Amir paid the driver in silver and stepped out, his eyes immediately drawn to a commotion near the hotel's entrance. A woman, her face flushed with anger, was jabbing a finger at a harried-looking manager.
"My sink is backing up with filth! And the shower! It's not draining at all!" she shouted. "This is unacceptable!"
Amir didn't linger, moving past them into the hotel lobby. The receptionist, a young man with tired eyes, offered him a room at a significant discount. A cold knot tightened in Amir's stomach. A discount... because the plumbing is a disaster for everyone.
Swallowing his suspicion, he took the room. He needed a base, a place to rest and think. He paid the 70 gold coins for the night and was led to a modest room by a silent porter.
Alone, he sat on the edge of the bed. The clock on the wall read 10 PM. He had roughly two hours before his Tuner abilities faded and the feeling returned to his pinky finger. The grime of this new world felt ingrained in his skin; he desperately needed a bath.
He tried the sink. A dry, rattling groan came from the pipes, but not a drop of water flowed. The shower handle came off in his hand. Annoyance flared into frustration.
Then, a thought struck him. The plumber company. VIC Plumber Company. It's right behind this hotel.
Driven by a mix of desperation and burgeoning curiosity, he left his room and headed back out into the night. The VIC Plumber Company was a squat, industrial building shrouded in shadow, its windows dark. A "CLOSED" sign hung crookedly on the door.
He tried the handle. It turned with a rusty squeal, and the door swung inward with an unnerving ease.
His foot landed on the floor with a crunch.
He looked down. The wooden floorboards were stained with dark, rusty patches. Blood.
Every sense screamed danger. The showroom was a scene of devastation. Tools, pipes, and porcelain fixtures were strewn everywhere as if a tornado had ripped through. And on the walls… deep, parallel gouges were carved into the plaster and wood. They were too long, too widely spaced to be from any animal he knew.
The air was thick, cold, and heavy with a silence that felt like a physical weight. An eerie, low hum seemed to vibrate in his very bones.
He took another cautious step. Crunch.
This time, he looked closer. It wasn't debris. It was a human finger, pale and severed, lying amidst the wreckage.
What the hell happened here? A wild animal?
He took another step—and the world gave way beneath him.
With a splintering roar, the floorboards shattered. Amir plummeted into the darkness, landing with a brutal impact on a wet, stone surface far below. The air filled with a choking cloud of dust, splinters, and decay.
He lay there, gasping, his body protesting the new abuse. As the dust slowly settled, he pushed himself up, his eyes struggling to adjust to the profound gloom. He was in a vast, brick-lined tunnel. The air reeked of stagnant water, rust, and something else… something sweetly rotten.
He was in the sewer system.
Not far away, through the labyrinth of tunnels, the beams of two powerful lanterns cut through the oppressive darkness.
Pyotr moved with a predator's grace, his white coat a stark beacon in the gloom. Johnathan Blake followed, his truncheon held at the ready, his eyes constantly scanning the shifting shadows.
A distant, echoing crash reverberated through the tunnels, the sound of splintering wood and collapsing structure.
Johnathan froze, his head cocked. "Did you hear that?"
Pyotr didn't even break stride, his voice a low, calm rumble. I am not deaf, Jonathan. Whatever this thing is… it is close.
Amir moved cautiously through the labyrinth of dripping tunnels, his senses on high alert. Strangely, the pipes lining the walls appeared intact—no visible cracks, no clear reason for the widespread failures plaguing the city above.
Then he saw them: two pools of lantern light cutting through the heavy darkness, moving steadily toward him.
Who's that? Maintenance workers? At this hour?
As the figures drew closer, the light fell across their faces. Amir's blood ran cold. One was a stranger—a tall man with sharp features and an unnervingly calm presence, dressed in a stark white coat. But the other…
It's him. The one who broke my ribs. The hunter.
Amir didn't wait another second. He slipped silently into a recess between two massive, moss-covered pipes, pressing himself into the shadows just as the two men passed by mere feet away. He held his breath, the damp chill of the brick seeping through his new coat.
Only when the glow of their lanterns had faded and their footsteps grew distant did he allow himself to exhale, his body trembling with a mix of fear and fury.
Pyotr walked with an almost preternatural calm, his lantern beam sweeping methodically across the tunnel ahead. After a long stretch of silence, his voice cut cleanly through the dripping quiet.
"Something is troubling you, Johnathan. You've been unusually quiet."
Johnathan didn't look at him, his eyes fixed on the shadows beyond his own light.
"No," he replied, his tone uncharacteristically subdued. "Just… thinking about Gerran
Pyotr's voice was calm, almost detached. "I recall you were the one who despised the fact he chose to resign."
Johnathan's stern expression wavered. For a moment, his mind drifted from the damp, oppressive sewers…
…to a sunlit garden. A little girl with his smile sat giggling on his lap, her small hands clapping. Behind them, a woman with warm eyes and flowing hair danced gently to a silent tune, her laughter like wind chimes. It was a memory of a life he'd once dreamed of—a life Gerran had just found before he went missing
The ghost of a smile touched Johnathan's lips.
Pyotr observed him silently, then took a long, slow drag from his cigar, the ember glowing like a demon's eye in the gloom.
Suddenly—
SCREEEEEEEEEEEECH—!
The sound was not of this world. It was a nails-on-chalkboard shriek fused with the wet, tearing of flesh and the distorted feedback of a broken radio. It clawed at the mind, a wave of pure, psychic dissonance that vibrated through the very bricks and rattled the teeth in their skulls.
Johnathan's nostalgia shattered. His face snapped back to hardened focus, all softness erased.
Pyotr took one final, deep drag, then dropped the cigar to the wet ground, extinguishing it with a sharp hiss.
"Finally," he murmured, a flicker of dark anticipation in his eyes. "The fun begins."
As one, they broke into a sprint, their lanterns throwing frantic, swinging beams as they charged toward the source of the nightmare scream.
The sound was so violently loud that it ripped through the tunnels and found Amir, freezing him mid-step.
A cold, primal dread seized him, crawling up his spine and tightening around his heart. This wasn't the fear of a man with a gun or a wraith in the woods. This was something deeper, older—the instinctual terror of a prey animal sensing an apex predator.
Something is here. Something powerful. Far more powerful than me.
Every fiber of his being screamed at him to run, to find a way out, to hide. The Harmonic Inquisition was down here, and they could handle it.
But then the memory flashed, sharp and painful: Gail's dying eyes, his final, blood-stained words. "Protect my sister."
A promise he had already broken.
A new resolve, forged in guilt and grief, overpowered the fear.
What if someone is actually in danger down here?
Without another moment of hesitation, Amir turned and began to run—not away from the horrifying sound, but directly toward it
Pyotr and Johnathan skidded to a halt at the edge of a wider junction in the sewers, their lantern beams slicing through the murk.
What they saw froze the air in their lungs.
In the center of the chamber, illuminated in the swaying light, was Inquisitor Gerran. Or what was left of him. His uniform was shredded and soaked in crimson, his face a mask of pure, primal terror.
"Pyotr... Johnathan... save me... please, I beg of—"
A long, black, glistening limb—slick with sewer filth and ending in claws like fractured obsidian—shot out from the shadows and wrapped around his ankle. A second identical limb seized his other leg. With a terrible, inexorable pull, Gerran's body was stretched taut.
CRACK-CRACK-SNAP.
The sound of his hips and spine giving way was a wet, sickening series of pops that echoed louder than any scream. Gerran's own shriek was cut short as his body was torn completely in half at the waist in a spray of viscera. Unbelievably, horrifically, his upper body remained conscious, his mouth working soundlessly, his eyes wide with a pain beyond comprehension.
Johnathan stood paralyzed, his mind screaming, his veteran instincts short-circuited by the sheer, unnatural brutality before him.
Pyotr, however, took a single step forward, his body coiling to strike.
It was then that the creature leaned forward into the light.
Its face was a mockery of life. It had no skin—only a glistening, raw-black musculature that pulsed as if breathing. Where a mouth should be was a vertical, tooth-lined gash that ran from where its nose would be down to its throat, now dripping with Gerran's blood. But the true horror was its eyes—or lack thereof. Set deep in the skeletal sockets were not two, but seven human eyes, all mismatched in color and size, all weeping black tears, all staring in different, maddening directions. One of them, a familiar, gentle brown eye, was fixed on Johnathan—it was Gerran's.
With a movement both casual and grotesquely deliberate, the creature picked up Gerran's still-living upper torso. It brought the head towards its vertical maw.
CRUNCH.
The sound of Gerran's skull collapsing between its jaws was like a porcelain vase shattering on stone. CRUNCH. CRUNCH. The wet, grinding consumption of bone and brain that followed was a noise that would haunt them for the rest of their lives.
The sound of Gerran's skull being pulverized was not just a sound; it was a violation. It shattered Jonathan Blake's paralysis, replacing it with a volcanic eruption of rage and horror. He didn't scream. He moved.
With a guttural roar, he flung a glass vial from his bandolier. It shattered at the creature's feet, erupting into a conflagration of alchemical fire. The thing recoiled, its glistening black flesh sizzling, the stench of burnt rot joining the sewer's miasma.
"You godless freckles!" Johnathan snarled, already hurling a second vial. This one released a cloud of corrosive green gas, but the creature swiped a monstrous hand, dispersing the cloud with a wave of tangible force.
Pyotr did not shout. He simply flowed. One moment he was standing, the next he was a white-clad blur, closing the distance. He didn't draw a conventional weapon. His right hand, clad in a fine leather glove that was now smoldering, lashed out and grasped the creature's forearm where the fire had charred it.
"Rust," Pyotr commanded, his voice cold and absolute.
The effect was instantaneous and horrifying. The creature's slick, powerful limb didn't just decay; it aged centuries in a second. The black flesh cracked and flaked away, revealing a lattice of bone that instantly turned brittle and ochre-red with rust. The creature let out a shriek that was the screech of tearing metal and a baby's wail fused into one. It ripped its arm back, the rusted bones snapping like dry twigs.
It was a victory that lasted a heartbeat.
The creature's seven eyes blazed with insane light. It lunged, not at Pyotr, but at Johnathan. Its remaining good hand moved faster than the eye could follow. Johnathan barely managed to cross his arms, bracing with a reinforced vambrace. The impact was not a punch; it was a train derailment. The vambrace shattered, and Johnathan was hurled backwards, crashing into a brick wall with a sickening thud. He slumped, his left arm bent at a grotesque angle, gasping for the air that had been driven from his lungs.
Pyotr was on it again. He became a specter of decay, his form flickering as he used Ghost-Walk to phase through a sudden, brutal swipe of its claws. Re-materializing behind it, he placed a hand on its back.
"Decay."
A patch of the creature's torso withered, muscle and sinew turning to dust and putrid liquid. The thing stumbled forward, but its tail—a barbed, bladed appendage no one had seen—lashed out like a scorpion's sting. Pyotr twisted, but not enough. The barb ripped through his pristine white coat and deep into his side. He grunted, a rare sound of pain, stumbling back as a wave of dizzying nausea washed over him—the tail was venomous.
Seeing Pyotr wounded seemed to electrify Johnathan. Ignoring the blinding pain in his broken arm, he surged to his feet with another potion in his good hand. "Eat this, you aberration!" This vial was filled with quicksilver. When it shattered against the creature's chest, the liquid metal didn't drip; it burrowed, digging into the decaying flesh like a thousand metallic maggots.
The creature convulsed, its multi-voiced scream reaching a new pitch of agony. It focused all its hatred on Johnathan. It ignored Pyotr's relentless, decaying touches that were slowly eating it alive. It wanted the potion-user dead.
It charged.
Johnathan threw a smoke potion, but the creature barreled through the obscuring cloud. A clawed hand, now half-eaten by Pyotr's power, slammed into Johnathan's chest. There was a wet, cracking sound. Ribs gave way. He was lifted off his feet and slammed back into the ground, the impact jarring his broken arm and sending fresh waves of white-hot agony through his body. He lay there, helpless, vision swimming, blood filling his mouth.
The creature stood over him, its vertical maw opening wide, the seven eyes staring down with a terrifying, final promise. The stench of its breath was the smell of an open grave.
Pyotr, bleeding profusely from his side, his face pale with pain and exertion, lunged forward one last time. He abandoned finesse, wrapping both arms around the creature from behind in a desperate grapple. He poured every ounce of his power into a final, concentrated burst.
"RUST AND REGRET!"
A wave of absolute entropy exploded from Pyotr. The creature's body audibly groaned, its form cracking and flaking, its movements slowing as if being petrified. The bricks around them crumbled to dust. The very air seemed to thin and die.
But it wasn't enough.
With a final, earth-shattering roar of defiance, the creature flexed its immense power. It threw Pyotr off its back. The Tuner of Rust and Regret flew through the air and landed in a heap near Johnathan, unable to rise, his energy utterly spent.
The creature, now a horrifying patchwork of decayed flesh, burrowing quicksilver, and rusted bone, turned its attention back to the helpless Johnathan. It was a testament to its unnatural vitality that it still stood, still functioned. It raised its one good, clawed hand for the final, killing blow.
Johnathan could only stare into the seven weeping eyes, one of them still wearing the face of his dead friend, and wait for the end.
Pyotr, from the ground, could only watch, his body refusing to obey his will.
The claw began its descent.
The creature's claw, a amalgamation of obsidian bone and decaying flesh, hung in the air for a final, terrifying moment, poised to shred Johnathan Blake into offal. The seven eyes in its face—Gerran's gentle brown one staring out amidst the madness—held no mercy, only a starved, alien hunger.
Then, from the tunnel behind it, a voice cut through the tension, calm and clear.
"Hey, Ugly."
The creature froze. Its head rotated a full one-hundred and eighty degrees with a sound of grinding vertebrae, its multitude of eyes focusing on the new arrival.
Amir Zen stood there, silhouetted in the gloom. His clothes were new but already dusted with sewer filth. His face was pale, but his jaw was set. He held no weapon.
"Your mother was a landfill," Amir said, the childish insult starkly out of place in the chamber of horror.
The creature's response was instantaneous and irrational. It forgot the two broken men at its feet. This new, mocking voice was an immediate threat to its dominion. It abandoned its kill and charged Amir with a ground-shaking bellow.
It never reached him.
Its claws passed through Amir's smirking face as if through smoke. The illusion dissolved.
The real Amir was twenty feet to the left, having used the distraction to circle the chamber. "Over here, you overgrown septic tank!"
The creature, enraged, changed direction. It was slower now, its body a ruin of Pyotr's making, but its speed was still terrifying. It lunged again.
Again, its attack met empty air. Another illusion.
This time, as the phantom vanished, the real Amir was close. He didn't attack. He couldn't. Instead, he darted toward the downed Inquisitors.
Johnathan stared up at him, his face a mask of pain, confusion, and raw hatred. "You... Why? Why are you saving us?"
Amir didn't look at him as he skidded to a halt between them and the disoriented monster. "I don't know," he grunted, his eyes fixed on the abomination. "Maybe because this ugly demon reminds me of something I hate the most." Failure. Helplessness. The feeling of watching someone die and being unable to stop it.
From the ground, Pyotr let out a wet, pained chuckle, a trickle of black-tinged blood leaking from his lips. "Johnathan," he rasped. "I must admit... your new fox has guts after all." His sharp eyes studied Amir with newfound, calculating interest. "Something new, I guess."
The creature, having realized the deception, was reorienting itself, its seven eyes burning with a focused, homicidal intent. The time for talk was over.
Johnathan, with a groan of sheer will, used his good arm to fumble at his bandolier. His fingers closed around two familiar vials. With one violent motion, he bit the cork out of the first—a milky, opalescent Healing Draught—and swallowed it. The effect was visceral. The grating of his broken ribs realigning was audible, and the grotesque angle of his arm straightened with a nauseating pop. The relief was immediate, though a deep ache remained.
Without pause, he downed the second vial—the Crimson Fury he had used against Amir. His veins lit up with fiery energy beneath his skin. The fatigue and residual pain were scorched away, replaced by a familiar, terrifying strength. He surged to his feet, his eyes locking onto the creature.
"Alright, you freckles," he snarled, a predator's smile twisting his lips. "Round two."
The battle was rejoined, but the dynamic had irrevocably shifted.
Three phantom Amirs appeared simultaneously, each taunting the monster from a different direction. The creature, its mind already fractured, swiped at the nearest one. As its claws passed through the illusion, Pyotr, who had used the precious seconds to force himself upright, pointed a trembling, blood-stained hand.
A visible wave of gray energy, shimmering with the ghosts of lost memories and despair, washed over the creature. It didn't cause physical damage, but the thing recoiled as if scalded. The mad light in its seven eyes flickered with confusion and sudden, profound sorrow. Its movements became sluggish, uncoordinated.
Amir yelled from the shadows, not using a name, just a sharp command: "Now! Hit it now!"
Johnathan was already moving, empowered by the Crimson Fury. He didn't throw a potion. He charged, a human battering ram. He slammed shoulder-first into the creature's decayed leg—the one Pyotr had already turned brittle. There was a sound like a rotten tree trunk snapping. The creature buckled, roaring in pain and surprise.
"Pyotr, contain it!" Johnathan barked, the unthinkable happening—a Potion Master giving orders to a Tuner.
Pyotr, understanding the strategy, complied. He slammed his palms onto the wet stone floor. "Bond of Suffering: Anchor." Black, vein-like tendrils of energy shot from his hands, crawling across the ground and latching onto the creature's limbs. It wasn't a full Bond; he lacked the strength. But it acted as a powerful restraint, rooting the monster in place, making it a stationary target.
The creature thrashed against the shadowy bonds, its rusted bones groaning in protest.
Johnathan threw the blue potion. It didn't explode. Instead, it splashed over the creature and solidified in an instant, forming a shell of shimmering, super-hardened Aether-Ice, locking its torso and one arm in place.
The creature was pinned.
Amir saw the opening. This was their chance. He created his most complex illusion yet. He didn't just make a copy of himself. He created a perfect, shimmering duplicate of the creature itself, standing directly behind the real one. The doppelgänger raised its claws as if to strike.
The real creature, seeing its own terrifying form mirrored back at it, froze in a moment of primal confusion. All seven of its eyes widened.
That was all the distraction Pyotr needed.
Gathering the dregs of his power, he lunged forward. His body flickered, using Ghost-Walk to phase through the Aether-Ice shell. He rematerialized inside the creature's guard, his hand, glowing with a sickly green aura, slamming directly onto the creature's chest, right over its pulsating core.
"FINAL DECAY!"
This was not a surface-level rot. This was a curse aimed at the thing's very essence. The glistening black flesh didn't just flake away; it dissolved into a pool of acrid, black sludge. The creature's roar was a symphony of agony, the sound of a universe dying. The Aether-Ice shell shattered from the internal convulsions.
It broke free, but it was critically wounded. A massive, sizzling hole was visible in its torso, revealing something that pulsed with a sickly, violet light deep within.
Enraged and mortally wounded, the creature became pure, unpredictable chaos. It ignored all tactics, lashing out at everything. A wild swing of its one good arm caught Johnathan, who had been moving in for another strike. The enhanced potion-user was sent flying again, his aura flickering, the Crimson Fury's effect nearly spent.
Its bladed tail, moving with a life of its own, stabbed toward Pyotr, who was too exhausted to phase away. But the tail hit nothing. Amir had projected an illusion of empty space over Pyotr at the last second. The tail embedded itself in the brick wall behind him.
The creature, confused, yanked its tail free. In that moment of vulnerability, Amir did something he hadn't done all fight.
He stopped running.
He stood his ground, directly in front of the beast. He looked small and fragile before its towering, decaying form.
"Your plan is flawed," Amir said, his voice unnervingly calm.
The creature hesitated, its seven eyes narrowing.
Amir smiled. "You only brought one mouth."
From behind the creature, the real Pyotr—who Amir had subtly hidden with an illusion—unleashed his last, desperate gambit. He wasn't aiming to decay it further. He focused his power on the creature's greatest weapon.
"Rust and Shatter."
He pointed at the creature's vertical, tooth-lined maw.
The metallic, bone-like teeth lining the horrific gash of a mouth instantly flaked with bright orange rust. Then, as the creature tried to shriek, they shattered inward, millions of razor-sharp fragments tearing into its own throat and the vile energy core within.
The creature went rigid. A light, not of this world, bled from its eyes and the hole in its chest. It didn't roar. It emitted a low, resonant frequency that made the sewer water vibrate and dust rain from the ceiling.
It was not dead. But it was broken. Its body began to shudder violently, its form flickering between solidity and something else—a mess of shadow and screaming faces.
It looked at the three of them—the Illusionist, the Alchemist, and the Lord of Decay—with a final, searing glare of hatred. Then, with a sound like a tearing reality, it dissolved into a cloud of black mist and retreated down a side tunnel, moving with unnatural speed, its haunting, multi-voiced scream echoing behind it.
END OF CHAPTER 2-(PART 3)