Orren summoned all his memories at once, leaving only the dagger unsummoned.
The Hunter’s Token appeared at his waist instantly, sharpening his senses to a razor edge.
Warden’s Embrace settled around his neck, sending a steady warmth through his exhausted body.
Finally, he brought forth the mask—The One Who Remembers.
The moment it covered his face, his thoughts went still.
The world did not become quieter.
He simply became calmer.
“Come, Draco,” he said softly.
“Time to shed some blood.” Draco moved first.
The Echo erupted forward in a blur of motion, using Sudden Lunge to close the distance instantly.
One of the scavengers barely had time to react before Draco’s jaws closed around its left pincer.
With a violent jerk of his head, he tore it free entirely.
A piercing screech echoed through the labyrinth.
That was the signal.
The remaining scavengers immediately reacted.
Three of them broke off toward Draco, including the injured one, clearly recognizing him as the greater threat.
That left one for Orren.
Too clean, Orren thought as he observed the split.
This is going too smoothly.
He didn’t hesitate, but he also didn’t relax.
Clad in dark armor, longsword in hand, he charged.
The scavenger met him head-on, raising its pincers to intercept him.
Orren adjusted instantly.
Instead of forcing a frontal clash, he slipped into its blind angle and targeted the joints, where armor gave way to movement.
Steel met flesh.
The blade cut through with far less resistance than it should have.
Even without a full soul core, his body still carried months of brutal combat experience.
More importantly, it carried discipline forged under Zain’s relentless training.
The scavenger lashed out, trying to catch him between its pincers.
Orren didn’t even look at the attacks.
Within a certain radius centered on himself, everything became clear.
Not visual clarity, but awareness.
Every shift of weight, every twitch of muscle, every intent to move registered in his mind as naturally as breathing.
A dome of perception.
He didn’t need to see the attack.
He already knew where it would land.
He slipped past another strike and severed the scavenger’s front legs one by one, forcing its massive body to tilt forward.
Instinctively, it braced itself on its remaining limbs to avoid collapsing completely.
That was the opening.
Orren moved.
He lunged upward, using the lowered angle of its body to reach its head, and brought his sword down in a single decisive arc.
The scavenger’s head hit the ground a moment later.
[You have slain an awakened beast, Carapace Scavenger.] [A Lost Fragment has been recovered.] [A Lost Fragment has been recovered.] ……..
Nephis and Sunny returned almost at the same time, cutting through the last of their opponents before sprinting toward Orren.
They arrived expecting a struggle, only to find him crouched beside a corpse, calmly working his blade between cracked chitin plates to extract the soul shard.
For a moment, neither of them spoke.
The battlefield around him was a mess of broken limbs and split carapace.
Four scavengers lay dead in uneven rings around the clearing.
Draco stood a short distance away, chest rising and falling heavily, one of its forelimbs bleeding dark ichor but still upright.
Orren glanced up as if only now noticing their presence.
“Oh.
Hey.” He wiped his blade against the creature’s shell and gave a small shrug.
“Almost done here.” He didn’t rush.
One by one, he finished extracting the shards with practiced efficiency, fingers steady even while Nephis and Sunny stood there watching him like they were trying to solve a problem they didn’t understand.
Sunny’s mouth had gone slightly open without him noticing.
Nephis, by contrast, said nothing but her gaze lingered longer than it should have, tracking the bodies, then Orren, then the distance between them as if recalculating something.
Only when Orren stood did the silence break.
He walked over, rolling his shoulder once as if the fight had been little more than a warm-up.
There wasn’t a single visible wound on him.
Not even a torn strap on his armor.
He glanced at his status almost absentmindedly.
Lost Fragments: [8/1000].
Just like Sunny he too gets his fragments by killing, but unlike Sunny who gets a portion of the opponents shadow as a shadow fragment, Orren extracts the instability from the beings he kills.
Every being is somewhat lost and that’s the part Orren gets for killing them.
Nephis finally turned away from the bodies.
“Bring Cassie.” Sunny snapped out of his stupor and jogged off without arguing.
The rest of the journey back to the statue passed in cautious silence, broken only by brief skirmishes.
Orren mostly let Sunny Nephis do the work, he wasn’t there to babysit them or to hamper their growth, so he let them struggle a bit.
Cassie was carried carefully between them, and by the time they reached the statue, the sun was still high, far earlier than expected.
They climbed in turns, pulling Cassie up to the upper platform, where wind and salt carried a faint, constant hum from the endless sea below.
Only then did the tension finally loosen.
Nephis divided the spoils without ceremony, distributing shards with precise fairness.
When she offered Orren his share, he pushed it back almost immediately.
“I can’t use them,” he said simply.
“Aspect thing.
You can take them.” Sunny frowned, clearly wanting to ask more, but Orren had already turned away.
“I’m tired,” he added, as if that explained everything.
“I’m sleeping.” He found a spot away from the others and lay down without another word, letting exhaustion finally catch up to him.
Within minutes, his breathing evened out.
While he slept Nephis accepted Sunny’s deal and started teaching him the essence of combat.
….
A scream shattered the quiet of the night.
Sunny and Nephis were on their feet instantly, weapons half-drawn before they even registered where the sound had come from.
Orren was a fraction slower—but only because he was already awake, his instincts catching the spike of fear in the air before his eyes fully opened.
Cassie stood at the edge of the platform.
For a terrifying moment, she looked as if she might step straight into the void.
Sunny reached her just in time, grabbing her arm and pulling her back from the edge.
The blind girl trembled violently as he guided her toward the center of the platform and eased her down.
Nephis followed closely, scanning the surroundings with a sharp, controlled vigilance, as if expecting something to come crawling up from the dark sea at any moment.
“Cassie?” Nephis asked, her voice steady but low.
“What happened?” The question seemed to anchor Cassie slightly.
Her breathing slowed, though her fingers still shook as she clutched at the air.
Her hand lifted unsteadily, pointing downward toward nothing in particular.
“The… the head…” she whispered.
“I saw… oh gods…” Sunny exchanged a glance with Nephis.
“Was it a vision?” he asked quietly.
“The past again?” Nephis didn’t answer immediately.
Her expression remained unreadable, but there was something unsettled behind her eyes.
“I don’t know,” she admitted at last.
“She’s never reacted like this before.” Neither of them seemed sure what to do next.
Cassie’s trembling didn’t stop.
It only became sharper, like something inside her mind was still echoing the image she had seen.
Orren finally stepped forward.
He didn’t speak at first.
Instead, he knelt beside her and placed a steady hand on her shoulder.
“Summon it,” he said simply.
Cassie blinked, confused through her panic.
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then understanding flickered across her face like a distant light breaking through fog.
The mask appeared on her face and something changed.
The tremors didn’t vanish entirely, but they softened, like the weight pressing down on her thoughts had been dulled.
Nephis and Sunny watched in silence.
Neither stopped him.
“It’s all fine now.
Did you perhaps have another vision?” Sunny asked.
Cassie drew a shaky breath before saying: “I… I don’t know,” she said again, voice quieter now.
“Maybe it was just a nightmare.” She hesitated, as if afraid that speaking would make the memory real again.
But slowly, she forced herself to continue.
“At first, I saw a… a boundless darkness locked behind seven seals.
Something vast was churning in the darkness.
I felt like if I directly saw it, I would lose my mind.
As I watched, terrified, the seals broke one after another, until only one remained.
And then that seal broke, too.” She trembled a little, though the mask calmed her again instantly.
“After that… I don’t know.
It was as though my mind shattered into a thousand shards, each shard reflecting its own image.
Most of them were dark and scary.
Some I have already forgotten.
The other…” Cassie fell silent, remembering.
“I saw the human castle again.
Only this time, it was at night.
There was a lonely star burning in the black skies, and under its light, the castle was suddenly consumed by fire, with rivers of blood flowing down its halls.
I saw a corpse in a golden armor sitting on a throne; a woman with a bronze spear drowning in a tide of monsters; an archer trying to pierce the falling sky with his arrows.” Finally, she looked up, her face full of horror, covered by the mask.
“In the end, I saw a colossal, terrifying crimson spire.
At its base, seven severed heads were guarding seven locks.
And at the top, a… a dying angel was being consumed by hungry shadows.
When I saw the angel bleed, I suddenly felt as though… as though something so precious that it can’t be described with words was taken from me.” Her voice became quieter.
“Then, I felt so much sorrow, pain and rage that what little remained of my sanity seemed to disappear.
That was when I woke up… I think.” For a long moment, nobody spoke.
Even the wind felt quieter.
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