herself, clenching her fingers. I have to breathe. I have to stay clear-headed. If I collapse now, everything falls apart.
Far behind them, a shadow glided with unnatural fluidity. The mysterious figure slid through the halls without making a sound, negotiating the rubble with light, feline leaps. Two royal guards attempting to organize a defensive line near a staircase to cover civilians didn't even have time to turn around: a flash of dark steel sliced through the gloom, drawing two perfect crimson lines across their throats, and the soldiers collapsed to the floor gurgling blood before their bodies even struck the ground.
Hayjin and Zhilian rounded the final bend of the officer quarters wing, finally arriving before the gutted door of Riko's room.
"Isabelle!" Hayjin called out, his voice cracked, bursting inside with sword drawn.
The scene that met their eyes snuffed out any remaining ember of hope.
Isabelle was no longer standing to maintain the barrier. She was slumped on the floor against the frame of the destroyed bed, curled into a fetal position. Her tiny, trembling fingers pressed hard against the left side of her abdomen, but they failed to hold back the dark, warm stain spreading like oil across her white maid uniform.
The girl was crying a soft, childish weep broken by the spasms of physical agony.
"It... it hurts..." Isabelle sobbed, barely lifting her hazy, terrified eyes toward the two. "Hayjin... Princess... it hurts so much... Sage Arkon... Riko managed to break free..."
"Isabelle!" Zhilian dropped to her knees beside her, laying her hands over the girl's wound. A flickering, unsteady golden glow emanated from her palms, desperately attempting to seal the deep gash tearing through her abdominal muscles. "Hold still! Don't talk! I'll heal you, stay with me!"
Hayjin surveyed the room furiously, blade trembling in his grip. Riko was gone the spatial magic shattered the moment the little servant had been struck down.
"We need to get her out of here, now!" Hayjin said, bending down to lift Isabelle, but the sound of rapid, heavy footsteps in the hallway made him snap sideways, weapons at the ready.
Several royal guards, covered in dust with battered chest plates, burst into the room with drawn swords. "Your Highness! We must evacuate this wing, the creatures are coming up through the vents!"
"Take her!" Zhilian's voice brooked no argument as she continued channeling radiant light into Isabelle's body to stabilize her. "Take her to the parade grounds immediately! Right now!"
The soldiers didn't hesitate. They gently scooped up Isabelle's petite body, cradling her in their arms. Vision blurring from pain and blood loss, the girl reached out a weak, trembling hand toward Hayjin as she was carried away.
"Hayjin..." she whispered, a thread of a voice, tears washing clean tracks through the lime dust on her face. "Please..."
Hayjin gave her a sharp, hard nod, feeling his heart gripped in an iron vise. "Go! Zhilian, go with them!"
"I am not going anywhere without you!" the princess fired back, snapping to her feet and falling in at his side.
Stepping out into the main corridor to cover the retreat of the soldiers carrying Isabelle, the two froze in their tracks.
Less than five meters away, the mysterious figure stood motionless, emerging from the smoke like a phantom. They held the bloody knife between black-gloved fingers. With a theatrical, almost sensual slowness, they brought the dark steel blade to their lips, sliding their tongue over the edge smeared with the fresh blood of Wilder and the soldiers, savoring it with macabre, visceral pleasure.
Their eyes, visible only as two golden slits beneath the deep hood, locked directly onto Hayjin.
"It's truly wonderful... to see each other again," the figure said. The voice was a strange, unsettling mixture of youthful cadence, feline inflection, and a faint metallic rasp.
Hayjin felt the hairs on his arms stand on end instantly. He turned to Zhilian imperiously. "Zhilian. Get Isabelle out of here. Catch up with the guards."
"Are you deaf or what... I told you, I'm not leaving you alone with this monster!" she protested, her blade wavering slightly from a mixture of rage, exhaustion, and sheer terror.
"I said go, damn it!" Hayjin roared.
Zhilian glanced at the figure, then looked at the guards struggling to carry Isabelle further down the hall. With a sob of frustration, she released her grip, entrusting Isabelle entirely to the royal guards. "Get her to safety! Get her immediate care! I'm staying here!"
Isabelle, carried away down the hallway by the soldiers, kept staring at Hayjin from afar, bursting into uncontrollable weeping until the stone corner swallowed her completely.
Zhilian took three steps forward, taking her place beside Hayjin with her sword pointed firmly at the intruder.
"Who the fuck are you?" Hayjin demanded, taking a menacing step forward, his voice dripping with poisonous hatred. "From your look, I take it you're with the Cult! Why the fuck are you hunting me?! Why are you doing all this?! Answer me!"
Zhilian shook her head, visibly confused and bewildered by her companion's words. "The Cult? What on earth is Hayjin talking about? What does that mean?"
But before the princess could voice even a single question, the air around them suddenly grew thick, heavy, insanely foul.
A wave of devastating nausea pierced Zhilian's skull. Her vision blurred instantly; the castle's stone walls began to warp, splitting and curling like paper tossed into a fire. The distant sounds of battle dissolved completely, replaced by a deafening, high-pitched ringing drilling through her eardrums.
Suddenly, Zhilian was no longer in the castle corridor.
Before her stood the form of her sister Wren. But it was not the living Wren she had embraced moments earlier. It was a rotting corpse, its head devoid of a face a smooth, sunken, bloody gray mass of flesh staring at her without eyes or mouth. And a second later, the nightmare vision shifted with terrifying brutality: she saw Hayjin, crouched on the floor over Zhilian's own mutilated corpse, tearing the muscles from her neck with his teeth, chewing and swallowing raw flesh while staring at her with hollow, blood-red eyes.
"AAAAAHHHH!"
Zhilian collapsed to her knees on the stone, clutching her head so violently her fingers dug in dangerously. Her scream of pain and terror echoed down the entire hallway agonizing, inhuman. "MY HEAD! MY HEAD! STOP! PLEASE, STOP!"
"Zhilian!" Hayjin spun around, dropping down instinctively toward her, scared out of his mind by the sudden, violent reaction. "Zhilian, what's wrong?! Look at me! Look at me, damn it!"
In the background, the mysterious figure let out a high, thin chuckle, savoring every single instant of the spectacle with blatant, gleeful satisfaction.
Hayjin slowly rose, backing away from Zhilian and fixing his gaze on the intruder with a fury that set the muscles of his neck and shoulders trembling. "You cowardly bastard... You enjoy messing with people's minds, huh? Why don't you show yourself for what you really are, you filthy worm?!"
The figure stopped laughing, tilting its head in a sharp motion. "Oh... but of course. If that is what you wish..."
With a fluid, almost elegant movement, the intruder slicked back their hood and cast off the heavy dark mantle, letting it drop to their feet like shed skin.
What stood revealed beneath the dark cloth was a fair-skinned humanoid lean, agile, and muscular, possessing distinct and unmistakably feline traits. A thick, exceptionally long mane of golden-blonde hair streamed wildly backward, from which long, sharp pointed ears poked out clearly. His face was sharp, dominated by piercing amber eyes and a fierce, sly, tight-toothed grin oozing pure madness. He wore a dark anthracite tunic with a deep V-neck open at the chest, cinched at the waist by a braided leather belt with a purple accent on the right shoulder. Around his throat hung a dark chain with a red ruby, while his forearms and ankles were wrapped in brown leather straps, his hands encased in black gloves curved into claws.
The feline beastman crossed his arms over his chest, the sly grin spreading wider across his angular face to reveal sharp fangs.
"It's truly a pity we've only met one other time in all this while..." the creature said, taking a soft, silent step forward. "But I'm genuinely happy to see you again at last. Tell me... how are you? Is your stay in the world of ALIUS to your liking?"
Hayjin stood frozen, his brow furrowed in complete bewilderment and blind fury. "What the fuck are you talking about?! I've never seen you in my life!"
The feline wore a genuinely disappointed pout, putting on a fake offended child's face and shaking his head. "Oh... come now. You really don't remember me? You hurt my feelings, you know. You ought to remember my face very well... seeing as it's thanks to me that you arrived in this place."
Time seemed to freeze in an instant.
Hayjin's eyes widened. The monster's words ricocheted through his head, shattering months of certainty, theories, assumptions, and nightmares.
"...thanks to me that you arrived in this place..."
A buried memory, buried beneath layers of trauma, battles, and deadly time loops, resurfaced with the terrifying violence of a stab to the gut.
The dark, cold alley on Earth. The pouring rain beating against asphalt. The stench of trash and smog. The sudden, cold impact of a blade driven into his flank from behind. The figure in the shadows watching him die as his blood mingled with rainwater in the storm drain.
It was him.
The being standing before him was not merely a Cult hitman come to finish the job in Alius. He was the exact same individual who had murdered him in his original world slaughtering him like an animal in a dark alleyway and flinging his soul into the endless nightmare of this magical realm.
An emotional earthquake of titanic proportions overwhelmed Hayjin. The memory of his first death, the unspeakable suffering endured in the dungeon, the hunger, the cold, the constant terror of never seeing home again, the suffocating time loops, tonight's blood all converged into a single, searing, devastating breaking point inside his mind.
From the base of his neck, the dark mark etched into his skin began to pulse violently. A spectral, toxic, blinding purple light burst from the mark, spreading like a web of glowing veins across the boy's neck, shoulder, and face.
Hayjin's mind snapped entirely.
His eyes stretched wide. The white sclera disappeared completely, drowned in a pitch-black so deep, dense, and void of any trace of humanity.
Hayjin threw his head back and began to laugh.
It was no ordinary laugh. It was a hysterical, repulsive, sadistic, uninhibited cackle the sound of a shattered soul embracing absolute dementia. A shrill sound that made the air in the corridor vibrate like a rusty blade scraped across glass.
Seeing this terrifying transformation, the golden feline widened his amber eyes and, mesmerized by the sight, joined in the laughter, cackling with the exact same insane, warped mental deviance. The two laughed hysterically in the half-light a grotesque and macabre duet above Zhilian's body, which was still writhing on the stone floor beneath the illusions.
But Hayjin's laughter cut off instantly.
With a movement that surpassed all limits of human reflex and speed, Hayjin closed the distance between them in a split fraction of a second. He did not use his sword. Clenching his right fist until his knuckles and tendons groaned ominously, he unleashed a brutal punch square into the middle of the feline's face.
CRACK!
The impact was devastating. The feline's nose and facial cartilage shattered cleanly with a sharp snap. The sheer, terrifying violence of the blow hurled the creature backward over three meters, slamming him into the masonry. Hot, red blood spurted copiously from his face, splattering his golden-blonde mane and dark anthracite tunic.
The feline pinned against the wall, bringing a hand to his shattered, deformed nose. He stared at the thick blood coating his gloved fingers, and his expression was not one of pain or rage, but of pure, uncontrollable, maniacal, and erotic excitement.
"Yes... YES!" the creature screamed, eagerly licking his own blood from his palm, eyes wild with frenzy. "Remind me to remind you... that you ought to thank me for killing you in that alley!"
Hayjin didn't answer with words. His eyes, now two pits of pitch darkness, rolled wildly in their sockets, revealing only pure shadow as the purple mark on his neck burned like an ember of hell.