From the stands, Jaka sat frozen.
His eyes remained locked on the black stains corroding the stone floor, watching as they ate through the rock and left small, smoking pits in their wake.
"That's not just blood… it's venom," he whispered hoarsely to Danu and Anin.
Danu swallowed hard, fighting a losing battle against his own terror.
His hands, which had been gripping his knees, now trembled violently.
"And Bandung… has to fight a monster like that alone? This is insane!"
In the center of the arena, it stopped thrashing.
A bizarre phenomenon took hold.
At the exact moment the wound on its arm began to hiss with heat, the temperature in the entire arena plummeted.
A sudden, piercing chill took hold, sharp enough to sting the bone. Bandung's breath escaped his lips in thin, ghostly plumes of white vapor, a stark contrast to the floor that still billowed with acrid smoke from the corrosive black blood.
For Bandung, the world seemed to split in two: the searing heat from the bruises burning his skin, and the ice-cold aura radiating from the entity.
Rangda's body shuddered violently, as if something was churning and convulsing beneath its ashen skin.
Its blackened tongue flickered out, vibrating as it swept through the air.
From its ruined throat came an alien murmur that made the hair on everyone's necks stand on end.
It wasn't a simple hiss.
The sound vibrated like rusted metal grinding together, laced with a guttural, predatory growl.
"Ih… iiiiihhh… rswa bshinedsa… dsadi bangkse… massmah kesnehsss…"
The chanting grew louder, echoing against the stone walls.
It was an ancient Balinese dialect, buried for centuries, now being uttered by vocal cords that should have been long destroyed.
The sounds were fractured, dragged through a mess of a flickering tongue and blackened gums.
"Tsitiang ssnyarap… sjiwa alit… sngiring… ngsiring…ssssaaaa!"
To those who understood the dark history of distant kingdoms, these words felt like rusted nails being driven into the soul.
It was a voice that refused to be called human, a voice from the grave, crawling out to collect a debt promised long ago.
To Bandung, standing mere feet away, the sound felt like thousands of needles piercing his mind, gnawing away at his sanity bit by bit.
In the spectator's gallery, Ranti suddenly sat up, her body rigid.
Her face was taut, the mask of her usual composure completely shattered.
She finally remembered that dialect, the origin of Rangda, the weight of its history.
It was a forbidden dialect, one that should have vanished along with the dark rituals banned by the blood-oaths of the realm's ancestors.
It was a cursed mantra, a voice that had once triggered a Great Civil War, forcing the alliance of Balinese kingdoms to purge the entire lineage of those who created such forbidden transformations.
Their names had been chiseled off inscriptions, their descendants hunted to the root, and their scrolls burned into ash and cast into the sunless depths of the sea.
There should have been nothing left.
The secret of this "forbidden form" should have died with the ancestors who carried it to their graves.
"Impossible…" Ranti murmured, her voice thin and raspy.
Her lips were pale; she realized something far darker was unfolding.
"That mantra… it is converting a portion of its own soul into something else."
Ranti didn't know exactly what would emerge, but every instinct she possessed screamed that something wretched was about to be born.
She knew from ancient records that this dark art, this blackened metamorphosis, always demanded a sacrifice of the flesh.
Her fingers moved frantically beneath the folds of her silk wrap, weaving a whispering counter-mantra she had kept hidden for a lifetime.
Just as Rangda's hiss began to gnaw at Bandung's sanity, a crystal-clear voice cut through the darkness of his mind.
It wasn't a sound that competed with the roar of the crowd or an echo bouncing off the stone walls.
It appeared out of nowhere within his consciousness.
Cold, sharp, and powerful enough to yank Bandung back from the brink of terror.
("Bandung! Don't listen to it! Focus!")
The voice spread like a stream of glacial water, dousing the fires of panic in his chest.
("Do not turn. Do not look for me. Just listen to my voice.")
Bandung jerked.
His neck muscles tensed, his head nearly turning to find the source before survival instinct forced his eyes to remain locked on the creature before him.
He realized then that this voice did not come from the air; it resonated directly from within his own mind.
("That creature is no mere reanimated corpse. It will not stop even if you cleave it a thousand times. Look at it, Bandung... it is beginning to consume itself!")
Ranti's voice dropped lower, carrying a tremor of genuine horror.
In the stands, she had just realized a bitter truth: the forbidden lineage had not truly been extinguished.
Someone within the Kingdom of Mataram had been playing with fire.
They had smuggled the remnants of this black art, hiding it in the keraton's darkest corners, nurturing it like a filthy secret ready to be unleashed at any moment.
Ranti's mind raced.
This was no longer mere politics.
A dark experiment was unfolding in the heart of the kingdom, and the Rangda before them was living proof that ancestral laws had been betrayed for the sake of an invisible ambition.
("It will sacrifice its own flesh. Whatever emerges from its body next will be its weapon. And listen well: it is not alone. There is a dark current being pumped into its heart from the shadows of this arena.")
Ranti's voice shivered at the end of the sentence.
("This is not a duel for the title of Vice Patih, Bandung... this is a disguised execution. You are not being tested. You are being destroyed so that no one else dares to challenge this system.")
Bandung's breath hitched.
He almost turned, desperate to find the speaker, but the crimson flash of Rangda's eyes stopped him dead.
He swallowed hard, forcing his muscles to coordinate once more.
He raised his cracked shield, bracing it before his chest.
And then, the horrific prophecy was fulfilled before his very eyes.
With a sky-rending shriek, Rangda did something unimaginable to any living thing.
Its upper hands gripped the bases of its own lower arms, then yanked with savage, raw strength until both limbs were torn clean off.
KRAK! SREEEEKKKK! CREAKKKK!
Rangda clutched its own severed limbs, gripping them tight with its remaining upper hands.
A moment later, a dark purple magic circle manifested again, vomiting violet flames that devoured the skin and meat remaining on the detached arms.
Bandung watched in paralyzed horror as the skin, flesh, and muscle vanished into thick purple smoke.
The aroma that filled the arena became sickening, a foul cocktail of rancid burnt meat mixed with the sweet, cloying scent of incense, pandan leaves, and jasmine.
Yet, the bone within did not crumble.
Instead, the bone absorbed the purple fire, lengthening and tapering until it formed two jagged, serrated bone-swords.
Simultaneously, the hemorrhaging from Rangda's shoulders ceased.
The gaping wounds sealed perfectly, as if those lower arms had never existed in the first place.
The skin of its shoulders became smooth and unmarked, while its upper hands now gripped the bone blades.
Blades that still pulsed with violet embers.
The injury had not weakened it.
The wound was a ritual, a necessary shedding for Rangda to reveal its true fangs.
Now, wielding the twin bone-swords, Rangda turned its gaze toward Bandung's splintering shield.
Rangda lunged once more.
The assault was feral, blindingly fast, and devoid of any readable rhythm.
Every swing of the bone-swords slammed into Bandung's shield with a deafening thud, sending shockwaves that threatened to shatter the very joints of his arm.
Cracks spider-webbed across the wood and metal plating, a fragile lattice ready to give way at any second.
Bandung was hurled backward, his heels skidding across the stone floor.
He no longer had the luxury of planning a counter-attack; he was merely existing in the narrow gap between life and death.
Every collision felt like being struck by a collapsing mountain.
His breath came in shallow, scorched hitches; his lungs burned, and his entire left arm began to go numb from the unrelenting vibration.
In the stands, the faces of Jaka, Danu, and Anindya turned ashen as they watched the duel mutate into a one-sided slaughter.
"This isn't fair," Jaka hissed, his fists clenched so tight his nails drew blood from his own palms.
"There's someone helping it from the outside… I'm sure of it!"
But their voices were swallowed by the madness of the arena.
As Rangda swung its bone-blade in a violent vertical arc, a single droplet of black fluid, remnants of the ritualistic blood, slid from the tip of the sword.
The liquid landed squarely on Bandung's unprotected left arm.
"AARGHHH!"
Bandung's shriek tore through the arena, a sound of pure, unadulterated agony.
Where the liquid touched, his skin hissed and evaporated into steam.
The flesh blistered instantly, turning into a horrific charred wound.
The heat didn't stop at the surface; it bored through muscle, gnawing at the nerves, feeling as though the bone beneath was being forcibly liquefied.
The sheer magnitude of the pain demanded that he kneel, that he submit, that he surrender.
"It's acid!" Danu screamed, his voice breaking with terror. "That's not normal blood! It's a corrosive poison!"
Bandung fell to one knee.
His support began to fail.
The severely cracked shield nearly slipped from his weakening grip.
His world began to tilt, his vision blurred by sweat and the blood trickling from his temple.
Yet, amidst the crushing agony, his fingers still white-knuckled around the small dagger, the only thing that felt real and cold in this sweltering hell.
Rangda paused for a moment, letting out a strange, vibrating sound from its throat, a sickening blend of a victor's laugh and a soul-hungry scream.
Thick, viscous saliva dripped to the floor, adding to the pungent rot in the air, as if the creature were preparing to feast on the remnants of Bandung's existence.
But just as Bandung thought he had witnessed the peak of the monster's depravity… something changed again.
Strange patterns of light, resembling ancient inscriptions, began to ignite across Rangda's legs.
At first, it was a faint crimson pulse beneath the gray skin, like embers hidden under a pile of ash.
But in an instant, the light spread, burning through the bulging veins.
The creature's leg muscles twitched violently, emitting a sound like dry timber being snapped by force.
The ground beneath its feet blackened and splintered, unable to contain the explosive pressure of the energy.
Every time Rangda shifted, the entire arena seemed to shudder, as if the earth's heart was being forced to beat at a lethal pace.
"What is that now..." Anin whispered, her chest tight as she forgot how to breathe. "This... this makes no sense!"
Then, Rangda moved.
It didn't run.
It didn't jump.
In a single, unfinished blink of an eye, the ashen figure vanished from Bandung's reality.
BOOM!
It wasn't the sound of a footstep that followed, but the thunderous crack of the air itself exploding, displaced by the sheer mass of Rangda's body moving at impossible speeds.
The space in front of Bandung went hollow, leaving only a swirling vortex of dust and the stinging stench of sulfur.
Bandung's instincts screamed in a deafening, hysterical siren of doom.
Something moving faster than a blink could no longer be parried by muscle; it could only be sensed by the shadow of death.
Bandung tightened his grip on his dagger and his trembling shield, cold sweat pouring down behind the wood that was moments away from splintering.
He knew one thing with terrifying certainty.
One small mistake now, one heartbeat too late, and he would pay for it with his final breath in this arena.