Day 25
Pain is a constant presence. My skin is a map of purple, greenish, and bluish-black marks. Breathing deeply hurts. Sitting hurts. Existing hurts.
It all started five days ago, during Bajiquan practice. The priest was explaining to me the explosive force that springs from the ground. In a clumsy attempt to imitate the hip movement, I brushed against him. That's all. My arm, out of control, passed within an inch of his side.
It was like flipping a switch to absolute violence.
His gaze, until then one of weary instruction, went blank. There was no warning. His body, which seemed to be at rest, exploded into motion. I didn't see a fist, I saw an iron mallet crashing into my sternum. The air left my lungs with a dry whoof. Before I fell to the ground, a blow to my side spun me around in the air. A low hook to the liver bent me in half. A low kick to the hamstrings knocked me down completely.
And it didn't stop there. As I writhed on the ground, choking, every attempt to get up or cover myself was met with a precise, controlled blow, designed to inflict maximum pain without breaking bones. A blow to the bicep that left it useless and sore. A slap with stiff fingers to the solar plexus that made me vomit bile. A stomp on the instep that drew a scream from me.
It wasn't a fight. He left me lying on the ground, gasping for breath, seeing stars, every part of my body throbbing with pain.
He spent the next few days applying the same principle. Every mistake in my posture, every opening in my guard, every moment of distraction, was punished with a relentless and precise blow that left me bruised and humiliated.
After another session of turning me into a human punching bag, as I tried to stand up with my head spinning, he said, without preamble:
"Physical pain is a lesson. Faith is a weapon. You will learn to stop being a mere hunter with a trick. You will learn the Sacrament of Baptism."
I stared at him, confused. Baptism... that's for babies, for people new to the faith. Water, words, a name. Not for this.
"Baptism?" I managed to stammer. "Isn't that...?"
"It's not what you think," he cut me off. "I'm not talking about the ritual for infants. It's a purification spell. The first and most basic of the Sacraments of the Church for those of us who walk the border. They teach it to all members."
"It is a ten-part aria. A structured song. Do not recite it. Embody it."
Then he began.
"I will kill. I will let live. I will hurt and I will heal. No one will escape me. No one will escape my sight."
"Be crushed."
"I welcome those who have grown old and those who have lost."
"Surrender to me, learn from me, and obey me."
"Rest. Do not forget the song, do not forget the prayer, and do not forget me."
"I am light and relieve you of all your burdens."
"Do not pretend. Retribution for forgiveness, betrayal for trust, despair for hope, darkness for light, dark death for the living."
"Relief is in my hands. I will smear your sins and leave a mark. Eternal life is given through death."
"Ask for forgiveness here. I, the incarnation, will swear."
"I, the incarnation":
"Kyrie eleison."
When he finished, the silence in the shed was palpable, as if the words had consumed the air.
"This," he said, his voice returning to its dry tone, "is not a prayer you ask for. It is a reality you impose. The ten beads are the steps to build a prison of faith around what you want to purge."
He ordered me to repeat them. Over and over again. Until they ceased to be verses and began to feel like bones in my mouth.
Today I did not cast a Black Key. I did not draw a line. I just filled the space with a song. And I understood, with a chill that reached my soul, that this "Sacrament" is not for saving. It is for judging and executing.
Day 30
Today, the priest broke the routine.
At dawn, instead of the sharp blow of his staff against the ground to wake me, there was an unusual silence. When I came out, I found him standing in front of the small stone chapel, not in his training attire, but in his full clerical vestments, the darkest, almost black ones.
"We will not be doing any training today," he said, his voice lacking its usual edge. "Today is a special day."
The news should have made me happy. A day without blows, without bruises, without the mental exhaustion or embodying the ten-count aria until my throat hurt. But instead, a cold nervousness settled in my gut. "Special" has never meant anything good here.
"A new tool?" I asked, trying to guess. Another strange weapon? A new, even more disturbing sacrament?
He shook his head, a slow movement.
"No. Today is not about taking. It's about remembering and recognizing." He paused, his eyes scanning the forest surrounding the clearing, as if searching for something among the trees. "Thirty days ago, you arrived here. A frightened creature, your eyes filled with a horror you didn't understand and an ability that was a curse. You have learned to channel your magical energy, to see your lines without crumbling, to take a blow without breaking, to speak words that could shatter a specter."
His gaze turned to me.
"But all of that has been reaction. To your trauma, to my commands, to the threats I made. Today, that ends."
The revelation did not come like thunder, but like ice spreading from the center of my chest to my fingertips.
"The one who took everything from you was seen yesterday."
The priest's words, so flat, so simple, were more effective than any scream. Him. That tall, dark thing with eyes the color of blood. The shaped void that walked among the screams of my friends and looked at me like one looks at a pebble on the path. He was here.
"And as you know, vampires don't come out during the day."
Of course. I know. The lessons hammered it home: the sun is their enemy, daylight weakens them.
"Most likely, it will stay."
"So tonight, you will go out."
Not him. Me. The responsibility, which had been floating in the air, settled on my shoulders with the weight of a slab.
"And you will kill him."
Direct. No room for interpretations of "recognition" or "marking."
"Consider this your graduation day."
These thirty days had been a crash course, the instruction brutal. Today, at dusk, the final practical exam began.
"You will pass if you succeed."
Passing meant surviving.
"Fail, and you will die."
My death would be the end of this line of failure.
The priest watched me, waiting for a reaction. There was no emotion in his eyes. Only the cold assessment of a teacher who has posed the ultimate problem.
"You have the daylight hours to prepare," he said. "To clear your mind. To review every lesson. To decide how you will use every tool I have given you. This is no time for hesitation. It is time to sharpen yourself."
He paused, his gaze sweeping across the clearing, the forest, the sky.
"At twilight, you will be at the edge of the forest. I will show you the way. I will point out the entrance. What lies within, how and when... that is your test."
He turned and left.
I looked at the sun, still high but beginning its slow descent toward the west. Every passing minute was a grain of sand falling into a giant hourglass.
Today, at dusk, I will go out.
And I will kill it.
Or I will die trying.
There are no other options. And in a way, that clarity is a relief.
XXX
The priest kept his word. At sunset, with the sky painted purple and orange, he appeared at the church door. Without a word, he turned and began walking toward the forest along a different path, narrower and more overgrown. I followed him, each step measuring the distance between me and the final moment.
The journey was long, silent, tense. We crossed the forest until we came out on the other side, and before us lay a village. This one was larger, with defined streets, a central square visible even from a distance, and two-story buildings. But it shared the same curse.
It smelled the same. The same stench of dried blood, copper, and dense rot that got stuck in your throat. A smell of large-scale carnage, already rancid. And also, the same inhabitants. Staggering figures, dark silhouettes silhouetted against the dead windows, moving with that clumsy, familiar shuffle. Ghouls. More than in the other village. Many more.
The priest pointed to the village with a minimal nod of his head.
"This is where my help ends. Now it's your turn. Whether you go in like a madman to kill, or whether you use stealth to go after the boss."
His words, spoken with the calmness of someone pointing out two paths on a map, were the final strategic choice.
Option 1: Go in like a madman to kill. A frontal purge. Use my speed, my lines, my od, to cut my way through the horde of ghouls. It would be noisy, exhausting. I would use up resources before even reaching the real target. But it could be a show of strength. And, deep down, it was what my most primitive rage screamed to do: destroy everything that smelled of him.
Option 2: Stealth to go after the boss. Ignore the ghouls. Save every drop of od, every breath, for the only confrontation that mattered. It was the best option.
The analysis was quick, cold. Option 2 was logical, the one for survival.
But I'm not just anyone.
The thought wasn't a burst of pride. It was a reminder of the monstrous and unique power I carried within me.
Not everyone has the power to see death.
And that power changed the equation. Because the ghouls... weren't an obstacle. They were walking cracks in the world, each marked with a swarm of beautiful and deadly lines. For me, "fighting my way through the horde" didn't mean an exhausting struggle. It meant a walk in the park.
A cold smile spread across my lips. The priest was thinking in terms of conventional resources: strength, stealth, reserves. He couldn't factor in the absolute efficiency of my eyes.
I looked at the nearest ghoul. A bright, perfect line ran up and down its spine. I could wipe it from the world with a flick of my dagger, in less than a second, without it making a sound beyond the whisper of its disintegration.
I made my decision.
"I appreciate everything you did for me."
The words came out of me, clear and low, directed at the empty darkness where the priest had vanished.
I started walking. My footsteps, firm on the dusty earth, were the drum roll. The first ghoul turned completely toward me, its mouth opening. I let it approach.
My arm moved. Not a wild slash. A stroke. A simple flick of the wrist, the dagger following the bright line that crossed his neck from side to side.
His head did not roll; simply, the line I had followed opened, and everything on either side of that crack lost cohesion. The body collapsed in two directions.
I didn't stop. I kept walking.
Another ghoul, drawn in, emerged from a doorway. Its lines were a swarm across its torso. My dagger, still clean, danced: a prick here, a scrape there. Each contact with a line was a switch that turned off a part. In three movements, what had been a staggering creature was a pile of disconnected limbs.
Every ghoul that approached me, every shadow that stood in my way, met its end in an instant. It was as if death itself were walking through its domain.
The smell of blood and rot began to mix with another, more subtle one: the metallic ozone of reality being cut. My eyes, focused only on the lines, saw the world as an intricate mosaic of faults, each one a point of no return.
Just as my dagger rose to draw the line of death for another ghoul, the air solidified. A cold that was not temperature, but absence of heat, of life, of possibility, spread like a heavy blanket over the village. All the ghouls stopped in unison, like puppets whose strings had turned to lead. The dark dust of those I had disintegrated seemed to freeze in the air.
And then, the voice.
It sprang from the silence itself, from the cold, from the elongated shadows of the buildings.
"How dare a mere amateur disturb me during my lunch hour?"
The words echoed inside my skull, rather than in my ears. A mere amateur. The same indifference, the same utter contempt that had frozen my blood.
And there he was.
He didn't emerge from a doorway. He was simply... standing in the center of the dusty square, as if he had been there since the beginning of time and I hadn't noticed. The last light of twilight, which should have illuminated him, seemed to fade around him, creating a halo of perfect darkness.
Now I could see him better.
He wasn't just a tall figure in black clothes. His skin was moon-pale, not sickly, but inert, like polished marble. His hair, long and straight, was the color of ash.
"You've ruined the mood," he said, and this time his thin, pale lips moved slightly.
He made a dismissive gesture with a long, pale hand, gloved in what looked like aged black leather.
"I suppose I should thank you. The local meat was getting... monotonous. A change in the menu is always refreshing."
"Now entertain me, wizard."
I am not a wizard.
I am an executor.
My first action was not toward him. It was inward. I brought my perception close to his lines.
Just like everyone else.
There was not one, but several. Some crossed his torso, others coiled around his limbs, one particularly dense one seemed to beat right where a human heart would have been.
There was no more analysis. There was no more chatter. The time for words, for evaluations, had run out.
So, I moved forward.
The distance evaporated. He didn't move. He stood there, like a mountain defying an avalanche. His red eyes absorbed my image as I approached, still underestimating me.
Then, when I was only about ten meters away, the world changed.
It was as if the earth itself awoke to his service, offended by my audacity. The ground beneath my feet, a dusty, hard road, warped. It did not open, but bristled.
Rock spikes emerged from the earth, growing at unnatural speed. They were perfect spears, sharp and twisted, sprouting in front of me, creating a deadly cage of spikes that rose toward the night sky. They didn't block my path to him; they made moving forward mean impaling myself.
One spike, the closest one, sprouted right in front of my leading foot, tearing the toe of my boot.
Instinct, honed by the priest's beatings, was quicker than thought. I threw myself to the ground, rolling in the dust, as the spear of earth whizzed over my head.
I looked up at him through the forest of píos. His red eyes glowed with a faint, satisfied light. This was the true power of a dead Apostle.
Another spike, this time to my left, broke off and lunged. This time I didn't roll. I jumped backward, forcing my body into an unnatural movement, and the dark spear grazed my side, tearing the fabric and leaving a superficial scratch that burned with a piercing cold.
I quickly stabilized myself. I braced my legs as much as possible, sinking energy, intention, hatred, into the ground, as if I could take root in this cursed place and tear it out by the roots.
And then, instead of retreating further, I changed my target.
My gaze swept over the earthen peaks surrounding me. Their lines, compared to those of the Apostle, were simple, childish. Clear, bright cracks.
I began to cut.
I didn't lunge at him. I became a whirlwind of desperate precision. My dagger, the simple iron blade, became a silver fan. I advanced toward the nearest peak, not to dodge it, but to destroy it. A sideways blow, following the diagonal line that ran through it.
One step. Another spike. A vertical line this time. My dagger cut it from top to bottom, and the spike split in two.
The Apostle watched, initially with that bored curiosity, but as his defensive forest of spikes began to fall, one after another, with mechanical efficiency, his expression hardened. It wasn't alarm. It was irritation.
And then, when the last spike between him and me vanished into dust, and only the flat, dark earth of the square remained between us, I lunged.
This time it wasn't a direct attack. It was a flanking move, fast and low, taking advantage of the clearing I had created myself, aiming for his chest.
Out of a mixture of desperation and frozen rage, he lunged in a low arc, the dagger extended like the stinger of a suicidal wasp.
Just as the tip was an inch from his torso, his arm moved.
Not with the contemptuous elegance of before. It was a brutal movement, coming out of nowhere. In his hand, which a moment before had been empty, there was now an object. It was a mallet. A monstrous block of dark, dull metal, wider than my head, mounted on a short, thick shaft.
There was no rush of air, no sound of movement. The mallet simply appeared in its downward trajectory, already in motion, as if it had been falling since the beginning of time and I, in my stupidity, had placed myself underneath it.
There was no time to dodge. Only to react. Instincts forged by the priest's blows came into play. Instead of trying to stop the unstoppable, I deflected my thrust. The dagger, instead of plunging into his chest, crossed over my head, flat, in a desperate and completely inadequate block.
The impact was cataclysmic.
The mallet of darkness didn't strike my dagger; it destroyed it. The iron blade, which had cut through ghoul flesh, didn't bend or break. It shattered in an explosion of silver splinters as fine as mirror dust.
The force of the blow sent me flying through the air.
The mallet, upon contact with my desperate block, transmitted not only force. It transmitted absolute repulsion.
There was no transition. One moment I was standing on solid ground, the next the world was a blur. The force lifted me like a rag doll, tearing me from the ground where my feet had stood firm. I flew backward in a short, violent arc, the air whistling in my ears, a trail of silver shards from my shattered dagger sparkling around me like a macabre feast of confetti.
Time stretched out. I saw the night sky, the indifferent stars. I saw the silhouette of the Apostle, already distant, motionless.
Then, the impact.
I hit the side of a house with a crack of rotten wood and protesting ribs. The structure crumbled beneath me, partially cushioning the fall, but not enough. The air escaped my lungs for the second time in minutes, this time with a dry groan. I rolled across the dusty ground, over rubble and splinters, until I came to rest against the stone wall of a dry well.
And then, in the silence broken only by my ragged breathing, the thought came, clear and bitter as the poison in my side:
I'm an idiot.
A monumental idiot. Because in the heat of the moment, I thought it was going to be so simple. That it was just another target, bigger, faster, but ultimately something to get to and cut down. Like the ghouls. Like training. Go straight in, draw the line, and done.
I didn't understand. Not until that mallet came out of nowhere and rewrote the physics around me. It wasn't a ghoul. It was another category of existence. A natural phenomenon.
My whole body was a testament to my mistake.
Maybe it could have been worse. The idea was terrifying. If I had delayed even a second in reinforcing my whole body. It would have pulverized me. The mallet wouldn't have just shattered my dagger; it would have blown out my arm, my collarbone, maybe my skull. I would have been a smear on the ground, not a broken toy thrown against a well.
That second of preparation, that moment stolen from the fury to remember the lessons of pain, was the only thing that kept me intact. Barely. It was the difference between being shattered and being shattered but conscious. Between instant death and this slow, conscious agony that was now my reality.
"Why did I take out my mallet?"
The Apostle stopped. It wasn't the confident halt of someone in control of the situation, but a sudden pause, as if his own feet had hesitated. His gaze, previously laden with weary contempt and sadistic curiosity, clouded over for a moment with something genuinely unexpected: perplexity.
His red eyes were fixed on me. The question that came from his pale lips did not have the melodious cadence of before. It sounded dry, almost to himself, as if he were struggling to solve a puzzle.
"No... you, what are you?"
The Apostle's question still hung in the air. But before my chapped lips could form some stupid, defiant reply, something changed in him.
"Right then, I felt like I might die."
The confession came out in a hoarse whisper, not to me, but to the emptiness of the night, as if he surprised himself by uttering it.
Then his gaze cleared and rested on me again. But there was no longer any perplexity. There was no curiosity. There was only a clean, final decision.
"I see you keep a secret. It doesn't matter. I will take you as I should." The words came from his lips like a final diagnosis.
"So now, die."
The words still echoed when the world exploded into directed motion.
The Apostle raised a hand.
Several stakes shot out of the ground like arrows or javelins. They whistled through the air, coming not from a single front, but from all directions: from the ground at my feet, from the walls of nearby houses, from behind me. A deluge of deadly stone designed to pin me where I stood.
At the same time, the ghouls that had been static before began to move directly toward me. Their lethargy was broken like a spell. They no longer wandered aimlessly. Their heads turned in unison toward my position, their glassy eyes fixed on me with a new and terrifying purpose. They lunged forward, not with the clumsy shuffle of before, but with an unnatural urgency, moving their broken bodies at a terrifying speed. They were a tide of corrupted flesh, hungry and focused, closing off any escape route.
Time compressed. There was no room for thought, only pure reflex.
With a scream that came from my gut, I threw myself forward. The earth javelins whistled past me: one stuck where my head had been a moment before, another tore through the air next to my ear, a third scratched my arm.
I fell face down, my breathing reduced to gasps of agony. I looked up just in time to see the first ghoul, a monster with a hanging jaw, raising its claws above me. The smell of rot hit me like a wall.
I didn't have time to draw the Black Keys.
Then, the training of the blows, the memory of the lines, and pure animal desperation merged into a single instinct.
I ignored the pain. I ignored the fear. I focused all my will on my right hand, not to wield a weapon, but to become one.
I pressed my index and middle fingers together, tensing them until my knuckles turned white, and closed the rest of my hand into a tight fist. It wasn't a martial arts stance. It was a primitive gesture, like a child pointing a finger gun, but charged with the lethal intent of thirty days of hell. My outstretched arm, those two rigid fingers, became the spearhead of my entire being.
And I didn't aim at the ghoul's body. I aimed at the line. The brightest line, the one that divided its torso from shoulder to hip, which my eyes, focused through the pain, saw with hallucinatory clarity.
With a hoarse cry that was more a snort of effort than a battle cry, I threw my arm forward in a short, sharp blow. Not with the force to pierce flesh. With the intention of piercing something much more fundamental.
My fingers did not touch the ghoul's rotten skin. They pierced the line.
There was no physical resistance. There was a feeling of absolute coldness and silence, like dipping your hand into a river of ice cream that didn't exist.
But the effect on the ghoul was instantaneous and catastrophic.
At the exact point where my fingers "entered" the line, a perfect black crack opened in its torso.
The ghoul froze, its claws suspended in midair. And it fell.
I stood with my arm outstretched, my fingers still trembling, feeling a residual coldness rising up my arm to my elbow.
It had worked. My body, my intention focused through the simplest of gestures, had been enough to activate the power of my eyes. I didn't need a weapon. I was the weapon. And my finger, my will, was the trigger.