Kaito huddled between the rough grain sacks in the rocking wagon. The brutal heat of the day was gone. Stolen. Replaced by a deep, penetrating cold. The cold seeped through the thick canvas cover. It seeped through his cloak. It settled into his bones, making him shiver.
Above, through a small tear in the canvas, he saw the sky. It was a breathtaking, terrifying sight. A blanket of stars so thick and bright it looked like spilled milk against black velvet. There were constellations he didn't recognize. A slow-moving swirl of cosmic dust. Two small, fast-moving lights—maybe satellites, maybe something else. It was nothing like the washed-out, light-polluted skies of his old world. This sky felt alive. And immensely lonely.
He kept Internal Dampening active. The skill was a constant, low hum in his mind. A mental muscle he had to keep flexed. He watched his MP tick down slowly, inevitably.
MP: 24/30... 23/30...
It was a slow-beating heart of expenditure. A reminder that safety here was an illusion. An illusion that cost him energy every single minute.
His Glitch Meter sat at 27%. It was a simmering pool of chaotic energy inside him. A pool that threatened to boil over with strong emotion. He had to keep it calm. He had to keep himself calm.
Sleep was impossible. Every sound was a potential threat. The crunch of the wagon wheels on compacted sand. The snort and huff of the giant dray-lizards pulling the caravan. The low, murmuring conversation of the guards walking alongside. The jingle of harnesses.
He was waiting for a shout. For the caravan to screech to a halt. For a shadow on the dune horizon to peel itself from the night and become Lilith.
To distract himself, he opened his Bond Links. The screen glowed softly in his mind's eye.
Lilith: ❤️🔥💢(Grieving/Rage) >> Location: Unknown. Emotional State: High Distress. Actively Tracing Bond Vector...
Seraphina: ❤️⚔️🌀(Disoriented/Intensified) >> Location: Zerzura (Estimated). Emotional State: High Conflict. Suppression Active.
He focused first on Lilith's link. He didn't reach out. He just… listened. He tried to gauge the distance, the direction. A faint echo of raw emotion came through. It was like hearing a cry from the other end of a long, cold tunnel.
Cold. The soup is cold on the table. A skin has formed. The garden soil is dry. It cracks under my fingers. The quiet is no longer peaceful. It is empty. It is a tomb for a hope that lived for one day. You took the warmth with you. You left only the old cold behind. But the old cold is sharper now. More bitter. I can feel the thread. A thin, cold line in the void. It points west. It pulls at me. I will follow it. I will follow you across the sand and the stone. I will bring you back to where you belong. To where it is safe. To where I can keep the world from hurting you.
The connection faded, leaving a residue of profound sadness in his own chest. She was following the bond. Actively using it as a compass. She was coming. But the echo felt distant. She wasn't here yet. There was still space between them.
He switched his focus to Seraphina's link. This one was harder. It was murky. Like trying to see through frosted glass. There was a hard, disciplined structure there—the steel frame of her duty. But beneath that frame, a chaotic swirl churned. The Glitch Pulse had cracked her certainty. It had let something else in.
He concentrated, and a fragment pushed through. It was sharp. Clear. A moment of her inner turmoil.
Direct orders. From the Grand Inquisitor himself. His voice was like stone. "Captain Seraphina. The anomaly is now a Priority Alpha heresy. The confirmed interest of the Shadow Sovereign only validates its corrupt nature. It is a beacon for Calamities. It is a tear in the Order of the world. Find it. Capture it. Prepare it for purification." The weight of the command is absolute. It settles on my shoulders like a mantle of lead. But the memory… the glitch showed me his face. Not a monster's face. A young man's face. Full of fear. And his intent… his desperate desire to stop us from fighting. To be a shield. Is that corruption? Or is that a soul? A misguided, chaotic, but… present soul?
Then, a surge of rigid, practiced will. The mental equivalent of a steel door slamming shut.
No. The law is clear. The doctrine is unambiguous. The anomaly is a threat. The Calamity is a threat. My personal feelings, my confusion, are irrelevant. They are a weakness. I am a weapon of the Light. I will be sharp. I will be certain. I will complete my mission.
The link went silent, forcibly clamped down by her immense discipline.
Kaito leaned back against the rough sack. The rough fabric scratched his neck. So, Seraphina had her orders. Direct from the top. She was a soldier, and he was the mission. Whatever fragile confusion or empathy the Glitch had sparked in her was being buried. Buried under layers of doctrine, duty, and holy law.
He was caught. Truly caught. Between a grief-stricken shadow who wanted to possess him to fill her void. And a duty-bound light who wanted to capture him to erase his error.
The wagon creaked on. The desert night stretched, vast and silent.
He needed to get stronger. Faster. He needed to understand this System completely. To master it before it, or his pursuers, mastered him.
He spent the long, cold hours experimenting quietly. With Enhanced Cognition active for short bursts, he could turn his senses inward. He could watch the flow of his own energy. It was a strange, out-of-body experience.
He observed how Internal Dampening worked. It created a subtle, shimmering shell around his core—the cracked, spinning star of his System. The shell absorbed the red, glitching light that leaked from the fractures. It didn't stop the leak. It just contained the spill, muffling the signal that spilled into the world. It was like wearing a lead apron in an X-ray room. It hid the radiation, but it was heavy. It was a constant drain.
He tried to fine-tune it. Instead of a uniform dampening field around his entire core, he experimented with shaping it. Could he make it stronger on one side? The side that faced the direction of the Bond Links? Weaker on the other side to conserve MP?
It was exhausting mental work. It was like trying to solve a complex math problem while juggling. But after an hour of intense focus, his System pinged.
[Skill Level Up: Internal Dampening is now Level 2.]
[Effectiveness increased to 30% signature reduction. MP cost reduced to 0.8 per minute.]
[New Function Unlocked: Directional Dampening. (Note: Requires significant mental focus and expertise to implement.)]
Progress. Small, hard-won, but real. He could work with that.
Next, he examined the System Instability: 15%. In his mind's eye, it was represented as a web of fine, angry red cracks across the surface of his blue core star. They pulsed faintly. They were wounds in the architecture of his soul.
He tentatively pushed a trickle of pure, un-glitched mana toward one of the smaller cracks. The clean blue energy flowed forward and touched the red fracture.
ZZZT.
A spark of painful feedback shot back. The mana was repelled, dissipated. The crack didn't heal. It didn't even flicker. It was like trying to fix a broken computer chip by dripping water on it. The materials were incompatible. The approach was wrong.
He remembered Bran's gravelly voice. Integration, not fighting it.
He stopped trying to push mana at the crack. He stopped seeing it as a wound to be sealed. Instead, he just… observed it. He accepted its presence as part of the star. A flaw. A unique feature. A scar that told a story. A story of a Limit Break, of survival, of chaotic power.
As he mentally shifted his perspective from combat to acceptance, something subtle happened. The angry, pulsing red glow of the tiny crack dimmed. Just a little. It didn't vanish. It didn't heal. But it became… quieter. More stable.
[System Instability: 14.9%]
An infinitesimal change. A fraction of a percent. But it was a change in the right direction. The path to mending his soul wasn't force. It wasn't opposition. It was understanding. It was integration. He had to make peace with the glitch. He had to make it a part of himself, not an enemy within.
Dawn came reluctantly. It was a line of fire on the eastern horizon. Then the desert transformed. The sea of black and silver became an ocean of burning gold and deep red. Dunes rose like frozen waves, stretching to the very edge of the world. The scale was breathtaking. It made him feel incredibly small.
The caravan ground to a halt at a known watering hole—a shallow, muddy well surrounded by hardy, thorny bushes. The drivers unhitched the tired dray-lizards. Guards stretched and complained about the cold night. People moved around.
Kaito stayed hidden, a statue among the grain sacks. He ate sparingly from his meager supplies: a piece of hard, dense bread and a strip of salty dried meat from the bundle Elara had given him. He took a small, careful sip from his waterskin. He had to make it last. He was a stowaway. His safety depended on being a ghost. On not being seen, not being heard.
He listened to the voices outside. The gossip of the caravan was his only news.
"...heard it from a Legion scout at the last waystation. They doubled the bounty. Ten thousand gold pieces now. Can you believe it?"
"Ten thousand? For one scrawny kid? There's gotta be more to the story. That's 'danger to the realm' money."
"They say he's got a demon's mark on his soul. That he lay with the Shadow Sovereign herself and stole a piece of her power in the night."
"Nah, that's tavern nonsense. I heard he's a lost prince of the Arcane Senate. Went rogue with forbidden chronomancy. Can twist time itself."
"Whatever he is, he's walking trouble. I wouldn't want to be in his boots when the Legion catches him. Or worse, when she does. They say her shadow can suck the life right out of you."
Kaito's blood turned to ice in his veins, despite the growing morning heat. Ten thousand gold. The rumor mill was spinning wild, fantastical tales, but the core truth was there, magnified and distorted: he was the most wanted man in the region. A prize for greed, a target for zealots, a quarry for a heartbroken goddess of night.
The caravan moved on. The sun climbed. It became an enemy. The inside of the wagon transformed from a cold cave into a stifling oven. The air grew thick and hard to breathe. Kaito sipped his water, his mouth parched. Swe soaked through his dark clothes.
He watched the Bond Links. They were his only map of the closing threats.
Lilith's emotional state shifted. The overwhelming grief was still there, a foundation of sorrow. But something else was crystallizing on top of it. Something harder. Sharper. More focused. Her status updated.
❤️🔥💢 >> ❤️🔥📍(Pursuing).
She was no longer just grieving in her hall. She was moving. Actively hunting. And the bond indicated she was moving fast.
Seraphina's location updated.
Zerzura >> Western Desert Road.
She was on the move too. Had she gotten specific information? A credible sighting from a scout? Or was she simply following the Legion's strategic best guess, sweeping the main trade route out of the city?
He was a rabbit running across an open field. And two wolves had just entered the field from opposite sides. One wolf was a blur of sorrowful darkness. The other was a arrow of focused light.
The second night fell. The cold returned with a vengeance. Kaito was exhausted—mentally from maintaining Dampening, physically from the heat and stress, emotionally from the relentless pressure. He drifted into a fitful, uneasy doze.
It wasn't a memory. It was a projection. A dream woven from the empathic thread of the bond.
He stood in the shadow garden. But it was wrong. The plants were wilted, their colors grey and muted. The soft light was gone, replaced by a dull, twilight gloom. Lilith stood with her back to him. She was tending to a night-bloom flower, but its petals were closed tight, blackened at the edges.
"It needs the right kind of dark to thrive," she said, her voice flat, without turning. "Not the cold dark of abandonment. The quiet, living dark of companionship. You took that dark with you when you left. You left only the dead dark behind."
"I can't live in a cage, Lilith," he said in the dream. His own voice sounded distant.
"And I cannot live in the screaming, burning light of the world," she replied, her tone hollow. "So where does that leave us, my anchor? Chasing each other across an endless desert? Until one of us collapses from exhaustion? Until one of us breaks?"
"Let me go."
"I cannot." The word was final, heavy with despair. "You are the only warmth left in all the cold eternity of my existence. If I let you go, the cold will win forever. And I will become exactly what they all say I am: a monster. A mindless, devouring thing of pure, hungry shadow. Is that what you want, Kaito? To be the one who finally makes me a monster?"
He woke with a gasping start, his heart hammering against his ribs. The dream had felt unbearably real. It was the bond. It was growing stronger as she got closer. Her consciousness was brushing against his, mingling with his subconscious in his sleep.
Glitch Meter: 28%.
Her proximity, her intense, focused emotion, was feeding the Glitch. It was a feedback loop. Her pursuit stressed him, which raised the Glitch, which made his signature slightly brighter, which might help her trace him.
He checked her link with a sense of dread.
❤️🔥📍(Pursuing) >> Distance Closing. Estimated Range: Medium.
She was gaining. Faster than he had hoped.
Panic, cold and sharp and utterly paralyzing, shot through him. His breath hitched. He fought it down violently. Panic was fuel. Panic would spike the Glitch Meter into the danger zone. He focused on his breathing. In for four, hold for four, out for four. He reinforced the Internal Dampening field around his core. He imagined the net growing tighter, stronger.
He couldn't stay on this caravan. It was a slow, predictable, linear path. A bright line on a map for both of his hunters to follow. He had to break away.
His chance came in the dead hours before dawn, at the caravan's next scheduled stop—a crumbling stone well at a lonely crossroads. The guards were distracted, refilling the heavy water barrels, their backs turned. The drivers were checking lizard harnesses.
Using Enhanced Cognition, he mapped his escape in a flash. The deep shadows between the wagons. The longer shadow of a nearby rock formation about a hundred yards to the north. The path between them.
He took a deep, silent breath. He activated Shadow Veil.
MP: 8/30.
Glitch Meter: 33%.
The world changed. Sounds became muffled. His own form blurred at the edges, blending with the darkness around him. He felt insubstantial. A ghost.
He slipped out from under the canvas like smoke. He moved from the deep shadow of one wagon to the next. Then, he dashed across the open ground. His feet, clad in soft-soled shoes Elara had provided, made no sound in the sand. He was a swift, silent patch of moving night.
He reached the rocky outcropping and ducked behind a large, weathered boulder just as the Shadow Veil dropped. The effort left him breathless, his MP critically low.
He was off the caravan. Alone. Truly alone in the vast, unforgiving desert.
He watched the wagons creak back into motion. The line of dark shapes and swinging lanterns continued down the worn trade road, oblivious. They grew smaller, swallowed by the distance and the pre-dawn gloom.
He was free of their predictable path. But now he had no shelter. No transportation. No guide. Just a waterskin half-full, a few scraps of food, a knife, and a desperate need to reach the coast.
He consulted his mental map, pieced together from fragments of driver conversation. The port town of Seabridge was still days away on foot. Through waterless dunes and rocky badlands.
He had to move. Now. He started walking, not on the road, but parallel to it, keeping it a faint line on his right. He used the fading stars and the growing light in the east to keep his direction west.
The desert was not dead. As dawn properly broke, he saw life. Strange, twisted plants with spiked, waxy leaves clung to the sand. Small, scaled lizards with frilled necks darted from his path. Once, he passed the massive, sun-bleached skeletal remains of some ancient beast, half-buried in the sand. The ribs curved toward the sky like the skeleton of a wooden ship. The scale of this world, of its history and its dangers, was immense. It was humbling. And it was terrifying.
As the sun climbed toward its zenith, the heat became a physical enemy. A hammer on an anvil, and he was the metal. His water dwindled. His throat became a dry canyon. A new status effect appeared.
[Minor Dehydration.]
[HP regeneration halted. Maximum stamina reduced by 20%.]
His HP began to tick down slowly, inevitably.
HP: 38/40... 36/40...
He needed shelter from the murderous sun. Up ahead, he saw a promising cluster of large, sandstone rocks. They cast a long, inviting slash of shadow. He fixed his eyes on it and pushed his weary legs to move faster.
He never made it.
The sand in front of him, just ten feet away, shivered. Then it bulged. A low, sub-audible rumble vibrated up through the soles of his feet.
Kaito froze. Every instinct screamed.
The sand erupted.
The creature that surged forth was a nightmare of biology. It was long—as long as a city bus. Its body was segmented, covered in overlapping plates of dusty brown chitin. Dozens of sharp, multi-jointed legs scrabbled for purchase. Its head was a horror of clicking, serrated mandibles surrounding a circular mouth lined with rows of rotating, bone-like teeth. Two stalked eyes, black and compound, swiveled to fix on him.
A Sand-Dredger. An ambush predator that lived beneath the dunes.
[Analyze Activated.]
Sand-Dredger (Juvenile). Lvl 15.
[Type: Ambush Predator. Burrows beneath sand. Detects prey via ground vibration. Weakness: Soft tissue at ventral joint connections. Highly sensitive to sonic and vibrational disruption.]
It let out a screech—a sound like massive stones being ground together. Then it charged, its countless legs a blur, kicking up a plume of sand.
Kaito had no time for a careful plan. He reacted. He fired a Mana Bolt directly into its face.
The blue energy burst against the thick chitin of its head plate with a sharp crack. It left a blackened scorch mark. The creature flinched, its charge faltering for a second. But it wasn't stopped. It wasn't even badly hurt.
Too armored.
He dove to the side as the massive mandibles snapped shut in the space where he had been standing. He felt the rush of air. He rolled, sand grating against his skin, and came up running.
The Dredger was terrifyingly fast on the surface, skimming over the sand like a monstrous centipede. He couldn't outrun it. Not in this soft sand, not in his dehydrated state.
Vibration. It senses vibration.
The Analyze information flashed in his mind. Highly sensitive to vibrational disruption.
He stopped running. He planted his feet. A desperate gamble. He forced his breathing to steady. He forced calm into his frantic limbs.
The Dredger hesitated. Its antennae, long and feathery, twitched in the air. It was confused. The vibrations of running prey had stopped. Now there was just a steady, faint pulse.
Slowly, carefully, Kaito raised his hands. He didn't cast another Mana Bolt. He changed tactics. He cast Shadow Spark.
But he didn't aim at the creature. He aimed at the sand on the ground between him and the monster.
The murky, static-filled bolt hit the sand. There was no explosion of light. Instead, the patch of sand where it struck seemed to… die. It lost its granular quality. It became a patch of utter, silent stillness. The subtle natural vibrations of the wind over sand ceased there. It was a hole in its sensory world.
The Dredger's antennae whipped frantically toward the deadened patch. It hissed in confusion. Its primary sense was thrown into disarray.
Kaito used the moment. He ran, but not in a straight line away. He ran in a wide, arcing circle around the creature, staying on the move. With each few steps, he fired another Shadow Spark behind him, not at the beast, but at the sand in its vicinity. Pop. Pop. Pop. Each spark created another small zone of vibrational silence.
The desert floor around the Dredger became a chaotic mess of silent spots and normal sand. Its antennae flailed. It thrashed its head side to side, unable to get a clear, consistent fix on him. It was sensorially blinded.
But Kaito's MP was draining fast. 15/30... 10/30...
Glitch Meter: 35% and rising with each spark.
He couldn't keep this up. He needed to finish it. Now.
He saw his chance. The confused creature, trying to reorient, lifted the front third of its body off the sand, mandibles waving in the air. For a moment, it exposed its underbelly. The chitin there was thinner. He could see the softer, pale membranes at the joints between segments.
Kaito didn't use a skill. He was out of MP for anything powerful. He drew the knife Bran had given him. The worn handle was solid in his grip.
He poured the last dregs of his MP—not into forming a bolt—but into a simple energy infusion. He channeled the Mana Bolt energy pattern directly into the blade. The knife glowed with a fierce, sustained blue light. It hummed in his hand.
He ran forward. With a raw, wordless yell that tore from his dry throat, he leaped.
He drove the glowing knife with both hands, putting all his weight and desperation behind it, deep into the soft joint between two segments of the creature's undercarriage.
The sensation was horrible. A wet crunch, then a give as the blade sank in to the hilt. Superheated blue energy discharged into the creature's innards.
The Sand-Dredger screamed. A piercing, alien shriek of agony that echoed across the dunes. Its body convulsed in a violent, muscular spasm. It threw Kaito off. He flew through the air and hit the sand hard, the wind knocked brutally from his lungs.
He lay there, gasping, watching as the monstrous creature thrashed and writhed. Blue-tinged, foul-smelling fluid gushed from the wound around his embedded knife. The thrashing grew weaker. Slower. Finally, with a final, shuddering twitch, the Dredger lay still. The light faded from its black eyes.
Silence returned to the desert, broken only by Kaito's ragged breathing.
[Sand-Dredger (Juvenile) defeated. EXP gained.]
[Level Up!]
[Level Up!]
You are now Level 5.
HP/MP fully restored.
Max HP increased by 5. Max MP increased by 10.
New Stat Points Available: 2.
[Skill Level Up: Mana Bolt is now Level 4.]
[Skill Level Up: Shadow Spark is now Level 2.]
Kaito lay in the sand, staring at the dead beast. Then he stared at the brilliant, uncaring blue sky. A hysterical laugh bubbled in his chest. He choked it down.
He was alive. He had won. He had fought a monster, alone, and won.
He pushed himself up onto shaky elbows, then to his knees. Every muscle ached. He was covered in sand, sweat, and flecks of alien ichor. But he felt a grim, primal sense of triumph. He had survived. By his own skill. His own choices.
He allocated his new stat points almost instinctively. One point into INTelligence, for more mana power, sharper skills. One point into VITality, for more health, more resilience. His body thrummed with the infusion of new energy from the level-up.
He walked on unsteady legs to the colossal corpse. He placed a foot on its chitinous side and wrenched his knife free. He wiped the blade clean on the sand.
Then he checked his Bond Links. The fight had been a massive spike of fear, effort, and adrenaline. Such intense emotions had to have rippled down the connections.
What he saw made his blood run cold.
Lilith: ❤️🔥📍(Pursuing) >> Emotional Spike Detected: Alarm? Interest? Pride? DISTANCE: SIGNIFICANTLY CLOSER.
Seraphina: ❤️⚔️🌀(Disoriented/Intensified) >> Location: Caravan Route. Emotional State: Detection? Magical signature discharge noted.
Lilith had felt it all. His fear. His struggle. His final, desperate triumph. And that intense cocktail of emotion had acted like a lighthouse beacon for her empathic bond. She wasn't just closer. The update said significantly closer. His victory had drawn her like a moth to a flame.
And Seraphina… she was on the caravan route. She might not have an empathic bond, but she was a powerful magic user. She would have felt the discharge of his Mana Bolt energy, the strange pulse of the Shadow Sparks. She would investigate deviations from the main road. She would find the signs of battle.
He was out of time. The wolves were no longer at the edge of the field. They were in the field. And they were sprinting toward him.
He looked west, toward his goal. In the distance, past the rolling dunes, he saw a smudge of hopeful color on the horizon. Green. Faint, but real. And beyond it, the thinnest, most beautiful sliver of brilliant, shimmering blue.
The coast. And the port town of Seabridge.
It was still miles away. A full day's hard walk, maybe more in his condition.
He heard a new sound on the wind. It wasn't the desert wind. It was a sound of tearing fabric. Of silent, distant screams being swallowed. The air behind him, to the east, grew suddenly, unnaturally cold.
A deep, primal dread settled in his stomach. He turned slowly.
A mile back, where the desert met the pale sky, the light was dying.
A wall of pure, liquid shadow was flowing over the dunes. It consumed the sunlight. It turned the golden sand a monochrome grey as it passed. It moved with impossible, silent speed, a tidal wave of darkness swallowing the world.
And in the center of that advancing wall, a single, unwavering pinpoint of violet light glowed like a malignant star.
Lilith.
She wasn't just following the bond on foot. She was bringing her domain with her. She was pulling the shadow of her Keep across the desert, turning the land itself into a corridor of her power to travel faster.
She would be on him in minutes.
Fear, pure and undiluted, shot through him. His Glitch Meter jumped in response.
Glitch Meter: 40%.
He couldn't outrun that. He couldn't out-fight it. He was trapped in the open desert.
His eyes darted frantically. They landed on the rocky outcropping he had originally been heading toward for shade. At its base, he saw a dark cleft. A crack in the sandstone. A cave? A crevice? It didn't matter. It was the only cover in sight.
It was his only chance.
He ran. He ran for the rocks as the wave of shadow swept toward him, chilling the air, draining the color from the world, silencing the very wind. The beautiful sliver of blue sea ahead seemed like a cruel mirage, impossibly far away.
He reached the cleft. It was narrow. Terrifyingly narrow. Just a vertical crack in the rock, barely wider than his shoulders. He didn't hesitate. He dropped his waterskin, turned sideways, and squeezed himself into the darkness, pushing deeper, scraping his back and chest against the rough stone.
He turned at the entrance, looking back out at the desert.
The wall of shadow reached the rocks. It didn't flow over them like water. It pooled around them. It rose like a black, silent tide, engulfing the base of the outcropping. The world outside the crack vanished into perfect, lightless black. The violet light was right there now, just outside.
A shape coalesced from the darkness. Lilith stepped forward. Her dress was part of the shadow itself, flowing and shifting. Her face was pale as moonlight. Her violet eyes burned with a terrifying mix of desperate relief and simmering, possessive anger.
She saw him, crammed into the narrow stone crack, trapped like an insect in amber.
A soft, sorrowful smile touched her lips. She reached a slender, pale hand toward the crevice opening. Her voice, when it came, was a whisper that carried all the cold of the void.
"Little star," she breathed. "You led me on quite a chase across the bright, burning world." Her fingers curled, beckoning. "Come out now. The game is over. It's time… to come home."
Kaito pressed himself deeper into the unforgiving stone. There was nowhere to go. The crevice ended in a solid wall just a few feet behind him. He was cornered. Caught.
[Quest Failed: Journey to the Coast.]
[New Quest Generated: Survive the Shadow's Recapture.]
[Objective: Do not be taken. Escape. Somehow.]
[Failure Condition: Return to the Shadow Keep.]
[Status: EXTREMELY UNLIKELY.]
He looked at her outstretched hand. He looked at his Glitch Meter, now at 42%. He looked at his MP, nearly full again from the level-up restoration.
He had one card left to play. A desperate, stupid, suicidal card. But it was the only one in his hand.
He met her glowing violet eyes. He forced his face into an expression of resignation. Of defeat.
"You're right," he said, his voice hollow, echoing slightly in the stone crack. "The game is over."
He raised his own hand. Not in surrender. In a familiar, casting gesture.
He saw her eyes widen a fraction, not in fear, but in curiosity. She didn't believe he had a real attack that could harm her here, in her manifested shadow.
He wasn't aiming at her.
He aimed his hand upward, at the rock ceiling of the shallow crevice, right above his own head.
He poured every last drop of his MP into the skill. Not Shadow Spark. The next evolution. Shadow Burst. And then, he did something insane. He mentally grabbed the Glitch Meter itself. He yanked on the chaotic energy, forcing a violent surge, channeling it directly into the forming spell.
"SHADOW BURST!" he screamed, not in defiance, but in a command to the universe to break.
But he didn't let the energy detonate outward. He contained it. He focused the entire, catastrophic explosion inward, into a point in the rock just above him. A point of concentrated, glitch-tainted, reality-disrupting force.
The world dissolved into noise and chaos and pain.
The rock above him didn't crack. It vaporized in a sphere of silent, shattering distortion. And the entire side of the rocky outcropping, its structural integrity annihilated by the localized blast, let out a deep, groaning CRACK that shook the earth.
Then it collapsed.
Ten tons, twenty tons of ancient sandstone broke apart and fell in a roaring, dust-choking avalanche, burying the crevice entrance—and Kaito with it—under a mountain of shattered rock.
The last thing he saw was Lilith's face. Her expression shifted in an instant from triumph to utter, horrified, disbelieving shock. Her mouth formed a silent "No."
Then, darkness.
True, absolute, crushing darkness.
And silence.
To be continued...