"Ren... look at this..." Copper's voice echoed, hoarse but laced with a strange certainty.
Ren opened his eyes.
In front of him, Copper was standing in the dim room, arm outstretched as if touching something invisible.
The faint magical light cast his shadow across the stone floor, making him look like a crumbling statue.
A soft clink of metal sounded, armor pieces on his forearm trembled in the heavy silence.
Ren frowned.
He was at it again. It had been more than a day, almost two, if their sense of time still held... the system clock said so... both of them were stuck in this sealed space.
No exit, no hidden door, no hint of another path.
They had even tried going back... but the maze no longer allowed it. It was as if it had come alive, shifting its walls to trap them inside.
At first, Copper had stubbornly checked every crevice, tracing every crack like a blind man reading. But when he found nothing, he collapsed onto the stone floor like a man defeated.
And now this? Arm stretched into empty air? That strange tone in his voice?
He's gone mad... Ren exhaled quietly, but didn't say it aloud. He closed his eyes, too exhausted to care anymore.
Hunger hollowed his stomach. Thirst made every breath feel like it dragged over thorns. Every fleeting thought was crushed by a dull, relentless dizziness.
If Copper truly had lost his mind, Ren couldn't blame him. They were only human, there was no HP bar to measure how much a soul could fracture.
Ren leaned back against the wall and shut his eyes.
...Just clinging to a hopeless thread of light. Or maybe... an illusion.
Sensing Ren's indifferent silence, Copper spoke again, his voice low but unwavering:
"It's not a hallucination. Come here... try touching it. There's something, like a stone platform... but you can't see it with your eyes."
He raised his head, his gaze glowing with something unusual, not fatigue, not delirium, but the light of absolute belief in something unnamed.
"You have to use... instinct. Not your eyes. But your intuition. Your heart."
"This might be the key to getting out of this damned, cursed place."
Ren looked at him, skeptical. But those eyes didn't belong to a madman. They belonged to someone wide awake, at the very moment when everything else had crumbled.
He stepped forward slowly, hand reaching out as if to peel back a thin veil of reality.
Nothing… just invisible air.
He shook his head lightly, but his fingers kept searching... until a strange sensation brushed against his fingertips.
A resistance. Gentle. Very gentle. Like air that had solidified into shape.
It didn't push him away. But it was there… and he could feel it.
Ren held his breath, palm gliding downward… and the resistance became clearer, like a cold, flat surface existing in midair.
He had touched… something. Invisible, silent, yet undeniable.
…A surface.
Ren froze, his breathing slowing.
It was icy cold like ancient stone, smooth like glass that had slept beneath centuries of dust, yet utterly unreflective, refusing even to acknowledge the world around it.
A stone altar. Invisible. And now Ren knew, Copper was right.
He looked up at him.
Copper said nothing, merely stood there, like a statue worn down by time. But in those dark brown eyes, something burned, an alertness so vivid it seemed the past two days of confusion and despair had been wiped away in this single moment.
"You felt it too… didn't you?" he asked, his voice deep and steady like an echo rising from the heart of ancient stone.
Ren didn't answer. He simply nodded.
And strangely… the moment he accepted its existence, the sensation of touching it became more vivid.
Not just at his fingertips, but spreading through his whole hand, down his arm, like an invisible current flowing into his mind.
Not touch. Not sight. Not sound.
But… a resonance. Like a dream trying to wake up inside him.
A whisper without words, yet clearly heard.
Like a drowning man grasping at a straw in a black sea, Ren began to trace every fragile strand of sensation.
He touched each unseen edge as guided by intuition, his fingers moving slowly, as though pressing into memories buried in frozen stone.
His palm pressed down gently, he wasn't sure what he was hoping to find: a switch, a way out… or simply proof that this thing was real.
Beside him, Copper did the same. His eyes held no doubt now, only a cold, determined resolve. The stone platform wasn't large… or maybe their minds had made it small so they could comprehend it.
Ren traced every inch… then...contact.
A tiny recessed button, pressing into the tip of Ren's finger like a silent whisper.
Click.
A faint sound, thin as a fingernail tapping on glass… yet it echoed through the chamber like an ancient bell awakening after a thousand years.
Ren's heart skipped a beat.
Then the light struck.
No warning. No transition. The entire room exploded in a flash of white, walls, ceiling, and stone floor blazing like thousands of soul-lights flaring to life at once.
"What the hell is happening?" Ren muttered, squinting helplessly.
The light didn't just hit his eyes, it seeped through his skin, through closed eyelids, through thought itself. Every cell in his body felt as if it were being summoned by a presence beyond understanding.
The altar beneath his hand now took form, an obsidian surface carved with strange patterns, both ancient and alive, as if it was… breathing.
But before he could take it in, before he could see anything clearly, the light swallowed it all.
The entire room, and both of them were devoured.
A wave of nausea crashed over him, rising from deep within his gut, dragging with it a dizziness like being violently crystal-warped.
Ren didn't have time to react.
His body slammed against a cold metallic floor with a dull thud, echoing like a sound from within a massive ancient tomb.
Pain shot down his spine like a forced crack. He groaned, no longer able to muster a single question.
It took several breaths before the blinding light faded. Ren opened his eyes.
The room before him looked like nowhere else they had seen in the labyrinth.
And yet… it was chillingly familiar. The space tightened his chest. It felt like a memory that didn't belong to him rising from within his bones.
A sound nearby pulled him back to the present. Copper, the enigmatic companion, had also sat upright, his eyes clouded with confusion and dread.
His face was as handsome as ever, but for the first time since entering the labyrinth… it clearly showed fear.
"We're… back here again…" he breathed, voice choking as if something had lodged in his throat.
His eyes swept across the strange room: high ceilings, shadowed arches, and gold coins covering the floor, each coin marked with an unfamiliar symbol… like the eye of some creature staring up from beneath the earth.
Ren pushed himself upright, heart pounding wildly in his chest.
A low hum echoed from the distance, soft, but it weighed the air like a slab of stone.
"Damn it…" Copper muttered, his voice trembling. He clenched his fists. "That thing is here too."
Ren didn't ask what that thing was.
He didn't need to.
He knew. Or… some part of him did. Like an invisible scar never fully healed, waiting only for the lightest touch to flare in pain again.
This room… the gold, the hushed light, the symbols sunken into every surface like watchers tracking their every breath.
This was the place where the nightmare began, the treasure room where everything seemed like a reward, but was truly the start of a curse.
Ren clenched his hands.
He knew they had escaped the labyrinth, but they weren't truly free. They had simply returned to the place where the darkness and fear first awoke.
"Let's go," he said, voice hoarse and low, without hesitation. Ren sprang to his feet, the ache in his back still sharp, but he refused to stop.
His feet lunged toward the room's exit as if that doorway was the last thread of sanity.
Copper still stood in the middle of the room, eyes lingering on an ancient sword glowing with a pale blue light. His hand almost reached for it, then stopped when Ren turned and signaled.
No words needed. Copper understood.
Even if the room held rare items, top-tier equipment, high-grade healing potions, treasures that could change the tide of the game, it all meant nothing if they died here.
"We're not strong enough to face it yet…" Copper whispered, almost to himself, then turned and ran after Ren, his figure fading into the waning golden light.
And behind them, where the light began to warp… something was stirring awake.
Just a few dozen meters more. The door was right ahead, a faint glow in the stone wall, hazy like an exit in a dream.
Ren and Copper ran with everything they had left. But...
The ground erupted.
The coins blanketing the room vibrated wildly as if moved by an unseen force. They leapt, shimmering like waves across a sea of fire.
Then… darkness crashed down.
A massive figure dropped from the ceiling, tearing through the air like the axe of judgment.
"Shit…!" Copper snarled, flipping away on instinct the moment the ground where he stood exploded into fragments.
BOOM!
The impact sounded like a meteor striking the earth. The treasure room trembled violently, stone ceilings cracked, gold scattered like the remnants of a fallen kingdom.
Ren stopped in his tracks. His chest tightened.
He turned...and saw it.
A creature over two meters tall, shaped like something birthed from a madman's fever dream.
Its body was rugged, muscles knotted beneath golden, metallic skin that shimmered like molten ore. Four massive arms moved with a rippling strength that made its form glisten like heated gold.
But what froze Ren's blood… were its eyes.
No. Two pairs.
Four milky eyes without sclera, unblinking, stared at them with the scorn of an ancient guardian… or a corpse that never found rest.
And now, it was awake.