He traversed burning corridors, passed rooms where soldiers were being torn apart by deformed beasts, and climbed rubble-strewn staircases, driven solely by a visceral need to discover the ultimate truth.
Finally, he arrived in the deepest dungeons of the east wing an ancient, uninhabited area of the castle lit only by the reddish glow of a few torches embedded in the rough stone walls.
Hayjin passed through yet another iron door and found himself inside a vast circular crypt.
At the center of the room, arranged in a circle around an altar of dark stone engraved with vile symbols, stood about twenty members of the Cult of the Mark. They wore long black robes with hoods pulled over their faces, clutching wavy-bladed daggers in their hands, still slick with fresh blood.
At the center of the circle stood Arkon. And by his side, bound by chains of dark magic, was Riko.
Hayjin positioned himself a few paces from them, floating in the shadows, and watched the scene wide-eyed.
Arkon approached Riko from behind. The old sage, the figure revered by everyone in the realm as the pillar of wisdom and justice, extended a withered, ghostly hand, touching the girl's face and neck with sickening slowness. His fingers slid along Riko's jawline, moving down toward her collarbone with a slimy, possessive, and deeply repulsive touch.
"You were careless, my dear Riko..." Arkon said, his voice dripping with an ostentatious, fake sweetness that made bile rise in the throat. "You ruined months of planning with your emotional weakness. But... I might find a way to forgive you. I could turn a blind eye to your failure... if you decided to give me something in return. You know how much I appreciate the devotion of young girls like you."
Riko snapped her head away, pulling from his touch in sheer disgust.
SPIT.
Riko spat straight into Arkon's face. The thick fluid struck the old mage's cheek, dripping slowly down his wrinkles.
"You're a monster..." Riko said, her voice shaking with rage and the tears still streaming from her eyes. "You're a disgusting, slimy monster!"
Arkon did not lose his composure. He pulled a silk handkerchief from his sleeve and wiped his face with a slow, deliberate motion, as though removing a speck of dust.
Riko burst into heavy sobs, her head bowed as the dark chains cut into the flesh of her wrists.
"I trusted you!" the girl shrieked, looking at Arkon through the haze of her grief. "You told me my action would bring true peace! You told me we were doing the right thing, that we were going to eliminate the real threat to the royal family to save them! Why are you doing all this?! Why are you destroying the castle?! Why did you have the guards and Isabelle killed?! WHY?!"
Listening to those words, Hayjin felt a twin jolt of nausea and bewilderment.
On one hand, there was Riko. The girl who had murdered him in cold blood during the second time loop, stabbing him in the back without a shred of mercy. Riko had proven to be a pawn of the Cult, an insider who had betrayed everyone's trust. But listening to her now, seeing her tears and her desperate confusion, Hayjin realized that Riko had been blindly manipulated, deceived by a narrative of false justice orchestrated by Arkon.
On the other hand, there was Arkon. The man Hayjin had considered an ally, a mentor, an anchor in this insane world. Arkon was the true director of the catastrophe. He was the cancer nested at the heart of the kingdom of Opes, the traitor pulling the Cult's strings from the shadows of the royal court.
Arkon folded the handkerchief and tucked it back into his robe. He looked at Riko with a hollow, icy gaze, completely devoid of any trace of empathy.
"It is entirely pointless to explain the inexplicable to you, Riko," Arkon said in a flat, neutral tone. "Your mind is far too limited to grasp the grand scale of Cross's design. You were merely a tool. A small, insignificant cog within a mechanism much larger than yourself."
Arkon stepped back, moving away from her.
"Initially, we had planned to spare you," the old sage continued. "You were the only one meant to survive the purge of the royal wing, as a reward for your cooperation. But your inability to kill Hayjin and your insubordination have proven that you have become an unstable variable. A risk we cannot afford."
Riko understood. The realization of her impending death pierced her, yet she did not beg for her life. She bowed her head, her final tears dropping onto the cold stone of the crypt.
"Wren... Isabelle..." Riko whispered, her faint voice broken by sobs. "Forgive me... forgive me for betraying your trust... I was such a fool... so delusional..."
Arkon raised his right hand toward the members of the Cult standing in the circle.
"Dispose of her," the sage ordered with the same coldness as ordering the slaughter of diseased livestock.
Arkon averted his gaze from Riko for a single, briefest instant, turning toward the dark stone altar to verify the stability of the great scarlet seal pulsing in the middle of the room. That split second of inattention, infinitesimal though it was, proved to be the sole crack in the structure of his dark magic.
Riko, whose elven nature granted her an innate hypersensitivity to fluctuations in the surrounding mana, felt the slackening pressure around her wrists. There was no hesitation. Physically worn down, broken in spirit, and covered in blood, the girl drew upon every last drop of energy remaining in her body. With a hoarse roar that tore through her throat, she detonated a surge of raw aura from the center of her chest.
CRACK.
The strands of dark pitch binding her snapped with the sound of dry branches breaking. Riko didn't even attempt to attack Arkon or draw a weapon: she knew fighting would be suicide. She spun around and bolted in a desperate, blind escape, aiming straight for the woods.
Her boots skidded across the damp stone, leaving messy prints as she ran with arms outstretched, eyes wide with sheer terror. She scrambled over the fallen boulders of the crumbling wall, pushing her body past its limits until the vault of the crypt suddenly gave way to the rear slope of the mountain.
The suffocating subterranean air was swept away in an instant by the gloomy night, lashed by a fine, freezing rain. Riko tumbled outside, rolling down a muddy slope before scrambling back to her feet on impact. Around her, stone walls and wall-mounted torches were gone, replaced by the dense darkness of the forest surrounding the foundations of the castle's east wing.
Her feet sank into the black mud as she resumed running breathlessly through the trees. Low branches of maples and oaks tore at her clothes and cut the skin of her arms, while rain mixed with the burning tears clouding her vision. Pursuing her through mid-air like an unnoticed spectral presence, Hayjin passed through the fissure in the rock and continued floating above her, watching her blind sprint through the storm's darkness.
But her run lasted only a few meters. Before she could go any further, four members of the Cult of the Mark emerged from the woodland shadows, blocking her path with long wavy blades already drawn.
Riko dug in her heels, nearly coming into contact with the cold steel of their swords. She tried to veer right, but three more cultists cut off her path, tightening the circle around her yet with a lightning-fast burst, she managed to break free and flee once more.
The night was dark, whipped by a storm beating against her face, merging with the searing tears blurring her sight. Low-hanging branches of maple and oak shredded her clothing and sliced the skin of her arms, but Riko kept pushing deeper into the thick vegetation, tripping over exposed roots and instantly scrambling up, her hands coated in mud and blood.
As she ran frantically, her mind turned into a chaotic vortex of despair and remorse that burned inside her hotter than the freezing rain.
"I ruined everything..." Riko wheezed, her voice drowning in her own tears as salty drops washed dirt from her cheeks. "I fucked everything up... how could I have been so blind?!"
Rage at her own stupidity pierced her brain like a blade. She thought back to Arkon the man she had worshipped as a deity of wisdom and the vile way he had used her and discarded her like trash. But what burned even worse, what tore at her elven soul, was the thought of Wren.
"An elf..." Riko sobbed, digging her fingers into her temples until it hurt, her tone dripping with self-loathing. "How could I have grown so attached to a... human?! I... I just wanted to protect her! I wanted to save her from this hell, and instead I condemned her! I betrayed everyone's trust..."
"Elves shouldn't bind themselves to these humans! They live a fraction of our centuries; they are fragile, fickle, ephemeral... Why did I let myself get dragged into this?! Why did I end up caring so much about a human girl like Wren?! Why did I let that affection blind me to the point of losing my mind?!"
The faces of the people she had deceived flashed before her like a swarm of ghosts: Captain Wilder, who had trusted her with the security of the ramparts; the guards she had looked in the eye before flinging open the gates to the shadows; little Isabelle, now lying dead in a pool of blood two floors above.
"Wilder... Isabelle... I betrayed you all..." Riko howled, and amidst her desperate weeping, grief quickly began to rot, curdling into a blind, toxic, venomous fury. "I betrayed everyone who welcomed me as a sister! I destroyed everything I touched!"
But immediately after the remorse, anger resurfaced, toxic and twisted. A blind hatred wrapped around her heart, and the girl's face contorted into a grimace of pure loathing.
"But it's all his fault!" the girl shrieked, her voice rising into an inhuman scream laden with immense resentment. "IT'S HAYJIN'S FAULT! That damned outsider... that damned parasite come from nowhere! Before he set foot in this castle, we had balance! We were fine! He's the one who brought ruin! He is the true curse of this kingdom!"
"I want him to die in the deepest hell! I have to see him dead he must pay for ruining my life and Wren's life!"
"I hope he dies!" she roared, foam at her lips and tears streaming down her neck. "I hope he dies a thousand times! I hope his body rots in hell and he never finds peace again! If he hadn't come, none of this would have happened! IT'S ALL HIS FAULT!"
Merely inches away from her, Hayjin's invisible spirit floated in the dark forest air.
Hayjin heard every single word. He heard her delusional accusations, heard the pure hatred the girl poured over him, blaming him for her own weakness, her own betrayal, and the fall of the castle.
Initially, when Riko had managed to break Arkon's chains to attempt an escape, a sliver of doubt had flickered through Hayjin's conscience. But as he watched her struggle and run, listening to the poison spilling from her mouth, every last shred of pity or empathy inside him withered away completely. His spectral heart hardened into a block of black ice.
Hayjin stared down at her with a gaze devoid of any human emotion. No pain, no visible anger: only cold, total, and absolute contempt.
The boy's spirit felt neither the cold of the rain nor the mud beneath his feet, but Riko's words pierced his consciousness with devastating force. Hayjin watched her run, saw her weeping, and listened to her rants with eyes steeped in a hatred so pure and profound it surpassed any trauma he had endured up to that moment.
Look at this filthy creature... Hayjin thought, his inner voice trembling with terrifying rage. Look at her crying... look at her feeling sorry for herself after plunging a knife into my back and condemning Isabelle to die alone on the floor of a ruined room.
Hayjin didn't know the exact origin of the primordial hatred Riko harbored toward him, nor did he care to understand it anymore. He didn't care if, in some twisted way, she had believed she was acting for the good of the kingdom or little Wren. In his eyes, Riko was nothing more than a hypocritical killer who had stabbed him in the back in the previous cycle and condemned Isabelle to death.
I don't know why you hate me so much, Hayjin continued in his mind, his jaw clenched to the point of hearing his teeth grind even in his abstract form. I don't know what absurd lies Arkon fed you to convince you I was the monster in this story... but you know what? I don't give a fuck. I don't give a single fuck!
As the cultists closed in on her with drawn daggers to recapture her, Hayjin felt not the slightest desire for her salvation.
I hope they kill you... Hayjin thought, crossing his spectral arms over his chest as he watched without blinking. I hope they tear your life away piece by piece. I hope you feel every single milligram of the pain you inflicted on Isabelle.
A ruthless realization took root in Hayjin's mind for the future.
And when I go back down the timeline again... I won't lift a single finger for you. I will never forgive you, you miserable bitch, I will have no mercy. If I have to be the one to drive a blade into your chest to stop you from ever touching Isabelle again, I won't hesitate for a second. You're already dead to me, Riko.
Hayjin clenched his impalpable fists, wishing her the most gruesome end possible with every single fiber of his being.
I hope they catch you, Hayjin prayed into the night's void, his voice soaked in toxic frustration. I hope those zealots reach you and tear you to shreds right here in the mud and garbage! And even when I go back... even when this goddamned loop resets and I find myself in the past again... I won't lift a single finger to save you! I'll leave you to rot in your own poison, Riko! You deserve no salvation!
Hayjin's merciless prayer was answered just a few meters ahead.
Out of the pine shadows came not just the twenty cultists. A spatial rift of shadow opened directly in front of Riko, and Arkon's figure emerged from the darkness with his hand already raised.
Riko froze in her tracks, her breath catching, but she had no time to step back. The black strands of the sage's magic wrapped around her once more, slamming her violently down into the mud. The twenty cultists emerged from the trees around her, encircling her in a cage of sharp blades.
The elven girl lay motionless in the mud, her face streaked with dirt and tears, as the hooded figures leaned over her with drawn daggers.
Hayjin stopped to watch just a few paces away, his eyes wide and his heart hardened to stone, as the ultimate truth of that tragedy played out before his eyes.
Arkon lazily raised his hand toward his followers, completely indifferent to the elf's hysterical outburst.
"Subdue that animal and end it," Arkon said in a flat voice.
The sage's dark magic tightened its hold on the girl's body, pinning her limbs in the mud to deny her any defense. The twenty cultists did not hesitate: they swarmed Riko, pinning her against the freezing ground as their blades began sinking relentlessly into her flesh.
It was a swift, merciless slaughter. The twenty men stabbed her to death in a rhythmic, brutal succession of thrusts, piercing her back, chest, flanks, and throat. The sharp ring of steel, the dull squelch of tearing tissue, and the desperate gurgles of the girl choking on her own blood filled the silence of the forest.
Hayjin watched it all.
His spectral eyes did not close. He stayed there, floating in the dark forest air with the total, frightening serenity of someone who has finally accepted the ruthless nature of his fate. He saw Riko's blood splatter onto the dark robes of the cultists, saw the light gradually fade from her eyes, until the girl collapsed to the ground like an emptied shell.
Arkon observed the corpse for a few seconds, without a single muscle in his face betraying an emotion, then turned toward his men.
Hayjin was left alone with Riko's body and the cultists.
The truth had finally been unveiled. Every piece of the puzzle, every betrayal, every lie that had brought about the fall of the kingdom had assembled before his eyes with terrifying, irrevocable clarity.
The hatred burning in his chest was no longer an uncontrolled flare: it had become an ocean of liquid pitch, a promise of total destruction that would consume every single person responsible for this hell.