The giant heart throbbed in Luka's palm.
Black. Filthy. Thick slime smelling of carcass dripped past his fingers, falling striking the frozen pine needle pile.
The red veins wrapping his right arm did not wait for brain commands. The raw muscle fibers were alive. They moved wild, embedding piercing the defective organ's surface. The flesh tips dug deeper, cleaving the monster's blood vessel valves.
Sucking.
Not through the mouth. Not past the esophagus. The Shattered Amalgam's spiritual energy was siphoned straight through his exposed arm flesh. Black smoke crawled up, piercing Luka's skin pores.
The bone-piercing cold clashed with the boiling heat inside his vein casings. Luka's blood flow stopped for one beat. His mouth opened. No sound emerged. His eye lost its pupil, covered by a pitch-black color swallowing light.
The soul burden of dozens of humans who fell victim to the Amalgam surged into his body in unison.
Inside his head, his inner foundation collapsed.
The monolithic gate at the edge of the Slaughterhouse pushed wide open. The rusted iron hinges shrieked loud, cleaving the dense silence. From behind the darkness of that stone door, a flash flood crashed inside.
Not water. It was hundreds of pale shadows. Crying faces. The souls of wretched humans who failed to evolve and trapped in the monster's meat lump earlier now spilled overlapping into Luka's inner dimension.
They wailed. The mass crying sound echoed bouncing from the rusted iron ceiling. They demanded freedom. They demanded their suffering be ended. The blood mud puddle on the Slaughterhouse floor churned rising responding to their screams.
Then, that sound came again.
Clink! Clink!
The clatter of falling copper coins. This time not just two. Thousands of filthy coins fell striking the blood mud from the ceiling above. The demeaning laughter of nobles echoed thick, cursing him as a lowly beggar. Trampling his remaining pride before dozens of wailing souls.
The Sin of Wrath responded.
Luka rejected the cries. He rejected the insults. In the middle of his inner arena, an imaginary black iron chain wrapped his neck, strangling him until his sanity snapped. The hearth at his solar plexus exploded feral. He had to burn them all. He had to silence these pathetic wails with pure violence.
The Oesterian forest bore witness.
Luka's body arched backward. His spine crunched, enduring the forced pull. The veins on his neck bulged thickly, threatening to burst at any moment.
His mutated right arm swelled wildly. The cartilage and red muscles wrapping the rusted sword grew uncontrollably. The flesh expanded, crawling up past the elbow and swallowing his shoulder, trying to alter his entire anatomy into an extension of that slaughtering weapon.
This energy was too massive. The Amalgam's soul was too filthy and noisy to be swallowed whole by a newly awakened vessel.
Luka fell to his knees. The frozen dirt cracked, enduring the slam of his right knee. His boots scratched the ice. His left hand gripped his own head. He screamed a muffled cry, his voice resembling the growl of a wolf with torn vocal cords.
"Suppress that energy, My Lord!"
A commanding voice cut through the storm's roar.
Ignoring her torn gray wool dress, Rhea ran, piercing the fog and charging the burning heat radiating from Luka's body. She ignored the black blood splashes dirtying her shoes.
"Close your inner gate! Do not let them take over your flesh!"
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The maid's words pierced the red fog in Luka's brain.
Suppress. Close the gate.
Luka ground his teeth until fresh blood seeped from his gums. He gripped his expanding right arm with his left hand. His nails embedded into the red veins. Tearing them. He forced dominance. His reason fought a life-or-death battle against the parasite instinct in his own hand.
Inside the Slaughterhouse, he slammed the monolithic gate. Forcing the giant stone door forward, crushing the pale shadows trying to escape. The iron hinges shut tight with a thud vibrating the skull.
The mutation in the real world stopped.
The giant arm on his right body hissed. Hot steam smelling of scorched copper spewed. The red muscles shrank fast, pulling themselves back into the skin tissues. The cartilage binding flesh and metal shattered into white dust fragments.
The rusted sword hilt slipped. The old iron fell clinking striking the frozen dirt.
Luka slumped resting on both his hands. His breaths roared pumping oxygen. Black fluid, blood, and sweat dripped from his chin soaking the dirt. He stared at his right arm. His leather sleeve was ruined. His ulna bone that previously protruded broken had now closed back to its original place, forced straight by feral regeneration.
Yet, a price was exacted from that repair.
From the back of his hand up past his elbow, his skin texture was no longer the same. His flesh hardened. Dark reddish in color. Rough and thick-scaled like cracked asphalt. A permanent scar that would never fade. The proof mark of achieving the Threshold of Form. A medal of savagery branded using hot iron straight onto his body.
Luka tried moving his fingers. His hand functioned. Stronger. Denser.
Then, a new pain tore the base of his brain.
Not a physical wound. Something was being pulled out by force using rusted pliers from inside his head. The nerves in his eyes throbbed severe.
Luka shut his eyes. His hand gripped the frozen dirt.
Two silhouettes appeared behind the darkness of his mind. Two girls. Twins. Their age approaching adolescence. They stood in the middle of a blizzard. Their small hands gripped his fingers, feeling warm—a touch banishing the Oesterian cold. Their laughter flowed crisply, mentioning a call, calling his name with a respectful tone wrapped in affection.
Who?
Luka's brain worked hard. He had to see their faces. He had to remember their names. They were important. He knew they were his sanity anchors in the past.
The laughter changed. Its tone distorted, warping into a discordant hum.
The faces of the twin girls melted. Their facial skin dripped like wax placed over a fire. Their eyes, noses, and lips fell, merging with the dirt. Their silhouettes faded into gray fog. Their physical features were erased. Their names burned to ash from his vocabulary.
Gone.
A massive gaping hole opened in his chest—a void torturing his internal organs. He had just lost something extremely precious, something more expensive than a mere throne, yet he could not even name the form of that thing. His brain groped empty space. Nothing.
"Who..." Luka muttered hoarsely. His voice trembled. His hand crushed the dirt until his nails broke. "Who were they?”
High-heeled boots stopped right in front of his face.
Rhea knelt. The woman's pale hand touched Luka's cheek. Her skin felt extremely cold, yet channeled firmness. The lily scent from her body immediately suppressed the Amalgam's carcass stench in the air. The maid's thumb wiped the dripping blood below Luka's eye with a slow motion.
"The Law of Erosion, My Lord," Rhea whispered.
Her tone was flat. Devoid of mercy. The sentence was spoken to wrap Luka's confusion with steel certainty.
"A sacrifice for power always demands a toll," Rhea continued. Her gray eyes stared straight into Luka's black eye. "Ulric shattered your inner vessel on that night of betrayal. Now, when you pull power by force from the soul realm, your flesh must burn your own past memories just to survive."
Luka stared at his maid. His breath heavy.
"They robbed your memory," Rhea said. The maid moved her face closer, embracing the side of her master's head, locking the man's gaze entirely. "But fear not. As long as I breathe, I will be your memory. I will always remind you of your name, and whose enemy's neck you must decapitate."
The explanation embedded in the empty space of his head.
The dissonance and panic in his chest subsided, drugged by that cold-blooded manipulation. This erosion was not his fault. This memory damage was Ulric's doing. His uncle forced his body to burn the memories of the people he loved. That tyrant mutilated his identity.
That memory void was now fully filled by one thing.
Hatred.
Luka released his grip from the frozen dirt. He pressed his thick mutated right palm onto the dirt, then pushed his body to stand up. Oesteria's storm wind slapped his black cloak. He no longer cared about the faces of the two girls melting in his head. All of that was unimportant. He only needed one name to keep moving forward.
Silas. That hunting dog must be subjugated immediately.