The whisper barely reached my ears before everything began to collapse.
"You came back..."
Seraphine's voice was a thread. A trembling line between the world of the living and the edge of unconsciousness. When I turned to face her, her eyes tried to smile, but her body had already given up. Blood trickled from her wrist, remnants of what she'd given to feed the chalice. Her shoulders fell like dead petals. She collapsed in the same instant.
I ran, but it was too late. Deep faint. Weak pulse. Terminal effort-induced anemia. Four days bleeding for the others.
I held her in my arms for one second too long.
And then I raised my eyes.
The world around me was no longer the one I had left.
It was a painting in decay, a battlefield silenced under the weight of the end.
Dórian, the unbreakable shield, lay motionless, his hands burned down to the bone.
His chest barely rising, the smell of necrotic flesh thick in the air, coming from within, as if his soul were rotting before his body.
Aeloria was beside him—or what was left of him.
Seraphine's brother had no legs left.
Dry blood formed an altar around him. The necrosis crawled up, stitching his waist with a black, pulsing line of death.
Dália was just a small body, curled up, breathing in thin, whistling gasps.
She had given too much blood. Burned too much prana. She had been more than her body could withstand.
And there it was.
The colossal aberration crawled in silence at the peak of the seventh mountain.
A centipede's body, each segment armored with black scales that devoured light like a black hole made of flesh.
Double jaws twisted into a perpetually mocking grin.
Broken horns curling backward like the tusks of a beast that had survived its own hell.
And the eyes.
God... the eyes.
Twenty in total, scattered randomly across the deformed face.
Some blinked diagonally, others were frozen like panes of glass.
Some... vibrated.
Others spun in orbits that defied physical law.
It felt like each eye saw a universe.
And they were all staring at me.
Chitinous claws tapped the ground with dry, brittle clicks, like glass being scratched.
Six legs. Each one a blade of obsidian, like the arms of the locusts we fought.
The tail coiled like a viper, ending in a stinger pulsing with purple venom.
And wherever it touched, the earth decayed.
This was the end of the road.
The final judge.
The very concept of annihilation given form.
And I was all that remained.
I stood between the fallen.
Closed my eyes.
Took a deep breath.
And let space respond.
I felt the power rushing through my energy pathways. My core flooded, my nexus bathed in both prana and mana. A final self-scan.
Four days here and four weeks inside the ring. And all the progress I made came back with me—without the wounds.
I was the last one standing.
And was that enough?
I was about to find out.
**
The silence was thick.
Not the kind that comes before death—but the one that follows it. The sound of a world post-collapse. Post-ruin.
The air was heavy, saturated with corrupted prana and subtle ashes drifting like particles of despair. Behind the sixth mountain, a dark void crept toward us. In just a few hours, everything here would be erased like the mountains before.
I inhaled.
And then walked.
My steps echoed on the cold ground as I approached Dórian. The giant lay still, eyes half-shut, face carved in stone. Breathing slow—but still there. Still alive.
The armor covering his torso was shattered, but still usable.
The artifact we found in this dungeon.
An incomplete set. Four pieces: a gauntlet, a vambrace, a couter, and a rerebrace—the entire arm from shoulder to hand now exposed. Mossy green with aged bronze glints. The metal still breathed, proof that artifacts were on another level entirely.
I removed it carefully.
No ceremony. Just necessity.
I donned the pieces slowly, feeling the near-symbiotic fit against my skin.
The artifact pulsed once, as if recognizing me, lightly fed by my prana.
"Better than nothing," I muttered, flexing the arm.
The weight was barely there.
I stepped toward the ground beside Dórian and knelt again.
His sword was there—soaked in blood and dry mud. A brutal blade, made to crush as much as to cut. When I lifted it, the weight caught me off guard.
"Lighter than the ones I used to wield..." I rotated my wrist, testing the balance. "...but it'll do."
And there, standing between the silence of the fallen and the gaze of the monster, I let the last mask fall.
There was no reason left to hide. And I wouldn't—not even if my companions were awake.
Seraphine, comatose.
Dália, unconscious.
Dórian and Aeloria on the brink of death.
There was no point pretending I was just a mage anymore.
My breath slowed.
My muscles hardened.
The energy channels in my body—the ones with specialized pores—swelled. My inner energy surged. Prana leaked into my bones and muscles, strengthening every fiber.
It was like opening long-forgotten floodgates.
Mana and Prana flowed side by side, channeled through pathways that were never meant to coexist.
But in my body, they did. Harmonized. Tamed. Made to converge.
"No more holding back," my voice came out low, but firm—like forged steel.
Heat surged through my shoulders, down my arms, and Dórian's sword quivered faintly in response. I fed it a bit of prana, turning the blade red, like it had just emerged from a forge. I'd seen Dórian use it—I knew it wasn't just a normal weapon.
The energy of a mage.
The presence of a warrior.
I was a Warlord. And for the first time—I allowed myself to be.
"Five minutes," I murmured, staring at the beast crawling in the distance.
"That's all I've got. Either I die, or we get out of this damn dungeon."
The creature kept watching me, its eyes full of curiosity, tracking my every movement like it was testing my resolve. Studying me.
But I didn't need to hide my intent anymore.
I was going to break the world.
Because the goal was never to defeat the monster.
I knew that now.
This dungeon didn't need a hero. It needed someone willing to tear open the truth behind it.
Before making any move, I raised my arm and sharpened all my senses.
Space folded.
A tiny rift opened before my right eye, like a magnifying lens.
I needed answers.
"The first thing..." I said, preparing the spell, "...is to know whether what binds us is the monster or a corrupting artifact."
A small vortex opened before me—eyes peeking into the fabric of the world.
From up there, at the summit of the seventh mountain, where the red sun hung like a candle about to burn out, the landscape wasn't natural.
It was a scar.
The mountaintop had no vegetation. No rocks.
It was as if an entire castle had been crushed by an invisible hand.
Everything had been flattened with surgical precision—like a being of unimaginable power had pressed its palm against the earth and demanded silence.
Some pillars remained.
Not because they were strong—but because they were lucky.
Broken stones. Decapitated towers.
Remnants of architecture that only hinted at what once stood before the devastation.
The ground was metallic—not iron, but something more fluid, pulsing subtly, like stagnant mercury. Like the floors of the previous mountains. A metal that seemed to breathe. Maybe an ancient scar. Maybe a living foundation.
And there, at the edge of the visible world through the rift, I saw it.
At the far end of the artificial plateau.
Alone. Untouched.
A chalice.
Deep red, almost scarlet.
Black veins slithered across its surface, pulsing at irregular intervals.
Every beat of the artifact made the metal around it tremble—like water under thunder.
It was a heartbeat.
That object was alive.
Or worse—it was feeding off something alive.
My blood went cold, but I didn't hesitate.
There was the answer.
There was the core of the corruption.
Not the monster.
The chalice.
The guardian was just the jailer.
The chalice was the cell.
"So that's it," I whispered, pulling my vision away from the rift, which snapped shut with a subtle blink—like eyelids.
My objective was clear.
Not to defeat the centipede.
Not to trap myself in a hopeless duel with a creature beyond my level.
I had to destroy the chalice.
With any resource.
With any technique.
With every drop of mana, prana, or blood I had left in my body.
And I would.
Or I'd die trying.
The monster's eyes glowed in the distance.
Its jaws smiled—
As if it knew I had finally understood everything.
The moment had come.
It was all or nothing.