Shojiro tasted iron and bile.
He'd forced himself into motion—baited, feinted, struck—trying to drag the orb where he could reach it. He had a plan now: force the beast's balance, pull its core into the open for one clean, burning strike. Pain and hunger had become precision. He could feel the Vythra humming in his limbs like a coiled engine, every nerve a live wire.
Erekrath read him. It had been reading him the whole time.
The creature's spine shuddered, vertebrae clicking like gears. For a heartbeat it bowed its head as if conceding an opening. Shojiro saw the faint motion—the orb sliding, a heartbeat's width of exposure beneath a hedgerow of jagged ribs. He launched, crimson claw extended, every ounce of Vythra poured into the strike.
For a second the world narrowed to bone and light.
Then the trap snapped.
A long shadow lashed out—the tail, moved with impossible speed. The spike at its tip drove through the air and found the single place Shojiro had left unshielded: the soft hollow at his sternum where the life point pulsed like a desperate drum.
He didn't feel the tip enter so much as the world explode outward from the point of impact. Pain detonated inside him, a white-hot starburst that stole his breath and turned his vision to caverns of red. The spike tore through flesh and bone as if the tower itself guided the strike; ribs parted like curtains. Shojiro's scream split the chamber—ragged, animal, burned raw by agony.
"AAARGH—! MY—!" His voice shredded into a broken howl as warm blood poured, hot and unstoppable, from the wound. The Vythra in his veins fluttered, then shuttered; the flow that had been his lifeline trembled, unclasped, and died like a candle in wind. His arms went heavy. The world tilted.
He tried to drag himself forward, hand clawing for the place inside his chest where the Life Point shone like a fever. Fingers came away slick with red. The spike had not only punctured—it had ripped. Something taut and burning was torn free and dragged outward. He understood with a clarity that was almost clinical: the creature had torn at his Life Point. It had not only struck flesh; it had struck the core.
Erekrath did not merely wound him. It savored it.
The creature reared back and—cruel beyond mercy—brought the torn thing close to its mouth. Shojiro's world went thin. He watched as the thing he had borne, the pulsing center of his reborn life, was crushed between bone and maw. The sight should have stopped him—broken him—but the pain sharpened him instead into a single hard edge of intent.
His knees hit the floor. The taste of blood filled his mouth. He coughed; his voice was a rasp of broken promises.
"You… won't…" he rasped, each syllable a knife. His remaining eye flared, a red flare of defiance. "I—"
His hand reached, uselessly, toward Erekrath's maw.
The creature's tail withdrew. The chamber seemed to breathe with the sound of his heartbeat slowing—thump… thump… a dragging, uneven beat. The "never hesitate" pain faded into something colder: his heart itself was failing, the Life Point gone. Vythra, untethered, rolled like storm-tossed waves and then collapsed inward. His armor—his crimson coating—flickered and guttered.
Shojiro's body convulsed once, twice. Bone-splintered breaths fought their way out of him. The pain was absolute now: not a flash to teach or punish, but the slow, grinding reality of a system turned against him. The gravity of the fifth floor—no healing, no mercy—pressed down like the weight of a god.
Images slid through his head faster than thought: the dojo; his father's voice; the match that had started it all; the boy at the tournament who'd asked for a signature. Memory and blood braided together.
Rage came then—hot and terrible and clean. It was not the scattered fury of pain but a blade of intent.
"If I die," he whispered, voice gone to gravel, "I will drag you with me."
He tried to rise. His muscles burned with useless protest. Darkness licked at the edge of vision. Erekrath's maw opened once more, slow and serene, as if performing some final liturgy. The creature's intelligence settled like a cold stone into Shojiro's chest: it had not simply broken him— it had proven him, and marked him.
His hand fell. Blood pooled beneath him, crimson seeping into the bone like oil. The heartbeat came thinner now—stuttering, then a long, ragged pause—then another faint thud. He felt the last thread of Vythra reel back into nothing.
Sound narrowed to a single drum of absence. The pain became a distant, terrible sea. He saw the ceiling blooming into a halo of light, not mercy but clarity: the roof of the world itself seemed to split open.
Shojiro's last thought was not fear. It was a jagged promise, a vow sharpened by the taste of everything he'd lost.
"I… won't… go… alone."
Then the light took him.
His body went slack. The chamber swallowed the sound. The Life Point's pulse snuffed like the last ember of a bonfire.
Where he fell, blood steamed on the cold stone; where he left, the air trembled—and far above, in a place between root and myth, something ancient stirred, answering to a call no one had expected to ring so soon.