Only wind screaming across the ridge.
Before he could reset his breathing, the air got heavy, like pressure had doubled in one ugly second.
[System Alert: 4/4 Void-Stalked Entities Neutralized] [Soul Convergence Initiated]
The fourth orb rose from the dead husk.
Not like the others. Bigger. Denser. Meaner. It pulsed in a heavy rhythm perfectly synced to Leonardo's heartbeat and painted the fog with bruised toxic light.
It moved toward him.
Leonardo braced and crushed the dagger hilt until his knuckles went white.
The orb touched his chest.
No burn. No frost.
The world simply... vanished.
No ridge. No wind. No forest. No mountain. No physical reality at all.
Leonardo wasn't standing anymore. He wasn't even sure he still had a body to stand with. He was reduced to a single point of consciousness suspended in an endless suffocating ocean of violet-black ink.
Cold. Not normal cold. The old kind, the kind that feels older than stars.
In the dead center of that void, one structure stood there like it didn't care about physics.
A throne.
It wasn't stone. Wasn't gold. Wasn't obsidian. The whole thing was built from twisted calcified limbs. Thousands of them. Human arms, inhuman claws, long unnatural appendages, all fused together and locked in one endless reach toward a sky that didn't exist and never would.
Sitting upon this mountain of dead reach was a figure.
The figure wore robes so dark they seemed to drink the violet light around them. Not metaphorically. Literally swallow it. No face, no skin, no expression. Just a smooth polished obsidian mask where features should've been.
Across the center of the mask, two horizontal, jagged slits existed.
They pulsed slow and steady, leaking that same bruised toxic purple the monsters had.
"So," a voice resonated.
The voice didn't cross distance. There was no air to cross. It appeared straight inside Leonardo's skull, vibrating in the wet tissue of his brain. Heavy. Ancient. Bored in a way that felt worse than rage.
"The Star Reaper has found a new vessel."
Leonardo tried to move. Tried to pull Vazio. Tried anything. Nothing worked. The violet ink around him felt like cooling lead and pinned his consciousness in place.
The figure on the throne leaned forward.
Pressure doubled. Then tripled. Like an entire ocean deciding one grain of sand was personal.
"You harvest my hounds," the voice said, each syllable scraping across his mind like a blade, "and now you think you're a hunter." A hand came out of the robes. Pale. Too long. All bone. One finger pointed straight at Leonardo's left eye.
"The Twelve Tiers are a lie," the King whispered. "A fairy tale told by frightened children who are terrified of the dark. And I..."
"...I am the dark."
Heat detonated in Leonardo's left eye. Not a dull ache anymore. A burning coal rammed into the socket. He felt his mind start to fray at the edges while his brain cooked under the pressure.
The King stood up.
Under him, the limb-throne started to shatter. The sound was wrong for a place with no air: like a thousand giant mirrors cracking all at once.
The violet ink surged like a tsunami and jammed itself into his mouth and nose, filling his lungs with shadow. He was drowning in nothing.
But it wasn't just ink. It was a memory.
A memory that did not belong to him.
His mind got ripped wider and forced to watch a massive city of white stone and gold spires. Not being invaded. Not burning. Being eaten. Shadows peeled off walls and towers like black water and swallowed the whole population. No corpses. No ruins. Just erasure.
The obsidian mask was the very last thing he saw before the vision tore itself apart at the seams.
"I see you, Leonardo," the King whispered, and the words kept echoing in that endless dark.
Leonardo's eyes snapped open.
The return hit like a punch to the ribs. He gasped hard, lungs jerking, dragging in thin freezing mountain air that barely had oxygen in it.
The violet void was gone.
Moonlight snapped back, silver and cold on wet jagged granite. He was flat on his back, staring at empty sky, fingers dug so hard into damp moss they hurt.
His left eye felt flayed open. Heavy heat pulsed behind it, and dark spots kept swimming at the edge of his vision without going away.
"The King..." he whispered.
The words felt physical. The name tasted like burnt ash and rusted copper on his tongue.
He sat up slow. Every joint, muscle, and tendon protested like he'd been run over.
He looked around. The plateau was empty.
The four Void-Stalked carcasses were gone. Not rotted. Dissolved. Their mass had melted into the heavy gray mist blanketing the ridge.
Only the Sting remained.
It lay on the stone a few inches from his right hand. The dagger had changed. Those old silver etchings in the Earth-Tier metal weren't bright anymore. They were stained bruised purple and pulsing in a slow heavy beat, like a second heart.
Leonardo reached out. He grasped the hilt.
The old comforting cold was gone. In its place, a low resonant heat throbbed up his arm and settled in his chest, exactly where the four harvested souls had collided.
[System Status: Integration Complete] [Warning: Soul Corruption at 4.2%. Monitor Vazio stability.]
Leonardo forced himself to stand. His legs shook violently, but they held his weight.
He looked west over the huge canopy of Elinor. Silent now. No clicking. No hiss. No hunting hum.
But the silence didn't feel like peace. It felt exactly like a held breath. A predator waiting in the tall grass.
Deal done. He survived the vertical ambush. Took four souls. Got stronger.
But when he raised the Sting and checked his reflection in that tainted blade, he didn't see the kid who had left the manor.
His left eye.
It used to be plain gray. Now the iris was laced with thick permanent violet veins that glowed and flickered in the dark: a physical mark of the abyss he had swallowed.
"I see you, too," Leonardo muttered.
His voice wasn't shaking. It was entirely cold. Steady. Dead.
He sheathed the corrupted blade, turned his back on the cliff edge, ignored the blood on the stone, and started the long ugly descent back to the forest floor.
He had two days to reach Albion. But that shining capital he'd dreamed about his whole life no longer looked like safety. It looked like thin glass waiting for a boot.
The lesson was over.
The war had just become deeply, undeniably personal.