The battlefield was still. Aerith lay dead at Dylan's feet, her divine blood soaking into the broken ground like molten gold. Her last scream had long faded into the nothingness above—this parallel dimension, this godless cage, no longer echoed anything holy.
Dylan stood amidst the wreckage, his breath shallow, blood running down his temple. His sword, cracked and dim, trembled in his hand. The others—Zephyr, Lilith, Necros, Tenshin—were still recovering from their own war deeper within the realm. He was alone now. Alone with a corpse that once ruled light.
But even in death, Aerith's body shimmered with divine decay. As Dylan turned to walk away, the ground beneath her erupted.
A hand shot out—black, twisted, scaled—and gripped his ankle.
But it wasn't hers.
It was something older. Something deeper.
Aerith's death had opened a crack… not in the earth, but in reality.
The air became syrupy. Time slowed. Shadows stretched, split, and coiled around Dylan's body. Voices whispered—not from mouths, but from wounds.
"You unseated the false light," a thousand voices said as one. "Now, accept our covenant. Become the Womb."
Dylan screamed as he was yanked downward into the hollow.
The fall was endless. Not physical, but metaphysical.
He landed not on ground—but in a womb. A living chamber of pulsating black flesh, suspended in a void of red lightning. The walls were lined with teeth, eyes, and twitching fingers. Veins pumped black ichor. The ceiling wept embryos of failed gods.
Dylan could not scream. The air was thick with silence.
A figure emerged. Not man. Not demon. A womb-shaped entity with a crown of uterine thorns and eyes stitched shut. It floated above the living pit.
"You destroyed divinity. Now you shall birth abomination."
Chains of bone shot from the walls, binding Dylan's limbs. His chest was slashed open—not with a blade, but by will. Flesh peeled. Bones cracked.
And into him, it planted the Seed of the Hollow Womb.
The seed did not grow—it consumed.
His veins turned black. His skin pulsed with foreign heat. His spine twisted, growing an additional vertebra that functioned as a sac.
From his chest emerged a new organ—a grotesque, sentient womb of blood and bone. It pulsed, breathed, and… wept.
His vision blurred as power surged into him.
Wombforging – Dylan could now spawn weapons, limbs, and armor from the womb itself. They were not summoned—they were born. Each blade had its own pulse, scream, and hunger. Despair Seedlings – If Dylan wounded an enemy, the Hollow Womb planted a parasitic seed into their body. It fed on fear and trauma, eventually mutating them into hollowed husks under his control. Hollow Ascension – In moments of near-death, Dylan could enter a partial fusion with the dark hell. His body elongated, his eyes vanished, and his heartbeat synchronized with the void. In this form, he became unreadable—his existence glitching in and out of the physical plane.
The ritual climaxed when Dylan's scream finally returned—only it wasn't human.
He emerged from the womb chamber, not crawling, but rising.
Reborn.
The Gatekeeper had vanished after watching that zephyr had still left his trump card; it was whole silence, like a dead end. Zephyr looked at the cohort, who had now recovered from the spiritual pressure of the gatekeeper and the dark void and were now finally stable. They looked at Zephyr with a serious emotion as if this battle is about to take some twists and turns, and they exactly know this is going to last longer. All of them had very cold and serious reactions; the climate inside the void was pretty tense and hot, but now that the cohort has suffered, they are very well aware of it, and they can't wait for dylan to comeback before it's too late or who knows he won't even come back, the cohort was about to face their toughest yet most horrifying battle which might end up being a nightmare for them.
The void remained still.
The Gatekeeper had vanished into the corpse-murk of the forbidden sky, but his presence was thick in the air—like the sour breath of a predator that hadn't finished feeding. The stone beneath the cohort was cracked, laced with runes that pulsed faintly with violet light. The battle that had nearly torn Zephyr apart left behind a warped terrain, jittering in and out of sync with time.
Zephyr remained kneeling, breath ragged, the Edilion Fang flickering faintly in his blood-slicked grasp. Lilith stood behind him, her pale skin singed and bruised, black ribbons coiling from her back like sentient tendrils. Necros leaned against a dead statue that was still weeping black fluid. Tenshin was silent, arms crossed, eyes focused on the broken bridge ahead—the place where the Gatekeeper had died... and resurrected.
"He's not dead," Tenshin said at last.
Lilith's jaw tightened. "He was obliterated."
Necros chuckled, a low dry sound. "And yet here we are. Still trapped. Still bleeding. Still breathing the same cursed air."
Zephyr's voice came low and slow. "He's looping."
Lilith raised an eyebrow. "What?"
Zephyr stood, his knees trembling. "The Gatekeeper. The entity isn't bound by normal death. He's tethered to the loop of this dimension. Every time we kill him... the dimension resets the core of his being. He is both guardian and symptom of the system."
Tenshin narrowed his eyes. "Then we aren't fighting a creature. We're fighting a failsafe."
Lilith stepped closer, black eyes glittering. "Then how do we kill a failsafe?"
Necros laughed. "By finding its command code."
Zephyr looked up, a faint glimmer returning to his eyes. "Exactly."
The four of them began moving—deeper into the fractured heart of the dimension. As they descended through skeletal spires and silent caverns stitched with blood-colored crystals, whispers began bleeding through the walls. Murmurs from lost gods, echoes of corrupted memories.
Time collapsed around them. Shadows moved in reverse. Footsteps echoed before they landed.
They arrived in what appeared to be a cathedral inverted—a roof of bone beneath a sky of molten stone. A terminal pulsed at the altar, mechanical and organic, fused with the nervous system of the realm.
Tenshin approached, fingers glowing. "This is no altar... it's a dimension core."
He laid his palm flat against it.
A scream erupted through the cathedral. The air rippled. The Gatekeeper's eye appeared in the ceiling—a single vertical slit of endless depth.
"Don't touch it too long," Zephyr warned. "It reacts."
Tenshin gritted his teeth. "I can extract fragments. Memories... failure logs."
Lilith's eyes flickered. "Logs?"
Tenshin nodded. "This place isn't organic. It's artificial... constructed from failure cycles. A prison built over and over again. We're in a simulation of punishment."
Zephyr stepped forward. "So there's a crack?"
Tenshin's voice dropped. "There's always a crack."
For hours—or days; time was breaking—they worked together. Necros summoned the spirits of those who had failed before. Lilith channeled their despair into glyphs. Zephyr bent time around frozen fragments, observing frames of the past. Tenshin decoded pulse patterns in the system's spine.
They encountered failed versions of themselves—torn, twisted, decayed. Echoes of previous loops. Lilith watched one version of herself drag a bleeding Zephyr into the abyss. Another showed Tenshin disemboweling Necros in madness.
"They've all failed," Necros murmured.
"But we have their scars," Lilith replied.
And at last, they found it.
A recursive loop error.
"A parasite soul," Tenshin whispered. "There's an echo caught in the realm's center. It feeds the Gatekeeper's resurrection."
"It's not just energy," Zephyr added. "It's a trapped mind—a prisoner that powers the loop."
Necros' jaw cracked as he grinned. "Then we find it. We kill it. We starve the reset."
Tenshin's hand tightened. "We must destroy its core—remove it from time entirely."
Lilith nodded. "No mercy. No burial. We're going to rip it out of existence."
The ground shifted beneath them as they passed through a sequence of mirrored corridors. Each wall reflected not their current selves—but alternate failures. Screams layered over screams.
At the center of the rift was a crystal cradle, webbed with living veins.
Inside it, a young version of the Gatekeeper.
"That's the parasite," Tenshin hissed.
Lilith's ribbons unfurled. "He's been reborn thousands of times… here's the first."
Zephyr raised Edilion Fang.
The cradle pulsed.
A shadow erupted from the crystal. It took on a monstrous form—half child, half beast—blinking in and out of frame.
Necros snarled. "Here we go again."
They fought.
And this time, the dimension began to crack.
The four of them began moving—deeper into the fractured heart of the dimension. As they descended through skeletal spires and silent caverns stitched with blood-colored crystals, whispers began bleeding through the walls. Murmurs from lost gods, echoes of corrupted memories.
Time collapsed around them. Shadows moved in reverse. Footsteps echoed before they landed.
They arrived in what appeared to be a cathedral inverted—a roof of bone beneath a sky of molten stone. A terminal pulsed at the altar, mechanical and organic, fused with the nervous system of the realm.
Tenshin approached, fingers glowing. "This is no altar... it's a dimension core."
He laid his palm flat against it.
A scream erupted through the cathedral. The air rippled. The Gatekeeper's eye appeared in the ceiling—a single vertical slit of endless depth.
"Don't touch it too long," Zephyr warned. "It reacts."
Tenshin gritted his teeth. "I can extract fragments. Memories... failure logs."
Lilith's eyes flickered. "Logs?"
Tenshin nodded. "This place isn't organic. It's artificial... constructed from failure cycles. A prison built over and over again. We're in a simulation of punishment."
Zephyr stepped forward. "So there's a crack?"
Tenshin's voice dropped. "There's always a crack."
Scene: Loop Deconstruction
For hours—or days; time was breaking—they worked together. Necros summoned the spirits of those who had failed before. Lilith channeled their despair into glyphs. Zephyr bent time around frozen fragments, observing frames of the past. Tenshin decoded pulse patterns in the system's spine.
They encountered failed versions of themselves—torn, twisted, decayed. Echoes of previous loops. Lilith watched one version of herself drag a bleeding Zephyr into the abyss. Another showed Tenshin disemboweling Necros in madness.
"They've all failed," Necros murmured.
"But we have their scars," Lilith replied.
And at last, they found it.
A recursive loop error.
"A parasite soul," Tenshin whispered. "There's an echo caught in the realm's center. It feeds the Gatekeeper's resurrection."
"It's not just energy," Zephyr added. "It's a trapped mind—a prisoner that powers the loop."
Necros' jaw cracked as he grinned. "Then we find it. We kill it. We starve the reset."
Tenshin's hand tightened. "We must destroy its core—remove it from time entirely."
Lilith nodded. "No mercy. No burial. We're going to rip it out of existence."
The ground shifted beneath them as they passed through a sequence of mirrored corridors. Each wall reflected not their current selves—but alternate failures. Screams layered over screams.
At the center of the rift was a crystal cradle, webbed with living veins.
Inside it, a young version of the Gatekeeper.
"That's the parasite," Tenshin hissed.
Lilith's ribbons unfurled. "He's been reborn thousands of times… here's the first."
Zephyr raised Edilion Fang.
The cradle pulsed.
A shadow erupted from the crystal. It took on a monstrous form—half child, half beast—blinking in and out of frame.
Necros snarled. "Here we go again."
They fought.
It began with Zephyr lunging forward, blade gleaming with compressed time. The parasite dodged impossibly, flickering through dimensions. Lilith caught it mid-phase, ribbons digging in like hooks. It shrieked—glass and madness.
Necros summoned a cyclone of bone, spiking the beast midair, only for it to detonate in fractal shards, tearing Necros's left arm clean off. He laughed through the gore.
Tenshin manipulated the echoes, trapping the parasite in a frozen moment. Zephyr slashed—but the thing split into ten overlapping selves.
"IT'S LEARNING!" Lilith screamed, dragged by its tail.
It grew larger—warped, demonic, screaming with a thousand mouths.
Then a thunderous BOOM.
The Gatekeeper returned.
Worse than before.
Towering. Mangled. Void-leaking. Time-bled.
Its blade came down, crushing Necros into the ground. Bones snapped.
Tenshin tried to phase out—but the Gatekeeper moved faster. A palm strike collapsed Tenshin's ribs and sent him hurling through six dimensions.
Lilith screamed, ribbons tearing into the Gatekeeper's face. It retaliated by grabbing her and slamming her into the spire.
Blood sprayed the walls.
Zephyr activated Staggered Hour. Time warped.
He fought alone—looping, blinking, slashing. But the Gatekeeper matched every move. The blade Edilion Fang cracked.
"No," Zephyr whispered.
The Gatekeeper punched through his chest.
As Zephyr fell to his knees, bleeding, broken—the Gatekeeper stood above them all.
Unstoppable.
To Be Continued…