Lonir left the shadow of the great tree with darkness crawling at his heels like a torn cloak.
He returned to the city's streets, where the dry air carried the familiar reek of dust and routine misery. His right hand remained hidden beneath his robe, pulsing like a diseased heart — heavy, engorged with the compressed ruin he had spent hours forcing it to hold. Every movement sent dull waves of fire up his arm, but the sensation was manageable, a constant pressure he had chosen and could tolerate.
The Covenant Anchor rocked softly against his hip with every step. The horned figure on its surface wore the same quiet, patient tilt. He didn't look at it. He didn't need to. He could feel its attention on him like a humid breath on the nape of his neck.
He was not searching randomly. He moved on something closer to bloody instinct — a tracker's sense that the covenant had planted in him without asking.
He reached the Bronze Square as the evening light turned the puddles into copper mirrors.
And there was Farkis.
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Exactly as Lonir expected. Soldiers, sellswords, and Hunters all found their way to the Bronze Square — for cheap company, cheaper drink, and the comfortable fiction that surviving another day meant something. Farkis stood with three others, all wearing light armor bearing different insignia. They were laughing loudly, telling stories with hands that gestured too broadly. Among them, Lonir picked out two contractor marks without difficulty: the dove insignia on the chest piece of a woman, and the pulsing Violence card on Farkis's arm.
Farkis's wounds had mostly closed. Whatever he'd had access to had done its work.
"A coward with alley tricks," Farkis was saying, indicating the faint scar on his thigh with exaggerated disgust. "Ran the moment he saw what I was capable of. New contractors always think the covenant makes them gods."
Laughter from the others.
Lonir stepped into the square without breaking his pace.
The laughter died.
Farkis turned — some animal instinct in him firing first — and his eyes locked onto Lonir with a flash of shock that hardened immediately into fury.
The sticky grin left his face completely.
Lonir stopped a few strides away. His scarred features were empty of expression. Calm, in the way a collapsed building is calm.
Farkis said slowly: "You didn't run."
"No," Lonir agreed.
The crowd that had been moving through the square began to feel the tension. People slowed. Stopped. Formed a loose ring at a careful distance.
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Farkis came like a storm made of steel and muscle.
The shattered shield card blazed dull crimson on his hand — Endurance. Strength. The gift of the God of Violence. He was faster than a man his size had any right to be, his strikes carrying the momentum of something that could go through walls if it chose to.
Lonir didn't try to match him.
He knew he couldn't.
He used The Bleak in small, targeted sacrifices — a fingernail torn away, a tooth cracked. Enough to feed it. Not enough to cripple himself.
He took the blade in his left shoulder deliberately, twisting just enough to save his neck. The steel drove deep, scraping bone, and his arm went half-dead from the shoulder down. The blood came hot and fast.
In the same moment, Farkis's free hand seized his throat and hoisted him from the ground with a victorious snarl.
"Finished," Farkis hissed, his yellow eye bright and close. "Whatever Despair is — it ends with your corpse."
Lonir's expression did not change.
He drew his stored hand from beneath his robe.
The palm was a ruin. Warped flesh, pulsing black, the compressed suffering of hours pressing outward against its own skin — dense, taut, wrong in every way that flesh can be wrong.
He pressed it flat against Farkis's broad chest.
And opened it.
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Not an explosion. A release.
A contained detonation, hours of endured dissolution unleashed into a single point.
Farkis's leather armor ruptured. The flesh beneath his chest shredded in an instant — tearing outward, launching blood and scorched tissue and splinters of bone in a wet, radiating burst. The sound was low and awful, a heavy tearing that sent the onlookers staggering back in stunned silence.
But Farkis screamed one word.
"THE COUNTER!"
His second card blazed to life on his chest — a red ward ringed by heavy chains, surging with the God of Violence's sanction. It absorbed half the lethal force and threw the rest back outward. Farkis flew backward as if struck by a battering ram, slamming into the earth with a crash that shook the square, his chest a smoldering crater of mangled meat and broken ribs.
He was breathing. Gurgling. But breathing.
Lonir fell.
His right hand was barely recognizable — a dissolving wreck of scorched flesh still steaming where the release had torn through it. He hit the ground on his knees, gasping, blood running in thick channels down his arm and dripping into the dry earth in rhythmic beats.
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Then came the voice.
Not from outside. From within his spine — rolling through his vertebrae like a depth charge.
Cold. Deep. Savoring its own amusement.
"You thought I'd overlook that little experiment?"
Lonir's eyes went wide.
The Covenant Anchor scorched against his hip — searing heat through the fabric, through the skin.
"The Bleak is not stored, Lonir. Despair is not a quantity to be measured. It is lived."
His right arm erupted.
Not a slow dissolution.
A detonation of blood and tissue — wet, total, catastrophic. Flesh and nerve and bone scattered across the square in a radius that silenced even the screams that should have followed. The stump of his forearm remained, ragged and smoking.
The echoing blast of wet destruction hung in the air.
Then the Covenant Anchor burned again — differently this time.
Warm. Purposeful.
A new card blazed into his mind, branded in black fire.
[ THE TORMENTED ]
From the ruined stump of his forearm, something grew.
It was not flesh.
It was not bone.
It was a thick, black vine — several of them, braided and writhing like furious serpents, each studded with long, glossy thorns. They coiled around one another with the grinding sound of wet wood under pressure, weaving outward and downward into the shape of an arm, a wrist, a hand of long, tapered fingers. The thorns pierced the remaining flesh where the vine connected to his body, anchoring into nerve and vein, and began to pump something into his blood.
Something violet.
The pain that followed was not the clean agony of The Bleak's use.
It was constant.
Every second, unrelenting — the sensation of the arm being crushed and boiled simultaneously, a fire that did not go out when the card was dormant, a screaming of nerves that had no pause, no relief, no end.
Lonir pitched forward.
His forehead struck the earth. His body convulsed. Cold sweat broke across his scarred face in an instant. Bloody saliva traced a line from the corner of his mouth.
The pain threatened to rip his consciousness away — fraying the edges of his mind until he could feel the individual threads of thought beginning to pull apart.
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The Hunters had not moved against him.
The woman with the dove insignia crouched beside Farkis. Her Mercy card pulsed soft and warm, threading pale light across his ruined chest — slowly, painstakingly knitting the catastrophic damage back into something that would eventually function again.
One of the others — lean-faced, holding a long spear, looking at Lonir with flat contempt — finally spoke.
"What a pitiful little wretch."
His voice dripped with aristocratic disdain.
"We'll collect him when we're not busy. Whatever his covenant is — I'm not interested. An amateur who can barely stand isn't worth the effort today. We'll kill him later, when we have the time for insects like him."
They carried Farkis and moved into the shadows of the nearest alley.
Gone.
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Lonir remained kneeling in the square's center.
The crowd stood at its edges — frozen. Not a single voice.
Then came the sound from his throat.
A wet, fractured rasp.
That became an almost-smile.
That became a laugh.
Quiet. Broken. Shaking with every wave of unrelenting pain from the thorned arm.
"They think I'm pathetic?" he thought, the laughter trembling in his chest like glass about to shatter. "They walked away because they thought they were being merciful?"
The absurdity of it. The scale of it. This entire world and its hierarchies of cruelty, and he was still just a joke at the bottom of the pile.
He laughed until the laughter was all that was left.
The violet poison dripped from the thorned arm and sizzled faintly where it struck the dry stone, leaving small pits.
The crowd retreated in lurching, silent waves — mothers pulling children, men backing into doorways, eyes wide and unable to process what they had witnessed.
They did not see a defeated man.
They saw a ruined thing that laughed while being eaten alive.
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The laughter faded. His breathing grew heavy, whistling between locked teeth, the pain contracting and expanding with every pulse.
He raised the thorned arm slowly and looked at it.
It twisted with a lazy, coiling motion. The poison dripped in a slow violet thread.
A hand built for ruin.
"I couldn't kill him," he thought, cold and clear beneath the constant fire in his nerves, "because of that woman."
He tucked the arm against his body and stood.
His legs were unsteady from the agony that had no end, but his eyes were lit with a purpose that was calm and terrible and entirely without warmth.
He turned and disappeared into the city's twisting dark, leaving the square empty behind him, its stones pitted where the poison had fallen.
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