The scorched, vitreous earth still radiated a suffocating heat, and the remnants of the glowing white ash from the Hellhounds drifted through the air like demonic snow. Dex stood amidst this destruction, his chest heaving violently, trying to comprehend the sheer volume of energy he had consumed. He looked at Lumia, who was leaning against a half-burned tree trunk, her arm, bandaged in torn linen, still trembling slightly. Dex knew through experience and instinct that remaining in this place was outright suicide. The terrifying noise of the battle, the electrical explosions, and the stellar heat wave he had unleashed were all massive visual and auditory flares, inviting every predatory creature, and perhaps surviving mercenaries, to converge upon them.
Considering their exhausted state, he was magically and physically drained, and she was injured, he decided they had to move away immediately and search for a temporary shelter, a hidden cave or a hollow beneath the roots of a giant tree, to spend the remainder of this ominous night, to rest and catch their breath before resuming the race toward the Elixir of the World Tree.
He helped Lumia up, and they began to walk away from the glass crater, delving deeper into the viscous darkness of the forest.
After minutes of cautious walking, Dex began to notice a slight change. At first, he thought it was merely a side effect of exhaustion and the ringing in his ears from the explosions. But with every step, this change became clearer and heavier. He realized that something strange, even terrifying in its anomaly, was overwhelming the area around them.
The sounds had vanished.
The Falus Forest is not a silent place. It is a breathing, living entity, full of the rustling of diseased leaves, the sounds of giant insects, the snapping of twigs under the feet of monsters, and the whistling of winds laden with gases. But now... there was an eerie stillness. No sound. No movement. No hum. Nothing at all. Just absolute silence, a silence so heavy and tangible it felt as if a blanket of lead had been thrown over the entire world, swallowing even the sound of their footsteps on the dry leaves.
Dex's brow furrowed deeply, his features hardening at the strangeness of the environment. "This isn't normal, even in this cursed forest," he thought to himself. He slowly turned his head to speak to Lumia, to ask her to activate her aura and scan their surroundings, but... he did not find her.
The space where she had been walking just one step behind him was completely empty. There was no trace of her, not even the cold scent of the void that accompanied her. She had vanished as if she had never existed.
Dex opened his mouth, and the air rushed from his lungs to scream her name at the top of his lungs, to shatter this sickening silence: "Lumia!" But to his horrifying surprise, no sound emerged from his mouth. His voice was not hoarse; rather, there was simply no vibration in his vocal cords at all. The air escaped his mouth, but the sound was stolen before it could be born. He tried again and again, screaming until the veins in his neck bulged, but the result was always an oppressive silence.
He looked forward again, and then he realized that the problem was not just with his senses, but with the fabric of reality itself. The distance ahead of him began to distort. The giant trees that had been only a few meters away began to lose their features and melt into a pitch-black darkness. The space itself began to "stretch." He could no longer see boundaries ahead of him, nor to his right or left. It was as if the ground had been erased, and the forest had transformed into a black corridor stretching into infinity. This absence of dimensions struck him with severe vertigo.
Dex tried to turn around again to run back the way he came, but in that precise moment, he froze in place.
It was not a voluntary freeze. A massive terror overwhelmed him, a primal, dark terror that shook his being to its roots. For the first time since his arrival in this world, and for the first time in his previous life as an inmate in the harshest of prisons, he felt this pure kind of dread. It was not the fear of a monster he could see, but the fear of the absolute unknown.
Then, he felt it.
He felt something behind him. A presence... an entity standing directly at his back. He did not need to see it to know it was there. The distance between them was practically non-existent, to the point that Dex could feel this entity's breath... cold, clammy breath that reeked of the dust of forgotten tombs... rhythmically and terrifyingly striking the bare nape of his neck.
His brain issued an emergency command to turn around, or ignite the Phoenix fire, or even throw his body forward to get away. But his body did not respond. The cells, muscles, and nerves refused to obey him. His voluntary motor control had been completely stripped away.
In that moment, amidst this total paralysis, Dex felt a hand placed very slowly upon the top of his head. A cold hand... a chilling coldness that seeped through his skull to touch his brain directly. This coldness was not like the coldness of Lumia's calm aura, which carried the stillness of space; rather, it was a coldness akin to the coldness of death, the coldness of a corpse that had lain at the bottom of a frozen ocean for thousands of years.
Dex bit down hard on his lower lip, trying to break this paralysis with any physical pain, biting until the flesh tore and he tasted the warm, metallic tang of his own blood filling his mouth, but he could not move an inch. The feeling of absolute helplessness, of being a prisoner inside his own body while death lurked behind him, was the worst feeling Dex could ever experience; it instantly transported him back to the nights in solitary confinement, multiplied a millionfold.
Then happened what shattered whatever certainty he had left in this world.
The entity whose dead breath was striking the back of his head began to mutter something. Faint, distorted whispers, resembling the sound of dry bones scraping against each other. Dex tried to concentrate, narrowing all his senses to try and understand this hellish language. And for a brief moment, the muttering was translated into his consciousness, and he comprehended the entity's words.
His eyes widened in lethal shock, his pupils dilating until they almost tore. For what he heard struck him with a terrifying astonishment that paralyzed his thoughts. The entity was not speaking the language of this world's empire, nor was it casting a magic spell upon him.
The entity was addressing him... by his true Earthly name, and by his cell number from his previous life as a prisoner! The entity slowly repeated the name and the number, savoring Dex's terror, revealing to him that this place did not recognize the "novel" or reincarnation, but looked directly into his bare soul, stained with the sins of his first world.