The black blood of the Corrupted Terror spread across the sacred wood of the Chain Breaker, pooling in the grooves of the ancient planks and dripping slowly over the gunwales into the liquid glass of the Great River.
The Mad Prince stood in the center of the massacre, his pristine, pale face speckled with droplets of abyssal crimson.
At his feet lay the ruined, bifurcated remains of Torment.
Even in death, the flesh of a Corrupted Terror refused to accept its own end quietly.
The two halves of the blind oracle were twitching in violent, erratic spasms.
Tendrils of dark, rotting essence lashed out from the severed spine, desperately seeking to reconnect with the other half of the ruined body, only to dissolve into noxious black smoke as they met the open air.
The monstrous, arachnid carapace that had been bursting through her skin during her transformation was now rapidly decaying, melting into a sickening, tar-like sludge.
The Mad Prince tilted his head, his obsidian eyes sweeping over the carnage with cold, analytical detachment.
Her long, elegant dress had been completely shredded by the colossal force of the two augmented shadows.
Where the fabric had been torn away, her pale, human flesh was fully exposed, heavily marred by the grotesque mutations of the Defilement.
The sickening contrast between the fragile beauty of the blind oracle and the rotting, insectoid nightmare erupting from beneath her skin was a perfect, macabre portrait of the Nightmare’s cruelty.
He stared at her ruined, exposed form for a long time.
There was no pity in his eyes.
There was no remnant of the boy who had once sworn to protect her, no trace of the friend who had bled for her on the Forgotten Shore.
There was only the cold, calculating gaze of a supreme predator evaluating a broken tool.
A heavy, exasperated sigh escaped the Mad Prince’s lips.
“What a waste,” he murmured, his voice dry and hollow, carrying across the silent, blood-soaked deck.
He had not wanted to kill her so quickly.
The original plan—the optimal, most efficient path to breaking the Tomb of Ariel—had been to subjugate her.
To break her mind entirely, strip away her defenses, and force her to lay bare every vision, every current, and every hidden secret of the Great River she had foreseen.
He would have kept her as a living, breathing slave, a compass of flesh and bone to navigate the paradoxes of time.
But she had forced his hand.
She had possessed the sheer, suicidal audacity to attempt to pluck a string within his mind.
‘She left me no choice,’ he thought coldly, stepping over a puddle of bubbling black blood.
‘If a parasite attempts to burrow into your brain, you do not study it.
You crush it.’
Still, it was deeply frustrating.
The sheer unpredictability of the encounter, the sudden escalation to fatal violence…
it tasted distinctly familiar.
It carried the bitter, metallic tang of an ancient curse.
The Mad Prince’s eyes narrowed into slits of pure, crystalline hatred.
[Fated]
That accursed Attribute.
He could feel it, even now, clinging to the very core of his soul like a parasitic web.
The string of Weaver’s lineage.
For as long as he could remember, long before he had surrendered to the madness and the dark, the [Fated] attribute had made a mockery of his autonomy.
It ensured that the worst, most improbable outcome would always manifest precisely when it could cause the most devastation.
Destiny had not wanted him to keep the oracle alive.
Destiny had deemed that the Mad Prince must tear her apart, depriving him of the foresight he so desperately needed.
“I despise it,” he whispered to the empty ship, his hands clenching into fists so tight that the knuckles turned pure white.
“I will tear Weaver’s ghost from my soul and burn that wretched string to ash. I will not be a puppet to a dead daemon. Not anymore.”
As the cold, venomous words left his lips, a sound echoed through the absolute silence of the Great River.
It was a familiar, crystalline chime.
Ding.
The voice of the Nightmare Spell, impartial and eternal, whispered directly into his mind.
[You have slain a Corrupted Terror, Torment.]
The Mad Prince did not react.
It was a statement of fact.
A Terror had been eradicated.
[Your shadow grows stronger.]
He felt a minuscule, almost imperceptible drop of shadow essence trickle into the vast, oceanic expanse of his seven Titan cores.
It was less than a drop in a boundless abyss.
The fragment of a Terror was utterly meaningless to a being resting at the absolute pinnacle of the Titan class.
He turned his back on the twitching corpse, preparing to assume control of the Chain Breaker and chart a course downstream.
But then, a second later, another chime echoed.
Ding.
The Mad Prince froze mid-step.
The voice of the Spell returned, carrying a sequence of words that he had not anticipated in the slightest.
[You have received an Echo.]
For a long, suspended moment, the Mad Prince simply stood there.
The wind of the Great River rustled the black silk of his tunic.
The golden light of the seven suns reflected off the pools of black blood on the deck.
His mind, a flawless engine of calculation and ancient malice, momentarily ground to a halt.
An Echo.
He had just received an Echo of a human being.
A Corrupted human, yes, but a human nonetheless.
The statistical probability of the Nightmare Spell granting an Echo from a Defiled Challenger was so infinitesimally small that it bordered on the realm of absolute impossibility.
Throughout his centuries of slaughter within the loops of the Great River, he had butchered countless horrors.
He had annihilated entire ecosystems of Nightmare Creatures.
Yet, to receive the Echo of the blind oracle?
The smile widened, revealing rows of sharp, blackened teeth, until it broke into a hollow, rumbling chuckle.
The chuckle escalated, rising from his chest, until the Mad Prince threw his head back and let out a booming, unhinged laugh that shook the very masts of the Chain Breaker.
“Ha… ha ha ha!”
The sound was terrifying, devoid of any genuine joy, fueled entirely by the cosmic irony of his existence.
“So, that is how it is,” the Mad Prince rasped, his obsidian eyes dancing with a lightless, sickening amusement.
He stared down at the dark, swirling Echo, a low, wet purr vibrating deep within his chest.
“Tell me, little oracle… are you truly that fond of me? You spent lifetimes plotting my ruin, weaving your delicate little threads to bind my soul, only for your spirit to come crawling straight back into my lap the moment I tore you apart.” A slow, unnatural smile carved its way across his pale face, stretching until his cracked skin nearly bled.
“Even in death, you couldn’t bear to leave your butcher. How deliciously, pathetically obsessed.”
He lowered his head, the smile still carved into his face.
“Not bad. Not bad at all.”
He did not waste another second.
With a mere thought, the Mad Prince shifted the focus of his consciousness.
He did not close his eyes; he simply layered his perception, stepping through the veil of physical reality and descending directly into the abyssal depths of his own mind.
He entered his soul sea.
The dark realm was just as he had left it.
An infinite, lightless expanse of absolute black.
Standing in perfect, unbroken silence were the millions of shadows he had claimed over lifetimes of slaughter.
The towering leviathans, the grotesque horrors, the frozen calamities—an endless, terrifying legion of the dead, all bowing toward the center of the void.
But now, hovering in the sky above the dark ocean, there was a new sphere of light.
It did not burn with the pure, silvery radiance of a normal Echo.
It was a sphere of deep, pulsing violet, swirling with the sickening, heavy mist of the Defilement.
The Mad Prince manifested his avatar within the soul sea, standing atop the black water.
He reached out with his pale, flawless hand and summoned the sphere to him.
The violet orb descended, hovering just above his palm.
Instantly, a shimmering tapestry of dark runes cascaded down into his vision.
Name: Torment.
Rank: Transcendent.
Class: Terror.
Attributes: [Near Sight].
The Mad Prince’s eyes scanned the runes.
The classification was expected.
She had been a Transcendent Terror in life, and so she remained in death.
But his gaze locked entirely upon the singular Attribute listed beneath her class.
[Near Sight]
He willed the Spell to expand the description.
Attribute Description:[Near Sight – The oracle’s eyes were violently plucked from the grand tapestry of fate, severing her connection to the grand currents of time. In return, she has gained absolute clarity of the immediate present. The Echo is capable of perceiving the flow of reality precisely two seconds into the future.]
The Mad Prince stared at the description, his dark, manic mind instantly deconstructing the tactical implications of the ability.