The chamber hadn't stopped shaking since Raga's hold on Rei broke. The Sayuri Elders whispered in hushed, broken voices, their fear so thick it felt like ash in the air.
Rei sat hunched over on the cold stone, his hands trembling against his face. His chest burned with shame. His skin still crawled where Raga's grip had been, his veins echoing with the memory of death itself.
I almost killed them.
The thought wouldn't leave. It carved itself into him deeper than any blade.
Daiken finally spoke, his voice like splintered rock.
"You must understand, Rei. What you carry now is not only Enso. Etherfall awakened something beyond us all. A fragment of what even the High Dark Elders… fear."
Kazumi's scar twitched as her shadow writhed against the walls.
"If Raga is inside you, then you are not a boy anymore. You are a curse. And curses are hunted."
The Silent Elder did not move, but his eyes were pits, voids that judged without mercy.
Rei opened his mouth to demand answers…
And the world shattered.
It wasn't an attack. It wasn't even sound. It was absence. A silence so sharp it erased breath, erased thought, erased time itself.
By the time Rei blinked, the Sayuri Elders were already gone.
No screams. No resistance.
One heartbeat they stood. The next, they were nothing. Not even ash. Their forms dissolved into nothingness, erased as though they had never existed.
Rei staggered back, heart thrashing, vision splitting.
"What… what just…"
And then he saw him.
A figure stood in the center of the chamber. He hadn't entered. He hadn't arrived. He had always been there, waiting for reality to catch up.
A Dark Elder.
His form was cloaked in shadow, yet not ragged like Raga's chaos. He was clean, sharp, absolute. His face was calm, almost expressionless, human in shape, but too perfect, too still, carved from a void that knew no time.
His presence crushed Rei harder than gravity, harder than storms, harder than death itself. Raga had smothered with weight; this Elder annihilated with precision. The air didn't bend around him, it simply ceased to exist.
Rei's chest locked. His legs buckled. Terror rooted deeper than instinct.
This isn't like Raga. This is worse.
The Elder's eyes slid to Rei. No emotion. No curiosity. Just cold inevitability.
"So." His voice was quiet, plain, yet it carved through the air like final judgment. "The vessel lives."
In less than a blink, he was in front of Rei. Faster than lightning, faster than thought. Rei didn't see him move, he simply was.
A single hand wrapped around Rei's throat. He was lifted, weightless, like nothing more than a thread.
Rei clawed at the grip, his legs kicking. Panic tore through him. His lungs screamed.
The Elder's calm gaze never shifted.
"Your existence… is an error."
The words weren't shouted. They weren't cruel. They were simply fact. And that made them unbearable.
Rei's vision swam. His ribs ached. His nails scraped against the Elder's hand, but it was like trying to claw at eternity itself.
And then, inside him, Raga stirred.
Laughter slithered up Rei's throat, layered over his strangled breath. It wasn't his own. It was deeper. Older. Hungry.
"Ahhh…" the demon whispered with delight. "So this is what crawls in the dark. One of the vaunted Elders. Look at you… so precise, so clean. Tell me, are you stronger than death itself?"
Rei's eyes flickered crimson. Black lines threatened to bloom again across his face.
The Dark Elder's grip tightened. But there was no fear in him, no hesitation. He studied Rei like one might a broken blade. He hadn't realized, not yet, that death itself was inside this boy.
Rei's chest convulsed. Terror and horror warred with the hunger that wasn't his. He wanted to scream, to beg, but no sound came out.
The Elder's voice dropped again, a whisper of inevitability.
"You should not be."
Rei's heart slammed once, hard, before everything collapsed into darkness.