The small, faded photograph felt impossibly heavy in Kane's trembling hand. His mind, already pushed to the breaking point by cosmic revelations and spectral murder, recoiled from the final, devastating piece of evidence.
"Mom. Dad."
The two figures in the picture, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with a younger, hopeful Emma and the long-lost 'First Batch,' were undeniably his parents. The lines of his mother's smile, the particular, confident set of his father's jaw—they were branded into his memory from his youth, yet here they stood, looking slightly older than the last time he'd seen them, but undeniably alive in the photo.
Kane was shocked to the core. The time discrepancy was a horrific, impossible anomaly. The photo suggested Emma should be the same age as her parents, placing the scene decades in the past, yet Emma herself, the girl who had just vanished, had appeared to be in her early twenties.
He immediately called the others over, his voice tight with urgency, and showed them the photograph.
Clarice looked at it, her expression confused. "What is weird with it? It's just her photo with others."
Kane ignored the general image, his finger stabbing down onto the faces of his parents. "Those are my parents!"
Now all three—Clarice, Linia, and Missy—were shocked into a terrifying silence.immediately snatched the photo, studying it with intense, cold curiosity.
Clarice voiced the terrifying question that hung in the air. "How is she looking younger? Are you sure that is your parents?"
"Even though I lost my parents at a young age, I am pretty sure that they are them," Kane insisted, the certainty deep in his gut. "They have an uncanny resemblance to them. The resemblance is too strong to be a coincidence."
The silence that descended was thick with unspoken horror. The time stream was broken, and his parents' past life was intertwined with the nightmare that had just consumed Emma.
As they huddled over the chilling photograph, the silence of the dust-choked room was violently ruptured.
A sound came from the locked door—a wet, muffled thudding, accompanied by a voice. It was slow, distorted, and sickeningly familiar.
"Hey, Kane. You left me."
Everyone froze. It was Emma's voice.
A pin-drop silence descended, more terrifying than any scream. They stood motionless, staring at the closed door, the source of the disembodied sound.
Before anyone could move or speak—before the panic could crest—Missy broke the spell, her voice faint but carrying an eerie, unsettling clarity.
"So... Who are you?"
All three of them looked at Missy, who had clearly sensed that she had messed up the crucial element of fear in the silence. 'Seriously,' Kane thought, the internal exasperation battling the external terror.
The voice from the other side of the door did not answer Missy directly. Instead, it let out a low, eerily drawn-out laugh. The sound was like dry rust scraping against bone. Kane felt shivers ripple violently down his spine. The sound was a terrifying, distant echo of the voice he had heard in the Soul Devouring Tree—a chilling, predatory sound of pure malice.
The laugh stopped abruptly, replaced by a cold, conversational tone.
"Remember, Kane, when you asked that question?"
Kane hesitated, a knot of ice forming in his stomach, remembering his final words to Emma: 'So, how long are you stuck here?'
The voice, now sounding closer, almost inside the room, continued the terrifying narrative: "Well, I haven't counted the days. But one fine day, I slept on the bed and suddenly, my body got disintegrated. My veins, my organs... they were absorbed into the walls. So, yeah. I can't keep track of the time."
Kane was stunned. This wasn't a killer; it was a phenomenon, a consciousness fused with the structure. He looked wildly around the room, frantically searching the surfaces.
His eyes fell on the wall. What he had dismissed as faded, ornate designs in the plaster, he now saw with stark, horrifying clarity. They were thin, dark, branching, and pulsing.
'Those are not designs. Those are Emma's blood veins,' the realization struck him, a profound, visceral sickness washing over him. The husk they found was just the discardable outer shell; the true Emma was the building itself.
Clarice and Linia, who had been hearing this monologue of cosmic horror, started to sweat. The former god and the hardened veteran realized they were not in a building; they were inside the digestive tract of a monstrously amplified, tormented consciousness.
The horror reached its final, most intimate climax.
Suddenly, Kane felt an impossible closeness. The air directly in front of his face thickened, growing cold and clammy.
He saw Emma's Face alone, staring at him. It was a floating, skin-mask apparition, only the face, detached from the body, suspended in the air. The empty eye sockets, the pale, hollowed skin, were inches from his own.
Emma spoke, her lips moving with a sickening, silent precision, her voice a bone-chilling whisper that seemed to bypass his ears and speak directly to the core of his soul.
The final words were breath-hot, close to his ear, a promise of eternal, terrifying union.
"Let's reach Enlightenment, shall we."
The words were the final trigger.
Linia even with her divine powers severely constrained, reacted on instinct. She let out a fierce, guttural cry—not a human shout, but a primordial snap of will that momentarily repelled the spectral attack. She reached out, trying to grab Kane and the unnervingly stoic Missy, attempting to retreat from the impossible face.
But it was too late.
The room, the small, dusty space that they had just realized was alive, retaliated instantly. The dark, branching lines on the walls—Emma's calcified blood veins—began to pulse with a sickly, internal luminescence, glowing like fevered red maps beneath the plaster. The air became thick and heavy, like trying to breathe under stagnant water.
The floor beneath them did not break or crack; it fell away.
Descent into the Non-Space
Without warning, without friction, and without gravity, they all felt the sickening, total loss of spatial orientation. The floor, the ceiling, the very geometry of the room, tore apart, replaced by an absolute, freezing void.
All three of them felt themselves falling.
It was a plunge not through air, but through non-space—a terrifying, stomach-lurching, infinite drop through a monochrome, lightless realm that felt like the inside of a dying creature's nightmare. The sensation was immediate and total, rendering their senses useless. They couldn't scream, couldn't see, couldn't tell if they were falling up or down.
In that terrifying, transitional moment between the real room and the infinite blackness, the entity struck.
Clarice, who had been standing slightly behind Linia, attempting to brace herself against the illusion of the door, was momentarily caught between realities. As Linia desperately clutched Missy's arm, trying to pull both herself and Kane toward the center of the perceived fall, Clarice's left leg drifted too close to the edge of the collapsing reality.
The edge of the void was not a boundary; it was a scissor.
A sharp, unbearable flash of white-hot pain ripped through the darkness. The edge of the collapsed room—the psychic tear in the fabric of space engineered by Emma's tormented consciousness—closed like a guillotine.
There was no sound of tearing flesh, no crunch of bone. Just a clean, cold, sickening snuff.
The transition ended as violently as it began.
They crashed not onto a floor, but onto something solid, cold, and rough—a surface that abruptly materialized out of the void. They were lying in what looked like the remnants of the cathedral floor, but warped, twisted into unnatural shapes, dimly lit by a sickly, green light that seemed to ooze from the stone itself.
Kane gasped, the wind knocked out of him, his head reeling from the disorientation of the sudden, brutal descent. He pushed himself up, it is screaming a delayed, painful warning that the danger was internal, not external.
Linia was immediately on her feet, coughing, her eyes blazing with focused terror. She looked at Clarice, who lay motionless beside a jagged piece of stone.
A low, rasping sound escaped Clarice's throat.
Clarice's left leg was gone.
It wasn't a messy wound; the cut was clean, terrifyingly precise, severed just above the knee as if by a razor-sharp, invisible wire. The skin around the stump was taut and bloodless, cauterized instantly by the sheer power of the dimensional tear. Yet, blood—fresh, warm, impossible blood—immediately began to pool on the cold, grey stone, staining the unnatural green luminescence.
Missy, having landed beside Clarice, stared blankly at the injury, her breath coming in shallow, silent gasps behind the fabric covering her mouth.
Linia rushed to Clarice, ignoring the growing crimson stain. She tore a strip of cloth from her own skirt and began tying it tightly around the stump, her ancient knowledge overriding her shock.
"It wasn't a blade," Linia whispered to Kane, her eyes wide with fear. "It was the closing of the space. She got caught in the tear."
Kane looked at the wound, his stomach churning, the horror of Ben's husk now compounded by the gruesome reality of Clarice's amputation. He realized the terrifying truth: the entire cathedral was the killer's body, and they were trapped inside its mind, subject to its every maddened whim.
Clarice groaned, her eyes fluttering open, landing immediately on the space where her leg had been. A silent, soul-crushing terror seized her face.
Before anyone could speak, a new sound began to resonate from the warped stone around them—a deep, wet thrumming, like a gigantic, internal heart struggling to beat. The sickly green light intensified, and the air grew thick with a metallic, sweet scent—the smell of fresh, raw flesh.
They hadn't fallen into a safe new room. They had landed in the digestive cavity of the entity known as Emma, and the space was beginning to contract.