Kael staggered under the weight of Pip on his back, every stumbling step on the uneven terrain causing fresh blood to seep from Pip's wounds. His cloak was already soaked in a deep, crimson stain—Pip's lifeblood. The gaping hole in the boy's chest was not merely a wound; it was a yawning maw, drinking away his warmth and his very vitality. The cloying, metallic scent of blood assaulted Kael's senses, mingling with the rot of fallen leaves and the humid air of the forest, weaving a suffocating shroud around them. He could feel Pip's body growing unnervingly cold and impossibly heavy, a harrowing shift from just moments before.
"Damn it... you were still talking just a minute ago..." Kael's voice was a ragged whisper, thin as a moth's wing, each word laced with the labored, wet rattling emanating from Pip's chest.
Kael stopped, desperate and frantic. He carefully eased Pip down against the base of an ancient, gnarled tree, its roots coiled like stone serpents across the forest floor. Kael's hands trembled; he dared not apply pressure to the boy's shoulders, terrified that the slightest movement would cause the "donut" of a wound to rupture further, spilling even more life onto the moss.
"Are you okay? Just... rest a bit, yeah? We're... we're almost there," Kael stammered, forcing a twisted smile. His voice cracked under the weight of his anxiety, his vision blurring with a mixture of sweat and tears. He scanned the suffocating darkness of the forest, searching for a miracle that refused to manifest.
"Agh... I'm fine... just... keep going... Don't let me hold you back..." Pip rasped, his breaths coming in jagged, agonizing hitches. Every inhalation was a rhythmic torture, a spasming of the chest that sent waves of agony through his core. Pip struggled to lift his clouded, fading eyes, desperate to utter a final thought, but only a frothy crimson bubble broke at the corner of his mouth.
Suddenly, Pip's hand, which had been clutching Kael's shoulder, slid away, falling limp against the leaf-strewn ground. Kael froze. Every sound in the forest seemed to vanish; even the wind whistling through the crags died into a vacuum of silence. He pressed a trembling finger to Pip's nose, then to his throat. The air itself seemed to solidify. Kael's heart thundered against his ribs, a frantic, painful rhythm, while a hollow, icy void took root in his soul.
"Pip? Pip! Don't you dare scare me like this!" Kael began to shake him, his voice rising in desperation. "Hey, say something! You can't just sleep! You promised we'd make it out, that we'd clear this exam together, right? Don't pull this crap on me, you idiot! I won't let you end it like this!"
No response. Only a silence so thick it felt like strangulation.
"Y-you... big... idiot..." Pip's voice was a ghost of a sound, frayed and barely audible. "Why... are you... shouting... so loud..."
Those were the final words. After that, the labored rhythm of Pip's chest ceased entirely. His eyes, which had held such dogged, stubborn persistence, slowly drifted shut, the light within them snuffed out. Pip's hand gave one final, phantom twitch before falling into eternal stillness.
Thump.
Kael collapsed to his knees, his hands fumbling blindly over Pip's chest, trying in vain to anchor the fading warmth. Not a flutter. Not a beat. Memories crashed over Kael: the grueling training sessions, Pip's mocking laughter even when battered and broken, and the steely resolve in his eyes before entering the trial. It was all a still life now, painted in blood and absolute despair. He recalled how Pip always took the lead, how he'd smirk in the face of death. All of it had vanished into a nightmare.
"No. This can't be it." Kael muttered, his smile shattering into a jagged grimace. "You promised, Pip? You said you'd win, that you'd live... Don't play such a cruel joke! Get up... please... If you just get up, I swear I'll stop nagging you about your recklessness..."
Ellarish rushed in like a specter, her face bloodless, a mask of sheer horror. She placed her shaking hands over the wound, but the moment her mana touched it, it was violently repelled by a cold, malevolent void. She jerked her hands back, eyes wide, drowning in panic. Her mind was a chaotic tempest; on one side, the duty to protect her sister Arisa, and on the other, the image of the savior who had died for her, now overlapping with the pale, lifeless mask of Pip. She realized, no matter how hard she fought, the one who had stayed by her side was slipping into the abyss—as cold and merciless as the past that had claimed everything else she loved.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
"His heart... it's stopped." Ellarish's voice shattered into jagged shards of grief. She slumped forward, wrapping her arms around herself, her sobs lost in the crushing silence of the woods.
Kael heard nothing. He gripped Pip's collar, shaking him, as if he could tear through the shroud of death itself.
"Ha... ha... no way... you're joking, right? YOU'RE JOKING, AREN'T YOU!!!" Kael roared, his scream the desperate cry of a trapped, wounded beast. Hot tears carved paths through the mud and gore on his face. "TELL ME YOU'RE JOKING!!!"
"Kael... I... I can't..." Ellarish huddled on the ground, shaking uncontrollably, her tears falling in silence.
Kael didn't let go. He pressed his face against Pip's cooling chest, his sobbing fracturing into broken, jagged gasps: "Pip... No... don't leave me behind... please..."
Far from the carnage, the fracture of a singular, profound existence sent shockwaves that made the most powerful entities tremble.
At the Royal Palace, Locus was reporting in the grand, opulent hall. Suddenly, the space warped. The sword at his hip vibrated violently, emitting a high-pitched screech like souls being dragged into the dark. The mystical tether the King had bestowed upon him to monitor the "Variable" Pip was dissolving, replaced by a cold, abyssal void radiating from the epicenter. Locus's knuckles turned white as he gripped his hilt, veins bulging as if to tear through his skin.
"This... this shouldn't be possible." He murmured, eyes wide as he stared into the void. The tether hadn't just snapped; it was being pulverized by an entity that existed in no ancient archive. He felt a catastrophe unfolding, a reality so horrific that even the King might not have foreseen it.
At the Cathedral of the Holy See, Yban and Lilit were mid-prayer before the majestic statue of the Divine. Without warning, the golden light of the statues flickered and died, replaced by a suffocating, pitch-black miasma that swirled through the vast sanctuary, causing even the most resilient stained glass to spiderweb and shatter.
"Yban, do you feel that?" Lilit trembled, her hands losing their grip on her rosary. The precious jade beads shattered against the marble floor with a sharp, dissonant clatter.
"That is the Mark of Alf." Yban surged to his feet, his face stripped of all color. He gazed into the ether, where the destiny-bound mark of the Chosen was being shredded. Usually the embodiment of composure, Yban found his own hands betraying him with tremors. "The tether to the host is being forcibly usurped by a malefic entity. If this thing fully awakens, the Holy See has no path of retreat, and we shall all be reduced to dust."
At the General Headquarters, Kales was savoring a goblet of wine when it exploded into fine powder in his grip. He looked down at his trembling hand, where black veins pulsed like fissures from the dark arts he had grafted onto Pip's body. The magical tether he used to siphon strength from his "host" didn't vanish—instead, it was being yanked backward with terrifying force toward the forest.
"I've calculated this wrong!" Kales recoiled, slamming into the heavy table, sending maps of the war spinning to the floor. He shrieked, his face a portrait of sheer terror as he realized the conduit he'd crafted was being seized by something infinitely more malevolent. "He's not dead... That thing... it's awakened a power far more monstrous than I could ever control!"
In a remote, shadow-drenched chamber, Zelus stood motionless, a statue in the void. No surveillance, no maps. He felt every ripple through his own soul.
Without warning, he stalled. A sensation of numbness—cold, like a blade carving straight into his psyche—struck him. He collapsed to his knees, clawing at his left breast, where something invisible had just been torn away. The connection to his "target" had been severed, leaving a cavernous, bone-chilling void.
"What... the hell... is this?" Zelus wheezed, his breath hitching.
He didn't observe with eyes; he felt with presence. And what he sensed now was no longer the presence of that boy. In its place, a soul-less, silent, and cruel power was filling the void. This was not a common power; it was a hollow abyss, rising from within the shell he had considered "his own."
Zelus staggered up, his eyes bloodshot with raw, frantic rage. He didn't hurt out of pity; he hurt out of deprivation. Someone, or something, had dared to enter his "playground" and swap the soul within without his permission.
"You... what have you done to it?" Zelus hissed through gritted teeth, his voice a venomous rasp.
He glared into the nothingness where the invisible tether had once hummed, now replaced by the stench of rot. He slammed his fist into the stone wall, pulverizing it under the crushing weight of his uncontrolled mana.
"Don't you dare!" He roared, his killing intent exploding and scouring everything in the room to ash. "You can kill him, you can ruin him, but you have no right to replace him with that soulless piece of trash!"
In the wild, the ground beneath Pip's corpse began to crack, forming jagged, obsidian rifts that bled the cold of a waking abyss. A magical storm was preparing to lash out, and no one within the forest would be left unscathed.