The infinite dive ended with a snap.
Gio's consciousness was violently flung into a new, oppressive space. The stillness was a torment, trapping the silent, screaming geometries of the void inside his mind. He was steeped in a thick, metallic air, suspended in a chamber of shimmering, half-formed matter—a reflection of a disastrous ritual.
His instincts broke through the fear: New location. Current threat: Unknown. Locate.
In the center of the distortion, chanting, was the anchor: a hooded figure, the summoner. It flickered between a black-robed humanoid and a terrifying, angular distortion of pure, wrong geometry.
Humanity and rationality was a shredded memory. Only instinctual survival remained. Gio moved like a predator, a creature of pure need and chaotic intent. He flowed, tore, and lunged, his soul-mass snapping and reforming with physics that belonged to the abyss. He sought only the annihilation of the figure that had dragged him here.
The attack was a mauling.
The summoner's soul was a brittle, terrified thing that offered no defense. Gio struck, and instead of scattering, a segment of the summoner's theoretical knowledge—a sharp, buzzing spike of runic calculus—fused onto Gio's core. The assimilation spiked the latent Eldritch madness, making Gio writhe in a spasm of pure, cognitive pain.
He struck again, driven by rage and the need to destroy the foreign terror now residing within him. He ripped at the shimmering form, and absorbed the crippling shame and desperation that had fueled the ritual. The torrent of emotion was suffocating, making him less man, more monster.
Each blow fused a piece, and each piece temporarily engaged the madness. The summoned was consuming his summoner, tearing apart Wyatt's soul and merging the bleeding fragments onto his own.
The robed figures overlayed glowing form was now a fraction of its original radiance—a small, quivering remnant radiating only the final, raw essence of self-loathing and resentment for the world that was taking its life.
Gio did not hesitate. He lunged one last time, his soul-mass focused into a single, devastating spike of controlled force. He was no longer trying to annihilate the threat; he was executing a final, necessary blow.
The force struck the last vestige of the summoners soul, and the annihilation was absolute.
It was an instant of explosive, profound emptiness. The fragment of light was extinguished, leaving nothing behind.
The distorted space snapped back, instantly. The shimmering, angular geometry vanished. The sickly, metallic air went silent.
The body of a seventeen-year-old student, now soulless, crumpled to the stone floor of the strange room, the empty vessel a remainder of the final, decisive blow.
The force was spent. The last piece of his target's soul was annihilated.
Gio's consciousness, now the single, reigning entity, shuddered to a halt. The frenzy faded, peeling back like a scab to reveal raw, exposed nerve endings underneath. The manic cackles that had been tearing through his mind slowly dissipated, replaced by a hollow, sickening calm.
The terrible, corrosive knowledge of the Eldritch void—the screams of the infinite cubes and the logic of absolute contradiction—began to slip away like sand from a shattered hourglass. He clung to the final, necessary memory: Annihilate. Survive. But the specifics of the horror were too big for his mind to hold, dissolving into meaningless visual static.
As the madness receded, Gio's perception sharpened. He was not a man; he was a gaseous cloud of highly potent, highly displaced life-force, maybe.
The strange, half-formed ritual chamber itself seemed to be rejecting him. He was a volatile energy source, and the environment was acting as a colossal stabilizer, forcing him toward equilibrium. He felt suddenly weak, ethereal, and sick—his being was dispersing, leaking into the strange, smoke-filled room.
He realized the awful, terrifying truth: He was a gas without a tank, water without a glass. Without a vessel, his potent, highly stressed soul would simply diffuse and fade into nothingness.
Then he saw it. The soulless shell of a seventeen-year-old boy lay crumpled on the stone floor, silent but for a slow, rhythmic beat. The summoner's heart, still ticking along on basal instinct, was a final, empty harbor.
A massive portion of his dissipating soul was already being drawn to the shell. The pressure difference was too great. The residue of his potent life-force wafted toward the waiting body, slowly filling the void left by Wyatt.
Gio knew his only chance for survival was shelter. With a conscious act of will, he focused the main mass of his soul on the body. It was an act of aggressive self-preservation, the opposite of the peaceful transmigration he'd read about.
He burrowed.
The larger, firmer mass of his soul compressed and melded into the small, physically frail vessel. It fit better than expected. The areas of the body that were already stained with the colors of Wyatt's terror and shame—the pieces of soul he had violently consumed—felt particularly comforting, a strange, sickening form of pre-acceptance.
The world snapped back into terrifying clarity.
Gio choked, sucking a harsh lungful of acrid air into unused lungs. He felt the intense, burning ache of mana exhaustion and the searing pain of magical burns. He was kneeling on stone tiles, surrounded by a ruined ritual circle.
In the very center of the circle, beside the catastrophic glyphs, was a shallow, bronze bowl holding a liquid that was too thick, too dark, and too vibrant to be anything but human blood.
He used more potent human blood instead of the required ceremonial animal blood to make up for a lack of power.
The thought was instantaneous. Clear. Precise.
Why did he know that?
Gio choked on the acrid air, his new lungs burning with the chemical sting of spent mana. He was on his knees, surrounded by the smoking wreckage of the ritual circle, the bronze basin of human blood beside him. The sudden influx of knowledge—was a terrifying invasion of his mind.
Get out of the danger zone. Stabilize.
His survival instinct, the core of his soul, took control of the screaming, unfamiliar body. His limbs were heavy, uncooperative, responding sluggishly to the commands of his mind. He ignored the throbbing heat of the mana burns and the deep, sickening ache in his neck.
He began to crawl. It was clumsy, an awful grind of limbs against stone, but he dragged the vessel away from the heart of the chaos, inch by agonizing inch, until his back scraped against the cold, unyielding stone of the nearest corner.
He curled into the fetal position, folding the young, weak body in on itself. The sensory barrage was too much. Every time his eyes snagged on an object, a wave of foreign comprehension slammed into his mind: the precise, drawn lines in the ritual circle; the metal of the bracelet on his wrist; the network of faint, older scars that were not his own, yet felt strangely familiar.
Déjà vu. It was a corrosive poison, proof that Wyatt's fragmented terror was still lodged in his mind.
He doubled over, the world spinning. The veteran's mind—the part of his mind that processed explosions as equations—rejected the chaos. His body revolted, trying to purge the non-physical contaminant.
He retched. Then, violently, he vomited and dry-heaved onto the stone floor. It was pure bile, tearing at his abused throat, but the physical exertion helped. He felt the terrifying cognitive pressure momentarily release with each heave.
He saw something on the stone—a thin, oily residue in the bile that shimmered with the maddening colors of the void.
(No, that's in your head. Close your eyes.)
He squeezed his eyes shut. The internal voice, a panicked echo of Wyatt's fear, shrieked: (Shut up. Shut up. Shut up!)
Gio forced his mind into the only thing it wanted: Organization. He grasped at the fragments, trying to locate a single, reliable piece of information, a memory of a name or a face from his old life. But the void had left him ragged. Nothing.
Exhaustion, the physical and existential cost of the last, finally won. He lost his grip on consciousness, sinking into a familiar void that was mercifully dark and silent.
He woke again.
The change was absolute. He was still pressed into the corner, still curled in the fetal position, but the ambient noise was different. The basin of blood beside him had coagulated into a deep, sickly black jelly. The meager candles that had lit the ritual were extinguished.
The previous deep shadows from the high, single window were replaced by soft rays of morning light, cutting across the dust-filled air of the chamber.
His head was clear. The screaming, geometric static was gone. The panic of the creature was gone. He felt the dull, manageable ache of the body—the pain of the burns, the throb in his neck—but the overwhelming, existential horror had retreated.
He was Gio.
But when he tentatively moved the body, reaching out a shaky hand to touch the ruined circle, the sense of déjà vu was still there, vague but persistent—an unwelcome, quiet reminder of the soul that had paid the price for his survival and the body that was not his own