The deeper they traveled through the cavern, the more Luke began to realize something unsettling. The darkness here was… different. Not entirely gone, never gone actually. It was... thinner.
Earlier, the cave had felt alive with it, an oppressive, endless abyss that swallowed thought and reason alike. Back there, the darkness had seemed infinite, ancient, almost conscious.
This side of the cavern was not like that.
There were faint mineral veins embedded within the stone walls here, glowing dimly with pale silver and muted blue hues. Strange moss clung to certain rock formations, pulsing faintly like sleeping embers. The shadows still stretched deep between the stone pillars and uneven terrain, but Luke could perceive the cave far more clearly now.
Or perhaps...
His ability had adapted.
Luke frowned faintly as they moved across a massive stone ridge overlooking a lower section of the cavern. His senses spread naturally through the shadows now, brushing against the environment in strange, intangible ways. Darkness had become… information. Distances, shapes, movement, sometimes he sensed things before he saw them. And every time he realized that, a quiet discomfort settled in his chest.
Because the ability didn't feel human.
'I wonder if it's because of that thing...'
Of course he was thinking about the unfathomable being he felt pierce his very being. The very essence of his existence. The Weave could not even identify the anomaly, his puny mind could never even attempt to understand what he thought he saw.
Ahead of him, Adrian moved steadily across the uneven terrain, his footsteps light despite his frame. Without the flames and monstrous arms, he looked deceptively ordinary now. Just another exhausted teenager trying to survive.
But Luke had seen what hid beneath that appearance.
And Adrian had seen enough of Luke to know the same.
For a while, only the distant echoes of dripping water accompanied them.
Then Adrian suddenly spoke.
"So," he said casually, stepping over a crack in the stone, "how exactly did you kill an Ontological Glitch?"
Luke blinked.
His steps slowed slightly.
"…You believe the Weave?" he asked.
Adrian snorted. "The Weave doesn't joke."
'Fair point.'
Luke was silent for a moment afterward, gathering the fragments of memory carefully. Even now, parts of it felt blurred, unstable, like recalling events through cracked glass.
But enough remained. So he spoke.
Slowly at first.
Then continuously.
He told Adrian everything. Everything about the dream, the false family, the warmth that felt too perfect, the growing unease, Jake...
Or the thing pretending Jake had once existed. The collapsing sky, the unbearable emotions that didn't belong to him and yet somehow did.
And finally, the fire.
Luke's voice grew quieter as he described it.
"My family died when I was very young, so I've been mostly alone for a decade. Even so, everything felt so warm and real, as if I belonged there. As if I had always been there. But I knew something was deeply, fundamentally wrong. Because of two reasons actually. My distorted memories, and one of my brothers, Jake."
He sighed.
"Jake was... rather lucid, too lucid for the dream to hold i guess, so he was erased. My family did not remember him after that, but I did. And that hurt even more. The traces of his existence dissappeared from the completely, with i knew would be impossible because of his status. That's when I knew something was deeply wrong about the world I thought I knew. Until that one dream..."
He turned to Adrian and chuckled.
"You can call it a dream upon a dream I guess," the joke did not land, so he continued in a somber tone, " everything shattered and collapsed. The world, reality...me. Alien emotions and memories flooded my being. Emotions that did not make any sense. But then I realized, those were actually my real emotions. They had sept through the cracks of the fractured reality."
He smile faintly.
"…I think I understood by then," he admitted, staring ahead into the cavern. "Not consciously. But somewhere deep down… I knew none of it was real."
Adrian listened without interruption.
Luke swallowed faintly before continuing.
"So I burned myself alive."
The words felt strange spoken aloud, detached even. Like describing someone else.
"I thought I was ending everything," Luke said softly. "But the Weave counted it as me killing the thing controlling the dream."
Heavy silence followed. Adrian's expression remained unreadable for several seconds.
Then...
"…That's horrifying," he muttered.
Luke let out a hollow laugh. "Yeah."
"But impressive."
Luke glanced at him.
Adrian shrugged lightly. "Most people would've stayed in the dream forever."
Luke looked away again. The thought unsettled him more than he expected. Because part of him still missed it, even now.
Adrian noticed the change in his mood, but didn't comment on it. Instead, after a while, he spoke again.
"I encountered one too."
Luke looked back immediately.
Adrian's gaze remained forward, distant now.
"…An Ontological Glitch," he said quietly. "The Remnant of the Demon Queen."
Even the name felt heavy. The air itself seemed colder around those words.
Luke frowned slightly. "What happened?"
For the first time since they met...
Adrian hesitated, not out of fear, but memory. The memory of being chewed upon blind, all while being broken down by the scorching hot saliva of a giant grotesque beast.
"It found me when I first arrived on Skysea Island," he said eventually. "Back then, I thought I understood my this whole awakened fighting Chaos and Corruption thing. Surviving against all odds."
A faint, bitter smile touched his face.
"I didn't."
He stopped walking briefly. Then slowly, his skin changed. Only for a moment. The fair complexion across his arm darkened into that smooth, glowing azure Luke had seen earlier. Thin streams of incandescent light moved beneath the surface like veins filled with liquid flame.
Luke stared. Even now, the transformation felt deeply unnatural. Adrian flexed his fingers once before the azure faded again.
"When I encountered the Remnant," Adrian said quietly, "I forced my body to evolve beyond what it should've survived."
Luke remained silent.
Something in Adrian's tone warned him not to interrupt.
"At first I lost my sight, that was when I knew I had encountered something truly dreadful. But I was still elated, being the bloodthirsty fiend that I am. Then the pressure descended upon me. The feeling of something deep and ancient, expressing its hunger for your soul. I did not give in though, I fought back. Blind as I was."
He drew another hoarse breath.
"But I was careless. In the end, I ended up in it maw, its razor sharp teeth tearing me to shreds, its boiling saliva breaking down my body. I healed it, repeatedly, but I was still not fast enough, not strong enough... so I accepted my fate and allowed my self to be digested. Not before attempting something insane first..."
His gaze darkened faintly.
"You see Luke, I opened my ears, and listened. I listened to all of it, and embraced it all. And when it was over… I wasn't fully human anymore."
Luke looked at him carefully then. The blue skin, the extra arm, Luke finally figured out what that reminded him of. He did not like his conclusion. But he did feel like he was dangerously close to the truth."
"…Did you kill it?" Luke asked quietly.
Adrian nodded once.
"But I lost something in return."
He didn't elaborate, and so Luke didn't ask.
Because he understood that feeling too well.
The cave fell silent again afterward.Two survivors walking through darkness, carrying pieces of themselves they could never fully recover.
#
It happened almost two hours later. Luke sensed them first. Movement around the vast cave, low and rapid. His body tensed instantly.
"…Something's ahead," he muttered.
Adrian's expression sharpened immediately.
"How many?"
Luke focused through the darkness.
"…Six. No, eight."
A shrill screech suddenly echoed through the cavern.
Then they came.
The creatures burst from between the stone formations in violent, twitching movements, their bodies long and malformed like predators stretched beyond natural proportions.
"Gravetongues."
Adrian recognized the type immediately from old Academy briefings. Their bodies resembled massive hairless reptiles, but their limbs were too long, their joints reversed in unnatural ways. Their skin hung in loose folds over lean muscle, covered in faint black markings that pulsed whenever they moved.
But the worst part..
Their mouths.
Each creature's jaw split open vertically into four separate sections, revealing long, muscular tongues lined with hooked barbs that writhed independently like living parasites.
One lunged instantly. Its tongue shot forward faster than Luke expected. He reacted instinctively. Space folded. Luke's body skipped sideways violently as reality distorted around him, the tongue narrowly missing his head before slamming into stone hard enough to crack it.
Pain exploded behind Luke's eyes immediately.
"Damn it!"
The creature screeched again. Then Adrian moved. Two additional limbs tore from his sides in a spray of glowing flesh. His body surged forward with terrifying aggression, one azure fist colliding with a Gravetongue's skull hard enough to cave it inward.
The beast shrieked as the shock from impact spread through its body. Another attacked from above, but Adrian caught it mid-air with all four arms and ripped it apart. Luke stared for only a second with wide eyes before another creature lunged toward him.
'No way...'
This time, he reacted faster. Not by moving. By forcing space itself to twist. The Gravetongue's momentum distorted abruptly as the distance between them folded unnaturally. The creature overshot entirely, crashing into the cavern wall instead of Luke.
Luke staggered immediately afterward, blood trickling faintly from one nostril.
Too much strain, but still, it worked. A second creature charged. Luke grabbed a loose stone instinctively and forced reality around it to bend. The rock vanished, then reappeared directly through the creature's skull.
The Gravetongue collapsed instantly.
[You have slain an Anarchy Incarnate: Gravetongue Reptile]
Luke froze.
"…What?"
He hadn't meant to do that.
Adrian noticed too.
"Focus later!" he shouted as blood exploded everywhere again.
The remaining creatures attacked together.
Chaos erupted.
Tongues lashed through the air like spears while claws scraped violently against stone. Luke folded space repeatedly now, not cleanly, not perfectly, but enough to survive. Distances warped unpredictably around him, forcing creatures to miss by inches or collide into one another.
But every use hurt. Reality pushed back harder each time. Meanwhile Adrian became something monstrous within the chaos. His azure skin glowed incandescently now, muscles tearing and healing repeatedly as he paid no attention to the creatures tearing him up from behind. One Gravetongue bit deep into his shoulder..
Adrian ignored it. He grabbed the creature's jaw and tore it open while its teeth remained buried in him. The smell of rotting flesh filled the cavern. Minutes later, silence returned.
The last creature collapsed twitching onto the stone floor. Luke stood breathing heavily, blood running from his nose now, his vision faintly warped again.
Adrian's extra arms retracted back into his torso, revealing two gaping holes that closed a moment later. For a while neither spoke.
Then Luke looked down at himself quietly. He was bruised, shaking, and exhausted. Completely spent.
If those creatures had come in greater numbers, Luke would've died first. That realization settled heavily into his chest. He felt like a burden, and he did not like that.
Adrian noticed the expression immediately.
"…What?" he asked.
Luke remained silent for a few seconds.
Then finally..
"Train me."
Adrian blinked once.
Luke lifted his gaze, serious now despite the exhaustion weighing on him.
"I can't survive this place like this," he admitted quietly. "My ability's unstable. My body's weak. If we run into something worse…"
He didn't finish, didn't need to really. Adrian studied him carefully. The silence stretched.
Then slowly, a faint grin appeared on his face.
"…You sure?" he asked. "Because I'm not very gentle."
For the first time in a long while...
Luke almost smiled.
"…Good."