The mist had grown thicker around Henry, swallowing distance until even the nearest trees looked like faded shadows drawn on dirty glass.
The ash-gray bark stood motionless, stripped of life.
Henry stood still, revolver held low but ready.
He didn't move much anymore. Moving blindly here felt like inviting death. Instead, he listened the surroundings carefully.
Not with his ears alone but with instinct.
Like standing in a room where someone else was breathing… but you couldn't see them.
A faint pressure rested at the edge of his senses. Not touching him but watching. He couldn't explain how he knew, yet the certainty settled deep into his spine.
Every time he shifted his stance, the feeling adjusted with him. Feeling something unseen recalculated his position.
Henry exhaled slowly, steadying himself.
His thoughts drifted unwillingly toward the others.
Those two... were they still running? Did they reach the guards at the eastern entrance? Or had something stopped them along the way?
His jaw tightened slightly,
"I told them to run… So they better be running."
But doubt crept in anyway.
Henry began walking slowly toward the east, revolver held low but steady.
The forest had lost its color entirely. The trees were no longer brown or green. Only ashen gray, like burned bones left standing upright. Their leaves hung stiff and brittle, unmoving even when Henry passed beside them.
Not by choice. Instinct forced him to.
Something was coming ahead.
From within the thick mist, a small figure emerged, stepping forward with slow, uneven movements.
At first glance, it looked like a child. A boy, perhaps no older than ten. His clothes were ripped and torn, hanging from his body like burned cloth barely holding together. Parts of his skin were charred black, cracked in places like dried mud.
Thin trails of gray smoke drifted from his shoulders, as if the burning had never fully stopped. But it was his eyes that froze Henry in place.
They glowed brightly in yellow.
Henry narrowed his eyes slightly, tightening his grip on the revolver.
"Who are you? What are you doing here?"
The boy tilted his head. Then his mouth opened.
Henry's foot took two steps backwards.
Inside the small mouth were rows of long, sharp teeth, far too many for a human jaw. They shifted and scraped against each other independently, moving like living blades adjusting their positions.
When the boy spoke, the voice was wrong than it should be. It was a voice of an adult and monstrous.
"I… am Ra'Khan, centuries ago… they buried me here alive… with the Crucifix Of Undying driven through my chest."
Henry's pupils shrank slightly. Recognition struck him.
There had been a document about it. Short and incomplete.
Ra'Khan... A parasitizing entity.
Capable of rifting the space between space itself, tearing small fractures between dimensions like wounds carved into reality.
Long ago, a hero—known only in lost records as The Warden of the Land had defeated Ra'Khan. But killing him had been impossible. Instead, the hero drove the "Crucifix Of Undying" through the entity's core, pinning his consciousness into a dead child's corpse, sealing him alive within lifeless flesh.
But the story hadn't ended there.
Ra'Khan's glowing eyes flickered faintly as he continued speaking.
"Decades passed… and they found me…"
His burned lips stretched into something resembling a smile.
"The cults..."
Henry's grip tightened. He remembered that part too. Vague notes about extremist groups, forbidden rituals, missing personnel.
"They did not worship me. No… they feared me… but they needed me."
His charred fingers lifted slowly, revealing thin black marks carved into the flesh. Symbols burned deep into bone.
"They cut my body apart… piece by piece… studied how my consciousness clung to flesh… how death refused to claim me…"
Henry felt unease coil deeper inside his chest.
"They fed me bodies… broken ones… criminals… wanderers… prisoners taken from forgotten places…"
The mist thickened around them.
"And each time… I devoured them… my mind grew stronger… clearer… more knowledgeable about this planet…"
Ra'Khan's glowing gaze locked onto Henry.
"But they feared my presence, of course! So they bound me… with a covenant of flesh."
Henry frowned slightly. "What covenant?"
Ra'Khan's teeth twitched again weirdly,
"They carved their names… into my marrow… stitched their blood into my nerves through different spells… forced fragments of their dying consciousness into my mind…"
"They made it so that when I awaken full...I am obligated to restore their lives."
"If I refuse…" Ra'Khan whispered, "...their agony will tear my consciousness apart."
A parasite forced to serve its captors. A weapon enslaved to dead masters.
" No matter how many dangerous cosmic tyrants are out there, you humans... you demons are always the cruelest!
And now… I gather bodies… flesh strong enough… minds stable enough…"
He stepped forward through the ash-gray ground.
The glowing yellow eyes fixed directly on Henry.
"So that those who buried me… and those who enslaved me…"
His voice dropped into something colder than hatred.
"...may walk this land again."
The mist around them shifted violently and the space itself seemed to tremble.
Henry's fingers loosened from the revolver grip as his other hand moved calmly to his side. There was no rush in his motion.
A thin distortion rippled beside him. His Astra appeared.
A black katana, long and unnaturally matte, as if it absorbed light rather than reflecting it. The blade looked simple at first glance but lines crawled along its surface like frozen cracks in space itself.
Henry did not raise it yet.
Ra'Khan's glowing eyes dimmed slightly and the burnt child's body leaned forward. Just enough for Henry to recognize the shift.
Henry remembered the document fragment.
It has habits of trapping targets in a different plain of existence and see them go mad.
That meant Ra'Khan wouldn't rush blindly. He would trap first, kill second.
Henry's gaze dropped briefly to the ground beneath his feet. The ash-gray soil looked solid but the mist near Ra'Khan's legs trembled, spiraling downward like water circling a drain.
Henry stepped sideways diagonally.
Ra'Khan's body suddenly sank into the ground, vanishing without sound. At the exact moment Henry predicted.
The earth beneath where he had been standing warped inward, collapsing into a shallow depression before sealing itself shut again.
If Ra'Khan predicted movement using spatial locking, then repeating paths would be fatal. So Henry deliberately broke rhythm. Never staying in one position long enough to anchor the trap.
The ground behind him ruptured again.
But as supposed, it missed.
Henry exhaled once, steady and cold.
He wasn't faster than Ra'Khan. He was harder to predict because now he was moving instantly one place to another changing patterns everytime.
Ra'Khan's charred lips stretched wider.
The ground beneath Henry growled once then space itself seemed to split open.
Without warning, beams of distorted space erupted from every direction.
They didn't travel like normal attacks. They appeared, distorting through space like penetrating a paper with a pencil.
One tore past Henry's shoulder, shaving off strands of his hair before vanishing into the trees behind him. Another ripped upward from the ground, carving a straight line through a trunk that silently folded apart.
Henry moved before thinking. His black katana flashed forward.
"Dimensional Cut."
The blade sliced through nothing, yet a rip followed its path. A sharp spatial tear that intercepted one of the incoming beams.
The two distortions collided, vanishing into flickering static before dissolving into mist.
Ra'Khan's glowing eyes brightened.
"You struggle… inside my domain. Within this land… I see all… know all… You are merely an ant before a god."
More beams fired faster than before.
Henry pivoted sharply, slashing downward, then sideways. Each swing of the katana carved thin fractures in space, intercepting some attacks, barely avoiding others.
A shallow cut opened across his sleeve, blood seeped through spot but he didn't care.
He smirked despite the maze.
"A god, huh?" Henry muttered dryly. "Then you must be the most exhausted god I have ever met."
Ra'Khan hissed as he moved swifly. His burnt body flickered across the battlefield, appearing and disappearing in jagged motions that made tracking him nearly impossible.
Henry clenched his jaw. Enough defense.
He lifted his left hand, fingers tightening as magical energy gathered around his palm. A sphere of deep orange light formed, glowing like the final moments of sunset.
"Spell: Ignis Vesper."
The sunset-colored flame sphere shot forward in a straight line, humming loudly as it absorbed surrounding energy. Even the mist around it thinned, drawn into the burning core.
Ra'Khan attempted to shift sideways but the explosion came late with a surprise.
The sphere detonated after passing him, bursting into a violent wave of fiery pressure. Flames expanded outward, swallowing nearby space in a delayed blast.
The shockwave slammed into Ra'Khan's body. The mist was gone for a brief moment.
For the first time, the creature staggered.
Smoke poured from fresh burns across his already ruined form.
Henry inhaled but carefully. He steadied himself but the strain in his muscles began to show. His breathing grew heavier. The next move would cost more than the last.
His fingers trembled slightly as he began forming another spell.
"This one's expensive, but I will keep the change."
He slammed the tip of his katana into the ground. Golden symbols erupted outward in a circular pattern beneath his feet, spreading across the gray earth like branching roots of light.
"Spell: King's Counterseal."
An invisible holy force descended over the battlefield. Henry raised his hand and spoke with deliberate authority.
"From this moment… this ground falls under my crown."
Golden lines surged outward, forming an invisible boundary around Ra'Khan.
"Anything cast within this space…" Henry continued, voice firm despite exhaustion, "...must acknowledge one of my authority first and for once."
Ra'Khan attempted to move and for some reasons, he failed.
His body froze mid-motion, limbs trembling violently as invisible force pressed against him from all directions.
"That includes you, God."