Eloy pressed one palm flat against the stone floor and counted his own heartbeat.
[ HP: 45% — POISON TICK DEDUCTION ]
Four beats. Three seconds.
[ HP: 42% ]
He did the math. Three percent every ten seconds. Roughly eight minutes before the number bottomed out. The Leader was still crouching at eye level, one hand on his knee, watching Eloy's face like he was reading something interesting in it.
[TrollKing99]: GG. ACTUALLY GG. good run folks
[PraiseTheSun]: BRO USE A HEALING ITEM
[IsoldeSimp47]: DOES HE HAVE ONE
[LMAO_cat]: he doesn't have one. he never picked one up. he's at 42 and dropping.
[nachtfalter]: someone do the math on this please
He already knew what they were saying.
"So." The Leader tilted his head. "You broke my ritual, bled on my floor, and now you're thinking too much. That's an unusual response to a recruitment offer."
Valen stepped forward.
He didn't announce it. He just moved to Eloy's left, and the two captured blades were reversed in his hands, grip casual enough to read as habit rather than threat.
"Caldwell deployed advance scouts before these two left. He knows the location. Ninety minutes before a Cavalry vanguard comes down those stairs."
The Leader smiled. Not the polite kind.
"Valen Croi." He said it like a man enjoying the way the syllables sat in his mouth. "I've been reading your files for years. You're thorough. Resourceful." He stood, hands clasped behind his back, turning away. "Caldwell sent these children here to die. He didn't file a location report. There is no vanguard." He glanced back. "You know this."
Valen produced a cigarette from somewhere and lit it without looking away from the Leader.
"I said ninety minutes," he said. "I didn't say I believed it."
[ HP: 39% ]
Isolde's hands were still up. The electricity had migrated from her palms to her forearms, two lines of it running purple-white and quiet under her skin. The nearest operatives hadn't advanced. Eloy had been tracking that standoff for twenty seconds and logged it: she was holding the room through sheer threat density alone, burning something he couldn't measure to do it.
He grabbed her ankle.
She went very still.
"I've got it," he said.
"You don't—"
"I've got it."
The electricity cut off her hands like a switch. She didn't say anything else. Eloy used the stillness to pull himself upright, and the floor made a serious attempt to tilt, and he chose the wall instead of the floor, and nobody needed to know that.
The Leader watched him stand with the expression of a man revising an estimate upward.
"Interesting," he said. "The floor is at a standard angle."
"Yeah." Eloy turned to face him. "What's the initiation."
"I place my hand on your chest. I push Mugen-Za mana through your foundation, and your body either accepts it or it doesn't." He spread his hands. "Most candidates don't make it past thirty seconds. You're already poisoned, which makes the variable more interesting." He paused. "If you survive, you're clan. We honor that."
"And if I refuse."
"Then I'm very sorry about what happens next." He glanced at Arthur, sitting against the far wall with his jaw set, spending most of his remaining strength on the trying to stay conscious. "Both of them."
Eloy looked at the chat feed.
[ghostrunner_x]: eloy if you don't do this we die
[nachtfalter]: the system already told him. it's not optional.
[IsoldeSimp47]: ELOY PLEASE
[LMAO_cat]: bro just do it and survive just do it and survive
[PraiseTheSun]: WE'RE NOT READY TO LOSE THE RUN
He already knew. He'd known since the notification fired over Arthur's ritual circle.
"Do it."
The Leader crossed the space between them without hurrying.
His palm hit Eloy's chest.
Cold. Extremely cold. His vision whited at the edges.
[ FOREIGN MANA INVASION DETECTED ]
[ HP: DROPPING RAPIDLY ]
[ HP: 31% ]
[ HP: 26% ]
He opened the Status menu.
Closed it.
[TrollKing99]: WHAT IS HE DOING
[ghostrunner_x]: STATUS CYCLING. He's cycling the HUD menu.
[nachtfalter]: the menu interrupt delays tick timing. if he can hold the frame—
[LMAO_cat]: IS THAT ACTUALLY A THING
[ghostrunner_x]: IT IS NOW
Open. Close. Open. Close. His thumb hit the same invisible corner of the HUD at the same interval, the same way it had hit the macro key on the Fading Crest final boss the night he died. Automatic. Precise. Completely divorced from whatever his body was doing underneath it.
[ HP: 23% ]
[ HP: 23% ]
The tick held.
[ HP: 22% ]
[ HP: 22% ]
He was counting frames. Not praying. His hands were shaking well outside his ability to control, and his field of vision had narrowed to a circle roughly the diameter of the Leader's face, and he was counting frames.
[ HP: 21% ]
[ HP: 21% ]
The mana pressure spiked. Eloy opened the menu before the next tick. He felt his count slip by a fraction, a single missed beat, and the poison punched through the gap.
[ HP: 16% ]
He heard Isolde move behind him.
He held one hand up. Don't. Not now.
[ HP: 14% ]
Open.
Close.
[ HP: 14% ]
The mana stopped.
Not gradually. One moment it was there and then it wasn't, like a tap shutting off, and the Leader withdrew his hand and looked at his own palm, curiosity all over his expression.
"Extraordinary." He stepped back, turning to address the room. "The foundation of his mana is completely empty. There was nothing there to reject the initiation." He looked back at Eloy. "You survived because you have no affinity for it to fight."
Eloy's hands hit stone.
[ QUEST COMPLETE: MUGEN-ZA INITIATION SURVIVED. ]
[ SOUL DELETION: CANCELED. ]
[ NEW STATUS: MUGEN-ZA CLAN ASSOCIATE (INVOLUNTARY) ]
[IsoldeSimp47]: HE DID IT
[wo1flion]: HE ACTUALLY DID IT
[ghostrunner_x]: menu exploit on a live mana initiation ritual. I have no words.
[TrollKing99]: GOD GAMER
Valen lowered the blades one inch.
Isolde knelt before he'd finished reading the notification. Her hand caught his shoulder and he didn't hit the floor, which he'd been three seconds from doing.
"You're an idiot," she said.
"Yeah." He managed one full breath. "We should leave."
"Yes."
Arthur was already upright. Bbarely, spine pressed to the wall, but on his feet. Valen crossed to him and took his arm without being asked and didn't say anything about it.
"Northeast passage," Valen said. "Same way in. Move now, talk never."
They moved.
Eloy kept the Status HUD in his peripheral. The counter was still dropping, slower now, the menu-stall rhythm still running somewhere in his hands as reflex. Fourteen percent. Fourteen percent, three hundred stairs, and a toxin that had another fifteen minutes minimum before it finished the job the initiation hadn't.
He looked down at his arm.
The wound pulsed black. Not the dull color it had been when the blade caught him. Brighter now, bioluminescent almost, the same red-veined light as the moss on the tunnel walls.
Behind them, the Leader's voice carried up the stone staircase without any effort at all.
"The toxin has roughly twenty minutes. But." He let the pause sit. "Your initiation revealed something interesting. The Mugen-Za teaches its members to weaponize what would kill anyone else. I'll show you how to turn that poison into something useful."
Eloy didn't slow down.
[ HP: 13% ]
The black light in his arm brightened, and the underground went dark.