Ragged breaths were the only sound that flowed through the dark expanse of the chamber, followed only by the small, clear patter of stray water drops leaking from the oily stone.
Leaning forward, Zachary looked one last time down into the chasm, almost as if he wanted to pierce the dark veil of its depths. But not even with the enhanced sight of Cinder Eyes was he able to see what hid beyond the fall. Not that he was actually curious; in fact, his thoughts revolved around something far more mundane.
'Now I can say it for certain... I don't particularly like heights,' Zachary muttered in his head as he continued breathing heavily, wiping the cold sweat from his forehead.
Back in the Other World, he had been quite fond of rollercoasters, and going mountaineering with some faculty friends was on his schedule at least once a month. Hell, jumping with a parachute was even on his bucket list. But after so many experiences hanging from walls and cliffs in such a short amount of time...
'Yeah... I'm completely fed up with it,' he thought with a sharp click of his tongue.
"Zach!"
The sudden scream from Kai snapped him back from his thoughts as the archer's hands grabbed his shoulders, pulling him away from the edge of the chasm.
"That was crazy back there! That double jump you did from your Echo's shoulders was... By the gods, you almost made me scream out loud."
Zachary looked back at the not-so-dashing archer with a tired expression before a faint smile appeared on his ruined face. Taking a deep breath to contain his exhaustion, he finally chuckled. "What can I say? That's why I'm being paid the big bucks."
And yet, despite the ease with which he delivered the line, no one laughed.
After taking another deep breath and finally silencing the heavy heartbeat drumming in his ears, Zachary looked past Kai. The rest of the cohort was staring directly at him, their expressions deadpan and serious.
After a few seconds of heavy silence, Caster was the first to ask what everyone was burning to know. "What was that?"
"What was what?" Zachary asked back immediately, his face a mask of pure, oblivious innocence.
A scowl appeared on the scion's face, one that was quickly mimicked by Effie, and to a lesser degree, Nephis. But just as Caster was about to snap back and repeat his question, Effie suddenly interrupted, a flash of newfound clarity reaching her amber eyes.
"Have you fully saturated your Core?"
Hearing that single question, a wave of understanding spread across the cohort's faces without needing Zachary's explicit confirmation. In all honesty, he was deeply thankful for the assumption. It was a far easier explanation than admitting his soul had gone through a partial awakening. That didn't mean he was completely safe—after all, Cassie could read his Runes, and he wasn't sure how much she had already shared with Nephis.
But for now, he had to take what he could get. Wearing a resigned expression, Zachary addressed the tired huntress.
"Oh, Effie, it seems I can't fool those beautiful eyes of yours," he said with feigned mockery. "Yes, I saturated my Core the day I dealt with those guards—Kai's old friends."
Thankfully, that seemed to satisfy them. After all, it was a stated fact that a Sleeper received a portion of Soul Fragments upon killing another human. But there was another elephant in the room that had to be addressed, and Nephis was quick to drag it into the light.
"And the lightning?" she asked. Her face was an impassive mask, the immense fatigue and pain from the previous hurdle reduced to nothing more than a faint remnant on her beautiful features. And yet, beneath her calm voice lay a sharp trace of tension.
Suddenly, the previous explanation felt entirely lacking as the cohort locked their serious gazes onto him once more, fully backing their leader.
"Wouldn't you like to know, weather girl?" Zachary answered immediately, his voice taking on a sketchy, playful edge as he tried to wink at her. But having only a single eye left, it just looked like a normal, slow blink.
Unfortunately, and to his quiet shame, once again no one laughed.
Sighing deeply, Zachary scratched the back of his neck, pondering his predicament seriously. Thunder Song was easily the strongest weapon in his arsenal, and on the perilous path ahead, he would undoubtedly have to unleash it again. That was the exact reason he had decided to debut it so early in the race.
But that brought him right back to his current crisis: how the hell was he supposed to explain it?
He could claim it was his Aspect, but that wouldn't hold up under scrutiny. First of all, it contradicted everything he had already shown them. Simply saying he had lied and been hiding his true strength didn't make tactical sense; Nephis had seen him nearly die under the scythe of the Carapace Demon and face countless other horrors on the Shore. Hiding his true power under those exact circumstances would make him look like a fool...
More than before.
Then again, he couldn't exactly reveal it was an Aspect Legacy. Kido discovering hers had been a fateful encounter, a clear example of divine providence. A second Sleeper discovering his own Legacy just a few months later? Worse, the very same person who had helped Kido unlock hers?
Simply impossible. Zachary would have an easier time explaining how he had achieved a partial soul awakening.
'Dammit, once again I'm a victim of my own success...' With no good answers in sight, he finally decided to do what he did best. Deflect.
Shaking his head with a sheepish smile, Zachary finally said, "Well, I can share my secrets with you if you really want, Neph. But you'll have to sign an NDA afterward, so..."
A minute twitch appeared in Nephis's left eye at his nonsense, perceptible only through his enhanced sight. But before she could retaliate, Effie thankfully came to his rescue.
"We can interrogate Blabbermouth later, Princess," she said, stretching her toned arms behind her back as she finally regained her composure. "But we should probably do that somewhere else... unless you want to share his secrets with the fishes." She added a familiar, calm grin.
Listening to her words, Nephis looked at Zachary for one long, unreadable second before finally looking away.
"Let's do that," she said simply, turning to walk in the direction of Cassie.
The blind girl looked in far better shape than the rest of them, though a few light cuts adorned her doll-like face. But before Nephis could place a comforting hand on her friend's shoulder, Effie interrupted her with a grim, sudden seriousness.
"Not yet, Neph," she said, her voice dropping into a dark register. "There's one last hurdle to overcome... We'll need you to be at the top of your game."
Zachary's expression turned grim at the reminder, and a cold weight settled over the rest of the cohort. Their objective had been made terrifyingly clear the moment they set foot in the catacombs.
A Fallen Tyrant was waiting for them.
He grimaced, his humor disappearing like a mirage. Zachary knew that he would soon have to concoct a plausible explanation for Thunder Song, yet his mind refused to address the matter, choosing instead to focus entirely on the fact that he was willingly walking straight into the den of a dreadful Tyrant.
'You owe me big, Kai... The lengths I go to just to get you a nice Memory...' he thought grimly.
With a heavy heart, he turned to look at Saint. She hadn't moved from her post since being pulled up from the chasm. Her shield arm bore a deep crack at the shoulder, ruby dust flowing slowly from the stone wound. Similar but smaller injuries were spread evenly across her helmet and breastplate, her sword and shield heavily nicked from the previous fray. Fortunately, she wasn't going to need them for their upcoming operation.
Leaning down, he inspected her stone legs, patting the complicated armor here and there. Thankfully, they were uninjured.
A few minutes later, they were ready to move. Zachary watched the backs of the cohort as he followed them into the descending tunnel. The sudden dampness that clung to the blackened, mossy walls triggered a deep sense of apprehension. The knowledge of what hid at the end of the path, coupled with the absolute lack of certainty regarding how it would react to him, made the space feel incredibly claustrophobic.
Suddenly, it no longer felt like he was walking through a damp stone passage; instead, he could picture himself marching straight into the open maw of some tenebrous beast. Such heavy, fatalistic thoughts were merely the preamble for what was to come.
'Focus, man... You have gone through the plan a dozen times. It should work,' Zachary repeated to himself, clenching his fists. But no matter how many times he cycled the thought, he couldn't completely shed the nervousness clawing at his heart.
That anxiety didn't stem from the enemy ahead, but from what was at risk. Zachary had already tasted the bitter alternative; a single misstep, a single mistake was all it took in this unforgiving world for everything to come crashing down. A single twist of Fate could crumble everything he had painstakingly built.
Remaining humble. It was a constant, vital reminder Zachary had to force upon himself. Despite Thunder Song, despite Flow Control, despite Ender's Solace... no matter how many advantages he held over other Sleepers, he still remained at the very bottom of the power chain in this nightmarish world.
Zachary shook his head, banishing the dark thoughts to the back of his mind to focus on what he could actually control. Taking a deep breath, he sharpened his senses and directed them inward. His heartbeat had already returned to normal, and his stamina was slowly replenishing, yet the remnants of his previous overexertion lingered. His core temperature remained higher than it should be.
Closing his eye, Zachary focused on his blood flow, his intimacy with his own life force sharpened through relentless training and contemplation. With each breath, his blood moved in a rhythmic, regulated tide, carrying oxygen to every corner of his body. Zeroing in on this internal cellular matrix, he took his next breath, a hot line of mist whistling past his closed lips.
Zachary inhaled deeply through his nose. The cold, humid air of the cave filled his lungs, spreading through his body along the bloodstream, displacing the excess heat and expelling it with his next exhalation.
Feeling the immediate shift, Zachary opened his eye, a dim smile pulling the corner of his lips upward. 'So with Balance Control, I can even thermoregulate my own body, huh?'
He had already demonstrated a deeper application of his Dormant Ability by enhancing his metabolism and digestion, but if he could manipulate specific biological functions on this level... it opened a much richer array of possibilities for the future.
"So... do you come here often?" Effie asked suddenly from his side, wrenching him from his thoughts. She had slowed her pace to match his.
Chuckling at the cliché opener, Zachary shook his head. "It was just once, and I couldn't even get past the entrance before being forced back by a literal sea of skeletons."
"And yet you still decided to come back," the huntress noted with a click of her tongue. "I was surprised you even proposed this route, considering your... situation."
Zachary grimaced for a fraction of a second, but ultimately answered with a sigh. "It was the better option. It still is." Noticing the dark, uncharacteristic humor bleeding into Effie's expression, he quickly deflected. "What? Are you worried about me, Effie? Oh, you're going to make me blush."
At the sudden nonsense, the huntress couldn't contain a sharp snort, though the heavy weight on her features only deepened. "You wish, Blabbermouth. It's just that I've seen that fat bastard myself... and I know exactly what happens to people who fall into his territory."
Listening to her words, Zachary threw a side glance at her. Effie continued walking beside him, but the burden on her shoulders was visibly immense.
He parted his lips to offer a reassuring quip, but closed them a second later. Instead, he gave her shoulder a light, companionable punch, trying to project absolute calm. "Worry about yourself first, Minerva. I have everything under—"
The words died in his throat.
Zachary stopped dead in his tracks, an imperceptible but violent tremor spreading through his shoulders and racing down his spine. Effie halted instantly, looking back at him with a sharply raised eyebrow. Noticing the sudden break in formation, the rest of the cohort turned around, worry and quiet doubt instantly clouding their expressions.
A shaky breath escaped his lips, immediately dissolving into a resigned, heavy sigh.
"This is as far as I go," Zachary stated. His voice possessed an unnatural, chilling calmness. But he was entirely certain of the data. After all, his Danger Sense had just calibrated the exact radius of the [Blasphemer] Attribute. "If I take another step, the Tyrant will feel my presence immediately."
A heavy, tense silence stretched through the group as they digested the sudden news. Everyone present, with the exception of Kai, had already witnessed firsthand how terrifyingly magnetic his [Blasphemer] Attribute was to lower-ranked creatures. Before anyone could vocalize their doubts, Zachary spoke up, his remaining eye locked on Nephis.
"You guys go on ahead. If my layout mapping is correct, we should be directly under the Priestess Statue to the east—the one we used as a rest point when we first arrived."
Nodding at his words, Effie chimed in, her voice tight with tension. "Yes, the dome of the chamber where the Tyrant made its nest is actually fractured. That's our exit route to the surface..."
As Effie continued to break down the Tyrant's positioning in the center of the cavern and calculate their slim margins for success, Nephis bit her lower lip lightly.
The reality was brutal: while the Tyrant would be asleep upon their initial arrival, granting the cohort a precious window to escape, the moment Zachary took a single step into that tunnel, that window would violently slam shut. Taking a deep breath to center herself, Changing Star summoned the Golden Rope and passed it directly to Kai.
"Then we begin immediately," she declared, the sudden infusion of authority in her voice refocusing the cohort. "Kai, you fly the moment we breach the chamber and tie off our path of escape." Turning her head toward the blind girl, she added, "You should take someone up with you on the first run to accelerate the process."
Kai and Cassie nodded in unison. Though Nephis hadn't spoken her name aloud, the choice of who needed to be evacuated first was obvious.
"Another person needs to already be holding the other end of the line, ready to climb the second it's secured," Effie noted, she and Caster trading determined nods.
"The whole operation should take no more than thirty seconds," Effie estimated, crossing her arms as the movement accentuated the dense muscle of her shoulders. "By that point, the Tyrant will only be halfway through its waking cycle, giving us just enough of a head start to vanish."
"I have something in mind..." Zachary intervened, seizing the moment. "Once everyone is safely topside, give me a loud signal. You don't need to worry about being stealthy at that point, considering the Tyrant will already be throwing a tantrum anyway."
Nephis looked back at him, a faint trace of reluctance bleeding through her usually impassive mask. "How confident are you?"
Curling his lips into a smile that didn't quite reach his eye, Zachary projected a wave of feigned confidence. "Sixty... maybe eighty percent, assuming the variables cooperate. But hey! When has one of my plans ever actually failed?"
Nephis leveled a deadpan stare at him, while Cassie slowly passed a tired hand over her blindfold. Both of them had personally witnessed the catastrophic aftermaths of his "successful" plans.
Zachary offered an awkward cough under the weight of their judgment. "Hey, don't look at me like that. And let's be honest, when have we ever had the luxury of certainty on our side?"
Looking over the rest of the cohort, he took a deep breath, deliberately burying his underlying anxiety beneath a layer of newfound determination. "Don't worry about it. I'll be fine."
Reaching down to his hips, Zachary uncoiled the metallic cables of his Memory, handing one lead to Effie and the other to Nephis. "Just secure these firmly to the mouth of the tunnel for me. I'll take care of the rest afterwards."
Nephis stared down at the wire resting in her palm for a long, silent second before raising her gaze to lock eyes with him. Her striking grey eyes searched his singular crimson one intensely before she finally turned around.
"Wait for the signal," she said flatly. "We'll see you outside."
After receiving a soft, encouraging pat on the shoulder from Kai and Cassie, and a much heavier, bruising fist-bump from Effie, Zachary watched their shrinking silhouettes disappear into the devouring darkness of the tunnel.
But before putting himself to work, he focused his vision into the distance. Even if his remaining eye couldn't pierce the physical gloom of the cavern ahead, his senses still picked up a distinct sight thanks to the enhancements of Blood Weave: the faint, golden shimmer of divinity.
"The Corpse Eaters..." Zachary muttered to himself as the sharp, metallic whistle of his extending cables echoed in the quiet. "There must be dozens of those minions in the nest. But the one which gives the Blood Arrow should be laying right next to the Cathedral's key. And with my cursed Attribute, I won't have to worry about it failing to notice me."
'Which means acquiring the Memory should technically be the easiest part of the evening. Now, as for the escape...' With a grim, tight smirk, he turned his head to look at Saint, who stood silently behind him like a stone sentinel.
"You're going to have to work some overtime, darling," Zachary said, his fingers unfastening the bindings that secured his left sleeve. "But don't worry. How do you feel about a pizza party once this entire nightmare is over?"
With a sharp, humorless chuckle, he withdrew his injured arm from the protective folds of the Witness Mantle. Looking down at the horrific tapestry of deep scars and severe burns adorning his arm and hand, a faint shiver raced down his spine—both in vivid remembrance of where those wounds came from, and in anticipation of the sheer agony of what was about to happen next.
Finally, the whistling of the cables stopped. A sudden, sharp tug on his right wire signaled that the cohort had reached their positions.
Without wasting a single second, Zachary pulled a makeshift knife from the pouch at his waist and sliced open both of his palms. He commanded Blood Weave to pool the dark, heavy ichor faster, smearing the thick fluid across Saint's stone helmet and breastplate. His blood would act as a secondary beacon, ensuring the Corpse Eaters smelled him on her the moment they split up.
Taking a deep breath, he looked down at his palms; the wounds were already attempting to knit back together under Blood Weave's passive regeneration, requiring a conscious, stubborn command just to keep them weeping. Looking one last time at Saint, he gave her a sharp nod, a fiery glow erupting from his crimson eye as his bloody hands gripped the steel cylinders at his hips.
[Soaring] Enchantment Description: Once attached, soar to your destination. Bound yet free.
This was the active enchantment of Rising Attachment—the absolute core of his operation. The only reason he could even attempt this was his unique ability to manually bypass the standard interface and fuel enchantments directly through the soul essence flowing in his blood.
A sudden, deep rumble reverberated from the tunnel ahead, causing oily water drops and ancient dust to rain from the ceiling. The Lord of the Dead was awakening.
His heart began to beat wildly, but to Zachary's surprise, he recognized the sensation instantly. It wasn't nervousness anymore. It was pure, unadulterated excitement.
"What the hell is wrong with me?" Zachary wheezed, shaking his head before giving Saint a silent mental command.
The Echo suddenly dropped her stone weapons, letting them clatter to the ground. Instead, she grabbed his arms tightly, pulling him backward step by step away from the tripwire line. The high-tensile cables groaned under the immense added tension, their flexibility proving itself as they stretched like a loaded slingshot.
'Tension... gravity from the drop... additional force from the Memory...' Zachary frantically calculated every possible vector that could impact his trajectory, but halfway through, he decided to drop the act. Physics hardly mattered at this point.
"Fuuu..."
He took a deep breath, but no matter how focused his respiration was, his heartbeat continued to hammer against his ribs. And then, completely overtaking the thumping in his ears, Zachary finally heard it.
A loud, familiar, piercing whistle. The signal from the surface.
A wide, excited grin split his scarred visage the exact moment Saint released her grip. Zachary violently flooded his hands with soul essence, bleeding the raw energy directly into the handles of the Memory.
"Cowabung—!"
The words were stolen from his mouth, ripped away along with his breath by the instantaneous, violent acceleration.
There had been a slight miscalculation in Zachary's plan. His ability to trigger active enchantments was merely a byproduct of his unique biology and Flow Control, a temporary bridge allowing him to manipulate the essence inside his Body. But once that essence left his flesh and entered the Memory, he lost all fine-tuning control over it.
It was a crude, brute-force method with a massive downside: Zachary could not modulate how much essence he directed into the enchantment. Once he forced it open, the enchantment operated at absolute maximum throttle until he manually cut the connection or his Body completely ran out of fragments.
Which is to say, the moment Zachary activated the [Soaring] enchantment, he was launched into the tunnel at Mach Fuck.
The Lord of the Dead, of course, registered his blasphemous presence immediately. But just as the gargantuan Tyrant finally woke up, ready to cull the life of the intruder, Zachary was already rocketing out of the tunnel mouth at an impossible velocity. His grinning face was twisted by the sheer force of the wind, and dark puddles of stagnant water exploded into mist behind his trail.
Zachary was completely caught off guard by the initial whiplash, but his instincts snapped into place the moment he shattered the threshold of the wide, central chamber. Trusting his Danger Sense to guide his mind through the blinding motion, he violently twisted his torso mid-air, barely dodging a massive, jagged pillar of calcified bones that erupted from the floor.
The next second, the spring-loaded cables at his hip whistled sharply as they shot upward, latching themselves securely onto the stone fingers of the broken priestess statue's hand high above.
Despite the terrifying, nauseating speed of his trajectory, his sharpened sight still managed to look upward. There, peeking down through the jagged hole in the ceiling, the exhausted cohort stared down at him with expressions of absolute, unmitigated shock.
They were utterly stunned by the fact that, after all his careful talk about avoiding the Tyrant's attention and staying behind, he was currently flying in a straight, screaming line directly toward the colossal body of the Fallen Tyrant like a human missile.
A moment earlier, just as his head whipped back from the violent recoil of his acceleration, Zachary felt it deep in his bones: the direct, unmitigated attention of the Lord of the Dead.
He had just crossed the threshold of the detection radius for his cursed attribute, and the psychological feedback was instantaneous and terrifying. The maddening gazes from the dwellers of the Dark Sea had been terrible, but they lacked a crucial element that now made Zachary reconsider everything he had experienced in this world.
Awareness.
A Tyrant was inherently intelligent, and with each progressive Rank, that cognitive capacity clearly expanded. But this was the first time Zachary felt a consciousness quite like this; not even the Forsaken Knight in the Cathedral had focused so intently, so deliberately on his presence. Through this mutual awareness, he noticed something that only reinforced the icy chill clawing at his heart: dozens of high-alert warnings began appearing in his perception almost simultaneously, each radiating outward from the focal point of the Tyrant's malice.
His worst fears were immediately confirmed. A Tyrant and its minions acted as a true Legion. Despite each individual creature existing as a separate entity, they still shared a vestige of a collective consciousness.
Through this hive-mind link, every single one of the Corpse Eaters nesting in the vast chamber he was currently rocketing toward—knew exactly where he was, how fast he was moving, and precisely when he would arrive.
Erupting from the tunnel at blinding speed, and under the crushing strain of such unbearable, localized danger, his mind sharpened to an unnatural degree. Time dilated, slowing down to a crawl. Yet, this was a momentarily phenomenon, and completely purposeless. It didn't change the physics of his trajectory.
Zachary was still flying directly toward his impending death at terrifying speed.
But the sensory slowdown did allow him to fight past the panic and execute his plan. As he twisted his body mid-air to avoid the first soaring pillar of bones, he locked his single eye onto the gargantuan mountain of skeletal remains at the center of the vast chamber.
The collision was imminent.
Danger Sense surged, louder and more frantic than ever before, nearly managing to overshadow the existential dread of the Tyrant itself. But even without the mental warning, Zachary would have known what was coming. Through the gloom, he could see tens of calcified bone pillars erupting from the floor, dashing inward from all directions to intercept him. Fortunately... he was going to arrive at his destination faster than they could close the gap. The faint glow of divinity was just a few meters away from his outstretched fingers.
He twisted his body again, the cables at his hip ringing like taut guitar strings as Zachary faced completely forward, extending his bare arm toward the mountain of bones.
But just as he was about to make contact, something that no one in the cohort could have foreseen happened.
The mountain of bones suddenly burst open, parting down the center like a blasphemous depiction of the miracle of the sea. Through the shattered remains of the Dark City's past citizens, the grotesque and abhorrent reality of the Lord of the Dead was laid bare—along with the countless leeches nesting beside their progenitor.
It was a white, putrid maggot. The thing would easily be a dozen meters long if it weren't curled into a massive, pulsing ball, and even now, it was slowly, heavily unfolding itself. Each of its fleshy, segmented rings was disgorging its own foul secretions, containing visible traces of foreign skulls and coagulated blood that only eons of decay could have fused into a single, profane entity. Surrounding it, wriggling violently at the sudden exposure to the open air, a sea of slimy leeches suddenly focused entirely on him.
Time slowed down even further, but this time, the dilation was a curse. It gave Zachary a front-row seat to contemplate the utter horror of the image.
Should he be thankful?
Because a Tyrant and its minions acted as a legion, the Lord of the Dead didn't bother using its main body to crush the flying insect invading its nest. Instead, it commanded the sea of writhing leeches surrounding it to strike.
Was Zachary thankful?
Perhaps he would be later. Currently, a dozen oversized leeches were launching themselves through the air toward him, their mouths gaping as they slammed into his exposed left arm—the exact moment his fingers finally snapped shut around the glowing object that had been sent flying amidst the stray skulls and debris.
"Aghhh!" The agonizing scream was torn violently from his throat, and once again, Zachary found himself bitterly cursing the existence of Cinder Eyes.
His enhanced perception was operating at absolute maximum capacity, forcing him to feel the exact, excruciating sensation of each minute, needle-like tooth sawing into his skin. He registered the foul, ancient stench of decay radiating from every single one of the mad parasites, and the putrid, stomach-churning feeling of their cold, slimy flesh pulsing against his bare arm.
That was his cue. He had achieved everything he had come down for—the key to the Cathedral and the Corpse Eater were firmly in his grasp. It was time to leave.
With clenched teeth and an iron grip, Zachary squeezed the right cylinder of Rising Attachment even harder, violently channeling essence into the Memory to yank himself upward toward the exit. But the Lord of the Dead had no intention of letting the Blasphemer escape. Uncoiling its grotesque, segmented mass, the Tyrant surged upward in a furious pursuit, launching jagged pillars of bone at blinding speed to impale him mid-air.
But at that exact millisecond, a dark figure erupted from the mouth of the tunnel like a black comet.
For a single, fraction of a heartbeat, the attention of the Tyrant wavered, before snapping back onto Zachary. This hierarchy of aggression was something Zachary had thoroughly documented during his grueling months of hunting in the ruins of the Dark City. Despite his blood carrying the exact same odious, blasphemous aura that defined his main body, whatever object or Echo he smeared with his ichor always remained a secondary objective to the monsters compared to the source.
But what if that secondary objective suddenly forced its hand?
Increasing her momentum with every mechanical stride, Saint sprinted directly toward the uncoiling Fallen Tyrant and its writhing offspring. The next second, just as the bone pillars were about to close around Zachary's ascending form, the stone Echo planted her feet heavily, shattering the ground beneath her. With ruthless precision, she drove her fist downward into a writhing leech, obliterating the parasite into a localized explosion of crimson mist.
[You have killed an Awakened Monster...]
The contemptuous, familiar voice of the Spell announced the kill. At that exact instant, the rising pillars of bone froze entirely in midair as the Lord of the Dead looked down with a spike of absolute, murderous malice. After all, Saint hadn't just killed a random parasite—she had just slaughtered a Corpse Eater, a literal, living extension of the Tyrant's own flesh.
This was the absolute crux of Zachary's plan, a desperate wager with his life on the line. He was relying entirely on the enhanced sapience and acute awareness that came with the creature's Fallen Rank. He had gambled that a highly intelligent Tyrant would be forced to calculate a choice between two blasphemous targets: the thief currently flying away, or the butcher below actively slaughtering its spawns.
Thankfully, the gamble paid off. The focus shifted. Now he just had to—
"Ughh!"
A sudden, white-hot agony lancing through his left arm shattered his concentration, pulling his single eye away from Saint as she nimbly dodged the descending storm of bones below.
Still rocketing upward, he looked down at his arm. The dozen writhing maggots were already engorging themselves, heavily pumping his tenacious life force into their translucent bellies. Zachary didn't waste another second. As they bloated on his blood, he executed the one technique he had strictly forbidden himself from using until his body was fully tempered.
He channeled Thunder Song directly inside his own flesh.
The already radiant core resting within his heart flared with blinding brilliance. His soul violently converted into raw lightning, erupting from the organ and tearing down the pathways of Flow Control with such volatile, untamed arrogance that his physical body instantly began to buckle under the strain. Zachary had already experienced the horrific aftermath of channeling inner lightning once before; his hand had literally exploded as a direct consequence of trying to force such untamable energy through a poorly reinforced human vessel.
Thankfully, this time, he had a dozen external lightning rods attached to his flesh that wouldn't mind absorbing the sudden voltage.
The leeches didn't die from the toxic indigestion of his blood; they simply weren't given the luxury of time. As the arc-lightning raced through his bloodstream and slammed into the engorging bellies of the Corpse Eaters, their translucent stomachs suddenly lit up with a brilliant, blinding blue glow—before exploding outward in a shower of scorched flesh and sizzling sparks.
[You have killed an Awakened Monster...]
[You have killed an Awakened Beast...]
[You have killed an Awakened Beast...]
[You have killed an Awakened Monster...]
[You have killed an Fallen Beast, Corpse Eater.]
[You have killed...]
[...]
[You have received a Memory.]
The Tyrant snapped its malformed head upward at the sudden, simultaneous death of its offspring. But just as it uncoiled to soar toward the Blasphemer along a rising network of bone pillars, Saint struck. In a final, absolute act of defiance, the stone Echo lunged forward, hammering a direct blow into the Lord's main body.
The strike itself had no physical effect against the gargantuan creature, but the sheer, unfathomable audacity of an Awakened Echo daring to lay hands on a Lord was enough to force the Lord of the Dead to focus its terrifying malice one last time on Nether's Last Daughter. Yet, just as she was about to be utterly crushed beneath the heavy weight of ancient bone and history, she dissolved into a brilliant cloud of ruby sparks—safely unsummoned the exact millisecond her role was fulfilled.
The Tyrant swung its focus back toward the ceiling, but it was a fraction of a second too late.
Zachary was suddenly yanked violently upward. The high-tensile cables of Rising Attachment groaned under the brutal, instantaneous strain, ripping his body completely out of the tunnel mouth and cleanly tearing him away from the Tyrant's detection radius.
Flying out of the jagged hole in an entirely ungraceful arc, Zachary barely managed to register his surroundings before slamming hard into the mud, sliding a few meters across the slick stone floor. With a deep, pained groan, he rolled onto his back and squinted. In the distance, a faint, familiar crimson hue stained the horizon.
He had escaped. He was finally, truly outside the detection radius of the Fallen Tyrant.
Breathing heavily, Zachary forced his battered body upright. To his left, the headless statue of the Saintess towered over the ruins, her broken stone hand resting in the dirt at her feet. Across the clearing, the cohort was sprinting toward him with hurried strides. That was when Zachary finally understood what had just happened.
Witnessing the entire chaotic cat-and-mouse game from the lip of the chasm above, Effie had seen the exact moment the Tyrant was about to re-target him. Acting on pure instinct, she had grabbed the taut steel cables anchored near her feet and pulled upward with her herculean strength—literally reeling him in like a prize fish. If anything, she had used a bit too much of her power, launching him clear out of the hole and into the dirt.
Shaking the mud from his head, Zachary stood up and dusted the damp grime from his pants. With a sharp, pained wince, he carefully tucked his bloodied left arm back into the adorned folds of the Witness' Mantle.
The cohort skidded to a halt around him, their faces a chaotic mix of astonishment, relief, and furious questions. But just as Nephis opened her mouth to demand an explanation, Zachary's head snapped toward the distant horizon.
He felt it instantly. A gaze. Cold and murderous, boring directly into the back of his neck with razor-sharp intensity.
Noticing the sudden, rigid shift in his posture, the rest of the cohort followed his gaze. There, standing high above the eternal stone barriers of the Dark City, silhouetted against the guardian statue of the ruined metropolis, a twisted shadow looked down upon them.
Harus.
The Bright Lord's butcher had successfully escaped the trap, and he was staring across the expanse with pure, unadulterated rage.
The cohort recognized the ominous silhouette immediately, several of them letting out quiet sighs of relief that they had put so much distance between themselves and the madman. But Zachary, through the enhanced perception of Cinder Eyes, could see much more.
The already malformed face of the Butcher was now mapped with deep, hideous lacerations. The cheek that had received the splash of Zachary's blasphemous blood had been violently torn or bitten off, exposing a raw, gruesome row of twisted, yellowish teeth. His uneven frame leaned heavily to one side, his hand pressing down to conceal a deep, ragged wound in his abdomen.
And, of course, there was the empty, mangled space where his left arm used to be.
Seeing the structural ruin of his enemy, Zachary couldn't contain the wild smile splitting his lips. Reaching around to the heavy pouch at his lower back, he unclipped something tied securely to the frame—a bundle wrapped in bloody, stained cloth that had miraculously survived the entire nightmare of the catacombs.
The cohort watched with curious eyes that quickly morphed into collective disgust as he casually unraveled the cloth to reveal a severed, pale human arm.
Zachary grabbed the limb firmly by the ragged stump and hoisted it high into the damp air, waving it happily toward the horizon. He moved it back and forth with a cheerful, mocking rhythm, as if the arm itself was bidding farewell to its former owner.
"Zach... is that...?" Caster asked, his voice trembling slightly as he stared at the macabre trophy.
Effie's amber eyes widened in absolute shock, a reaction mirrored instantly by Kai as they recognized the precise build of the limb. Nephis, meanwhile, leveled her striking gray eyes straight at him, her gaze burning with an intense, blinding feeling.
"Well, of course," Zachary said with a soft chuckle, his voice dripping with rogue amusement. "I wouldn't go through all that hell without taking a little souvenir for myself."
And without a single care, he tossed the severed arm over his shoulder.
It sailed through the air, falling directly back into the dark, gaping maw of the hole they had just escaped—straight into the heart of the Fallen Tyrant's den, down into a dark abyss where absolutely no one would ever be able to retrieve it.
Taking a deep, stabilizing breath, Zachary looked up at the bleak, gray sky of the Forgotten Shore. He had achieved every single parameter of his hidden directive... The dice was cast.
Not everything was perfect, though. He had paid a massive price to pull this off.
Directing his awareness inward to inspect his Body, Zachary noticed with a grim, internal snicker that there were no longer any Soul Fragments nesting within it. The vast reservoir of essence he had painstakingly accumulated across months of slaughter and digestion had been utterly drained—consumed entirely by the brute-force over-channeling of the [Soaring] Enchantment and the violent, volatile discharge of Thunder Song through his veins.
The tactical reality was severe: until he replenished his fragments and refilled his internal reservoir, he would be completely unable to utilize Flow Control.
'It was worth it,' Zachary told himself, turning to face the speechless, staring cohort with his signature, roguish grin.
This marked the definitive conclusion of his Second Move. The sequence was locked, and the power dynamic of the Bright Castle would now be forced to tilt in a direction that served his grander designs. 'Now, the only thing left is...'
Shaking his head, Zachary looked toward the horizon, where the crimson Labyrinth spread out for thousands of miles—a lethal, shifting trap designed to swallow any foolish soul brave enough to cross it. The playful smirk faded from his face, replaced by a hard, resolute expression.
The Journey to the South had officially begun.