Rick's scream died in his throat, swallowed by the void.
The throne room was gone. No marble floor, no cracked pillars, no Devil chained beneath the seat of eyes. Nothing remained but emptiness—dark, silent, suffocating. He staggered forward blindly, boots pressing into nothingness, every step sending ripples through the black as if he were walking on water.
His hand reached instinctively for his spear, but his fingers met only air. The weight he had carried through blood and fire was gone, leaving him hollow.
Then came the sound.
Boom.
Slow. Heavy. It reverberated through the void, crawling down his spine.
Boom.
Not his heartbeat. Too vast, too ancient. The pulse of something buried deep within the dark. Each throb twisted the air, and with every beat, chains slithered out of the void, coiling around him like serpents made of iron.
Rick staggered back, clutching his chest. Fire burned beneath his palm, right where the tether had once been. The scar pulsed with the rhythm of that monstrous heart. His breath caught. His knees buckled.
And then he saw it—his own reflection.
It rippled into existence before him, suspended in the void like a mirror with no glass. A man stood there: tall, cloaked in chains, crowned with jagged iron, eyes burning with the same starlight fury as the Hollow King. His face was Rick's, but older, colder, carved with a cruelty that chilled him to the bone.
Rick staggered back. "No… that's not me. That's not me!"
The reflection smiled, lips curling into something both triumphant and mocking.
A whisper brushed against his ear, intimate and venomous.
"It is you. Every chain you broke, every drop of blood you spilled, every scream you survived—you fed me. You carved yourself into my heir."
Rick clutched his head, trembling. The words pressed into him like nails hammered into bone. His heartbeat faltered, twisting, until it aligned perfectly with the monstrous pulse of the void.
"No!" he roared, shaking, voice ragged. "I don't belong to you!"
The laughter came then. Not loud, not thunderous. Soft. Icy. The kind of laughter that slid into your veins and made your blood freeze.
"Not yet. But you will."
The reflection lifted its hand. Chains slithered out of its skin, wrapping around Rick's ankles, wrists, throat. He struggled, gasping, the weight dragging him down. His chest burned, the scar flaring as if the void itself was trying to crawl inside him.
Then—
Light.
A sudden flare of white-gold fire ripped through the dark. The chains recoiled, hissing like snakes struck by flame. A voice rang out, raw, furious, defiant—
"Rick! Don't you dare give in!"
Devil.
The sound pierced him like lightning, cutting through the void's suffocating weight. Rick's knees steadied. His scar blazed with fire, cracks of light spreading across his arms, his veins, his very skin. He forced himself upright, chains burning under his grip.
The Hollow King's laughter faltered, the whisper sharpening into a growl.
Rick raised his voice, every word tearing his throat raw:
"If you think I'll wear your crown—then I'll shatter it myself!"
The void trembled. Shadows rippled like a storm-tossed sea.
For the first time, the Hollow King's voice cracked—not amused, not mocking, but furious.
"Insolent child—!"
But then Rick saw it.
Behind the chains, buried deep in the black, something stirred. A shape older than the Hollow King. A presence vast and suffocating. The chains weren't restraining him—they were restraining it.
The King's voice dropped, almost panicked.
"Do not look there."
The ground beneath Rick split, cracks of white-gold light bleeding through the dark like veins in shattered glass. The void shook. The chains tightened, pulling him down.
And then—he fell.
Rick plummeted, tumbling through the black as shards of shadow and fire tore past him. The reflection above stretched out its hand, chains trailing like smoke. The Hollow King's roar chased him as he plunged deeper, deeper, into the abyss below.
"Fall, child! Fall into the core! Break my prison—and set free what even I fear!"
Rick's scream was swallowed by the endless dark.
And then he saw it.
An eye. Vast. Primeval. Burning with hunger older than time. It opened in the abyss below and fixed on him.
It wasn't the Hollow King.
It was something worse.
And it was waiting.
---
To be continued…