*I've officially run out of time,* Areia thought slowly, a heavy, suffocating fog clouding her consciousness.
She stared down at Dan's trembling, exhausted form huddled in her grasp. He was barely conscious, his body entirely spent from the emotional wreckage of his breakdown. Forcing her neck to move, she turned her fading, crimson-stained gaze around the shifting chamber. The grotesque walls of bone and flesh had finally slowed their frantic churning; the room now resembled nothing more than a hollow, long-abandoned castle hall, dripping with ancient dust and eerie silence.
With every passing second, her vision grew blurrier, fracturing into dark vignettes.
*I think my internal components are literally melting,* she calmly assessed her own biological state. *My human body fundamentally wasn't built to handle the infinite weight of a dragon prince's mana. But... I can't let him know that. Not now.* The vibrant purple of her eyes had been completely overwhelmed, replaced by a fierce, unstable red glow that mirrored his own destructive power. She stared down at his dark hair, a quiet, stubborn resolve locking in her chest. *Yeah... that's right. In order to truly stand beside the absolute void... I'm just going to have to adapt.* A thin, dark line of blood trickled silently from the corner of her lips, staining her chin.
*Adapt?* she mocked herself in the quiet of her mind. *Who am I kidding? At this point, I don't even possess a magical core anymore. Dan's raw energy completely shattered it into pieces the moment I opened the gates. I'm currently just a hollow shell, forcefully sheltering his god-like power inside my mortal flesh.* She looked at Dan's peaceful face one last time, her heart aching. *I really don't think I'm going to survive this one.*
"Areia... are you ok?"
Dan's cracked, fragile voice abruptly broke through her slipping train of thought. He slowly looked up, his heavy eyes locking directly onto her face. His rampaging, toxic energy was completely gone, siphoned entirely into her collapsing system. Areia noted the profound, tired look in his eyes, and despite the agonizing heat destroying her veins, she forced a gentle, reassuring smile.
"Never been better, Master," she whispered.
*WHOOSH!*
Before the lie could even leave her lips, a violent, localized vortex of dark energy erupted beneath them. Areia was brutally ripped straight out of Dan's protective grip, her body launching upward and suspending precariously in the mid-air void of the tower.
Dan tumbled hard against the cracked stone floor, the sudden loss of her warmth snapping his mind awake. Groaning through the fatigue, he forcefully pushed himself up onto his knees, his fists clenching into the dirt. He stared upward, a wave of absolute, unbridled fury instantly replacing his exhaustion as he locked onto the demon's shifting, smoky form as it wrapped itself aggressively around Areia's paralyzed body like a choking shadow.
*Uh?* Areia's mind drifted dreamily through a thick, suffocating haze. *Am I... floating?* She forced her heavy eyelids open, looking down toward the cracked stone floor of the collapsing tower. She could see Dan far below. *He's yelling? Speaking? No... I can't tell. I can't hear a single thing.* The world had gone entirely mute. *I can't move, either. My body... it feels like it's completely breaking apart from the inside.*
"Thanks to you, kid, I finally have the means to leave this absolute hellhole!" the demon laughed madly, its disembodied, screeching voice echoing with raw bliss. "I honestly don't even know how to properly express my gratitude toward you. Oh, wait, I know! How about I take the physical body of the very human you love?"
With that sickening declaration, its gruesome, smoky shape twisted and coiled into the ceiling, compressing itself before shooting downward. It forced its way straight into Areia's open mouth like a large, writhing earthworm.
"Also, just so you know, if you try to forcefully stop this process, you might just break your sweet little heart entirely!" the demon mocked, its laughter muffled as its shadowy essence disappeared completely into her form.
The invisible gravity holding her up snapped, and she dropped toward the ground like a stone.
*My body... it's boiling,* Areia pondered distantly as she fell, a searing agony igniting in her chest. *I feel like my head is gonna split wide open. Wait... Dan's energy is increasing? No, is it an external factor?*
Down on the floor, Dan gritted his teeth so hard they bled, a faint, dangerous purple glow igniting in his pupils. *I should have noticed it earlier,* his mind raced in a sudden panic. *Her internal state is a complete and absolute mess. From this exact distance, I could easily rip the demon out of her flesh by force using my magic... but what would happen to Areia's fractured soul after a trauma like that?*
Areia violently gritted her teeth as an immense, unholy pain shot through her brain. *I'm gonna blow,* she thought, her consciousness slipping.
Suddenly, her pristine white hair began to grow wildly, cascading down her shoulders and increasing gradually in length until the long, snowy strands literally kissed the cracked floor. She screamed into the darkness of the tower as two jagged, obsidian horns erupted forcefully from her skull, tearing through her skin.
*I have to act now!* Dan thought wildly, stepping forward. But he stopped dead in his tracks. A sudden, absurd thought hit him hard in the chest. He stared at her, held his hand over his mouth for a split second, and then—incredibly—burst out into loud, hysterical laughing.
Areia, dropping from the sky like a heavy log, landed perfectly on her feet. She stood up slowly to look at him. Her once-purple eyes had turned a piercing, malicious emerald green. The twin horns on her head bent sharply backward, sitting atop her white hair like a demonic crown, and a wicked, unnatural smile pulled at her lips. She stared at her new hands, flexing her fingers, before feeling her chest and legs to test the vessel.
"She is vastly more powerful than I could have ever imagined," the entity spoke, its voice layering over Areia's, echoing with a force so immense that the tower vibrated violently, the surrounding stone walls crumbling into powder. The demon lifted a casual hand, and with a mere flick of its wrist, the entire grand layout of the tower violently folded and rearranged itself, compressing into a small, harmless stone cube floating right over its palm.
"Thank you for the magnificent host—" The demon cut itself off, its green eyes blinking in confusion as it stared at Dan, who was still doubling over, laughing his ass off.
"It seems you are taking this situation entirely too lightly," the demon sneered through Areia's mouth, its tone darkening. "Maybe you've really gone completely mad this time around. No worries... I'll put your girlfriend's body to exceptionally good use."
"No, no... it's not that at all," Dan managed to say between gasps, wiping a tear from his eye as he chuckled. His glowing eyes stared directly at Areia's form, his vision completely seeing through her physical flesh to read her internal magic.
The demon's possession had actually saved her life. Because the entity had forced its dense spiritual mass into her hollowed-out system, she didn't just suddenly have a magical core again—she now possessed about *eight* of them simultaneously. A miraculous, hyper-dense anomaly that had never been recorded in history.
"Then tell me, why on earth are you laughing?!" the demon demanded, growing irritated.
"Well, you see, it was a long time ago, back during the missions we used to take in that old guild we joined," Dan began, entirely unable to contain his amusement. "We tried performing an exorcism completely on our own without a certified priest. I managed to get the spirit out of the client, but the thing immediately doubled down, panicked, and went straight into Areia instead."
Dan's eyes suddenly narrowed, his laughter instantly dying into a sharp, mocking grin.
*Where exactly is he getting at with this story?* the demon pondered, a sudden chill running down its stolen spine. *No... he's just rambling. He's trying to provoke me into making a mistake.* The entity raised Areia's hand, pointing a finger directly at Dan's chest. *With the infinite power she just absorbed from him, combined with my own spiritual malice, I should be able to delete him from this world entirely. I should be infinitely stronger than—*
It paused. Areia's arm began to vibrate violently, completely resisting its control.
*What is this? I should have easily destroyed her mind and soul by now... is her body fighting back?! No...* Suddenly, the terrifying truth dawned on the entity. It snapped its green-eyed gaze back to Dan, who just stood there, grinning like a madman.
"You see," Dan smiled victoriously, "Areia obviously doesn't have a single shred of mental protection against spiritual possession. But her unique physical biology naturally and aggressively breaks down any external consciousness that tries to nest inside her. Her physical body is basically a high-efficiency furnace for spirits." His grin spread from ear to ear. "Ain't that right, Areia?"
"Master... I have an absolute, bloody headache," Areia's voice changed instantly, the emerald green fading back into her soft, cold, melodic purple.
She held her temples wincing, her fingers accidentally brushing past the massive obsidian horns protruding from her head. She paused, looking confused as she touched the ridges. "I don't think I quite caught what you said just now... would you mind repeating that?"
*Of course, Areia doesn't actually know any of this herself, nor can she physically perceive spirits,* Dan thought to himself, completely amused.
"I have horns now? Or is this just an extremely aggressive rash?" Areia muttered, her fingers rubbing the solid, ridged surface of the obsidian horn on her head.
Confused, she took a clumsy step backward and instantly stumbled, nearly losing her balance completely as her heel caught on her own long, snowy hair. "When on earth did this even grow out?" she asked, her voice cracking slightly.
As she steady herself, she finally noticed the compressed stone cube floating lazily beside her palm, and the scenery that had replaced the tower. They were no longer in an enclosed space. Instead, they were standing in a gruesome, desolated landscape, an infinite wasteland filled with ancient, rotting corpses stretching as far as the eye could see.
"Master, the tower is completely gone—" she began, but the words caught in her throat as she watched Dan's knees buckle. He was falling forward like a puppet with its strings cut.
Moving with an impossible velocity—as if she was already standing there before he even began to tilt—Areia caught Dan securely in her arms before he could hit the brutal ground. The moment she held him, her deep purple eyes flickered violently, plunging back into that emerald green state as she stared down at his pale, exhausted face.
"Areia... I think I've officially hit my absolute limit for the day," Dan whispered softly in her embrace, his breathing incredibly shallow. "I think I'm going to sleep now... Please, take care of things in my stead. Also... tell Lilly to just go home," he murmured, his eyelids fluttering shut before he faded completely into a deep, heavy sleep.
"Roger," Areia said quietly.
Shifting her grip with effortless power, she hoisted him up into a flawless princess carry, her stance completely unbothered by his weight. Turning her heels toward the faint, swirling dimensional portal that would take them out of this nightmare realm, she began to march forward.
*I feel... insanely strong,* she thought, taking slow, meticulously careful steps as the compressed stone cube floated silently beside her shoulder. Her vibrant green eyes narrowed as she analyzed her own physical template. *Yeah... that's right. I'll take care of absolutely everything in your stead, Master.* As she walked, her impossibly long white hair gently lifted itself off the corpse-strewn dirt, levitating slightly into the air and trailing neatly behind her as she moved. *I'll definitely have to cut this later,* she noted calmly, *but it absolutely shouldn't get dirty before then.*
"I don't know why, but I feel like I need to be exceptionally careful with how I move and act from now on," she said slowly to the empty, silent wasteland. "It seems my biology adjusted quite well to Master's overflowing power. I can literally feel multiple distinct cores beating inside my body like a furnace."
She tightened her grip on Dan, ensuring he was perfectly safe against her chest.
"I shouldn't make a single error. If I lose control for even a split second... I might cause completely unnecessary damage anytime I fight from this point onward."