The brass cylinder in the stranger's hands continued to hum, emitting a distorted, metallic melody that seemed to vibrate in perfect sync with Zhilian's headache. The man in the dark coat took another step forward. As he moved, the edge of his sleeve lifted slightly, revealing his wrist.
On his pale skin, imprinted like a fresh acid burn, stood a symbol: a stylized eye surrounded by three crossing broken lines.
The Brand.
At that exact moment, Hayjin's brain stopped working. His neck began to throb violently, causing a lancinating pain; his vision blurred for a moment, and he began to lose track of what was happening around him.
Time dilated, warping. The crystal tower, the wyvern roaring in the distance, Zhilian's lifeless body on the floor... everything vanished, replaced by a polar cold and the sound of wet footsteps in a dark alley.
Hayjin's mind was violently sucked backward, to that night. The night he died. He remembered with terrifying clarity the sensation of the cold blade penetrating his stomach, the dull sound of steel cutting through internal tissue, the bitter taste of his own blood rushing up his throat as he desperately tried to breathe. He remembered the vacant eyes of his assassin, a member of the Cult of the Brand, who stared at him without any emotion as he left him to die in the mud like trash.
The panic attack hit him like a runaway train.
His chest tightened in a steel vise. Hayjin began to hyperventilate; air entered his lungs, but it felt like it was never enough dry and freezing. The room began to spin dizzyingly; a violent vertigo forced him to take a step back, making him lose his balance. His vision blurred, the stranger's contours dissolving into a dark, indistinct blur, while a thousand invisible pins pierced his hands and face with an unbearable tingling.
"No... no, not you... not again..." Hayjin whispered, his voice reduced to a trembling rattle. The resonance sword slipped ever so slightly from his limp fingers, vibrating weakly on the floor.
From the shadows behind the first man emerged other individuals, dressed in tattered tunics the same color as the dead rock. They didn't speak. They moved like specters, with a millimetric coordination that oozed death.
The leader in the dark coat looked at Hayjin, tilting his head slightly. "Look how you tremble, Hayjin. Your body still remembers the taste of death, doesn't it? It is a fascinating biological reaction. But fear not, today we are not here for you. Not yet, at least."
His gaze shifted to Zhilian's inert body. One of the cultists behind him drew a dagger with a curved blade, black as pitch, which did not reflect the light of the dungeon.
"We will kill the princess now," the hooded man said, with a calmness that made the skin crawl. "Consider it an act of mercy toward you. If she dies today, you won't have to suffer in the future. You won't have to forge bonds that this world, regardless, will break in a much more brutal manner. We are sparing you tomorrow's pain."
Those words, in their mad and distorted logic, touched something inside Hayjin's frozen mind. The terror was still there, devastating and paralyzing, but the protective instinct toward the girl who had taken a wyvern's tail strike to save him carved a crack in the wall of panic.
"S-Stop... stay away from her!" Hayjin screamed, his voice cracking from the effort.
He picked up the sword with a hand that trembled violently. He gritted his teeth until his gums bled, forcing his legs to take a step forward. He had no mana, but his resonance sword could still manipulate the frequencies of the air if pushed by pure desperation.
He channeled every remaining shred of will, unleashing a horizontal slash. A violent gust of compressed wind a sharp blade of air shot toward the two advancing cultists.
Fshhh.
Before Hayjin could even attempt another attack, the air in front of him contracted.
The cultist who had parried the blow vanished from his field of vision with impressive speed, leaving behind only a slight displacement of air. Hayjin, his vision still blurred and his mind muddled by panic, couldn't even perceive the trajectory of the movement.
A millisecond.
The cultist's face appeared a few centimeters from his own. The man's eyes, visible beneath the tunic, were glassy, devoid of any human spark. Without giving Hayjin time to raise his sword, the man delivered a powerful punch, straight to the center of his sternum.
BAM!
The impact was monstrous. The sound of Hayjin's ribs cracking echoed clearly in the room. The force of the blow lifted him off the ground, throwing him backward several meters like a ragdoll. The boy crashed violently against a surviving wall of blue crystal. The structure cracked visibly under the impact, and Hayjin slid to the ground, collapsing onto his knees.
"C-Cough..."
A wave of thick, dark blood gushed from his mouth, staining his lips, his chin, and dripping onto the crystalline floor. The pain was so intense it blacked out his vision for an instant; he felt his lungs locked, unable to expand, as if the punch had stopped the very mechanism of his breath.
"G-Get up... I must..." his mind programmed, trying to prop himself up on his sword to straighten his back. His head lolled, incredibly heavy.
But the Cult granted no reprieve.
Before he could lift his knees from the ground, a shadow loomed behind him. A second cultist, moving with the same ghostly speed as the first, delivered a violent kick to the base of his neck.
CRACK.
The blow projected Hayjin's face directly against the floor. The boy let out a muffled groan, the dizziness threatening to make him lose consciousness. He tasted his own blood mixing with the blue dust of the dungeon.
It wasn't over. The cultist's gloved hand descended rapidly, grabbing Hayjin firmly by his left ankle. With a display of inhuman and unnatural physical strength, the man lifted the boy's entire body as if it weighed nothing, swinging him through the air.
SBAM!
Hayjin was literally slammed onto his back against the bare, rocky ground of the tower with unprecedented violence. The impact definitively knocked out what little air he had managed to recover. His spine emitted a sinister sound, and another violent spray of blood erupted from his lips, staining the surrounding floor in a crimson pool.
The resonance sword slipped away, rolling out of his reach. Hayjin lay flat on his back, his wide eyes staring at the collapsed ceiling, no longer seeing anything, his body wracked by weak shivers as blood continued to trickle from the sides of his mouth. The panic was gone, replaced by the cold, brutal certainty that death had found him once again.
The taste of blood was everywhere. Thick, hot, disgustingly metallic. It filled Hayjin's mouth, ran down his chin in dark strings, and blocked his throat, forcing him to take short, gurgling breaths. The blue crystal floor beneath his cheek was cold, a brutal contrast to the hellish fire burning in his chest where the cultist's punch had struck him.
His vision flickered. Black spots expanded and contracted like visual parasites, and for an instant, the darkness seemed almost welcoming. It would be so easy. All he had to do was close his eyes, stop fighting against that immense weight crushing his lungs, and let go.
"No..."
A thought, small and desperate, made its way through the fog of his dazed brain.
"Not again. Fuck, I don't want to die again..."
His fingers twitched against the smooth stone. With an effort that tore a hoarse groan from deep within his throat, Hayjin began to prop his left arm on the floor. Pain radiated along his spine like a series of electric shocks, but he didn't stop. The muscles in his back trembled violently, almost on the verge of giving out, as he tried to lift his torso from the ground. Every inch gained was agony.
"Don't... touch her..." he hissed through gritted teeth, his voice reduced to a broken whisper, steeped in a sadness so deep and tangible it cut through the air. Tears, born of physical pain and devastating frustration, streaked his dust-caked face. "Please... kill me. But not her... I can't do this another time..."
It was the plea of a broken boy, stripped of all hope, fighting a losing war just to avoid witnessing his worst nightmare repeat itself.
The leader of the Cult, standing a few steps away in his long coat of dark leather, observed him slowly climbing back up from the floor. On his face, partially covered by the hood, there was no trace of anger or sadism. There was only a terrifying, clinical apathy.
"It is an admirable reaction, albeit pathetic," the man said, his voice calm and measured echoing in the silence of the tower. He made a gesture with his black-gloved hand.
The second cultist moved. He didn't sprint; he simply walked toward Hayjin, who had managed to painfully bring himself to his knees. Before the boy could even sketch a defense, the cultist planted a heavy boot on his thigh, pinning him to the ground, and firmly grabbed his left wrist.
"For now, do not despair too much over your weakness, boy," the leader continued, crossing his arms. "You should not be ashamed of this total impotence. Rather... you should be proud of it. This suffering is your starting point. Only by hitting the absolute bottom will you understand how necessary it is to improve for what is to come in the future. Consider it an investment for your future evolution."
Hayjin's eyes widened, caught by a terrifying presentiment. "No... wait, s-stop"
The cultist did not answer. With a sharp, cold, and calculated movement, he applied a violent upward twist, pinning Hayjin's shoulder with his knee and pulling his right arm past its natural limit.
CRACK.
A horrible, wet, sharp sound the noise of bone cleanly snapping in two midway down the forearm echoed in the room.
"AAAAHHHHHHHHG! AAAAAAHHH!"
A piercing, inhuman scream rent the air. Hayjin opened his mouth wide in a grimace of pure agony, his eyes nearly popping from their sockets as his nervous system was hit by an unimaginable overload of pain. His left arm now dangled at an impossible angle, broken, deformed beneath his torn sleeve. The physical shock was so violent that his body retched involuntarily, causing him to spit out another heavy wave of dark blood that stained his executioner's shoes.
A bit further away, the other cultist had approached Zhilian's body. The princess was still curled on her side, her hands pressed against her temples as small shivers shook her limbs.
"Look at the splendid heir of Opes," the cultist said with a subtle, creeping note of mockery in his voice, turning toward his leader. "All this imperial purity reduced to an animal trembling in the mud. It takes so little to shatter their precious royal blood."
Meanwhile, Zhilian's mind was a theater of death. The psionic hallucinations gave her no respite, hitting her with the speed of frantic frames from a horror movie.
[HALLUCINATION - FRAGMENT 01: THE BETRAYAL]
The darkness of a familiar room. Wren, her younger sister, her anchor, was on her knees. Looming above her stood a mysterious figure, a faceless shadow with glowing purple eyes. With a sadistic slowness, the shadow brought an obsidian blade down upon Wren's neck. Blood sprayed across the walls, and the sister's head rolled onto the floor, her wide eyes staring at Zhilian in silent reproach.
[HALLUCINATION - FRAGMENT 02: THE ASHES OF OPES]
The great white towers of her kingdom were in flames. The sky was black, saturated with smoke and ash. Thousands of bodies of citizens and soldiers lay piled in the streets, their faces crystallized by terror. There was no music, no hope. Only the weeping of a dying kingdom sinking into the void.
[HALLUCINATION - FRAGMENT 03: THE MIRROR OF DEATH]
Zhilian saw herself. She was lying on the floor of a deserted throne room, her skin gray and her eyes glassy, devoid of life. Worms of dark mana crawled out of the wounds in her belly, devouring what remained of her royal flesh.
"No... Wren... Opes... stop... please, stop it!" Zhilian shrieked, her voice broken by sobs and a mental suffering that far surpassed any physical wound. She thrashed on the floor, her nails desperately clawing at the stone, trying to escape from those monsters tearing her soul apart from the inside.
The cultists looked down at her, their hooded faces showing not the slightest pity. To them, those screams were merely the background noise of a successful experiment.
The pain in his left arm had surpassed the threshold of endurance, turning into a cold numbness that radiated up to his shoulder. Hayjin, his face pressed against the rock and his broken arm resting inert beside him, used the only part of his body that still responded: his right hand.
He crawled a few centimeters, leaving a trail of blood on the floor. His fingers brushed the cold metal of his resonance sword's hilt, which had remained on the ground a short distance away. He gripped it with a desperate hold, a grip dictated by the pure madness of someone who has nothing left to lose.
With a gurgle that cost him the last shred of energy in his lungs, he sat up, planting his feet. With a clumsy and violent movement of his left shoulder, he hurled the sword directly at the chest of the Cult's leader.
The weapon flew through the air, emitting a faint hum the last lament of a technological object trying to rebel against magic.
The man in the dark coat didn't move a millimeter. He simply raised two fingers of his left hand, catching the tip of the blade mid-air with an embarrassing, almost offensive ease. The wind generated by the throw dissipated instantly around his fingers.
"You still do not understand, Hayjin," the leader whispered.
He applied a slight pressure with his index finger and thumb.
PING.
A sharp, crystalline sound, and the blade of the resonance sword filled with a spiderweb of glowing cracks. An instant later, the weapon's special steel shattered, exploding into a thousand pieces that rained to the ground like useless metallic confetti. The empty hilt fell with a dull thud among the rubble.
Hayjin remained motionless, his hand still extended into the void, his eyes wide in the face of the total destruction of his only defensive tool.
"It is time to put an end to this farce," the head of the Cult said, pointing the index finger of his right hand directly at the center of Hayjin's chest.
From the tip of his finger erupted a concentrated dart of energy a dark purple, almost black beam that traced a perfect line through the dense air of the tower. The strike hit Hayjin square in the sternum.
BOOM.
The impact didn't throw him backward this time; the magical energy penetrated directly through his tissues, burning his flesh and compressing his internal organs with a devastating shockwave. Hayjin felt a sensation of corrosive heat tearing through his chest from the inside.
"AAAAAAGGGGGHHH! AAAAAARRRGH!"
The scream that tore from his throat was lacerating, broken by a massive, violent expulsion of blood that literally sprayed from his lips in a scarlet stream, striking the surrounding floor. The boy collapsed forward, clutching his chest with his left hand, while the purple beam continued to consume his last remaining strength, leaving him agonizing amidst the shards of his own sword.
The dark purple energy slowly dissipated into the air of the ruined tower, leaving behind wisps of black smoke that smelled of burnt flesh and ozone. Hayjin's chest was reduced to an open wound beneath the scorched fabric of his jacket; the cloth had fused with his skin in a shapeless mass of purplish and scarlet sores that continued to emit a corrosive heat.
The boy finally collapsed onto his side, pressing his left ear against the cold crystal of the floor. His broken right arm remained trapped beneath his own weight, and that added pressure on the shattered bone triggered a new wave of painful impulses that made his eyes snap open into the void. He could no longer scream. His throat was too full of blood, too dry, too torn apart.
Tears began to stream uncontrollably from his eyes, hot and clear, carving clean tracks through the mud, blue dust, and clotted blood that covered his cheeks. These were tears born not only from the collapse of his body, but from the total and final breakdown of his mind.
"It hurts..." Hayjin whispered, the sound so faint that the whistling of the wind through the rubble nearly drowned it out. A thread of saliva mixed with blood slipped from the corner of his lips, settling onto the crystal. "Fuck... it hurts... it hurts so much... please, stop..."
The Cult leader didn't move a step. He stood there, a motionless shadow in the twilight, observing the boy's agony with the same coldness an anatomist would study the nervous reflex of a skinned frog. That absolute indifference hurt Hayjin more than the magical beam. It made him feel insignificant. A miscalculation of the universe.
"Why...?" Hayjin's voice broke in a muffled sob that made his chest heave, triggering another lancinating pain in his sternum. The fingers of his left hand clawed weakly at the floor, searching for a handhold that didn't exist. "Why... why me? What did I do... so horrible... to deserve this? Why does all of this have to happen to me?"
His mind, unable to handle the sheer volume of painful stimuli, sought refuge in the recent past. Just a few hours ago. The memory presented itself with cruel sharpness, almost as if to mock him.
"Just a few hours ago... everything was going well," he muttered, his voice turning childlike, a litany of pure despair. "We were in Opes... studying the dossiers... I was teasing... Zhilian about her princess ways... everything was fine. We were just two kids trying to pass a damn exam. How did we end up here? How is it possible that this hell opened up beneath my feet...?"
The cold of the crystal floor began to seep into his bones, progressively replacing the burning of the purple beam. It was a familiar cold. A cold that Hayjin already had imprinted in the cellular memory of his spirit.
The thought of his first death the real one, the one on Earth, in that dark, rain-soaked alley surfaced with the force of a sinking anchor. He remembered the sensation of the knife tearing through his tissues, the mathematical certainty that his life was fading away amidst the garbage, with nobody caring.
"I'm back there again..." Hayjin realized, and a new flood of tears completely blurred his vision, transforming the figures of the cultists into monstrous, dilated shadows. "I ended up here again... in the exact same way. Nothing has changed. All that talk about a second chance... about this world being different... all bullshit. I'm dying like trash again, covered in blood, on a cold floor, while strangers watch me croak."
A sense of cosmic injustice wrapped around him like a lead blanket. He had tried to adapt. He had used his brain, his analyst's logic, his knowledge of frequencies to fill the void of his lack of mana. He had fought tooth and nail not to be mere dead weight. And what was the result? An arm snapped in two and a hole in his chest.
"It's my fault..." he began to repeat, his mind slipping definitively into the abyss of the most destructive guilt. He painstakingly shifted his gaze a few millimeters, pointing his wet eyes toward the curled up figure of Zhilian, who not far away continued to emit faint groans in her hallucination induced sleep. "It's entirely my fault. I couldn't... I couldn't even defend her. I didn't know how to do anything but get my sword broken. I couldn't even buy her five minutes of her time."
The silence of the dungeon was broken only by his wet breaths and the ticking of the crystals. The cultists were there, mute witnesses to a total surrender. Hayjin felt drained of every last shred of human dignity.
"I am... just a nobody..." he said, the words leaving his lips with the weight of a final sentence. "A complete, absolute nobody... I'm worth nothing. I spent my whole life believing I was smarter than everyone else, and here... in this real world... I'm just cattle for the slaughter. A system error... tossed into a corner."
Sadness flooded him, a liquid and dense sadness that seemed to replace the blood missing from his veins. The physical pain had lessened, turning into a dull numbness a sign that his body was beginning to shut down its nerve endings to protect itself from final shock. But the pain of the soul was intact, vivid, ruthless.
"Where did I go wrong?" he asked himself, looking at the fragments of his resonance sword scattered around his left hand. The pieces of special metal gleamed faintly, ironic relics of a crushed ambition. "Where the fuck did I go wrong... in my entire life? In the first one, in the second one... when did this disaster begin?"
The leader of the Cult took a small step forward, the hem of his leather coat brushing against one of the shards of Hayjin's sword. He slightly raised the brass cylinder, its purple light beginning to fade, a sign that their task in this sector was complete.
"Your mistake, Hayjin," the man said in his usual flat, warmthless voice, "was believing that knowledge could substitute essence. This world does not belong to those who understand the rules, but to those who have the strength to write them with suffering."
Hayjin didn't answer. He closed his eyes, letting his last tears mix into the dark pool widening beneath his head. The sound of the wyvern in the distance became a muffled whisper, like the sound of the sea heard through a seashell. The chapter of his second life was closing exactly like the first: in the darkness, in pain, and with the heartbreaking certainty of never having been enough.