"Good answer."
The words didn't fade. They hung in the fetid air of The Maw, resonating like a tuning fork struck against bone. Kazimir felt them vibrate in his shattered ribs, in his collapsed lung, in the fragmented mess of his spine.
Then the world ended.
Or at least, the silence did.
The amber prison encasing the woman didn't just break—it detonated.
There was no warning. No buildup. One moment the barrier was there, cracked but intact. The next, it exploded outward in a shockwave of pure, condensed mana that hit Kazimir like a physical wall.
The sound was a thunderclap trapped inside a coffin.
The mountain of bones beneath him shifted violently, thousands of skeletons rattling in macabre applause. Skulls bounced past his head. A ribcage the size of a barrel rolled away into the darkness. The entire foundation of corpses was moving, disturbed by a pressure wave that had actual mass.
Kazimir couldn't even flinch. His spine was severed. His lungs were drowning in blood. He could only watch as the ancient amber shattered into a million glittering shards that hung in the air like frozen rain before dissolving into motes of orange light.
The pressure that followed wasn't the warm, holy aura of a savior descending to rescue the faithful.
It was the crushing gravity of a singularity.
The air in the cavern became heavy. Thick. Suffocating. It pressed down on Kazimir's broken body like an invisible hand trying to compress him into paste. The smell hit him next—ozone, old blood, and something metallic that tasted like copper when he tried to breathe.
It was the smell of a time before the Hanazakura Imperium, before the Doctrine of Purity, before humans had learned to chain magic into neat little systems and hierarchies.
It was the smell of the raw, screaming chaos that had existed when the gods still walked.
From the dissolving mist of amber, the figure rose.
She was colossal.
Even from his position—broken and bleeding on a pile of corpses—Kazimir could tell she stood well over two meters tall. Her silhouette was broadened by jagged plate armor that looked less like protective gear and more like it had grown from her skin. The armor was black as midnight, etched with runes that glowed with a hateful crimson light.
Clank.
She took a step down from her obsidian throne.
Crunch.
Her sabaton crushed a human skull into powder with casual indifference.
Kazimir felt primal, animal terror spike through his dying nervous system. Every instinct he had left—every evolutionary survival mechanism encoded into his genes—was screaming at him to run, to hide, to burrow into the pile of bones and pray she didn't notice him.
But he couldn't move.
He was a broken doll discarded in the dark.
Clank. Crunch. Clank. Crunch.
She descended the dais of skulls with movements that were slow, deliberate, and terrifyingly fluid. The liquid silver hair floating around her head settled onto her shoulders like a cloak of moonlight, somehow defying the complete lack of wind in this sealed tomb.
She stopped directly above him.
Up close, she was even more terrifying.
Her skin was the color of burnished bronze, flawless and hard as stone. Not a single scar marred the surface—which was somehow more disturbing than if she'd been covered in battle damage. It meant nothing had ever touched her. Her face was angular, almost cruel in its perfection, with high cheekbones and a jaw that could have been carved from marble.
But her eyes.
Her eyes were vertical slits of molten crimson, glowing from within like forge-coals. There was no white, no iris, no humanity in them at all. Just burning, infinite red.
She looked down at Kazimir without kneeling, without offering a healing potion, without any gesture of comfort.
She simply bent at the waist, reaching down with a gauntleted hand that looked capable of crushing a tank.
Her fingers—cold and hard as iron despite the heat radiating from her armor—clamped around Kazimir's jaw.
She wrenched his head up, twisting his face from side to side like a farmer examining a possibly diseased cow. The movement sent bolts of white-hot agony shooting through his neck, and Kazimir's vision whited out for a second.
He tried to scream but his throat only produced a pathetic whimper.
"Pathetic," the woman murmured.
Her voice was deep—a contralto that resonated in Kazimir's chest cavity like someone had struck a gong inside his ribcage. It wasn't loud, but it had weight. Physical presence.
"Three bloodlines fighting for dominance in a vessel made of glass," she continued, her crimson eyes narrowing as if she could see through his skin to the warring mana channels beneath. "Your Soul Core isn't just knotted, boy. The frequencies are strangling each other. It's a miracle you survived to adulthood. Or perhaps... a curse."
She released his jaw, letting his head drop back onto the sharp edge of a femur.
Kazimir gasped, tasting copper.
The woman straightened up, looking around the vast darkness of The Maw with the casual interest of someone touring a mildly interesting museum.
"The Eisenherz Dominion would call you a manufacturing defect," she mused, her tone almost conversational. "The Zimny Perlas Kingdom would leave you on the ice to freeze—cleaner that way. And the Al-Shams Sultanate... well, they evidently decided to simply throw you in the trash."
She glanced back down at him, lips curling into a smirk that was all teeth.
"But I do not care what the blind think."
She began to pace in a slow circle around his broken body, her sabatons leaving deep impressions in the bone-pile.
"I have seen the 'perfect' Purebloods rise and fall a hundred times. A thousand times. I have watched the Golden Princes and the Steel Dukes build their shining empires, proclaim their divine mandates, promise eternal peace."
Her voice dropped, becoming something cold and bitter.
"They always fail. Always. Order is stagnation. Purity is weakness masquerading as strength. I have watched their precious bloodlines collapse into dust more times than you have drawn breath, and do you know what the problem is?"
She stopped pacing, looking down at him with those burning eyes.
"They're stable. Too stable. When the world changes—when it shifts—they cannot adapt. They break. And then they cry to the gods who are already dead, wondering why their purity didn't save them."
The woman leaned in closer. The heat radiating off her armor was intense, like standing too close to a blacksmith's forge.
"I am tired of perfection, little mongrel."
Her eyes bored into his.
"I require... a glitch."
Kazimir tried to focus on her words, but the darkness was creeping in at the edges of his vision. His heart was no longer beating in a regular rhythm. It stuttered.
Thump... thump... silence... thump.
"Am I..." Kazimir wheezed, blood bubbling past his lips. "Am I... dying?"
The woman actually laughed. It was a short, bark-like sound, devoid of humor.
"Obviously," she said, her tone dry as desert sand. "Your left lung is punctured in three places. Your T4 and T5 vertebrae are powder. Your liver is ruptured and leaking toxins into your abdominal cavity. You have approximately ninety seconds before your brain shuts down from oxygen deprivation."
She tilted her head, watching the light fade from his amber eyes with clinical interest.
"The question is not if you are dying. The question is—"
She paused, and when she spoke again, her voice carried a weight that made the air itself tremble.
"—is your hatred strong enough to survive the cure?"
Suddenly, the pressure in the room spiked.
This wasn't physical gravity. This was something else. Something worse.
Killing Intent.
Pure, distilled malice directed solely at Kazimir. It felt like being submerged in freezing water, like being crushed under a mountain, like staring into the eyes of a predator that had decided you were prey.
The darkness of The Maw seemed to recoil from the woman, terrified.
"Look at me," she commanded.
It wasn't a request. The words carried a compulsion that bypassed Kazimir's ears and went straight to his brain stem.
His heavy eyelids snapped open.
"They spat on you," the woman whispered, and her voice slithered into his mind like a serpent made of razors. "That golden whore used you like a regenerating mana potion and threw away the empty bottle. The Prince broke your bones for sport, for entertainment. They are up there right now—can you hear them?"
Kazimir strained his ears. Distantly, impossibly far above, he could hear it.
Music. Laughter. The clink of glasses.
"They're celebrating," the woman continued, her voice a venomous purr. "Drinking wine. Dancing the Solstice Waltz. Making toasts to the happy couple. Do you think they're thinking about you? Do you think the woman who drained your blood for three years is feeling even the slightest bit of guilt?"
Kazimir's fingers twitched against the bone pile.
He could see it. He could see Elara's face—bored, apathetic, already moving on to her next social engagement. He could feel the weight of Viktor's boot on his chest. He could hear the tittering laughter of the nobles.
The mongrel thought she loved him. How pathetic.
"Yes," Kazimir rasped.
"Do you want peace?" the woman asked softly, her tone almost gentle. "I can let you die. Right now. It would be easy. Painless, even. No more suffering. No more mockery. You can sleep here with the rest of the refuse, and eventually your bones will join the pile, indistinguishable from all the others. Forgotten."
Kazimir thought about it.
It would be so easy to let go. To stop fighting. To fade away into the darkness and become just another nameless skeleton in the Dungeon of the Discarded.
Then he remembered.
I pledge myself to Crown Prince Viktor.
Elara's voice, sweet and triumphant.
Viktor's smile, cruel and victorious.
The applause.
A spark ignited in the cold coal of his heart. Not a noble spark. Not the flame of heroic determination.
It was dirty. Oily. Black.
It was the spite of a dying animal that wanted to bite the hand that beat it.
"No," Kazimir choked out, blood spraying from his lips. "No peace."
"Then what do you want?" the woman pressed.
Kazimir looked up at her. At the monster. At the nightmare made flesh.
And he saw exactly what she was.
A weapon. The only weapon big enough to hurt the people who had destroyed him.
"I want..." Kazimir swallowed a mouthful of blood, tasting iron and copper and his own dying body. "I want to drag them down here. I want them to scream. I want—"
His voice broke.
"I want them to feel what I felt."
The woman threw her head back and laughed.
It was a harsh, barking sound, terrifying in its delight. It echoed off the cavern walls, shaking dust from the ceiling kilometers above. It was the laugh of something that had seen civilizations rise and fall and found them all equally amusing.
"Excellent," she purred when the laughter subsided. "A vengeful spirit. A broken toy that wants to bite back."
She raised her right hand. The gauntlet retracted with a hiss of escaping steam, sliding back in segmented plates to reveal the hand beneath.
It was surprisingly elegant. Long fingers, dark bronze skin, nails painted black and filed to sharp points.
But it was the power radiating from that hand that made Kazimir's surviving instincts scream.
"I do not run a charity, mongrel," the woman said, her voice hardening into something ancient and absolute. "I am Zarya Sekhmet, the Twilight Empress, the Breaker of the Great Cycle, the Ending of Stories."
She held her hand over his face, close enough that he could feel the heat.
"I do not save people. I own them."
Her crimson eyes bored into his, demanding absolute understanding.
"I will fix your broken body. I will untie the knots in your blood. I will force those three warring frequencies to bow to a singular will. I will turn you into a weapon that makes the Purebloods tremble in their silk sheets."
She leaned closer.
"But the price is your existence. You will be my shield when I command it. You will be my sword when I point. You will bleed for me, kill for me, and if I deem it necessary, you will die for me without hesitation."
Her voice dropped to a whisper that somehow carried more weight than her previous shouts.
"Your soul is no longer yours. It belongs to the Throne. It belongs to me."
The pressure intensified. Kazimir felt it pressing down on his forehead like a crown made of lead.
"DO YOU ACCEPT THE COLLAR?"
The words bypassed his ears entirely. They were a Voice of Command, a divine decree, a compulsion that demanded submission on a level deeper than thought.
Kazimir's vision was fading. His heart had stopped beating entirely—only the residual electrical impulses in his nervous system were keeping him conscious for a few more seconds.
He had a choice.
Die here, alone and forgotten.
Or sell his soul to a monster.
Kazimir didn't hesitate.
He had nothing left to lose. His name was gone. His dignity was gone. His body was already dead.
This was just selling the corpse.
"I accept," he whispered, forcing the words through a throat full of blood. "My soul... is yours."
Zarya Sekhmet smiled.
"Good."
She brought her thumb to her mouth. Her teeth glinted in the dim red light—canines that were too long, too sharp, too many.
She bit down on her thumb.
She didn't bleed red.
A single drop of liquid welled up on the pad of her thumb. It was black, swirled through with veins of glowing gold like ore in stone. It looked heavy, viscous like mercury. The drop didn't fall immediately—it clung to her skin, defying gravity, radiating a heat that distorted the air around her hand.
Kazimir stared at it.
He'd seen a lot of blood in his life. He'd bled his own blood for Elara for three years, watched it flow through tubes into her veins.
This wasn't blood.
This was power given physical form.
"Open your mouth," Zarya commanded.
Kazimir obeyed.
The drop fell in slow motion, catching the crimson light from her eyes. It seemed to fall for an eternity, growing larger in his vision until it filled his entire world.
It hit his tongue.
For exactly one second, there was nothing. No taste. No sensation. No pain.
Kazimir had time to think: Maybe this won't be so bad.
Then Kazimir Ahn-Ra started to scream.
To be continued..