July 21.
Total Deaths: 36
Second day since awakening the Hunter’s Mark.
The shadow demons lunged at him without warning, exactly as they had the last time. But something was different.
The impact didn’t feel the same. When the second demon’s claw struck his forearm—a blow that had left him with a fist-sized bruise last time—he barely felt a dull pressure, as if someone had pushed him with the palm of their hand instead of raking him with five blades of black keratin.
‘There it is,’ he thought, stepping back to put some distance between them. ‘Less strength. Much less strength.’
He lunged forward again, this time without the exaggerated caution of his first attempt, letting his body trust in the resistance he had just gained.
A third demon leaped straight for his throat, and Noah simply turned his shoulder as his dagger plunged upward into the creature’s skull.
It fell, dissolving into the same old black smoke.
The fight, which had forced him to flee constantly for hours the first time, was over in minutes this time.
When the last demon vanished, Noah stood in the middle of the hallway, breathing normally, without a single new scratch.
“Incredible,” he murmured, looking at his arms as if he expected to find wounds that simply weren’t there. “So this is the resistance [Devourer’s Hunger] grants.”
He glanced indifferently at the remains of the bodies: fragments of dark skin, a couple of small fangs, nothing worth much.
“Pathetic,” he muttered, tucking the dagger behind his waist. “It’s not worth carrying this stuff. I need something bigger. I need to find that knight again, or something like him.”
He walked for nearly a full hour, venturing deeper into the ruined structure of the second floor, leaving behind collapsed halls, staircases that led nowhere, and corridors that repeated with an almost deliberate monotony.
Then, without warning, the landscape changed completely.
He crossed what looked like an ordinary doorframe, and there were no more ruins on the other side.
There was a courtyard.
An enormous backyard, bathed in the pale light of a full moon hanging in an artificial night sky, perfect and without a single star.
Before him, stretching in every direction until it disappeared into the distance, was a maze of hedge walls so tall and dense that the very idea of trying to see over them seemed absurd.
Noah froze for a moment, his mouth slightly open.
“How the hell can this exist inside a castle?” he whispered, slowly turning in place, unable to fully process the scale of the place.
He remembered, like a distant echo of something he had hurriedly read, that each floor of the Fortress functioned as its own enclosed dimension, with rules, weather, and geography completely independent of everything else.
The first floor had been all luxury and decadent opulence. The general interior of the second was all ruins and gloom.
This, on the other hand, felt like being transported to an entirely different world.
He pulled the flashlight from his inventory and switched it on, aiming the beam into the maze.
The beam disappeared into the low mist winding between the hedges, illuminating only a few yards before dissolving into the darkness.
The silence was absolute.
There was no wind. No insects chirped. There was absolutely no sound to break that unnatural stillness, and that total absence of noise was precisely what unsettled him the most.
A shiver ran down his back.
“I really don’t like having to cross this alone,” he admitted in a low voice, feeling the hairs on his arms stand on end.
In the distance, beyond dozens of yards of impossibly tall hedges, he made out the outline of a hill, and on top of it, a dark tower of weathered stone, crowned by a flag that fluttered despite there being no wind to move it.
‘Could that be where the boss is?’
There was no alternative. To reach that tower, he would have to cross the entire maze.
He took a deep breath, adjusted his grip on the flashlight, and went in.
The first few minutes passed without incident, though every intersection forced him to stop completely, shining his light in every possible direction before choosing a path.
The hedge corridors stretched out identically in every direction: the same height, the same dark leaves, the same low mist drifting over the packed earth.
There was no way to tell one stretch from another.
He reached a four-way intersection and stopped, frowning as he tried to mentally reconstruct the route he had taken to get there.
“Did I turn left a moment ago?” he murmured, slowly turning in place. “Wait. I went right, then left twice, right twice, straight through five corridors, left once, right three times, then left twice and walked straight for… twenty corridors? Or was it seventeen?”
He ran a hand over his face, frustrated.
“Damn it. I forgot how far I’d gone.”
He closed his eyes for a moment, trying to reconstruct the route through muscle memory rather than conscious thought.
“I think I turned right three times and then left,” he finally said, not entirely convinced, and started retracing his steps.
The result was, predictably, a dead end: a solid hedge wall completely blocking his way.
Noah stared at the obstacle for a long moment, his breathing beginning to quicken slightly with all the frustration he had built up.
“To hell with this,” he finally said, looking up at the imposing height of the wall. “I’ll go over it.”
He estimated that the hedges must have been nearly a hundred feet tall, a vertical barrier he would normally have considered completely impossible to climb.
But the branches were thick, intertwined with an almost artificial density, forming a stepped structure that could, with care, serve as a sort of irregular ladder.
He began to climb.
The ascent was slow and tedious, but steady. Every few yards, he stopped to catch his breath, looking down to gauge how far he had climbed.
When he was finally only a couple of yards from the top, with his right hand reaching for the last branch that would let him look out over the entire maze, something changed.
First came a tremor. Subtle at first, barely a vibration that he felt more in the bones of his hands than in the hedge beneath him.
Then, without warning, a brutal gust of wind struck him full force.
It wasn’t a simple gust. It was a solid, furious force that seemed to materialize out of nowhere and tear him from his perch with a violence that left no room for a coherent reaction.
“Wh—¿!”
He tried to grab the nearest branch, but his fingers barely brushed the bark before the force of the wind shoved them away.
He felt his body hurtle backward, spinning through the air for what seemed like an eternity, completely disoriented, with no sense of up or down—only wind and darkness, and the sharp whistle of air cutting into his ears.
He hit the ground without warning.
He rolled once, twice, three times, feeling each impact knock the air from his lungs, until he finally stopped on his back, gasping, his vision clouded, a dull pain spreading throughout his body.
He tried to sit up.
Then he felt it. Pain so sharp, so absolute, that for a moment he couldn’t even process exactly where it was coming from.
He looked down at his right leg, already certain, with growing terror, of what he would find.
The bone at his knee protruded from the outer side of the joint, a whitish fragment showing through torn flesh. Blood had already soaked the earth around him, spreading into an ever-widening pool.
The scream tore out of him, raw and uncontrollable, a sound he never thought his own throat could produce.
And the entire maze seemed to respond.
The tremor returned, stronger this time, more constant, shaking the hedge walls around him as if the ground itself were breathing. Over that tremor, a new sound began to grow: a low, dense buzzing that intensified second by second until it became unmistakable.
Thousands of wings.
Thousands upon thousands of wings beating in unison, approaching from every direction at once.
Noah whipped his head around, frantically searching for the source of the sound, clumsily dragging himself backward with the only leg that still obeyed him.
Panic seized every fiber of his body. He had no time to get up. He had no time for anything.
A compact cloud of insects—each the size of an adult pigeon, with glossy black bodies and serrated mandibles gleaming beneath the artificial moonlight—descended on him from above, covering him completely within seconds.
The first bite tore a scream from him that he didn’t even recognize as his own.
He felt dozens, hundreds of tiny mandibles sink simultaneously into every inch of exposed skin, tearing, ripping, chewing with mechanical efficiency that left no room for any kind of mercy.
He tried to cover his face with his arms, but the insects were already there too, forcing their way between his fingers, burrowing beneath his shirt sleeves, finding every fold of exposed skin.
Blood burst in every direction, soaking the earth and the nearby hedges, filling the air with a thick, metallic smell that mingled with his own choked sobs and screams.
And for some reason his mind, already on the verge of collapse, couldn’t fully understand, they didn’t kill him.
They left him alive. Conscious. With his organs partially exposed, his flesh torn in dozens of places, but alive, clinging to a thread of consciousness that refused to break completely.
That was when he saw it.
Something began to move atop the nearest hedge wall. At first, he could make out only the gleam of a pair of curved mandibles, the size of short swords, emerging between the leaves.
Then came long, segmented antennae, moving with almost elegant precision as they tested the air.
And finally, its whole body: a centipede of colossal proportions, its length stretching across the entire visible wall, every segment covered in oily black chitin plates that reflected the moonlight.
It descended.
Not in a hurry. Not with the urgency of a hungry predator. It descended with the patient calm of something that knew, with absolute certainty, that its prey wasn’t going anywhere.
Noah tried to scream again, tried to move, to crawl, to do anything, but his limbs no longer fully obeyed him, mutilated by the swarm that was still feeding on him in intermittent waves.
All he could do was watch.
Watch as the centipede’s mandibles slowly approached his face, watch the wet gleam of its compound eyes multiplying his own terrified reflection across dozens of tiny facets.
Watch as the first bite closed over his shoulder with a wet crunch that rang louder than any other sound in that moment.
The pain spread, multiplied, became something that no longer had a name or recognizable shape, only a continuous agony that seemed to stretch on indefinitely.
Bite after bite, second after interminable second, while Noah cried and screamed and wordlessly begged for something, anything, to put an end to it all.
[You Died.]
◇◆◇
Noah woke up screaming.
It wasn’t a gradual awakening, or even a sudden one in the usual sense of the word. It was an explosion of consciousness accompanied by a scream that tore at his throat before his mind had even finished registering where he was.
He jerked upright, recoiling instinctively, and his back slammed violently into the piece of furniture beside his bed.
The glass lamp shattered against the floor, scattering bright fragments across the room.
He didn’t care. He couldn’t process anything beyond the absolute terror still coursing through every fiber of his body.
“Brother!” Lily’s voice came from the other side of the hall, alarmed and broken with fear. “Are you okay?! Answer me!”
Noah couldn’t answer. Both his hands gripped his shirt so tightly that his knuckles had turned white, as he tried to feel the frantic pounding of his heart beneath his palm, as if that could anchor him back to reality.
‘Calm down, calm down, calm down, calm down, calm down, calm down, calm down, calm down.’
But his body absolutely refused to obey. His breathing came in ragged gasps, almost hyperventilating, and the images were still there, etched behind his eyelids every time he blinked: the mandibles, the blood, the bone protruding from his own knee.
He heard a new sound, a dragging, insistent one, approaching down the hallway.
Lily appeared in the doorway, dragging herself across the floor with fierce determination, not caring at all how much effort each movement cost her.
“What are you doing here?” Noah managed to say, his voice broken and almost unrecognizable. “You should be in bed.”
“That’s my question!” she replied, agitated, not stopping until she reached his side. “What’s going on?! I heard you screaming like you were being killed!”
Noah hugged her with a strength that was probably too much, burying his face in her shoulder, desperately searching for something real, something tangible, something that wasn’t fangs or blood or the unbearable memory of being eaten alive.
Lily, surprised by the intensity of the embrace, took only a second to react, wrapping her arms around him too and awkwardly stroking his hair with all the tenderness she could muster in that moment.
“I’m here,” she whispered, her soft voice in stark contrast to the panic Noah still felt coursing through his veins. “I’m here with you. Nothing bad is happening. Nothing is hurting you right now. You’re home. You’re with me.”
She repeated those words several times in a steady murmur, almost like an improvised lullaby, while Noah slowly felt his breathing begin to steady and the trembling in his hands begin to subside.
He didn’t stop hugging her for several more minutes, not even after he had stopped trembling completely.
◇◆◇
In front of the bathroom mirror, with cold water still running down his face and neck, Noah studied himself with almost clinical attention, as if he were examining a stranger.
His eyes were bloodshot. His skin was pale to an almost sickly degree. And in his gaze was something he didn’t fully recognize: a trace of genuine fear that none of his previous deaths had left so deeply ingrained.
‘Coming back from the dead doesn’t mean I’m ready for every kind of death I might face,’ he thought, bracing both hands on the edge of the sink and feeling the cold porcelain against his palms.
He knew, with absolute rational certainty, that he would come back. He had known it even while he was dying beneath the mandibles of that colossal centipede.
That knowledge, however, had done him no good in the moment it was happening.
His mind, trapped in the pure terror of the moment, hadn’t been able to cling to any certainty about the future. There had only been pain, panic, and the suffocating feeling of being consumed piece by piece while he remained fully conscious.
The memory of the insects making their way beneath his clothes and under his skin, entering his stomach and working their way between his organs, made him gag so suddenly and violently that he barely managed to turn toward the toilet before vomiting.
He trembled, gripping the rim of the toilet as his body convulsed in spasms that seemed to have no end.