The bodies were already cooling.
Smoke curled from the cracked earth. Steam hissed off my skin. The taste of ash mixed with blood coated my tongue like copper dust.
They were dead. All of them.
But I was still moving.
Glistening.
Essence clung to my flesh like a second skin—slithering, pulsing, twitching. It wasn't mine anymore. It wore me, twisted around my bones like it had always been waiting to take control.
Every movement sparked trails of purple and black light—erratic. Violent. Feral.
The thing inside me…It had no name.No thoughts.Only need.
Kill.
I dropped to all fours without thinking, claws digging into volcanic stone, breath ragged and snarling through gritted teeth. My tongue ran over bloodstained canines. My eyes burned.
No pupils.No whites.Just red.Just black.Just rage.
Something moved nearby.
A flicker behind the fog.
I didn't wait.
Didn't analyze.
Didn't care what it was.
I lunged.
The sound of my foot hitting the ground cracked the stone in a radial blast.
The creature never saw me coming.
Didn't matter what it was.
It existed.
So it had to die.
I hit it mid-sprint—shoulder into ribs. We slammed through a jagged rock spire. I rolled on top of it, pinning it with my knees, and brought both fists down—Essence detonating from my knuckles with every strike.
Bone.Stone.Flesh.
Didn't matter.
It all gave way.
By the time I stood, its body was paste.
And I was grinning.
More.
I sprinted into the haze—not for escape.
For the next.
The Mortar Zone breathed violence.
Everything here was born of fire and fury—shaped by pressure, hardened in hatred.
But I was worse.
I was born in silence.Fed on pain.Sharpened in regret.
I became a blur across the scorched fields.
Everything that moved—twitched, breathed, existed—
I tore it apart.
A creature with bladed arms lunged at me. I let it hit me just to feel it. Just to taste the impact.
It screamed in my face.
I screamed louder.
Then I grabbed its throat and crushed it in one hand, lifting it off the ground and slamming it into the lava-soaked rocks until it split down the middle.
Steam rose.
Ash rained.
Blood spattered across my chest like war paint.
I didn't wipe it off.
I bathed in it.
Keep going.
Clawed feet thundered across the ridge behind me—more of them.
Pack hunters.
Didn't matter.
I was a pack on my own.
They swarmed.
I didn't dodge.
I didn't flinch.
I threw myself into them like a landslide.
Tore through spines with my bare hands.Ripped jaws sideways until their heads dangled by strands.Bit one across the neck and tasted flame.
Didn't care.
I kept tearing.
One of them shrieked as I broke its legs backwards, then used its body to bludgeon the next.
My hands were cracked and steaming.
Essence leaked like venom from the gashes in my forearms.
Still, I didn't stop.
I couldn't.
Time disappeared.
There was no sun.
No moon.
Just war.
I crawled across the ground between kills.Leapt from cliffs with a snarl in my throat.Dug my claws into things that were once beasts and left them unrecognizable.
I stopped seeing them as anything more than shapes.
Obstacles.
Targets.
There was a moment—I don't know when—where I caught my reflection again.
In a molten pool.
What I saw made my heart hesitate.
Just once.
Hair clumped with blood.Skin split in a dozen places.Eyes glowing like a star on its deathbed—red, seething, animal.
A monster.
Not haunted.
Not hunted.
Just predator.
I punched the reflection until the surface broke.
The kills kept coming.
I started using the terrain—slamming enemies into walls, dragging them through lava currents, impaling them on obsidian shards I shaped with raw force.
One tried to beg.
I didn't speak its language.
Didn't matter.
My knee drove through its skull before it finished the first syllable.
Everything slowed near the end.
Not because I stopped.
But because there was nothing left.
The field of the Mortar Zone had gone silent.
I stood in a crater, blood dripping off my arms, jaw locked, essence fizzing like unstable gas.
Breathing too hard.
Chest seizing.
Legs twitching.
My body had reached its limit.
But the thing inside me hadn't.
It wanted more.
It always wanted more.
I stumbled forward—half-running, half-crawling—until the ground gave out beneath me.
A fissure.Deep.Black.
I fell.
Didn't care.
Didn't scream.
Just let gravity take me.
I landed hard.Rocks cracked beneath me.The light of the zone faded overhead.
And finally—
Finally—
I stopped.
Face in the dirt.Body twitching.Essence flickering out in short, wild pulses.
I didn't even feel pain anymore.
Only exhaustion.
Only that small, whispering voice...
Still begging for another kill.
But for now…
I had no more blood to spill.
I don't know how long I laid there.
Minutes.Hours.A full day, maybe.
Time didn't pass in this place.It just hovered.
Thick.Sulfuric.Buzzing like a live wire just beneath my skin.
My body twitched again.
The last tremor of a dying engine.
Essence still fizzled from my fingertips—spitting purple and black sparks into the air, flickering along the floor like dying insects. The glow was dim now.
Barely pulsing.
But the heat from it still scalded the rock beneath me.
I tried to move.
Couldn't.
Arms wouldn't respond.
Legs were locked in cramps—muscle fibers frayed from too much motion, too much pressure, too much power run through something not built to hold it.
My mouth was dry.
My throat tasted like rust.
I'd bitten through my tongue at some point—maybe when I crushed that thing's spine between my forearms. I couldn't remember. Didn't care.
I had killed everything.
The high of it still lingered behind my eyes.
The feel of blood bursting against my fists.
The sensation of spines snapping under my grip.
The weightless thrill of leaping into a kill and knowing nothing could stop me.
But now?
I was empty.
The silence pressed in from all sides.
The pit I'd landed in was narrow—claw marks gouged the walls where I'd flailed on the way down. Blood marked the ledge. My blood. Their blood. It was all the same now.
The only light came from the Essence still leaking from my cracked skin.
Faint veins of it pulsing across my arms, my neck, my chest—tiny rivers of violent memory.
My breathing slowed.
But every inhale felt wrong.
Like my lungs had forgotten how to work without rage driving them.
I shifted my head slightly, the stone biting into my temple.
And there it was.
A reflection again.
Faint.Distorted.But still… me.
The creature.
The thing that tore through an army of fire-born beasts without blinking.
Hair stuck to my face with blood.
Eyes still faintly glowing.
Pupils like a beast's.
"Grimson," I muttered under my breath.
The name felt like sand on my tongue.
But it fit.
Too well.
Not a man.
Not anymore.
I wasn't just soulless in name.
I had become it.
And that thought?
Didn't scare me.
But the silence did.
Because in the silence, I could hear myself again.
Not the beast.
Not the blood.
Me.
The boy Faze raised.
The man Violet believed in.
The soul Nyxia whispered to in the dark.