An arrow hissed through the air, splitting the tension of the battlefield with a sharp whistle. It struck a lunging monster dead in its chest, sending the creature tumbling back with a wet, guttural scream. Shun, bloodied and staggering, looked up in surprise. His vision was blurred, the world shaking with every heartbeat, but he could just barely make out a familiar silhouette on the ridge.
Xin had arrived.
The beautiful fighter's bow was already drawn again, his stance steady, his golden eyes locked on the chaos below. Another arrow loosed, this one piercing clean through a beast's jaw just as it closed in on Shun's flank. Xin's precision was flawless. Every shot an answer to danger, every pull of the bowstring another lifeline.
"Shun!" Xin's voice cut across the battlefield, commanding and unyielding. "Stay on your feet! I've got you covered."
Shun spat blood to the ground and tightened his grip on his blade. Relief warred with exhaustion in his chest, but Xin's arrival had bought him more than just time—it gave him hope. He forced his legs to move, his weapon lashing out in wide, desperate arcs that pushed back the monsters swarming him.
From above, Xin never slowed. Arrow after arrow streaked down like falling stars, bursting through flesh and bone with merciless precision. His quiver dwindled, but his focus did not falter. Every breath, every shot was measured, controlled, and deadly. He was the shield Shun needed, even from afar.
But then, something changed.
A darkness stirred at Shun's feet, faint at first, no more than the flicker of a shadow against the battlefield's blood-soaked ground. It stretched unnaturally, writhing as though alive, slithering against the stone and dirt. With each swing of Shun's blade, each pulse of his rage and fear, the shadow grew thicker, denser, darker.
Xin noticed it immediately. His sharp eyes, trained to track even the slightest movement, caught the strange swell beneath Shun's boots. For a heartbeat he hesitated, his bowstring taut, arrow poised.
"Shun…" Xin muttered under his breath, narrowing his eyes.
The shadow surged.
The creature did not step from the shadow.
It poured. Its body was not bound to shape or logic, its substance folding and unfolding as if the world itself failed to agree on what it was. One instant it rose like a spined humanoid with limbs drawn too long, stretched too thin, shimmering with crystal edges; the next, its torso melted into jagged ribs of glass and bone, dripping into the stones before reforming again. The crown upon its head—if it could be called that was a halo of crystalline shards, their tips pointing outward like spears. Yet where a face should have been was only absence, a hollow circle, perfect and obscene.
Shadows trembled against the cracked walls of the monolith. They flickered into shapes that seemed eager to be born, wings, hands, talons, coils, yet none of them completed. They pulsed, writhing as if they fed on the struggle of definition. The color bled from the battlefield around it. Flags sagged into gray. Armor dulled into pale husks. Blood on the stones no longer looked red but like ash dissolved in water. It was not that light had vanished, it was meaning itself that drained away.
Then came the sound.
It was faint at first, a crawling scrape that wormed into the ear. Fingers upon metal too wet to ring, fibers snapping one by one, strands pulling apart in some endless unravelling. The soldiers froze. The Hunters' lines faltered. Even the monsters shrank back, their jaws slack, their claws twitching nervously as the sound grew. It was not communication. It was recognition, cold and absolute, a truth too sharp for language.
And then the screen appeared.
A sheet of dull gray light tore into existence before Xin's eyes. Letters bled onto it, jagged and fractured, as if scrawled by a hand that had never learned to write but somehow knew what it was naming.
ㄴOmega Hollow: He Who Refracts the World.ㄱ
Xin's stomach lurched. His vision blurred. The word seared into his mind like a brand. Omega. The highest class.
To see one here, now, while the dome lay shattered and the world quaked this was not fate. It was collapse.
The pressure came then. Sharp, invisible, cutting through ether as a blade slides through cloth. Xin's instincts flared. He dropped to the ground, his hand slamming against the stone with the reflex of a thousand battles. His power roared in answer, a dome of fractured energy rising around the frontline. The barrier pulsed like stained glass, glowing with veins of gold as it resisted the ripple. The soldiers huddled within gasped for breath, clutching their weapons, staring in terror at the thing outside.
And then it moved.
No stride. No leap. No sound. It had simply shifted.
The stones beneath hissed, steaming as ether burned away wherever its mass touched the world. It had no weight. It had no rhythm. Its existence pressed against the battlefield like a sickness.
Xin's mind recoiled the moment his gaze landed upon it. His body locked in place. His breath stalled. His thoughts became static, dissolving into white noise as madness scraped its claws along the edges of his soul. Every beat of his heart grew jagged, uneven, as if the very concept of rhythm had lost meaning.
A mind attack.
The realization throbbed in him like a wound. His hands shook uncontrollably, his bow forgotten, his body trembling. His vision split—half of it consumed by the battlefield, the other half eaten by chaotic patterns, shifting geometry that bled from the Hollow's faceless crown. He tried to close his eyes, but the patterns followed him inside.
Madness was corroding him, tearing into the threads of who he was.
But another force rose within. Chaos. The same storm that had marked his veins since the catacombs. It surged in answer, boiling through his chest, fighting the corrosion with raw defiance. It did not erase the horror. It did not cleanse him. But it gave him an anchor.
Xin fell to his knees, curling into himself, arms locked around his body as if he could hold his soul together by sheer force. His teeth gnashed, his jaw cracking with pressure. He wanted to scream but no sound emerged, only a dry rasp. Still, even in that torment, his arm stretched outward. His fingers clawed through the dirt, reaching for Shun.
Shun, who stood against the thing.
The Omega Hollow tilted, or at least its crown of shards angled toward him. Shadows twisted from beneath its form, slithering toward him like streams of ink. They spread around Shun's feet, writhing upward in black tendrils, thin at first, then thickening, binding him where he stood.
"Shun!" Xin's voice cracked, strangled with panic. He tried to stand. His legs refused him. His heart pounded as if trying to burst free. He reached farther, nails ripping through the stone, bleeding as his hand stretched toward the one person who had always stood taller than he did.
A spark flared in his chest. Not his chaos. Something older. Warmer. Golden. The Dharma Wheel.
He had left it behind in the shrine above the catacombs. He had thought it lifeless, a relic of a fallen god. But now, in his desperation, he felt its pull. Felt its slow rotation in the distance, as though waiting.
Xin's fingers slammed into the stone and pressed into a symbol he had carved into his palm weeks ago. The chaos inside him surged toward it. His voice broke as he spoke the invocation through blood and grit.
The air trembled. Light erupted.
From the far edge of the battlefield the Dharma Wheel tore itself free of its resting place. Its golden spokes spun faster than sight. A ring of sunfire screamed across the ground, crossing the distance in a blink. The moment it appeared behind Xin, its aura expanded, a dome of radiant force pushing the shadows back.
The Omega Hollow hissed without a mouth. Its tendrils recoiled under the Wheel's light, sizzling like ice in flame. The battlefield blazed with molten gold. Soldiers shielded their eyes.
Shun gasped as the tendrils around his legs weakened. He raised his sword, silver ether glimmering in his trembling grasp. His eyes locked on Xin, a faint smile breaking through the sweat and the fear. A look that said it's all right. A look that carried calmness, radiance, assurance.
But the shadow did not care for radiance.
A tendril speared through his leg.
The sound was soft. A wet crack, a breath stolen too soon. Shun's mouth opened, a spray of red across his the floor , his sword slipping in his grasp. The tendril pulsed, burrowing deeper, tethering him to the void's embrace.
Xin's scream tore from his throat, raw and broken. He forced his body upright, chaos and golden light entwining his veins. The Dharma Wheel spun above him, spokes warping, flaring brighter, pressing the Hollow back one inch at a time.
The Omega Hollow's crown tilted. More tendrils rose but faltered under the Wheel's glow. Shadows split like ink under a blade. For the first time, it hesitated.
Shun stumbled forward, coughing blood, the tendril still in his leg but loosening under the Wheel's power. His hand reached toward Xin, fingers trembling.
The Wheel roared, each rotation hammering the battlefield with golden shockwaves.
The Hollow's body shifted, its shimmer twisting into a deeper hue. Its faceless crown pulsed once, then again, as if preparing something worse.
Xin's grip tightened on the invocation mark, sweat and blood running down his face.
The Wheel spun faster, golden fire licking the shadows, burning paths into the stone. For a heartbeat it looked like the Hollow might break.
Then, in the heart of the glow, the Hollow moved again.
The cliff edge trembled. The Wheel blazed. Shun's blood dripped onto the stone.
And everything hung between salvation and ruin.