Shojiro drove his crimson-coated fists again and again into the creature's chest — every strike heavier, every impact louder. The bone plate guarding the heart-shaped orb began to fracture, fine cracks spiderwebbing across its surface. His breathing grew harsher, his heartbeat pounding like war drums. He was close — he could feel it.
"Break already!" he roared, slamming another punch into the creature's ribs, Vythra flaring violently with each strike.
But then —
The creature screeched.
A sound like a thousand nails tearing through flesh and steel ripped through the air. The vibration distorted the flow of Vythra inside Shojiro, making his crimson aura flicker and then die out completely. The energy he'd fought to control was gone, severed mid-motion.
Before he could react —
The tail moved.
The spike extended, twisting unnaturally long, and stabbed straight toward his face.
Shojiro barely had time to flinch before the razor tip pierced through his left eye socket.
A sickening SHLICK echoed as the tail withdrew — dragging something with it.
Shojiro screamed — a sound not of fear, but of pure, primal agony.
"ARGH—!! MY FUCKING EYE!!"
He collapsed to one knee, clutching his face, blood gushing between his fingers, staining the bones beneath him a deep crimson. His body trembled, veins bulging from the pain as every nerve screamed. His vision spun, half of the world swallowed by darkness and the other half red from blood.
The creature — Erekrath — stood motionless, its eyeless face turning slightly toward him. Then, with deliberate cruelty, it lifted Shojiro's torn eyeball with its clawed hand… and popped it into its maw.
It chewed. Slowly. Loudly. Mockingly.
Crunch.
Crunch.
Gulp.
Shojiro froze. His mind fractured for a moment — disbelief and rage twisting into something darker. His hands shook, not from weakness, but from the overwhelming storm brewing inside him.
His breath grew ragged, every inhale shallow, his heart hammering louder and louder — dangerously close to triggering the "never hesitate" rule again. But he didn't care.
He couldn't care.
All the fury, the humiliation, the despair… it started to melt together into one singular, burning thought:
"I'm going to tear you apart."
His crimson veins began to pulse again, faintly glowing beneath his skin — weaker than before, unstable, but alive. His remaining eye blazed red, reflecting pure vengeance.
Erekrath crouched low, claws digging into the bone floor, tail twitching, preparing to lunge again.
Shojiro rose slowly, blood dripping from his chin, his expression twisted into something between madness and resolve. His voice was hoarse, but the words cut like knives:
"You can take my eye… but I'll take everything from you."
Shojiro roared, pain and fury braided into one raw sound. The loss of his eye had burned everything down to a single, scorching focus.
"That's it," he snarled through blood. "I'm gonna blow you to smithereens."
He pushed his life point open with everything left in him. Vythra answered like a tide unleashed — not the careful threads he'd practiced with, but a volcanic surge. The crimson field around him swelled and writhed, condensing into a single, enormous claw of living light. It hung in the air like a guillotine, dripping with intent.
Shojiro didn't hesitate. He hurled the giant crimson claw forward, driving it deep into the beast's ribcage where the heart-shaped core throbbed. The Vythra tunneled through muscle and bone, reaching for the orb with hungry fingers of light, planting threads of overload into the creature's life-point like tiny charges.
For a brutal half-second, everything held — the orb pulsed, Vythra sank into it, the core flared like a struck sun, and Shojiro felt the tower begin to answer him back. His chest roared with the urge to trigger it, to detonate, to end this.
Then the creature reacted.
Erekrath convulsed. Its whole torso shifted as if the ribs were on hinges. The heart-shaped core slid — slow as a wound closing, smooth as oil — deeper into the cage of bone. In the same motion a lattice of bone plates folded, and the orb vanished from beneath Shojiro's claws. The Vythra charges slid against the shell, finding nothing to bite into.
The crimson claw struck empty air.
Shock slammed through Shojiro more violent than any strike had. The overload he'd poured into the creature had nowhere to anchor. The Vythra backlash hit him like a physical blow: his arms spasmed, burning from the inside out, shards of energy flaring across his skin. He coughed, blood bubbling in his throat; the taste of seared metal filled his mouth.
Erekrath didn't even have to move to mock him. It tilted its broad, mawless face, and a low, delighted rumble rolled out of its chest — a sound that felt like the tower laughing.
The orb's beat could be felt now only as a distant, shifting rhythm somewhere deeper in the beast's torso. It had slid away again — smarter, slicker than any projection or slime. It would not be pinned where Shojiro struck.
For a beat, rage flickered into something darker: cold, precise, a new kind of calculation. The claw receded; Vythra retracted like a tide pulled back from a reef. Shojiro steadied himself on shaking legs, one good eye blazing crimson with a single, lethal thought.
It had relocated. It couldn't be brute-forced the same way twice.
He tasted bile and iron on his tongue and felt the hollowness where an eye had been. Despair licked at him, but under it — coiled like a spring — was resolve.
If the orb could move, he would force it to move on his terms. He would bait the beast, pull, break its balance, and catch the core the moment it shifted. He would weaponize the mechanics that saved Erekrath.
Slow, measured fury settled over him. He planted his feet, let the Vythra cool into a steady hum, and readied himself for the next strike — not with blind violence, but with a plan born of pain and sharpened by a thousand brutal lessons from the tower.
Erekrath's chest pulsed. The heart inside it slid once more, like a secret repositioning beneath armor. Shojiro licked his cracked lips, let the taste of revenge spread through him, and stepped forward again.