Time stopped meaning anything.
Reven watched his greatsword tumble through the air—seven feet of folded steel spinning end over end, torchlight replaced by the crimson glow of Vyraxes's eyes painting the blade in shades of blood and shadow. Every rotation seemed to take an hour. Every inch of distance felt like miles.
The three heads tracked the movement.
Reven felt their attention shift, feeling the weight of cosmic awareness move fractionally away from him and toward the spinning blade. It was like standing in a spotlight and having it suddenly dim—not gone, but reduced, and even that tiny reduction let him breathe again, let his thoughts reform into something resembling coherence.
Granite Fang hit the Stormbreaker Pike pommel-first with a sound like a bell tolling across dimensions.
The legendary spear's enchantments activated.
The Stormbreaker Pike was A-Rank for a reason—centuries old, forged by a grandmaster whose name had been lost to time, enchanted with lightning captured from a Thunder Wyrm's death throes. It was meant to be wielded. Thrust. Thrown with precision and control, the enchantments releasing measured bolts that could drop Apex Predators with surgical strikes.
What it was not designed for was having seven feet of greatsword impact its pommel at terminal velocity while every safety mechanism and control enchantment simultaneously failed.
Lightning exploded outward.
Raw electrical fury expanding from the impact point in a wave of white-blue annihilation that turned the obsidian ground into glass, that made the air itself scream, that carried with it the dying rage of a Thunder Wyrm whose essence had been trapped in metal for three hundred years and had finally found release.
The wave hit Reven first.
He felt his muscles lock. Reven's heart stuttered and restarted in a rhythm that wasn't quite right. He felt his hair stand on end and his skin try to crawl off his body. The ritual circle's hold on him shattered. The ancient mechanisms was forced to choose between maintaining their grip and not having their entire structure fried by several thousand volts of concentrated fury.
He collapsed.
The pressure plate clicked as his weight left it, some backup mechanism activating, but it was already too late. Vyraxes was awake. The trap had been sprung. Whatever the ancient architects had built this place to do had already failed or succeeded, and nothing Reven did now would change that.
But the lightning sphere was still expanding.
And it was rising.
Reven hit the ground hard, every muscle spasming, vision white with afterimages. Through the chaos, through the pain, through the residual electricity making his nervous system fire random signals, he watched the lightning climb.
Twenty feet. Forty. Sixty.
Higher.
Finding the only targets tall enough to reach.
The three heads of Vyraxes.
One.
The sphere touched the leftmost Devourer Twin first.
For a fraction of a second—one impossible, crystalline instant—the eyeless head recoiled. Not in pain. Vyraxes was too far beyond concepts like pain. But in something that might have been surprise. As if a mountain had been mildly startled by an insect's bite.
The lightning wrapped around its neck, crackling through obsidian scales and crimson crystal, finding every gap and imperfection. Where it touched, the flowing semi-liquid crystal solidified, locking in place. The head thrashed—a movement so fast and so powerful that the air itself tore, creating vacuum pockets that collapsed with thunderous cracks.
The Stormbreaker Pike shattered.
Three centuries of craftsmanship, three centuries of careful maintenance, three centuries of Ironpeak Vanguard pride—gone in an instant. The spear didn't just break. It disintegrated. The lightning had used the weapon as a conduit, had channeled through it with such intensity that the metal simply ceased to exist as anything but vapor and glowing fragments.
Those fragments became shrapnel.
Two.
Reven tried to move and couldn't. His muscles still wouldn't obey. The aftereffects of the lightning had temporarily severed the connection between intent and action. He lay on the glass-smooth ground, watching helplessly as chunks of superheated metal hurtled in every direction.
Several pieces struck Vyraxes's central head.
Against obsidian scales that had survived unimaginable eons, against armor that suggested something more than mere physical matter, the shrapnel bounced off harmlessly. Each impact created a spark. Each spark died instantly. The fragments clattered to the ground, already cooling to useless scrap.
But one piece—one single shard, maybe the length of Reven's finger—found a gap.
Not in the armor.
Between dimensions.
Where the central head's neck met the massive body still hidden in the chasm's depths, there existed a space that wasn't quite physical. A seam in reality where Vyraxes existed in multiple states simultaneously. The shrapnel entered that space and caught.
Like a key finding a lock.
The shard began to glow. Brighter. Hotter. The residual lightning still clinging to it discharged all at once, finding something to ground against that actually mattered—
—and drew blood.
Three.
Reven's mind, still reeling from the lightning strike, from the impossible presence of Vyraxes, from the reality-crushing pressure of the last five seconds, took several long moments to process what he was seeing.
Blood.
From Vyraxes.
A single drop.
It didn't fall like liquid. It condensed from the wound like reality crystallizing into a form that shouldn't exist. The drop was the size of Reven's own body, maybe even larger. Perfectly spherical, glowing with internal light that cycled through shades of crimson and black and colors that didn't have names because human eyes had never been meant to perceive them.
Where it formed, the air itself cracked. Hairline fractures spread through three-dimensional space, and through those fractures, Reven could see... something else. Somewhere else. Spaces that existed perpendicular to normal existence, where different rules applied and geometry was negotiable.
The drop began to fall.
Time resumed its normal pace with a sound like reality sighing in relief.
Four.
Everything happened at once.
All three heads moved. The Devourer Twins pulled back, their eyeless sockets somehow conveying... something. Not pain. Not even discomfort. But acknowledgment. The central head—the Sovereign Maw, with its seven burning horns and eyes like cathedral windows made of blood—tilted downward, following the trajectory of that single falling drop.
And Reven, lying on the ground with his muscles finally starting to obey again, realized with absolute horror what was about to happen.
The drop was falling directly toward him.
He tried to roll. But his legs began twitching, his arms spasming. His body was a puppet with tangled strings, and the puppet master was electricity.
The drop fell faster.
Picking up speed that violated physics. Accelerating past terminal velocity into speeds that suggested it weighed far more than any liquid should, that it was pulling itself toward the ground with its own gravity, creating its own rules about how falling worked.
Reven's hand found Granite Fang's hilt. The greatsword had landed three feet away, point-first, embedded in the obsidian-turned-glass. He pulled. The blade came free with a sound like tearing metal.
The drop was ten feet above him.
He raised the sword.
Not to block. Blocking something like this was pointless. But maybe—maybe—he could deflect it. Redirect it. Send it somewhere, anywhere except directly into his chest where the shrapnel had already opened half a dozen wounds, where his armor had been torn and his skin exposed and his blood was already flowing freely.
Five feet.
The sword came up.
Three feet.
The flat of the blade intercepted the drop's trajectory.
Two feet.
The crimson sphere touched folded steel.
One foot.
The sword exploded.
Five.
Granite Fang—seven feet of steel Reven had forged himself, quenched in ice-water from the northern glaciers, folded two hundred times until the metal sang when struck, the weapon he'd spent three months perfecting because if he was going to be a Titan Cleaver then he was going to have a blade worthy of the discipline—ceased to exist.
The drop of Vyraxes's blood touched the steel and the steel evaporated.
What was left was mist. Crimson-tinted mist that hung in the air for one heartbeat before the vacuum of the drop's passage pulled it inward, consuming it, adding it to the sphere's mass in a way that suggested this was how Calamity-class blood worked—it consumed. It devoured. It broke things down to their component essences and integrated them.
The drop, now impossibly larger, continued its fall.
It struck Reven's chest.
There was no impact.
The blood simply arrived at the location his chest occupied.
And then it was inside him.
Reven screamed.
Not from pain. But from the absolute wrongness of what was happening. His body knew—on some fundamental cellular level that predated conscious thought—that something that shouldn't exist inside a human form had just taken up residence in his chest cavity.
The blood didn't sink in. It merged.
Reven felt it happening in real-time. He felt the crimson sphere spreading through his circulatory system like ink dropped in water. He felt it reach his heart, then rewrite what it meant to be a muscle that pumped blood, adding new chambers or removing old ones or creating structures that existed in the spaces between them.
His veins lit up with crimson light.
Visible through his skin. Glowing. Pulsing in rhythm with a heartbeat that no longer sounded like one beat but like seven, each one slightly offset, creating a cascading rhythm that human biology should never produce.
Thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-thump.
Not seven separate hearts. One heart beating in seven rhythms simultaneously, existing in multiple states at once, pumping blood that was no longer entirely human.
Reven's back arched. His hands clawed at the ground, nails breaking against glass-smooth obsidian. His legs kicked out in convulsions that had nothing to do with the residual lightning and everything to do with his body trying to reject what was happening and failing because rejection required the thing to be separate, and Vyraxes's blood was no longer separate.
It was becoming him.
His System interface flickered back to life.
Not normal. Not stable. But active, trying desperately to process something that broke every parameter it had been designed to measure.
The text appeared directly in his vision, overlaying the crimson-lit chamber and the three heads of Vyraxes still looming above:
[FOREIGN ESSENCE DETECTED]
[ANALYSIS INITIATED]
[ERROR: ESSENCE TYPE UNKNOWN]
[SEARCHING ARCHIVES...]
[ARCHIVE SEARCH FAILED]
[SUBSTANCE CLASSIFICATION: UNDEFINED]
[SUBSTANCE ORIGIN: UNDEFINED]
[SUBSTANCE EFFECTS: CATASTROPHIC]
Reven tried to speak, to tell the System to shut down, to stop analyzing and just let him die because dying had to be better than this—
The pain finally started.
If the lightning had made his nervous system fire random signals, the blood made it fire all signals. Every pain receptor activated at once. Every nerve ending screamed. His brain, trying to process sensory input that exceeded its capacity by orders of magnitude, began shutting down non-essential functions.
His sight went first. The chamber disappeared into red-tinted darkness.
Hearing went second. The residual thunder from the lightning, the grinding of stone as Vyraxes moved, his own screaming—all of it faded to silence.
Smell and taste went together. The metallic tang of his own blood, the ozone from electrical discharge, the ancient dust—gone.
Touch tried to go but couldn't. The pain was touch. The burning was touch. The sensation of his body being rewritten from the inside out was fundamentally tactile and couldn't be escaped.
His System continued its desperate analysis:
[FOREIGN SUBSTANCE INTEGRATING WITH HOST BIOLOGY]
[INTEGRATION PROGRESS: 3%... 7%... 14%...]
[WARNING: CELLULAR MUTATION DETECTED]
[WARNING: DNA STRUCTURE COMPROMISED]
[WARNING: ENTITY CLASSIFICATION CHANGING]
[HOST IS NO LONGER RECOGNIZABLE AS BASELINE HUMAN]
[INTEGRATION PROGRESS: 28%... 35%... 41%...]
The text scrolled faster, overlapping itself, corruption spreading through the interface like infection:
[CLASS EVOLUTION DETECTED]
[ERROR: EVOLUTION SOURCE UNKNOWN]
[ERROR: EVOLUTION TYPE UNDEFINED]
[ERROR: CLASS DATABASE DOES NOT CONTAIN MATCHING PARAMETERS]
[ANALYZING ESSENCE SIGNATURE...]
[SIGNATURE CONTAINS: PRIMORDIAL MARKERS]
[SIGNATURE CONTAINS: CALAMITY-CLASS IDENTIFIERS]
[SIGNATURE CONTAINS: [DATA REDACTED BY SYSTEM AUTHORITY]]
[INTEGRATION PROGRESS: 54%... 63%... 71%...]
Reven's consciousness flickered. In and out. Each time it returned, he was less himself and more... something else. Something that contained his memories but viewed them from a distance. Something that remembered being Reven but wasn't sure if that was still accurate.
His senses began returning. But they were different.
When sight came back, he could see more.
Not just light. Heat signatures. Magical resonances. The faint shimmer of the ritual circle's lingering enchantments. And most disturbingly—he could see the obsidian walls of the chamber, except he was seeing through them. Seeing the stone's molecular structure. Seeing the imperfections and the pockets of trapped gas and the places where the rock had been stressed over millennia.
When hearing returned, he heard everything.
The grinding of tectonic plates miles below. The flutter of bat wings in distant caverns. The high-frequency hum of magic dissipating. And beyond all that—a sound like breathing. Deep. Vast. The sound of something impossibly large drawing breath in a rhythm that made the planet shudder.
Vyraxes.
He could hear Vyraxes breathing.
Touch came back distorted. He could feel the ground beneath him. But he could also feel the stone's perspective. How it experienced being stone. The pressure of air above. The weight of earth below. The slow crystallization of its structure over geological time.
His mind should have shattered.
But it didn't.
Because it was no longer entirely human.
[INTEGRATION PROGRESS: 82%... 89%... 94%...]
[CRITICAL THRESHOLD REACHED]
[HOST BIOLOGY ADAPTING TO FOREIGN ESSENCE]
[HOST BIOLOGY ACCEPTING FOREIGN ESSENCE]
[HOST BIOLOGY BECOMING SYMBIOTIC WITH FOREIGN ESSENCE]
[WARNING: POINT OF NO RETURN APPROACHING]
[WARNING: CONTINUED INTEGRATION WILL RESULT IN PERMANENT TRANSFORMATION]
[WARNING: HOST WILL NO LONGER QUALIFY AS HUMAN]
[ABORT INTEGRATION? Y/N]
The choice appeared in Reven's vision. Stark. Clear. His last chance to reject what was happening, to force his body to purge the foreign blood even if the attempt killed him.
He tried to select YES.
His hand—still glowing with crimson veins, fingers twitching with involuntary spasms—refused to move toward the confirmation.
Because somewhere in the merging of his blood and Vyraxes's blood, in the integration of human and Calamity, a new consciousness had formed. Not overriding his will. Not dominating his thoughts. But coexisting. Sharing space. Offering input.
And that part—the part that was no longer Reven but not yet something else—whispered:
If you reject it, you die. If you accept it, you change. But change means survival. And survival means revenge.
The word revenge resonated through his entire being.
Dravin. The guild. The betrayal. They'd tried to sacrifice him. Everything he'd been—loyal hunter, skilled craftsman—had died the moment that drop of blood entered his chest.
But what came after death?
What rose from the ashes of the old Reven?
His hand moved to NO.
[INTEGRATION CONFIRMED]
[PROCEEDING TO COMPLETION]
[INTEGRATION PROGRESS: 97%... 99%... 100%]
[...]
[INTEGRATION COMPLETE]
The pain stopped.
Reven lay on the obsidian glass, chest heaving, crimson veins still glowing beneath his skin. His heart beat in that impossible seven-rhythm pattern. His blood—he could feel his blood—no longer flowed like liquid but like something between liquid and crystal, pumping through veins that had been reinforced and restructured to handle the new substance.
His System interface stabilized:
[NEW CLASS ACQUIRED]
[CLASS NAME: ████████ ████████ (Corrupted Data)]
[CLASSIFICATION: UNIQUE]
[RANK: UNDEFINED]
[ESSENCE TYPE: CALAMITY-TOUCHED]
More text appeared:
[ANALYZING NEW CAPABILITIES...]
[SKILL ACQUIRED: MATERIAL INTEGRATION - HOST CAN MERGE WITH MONSTER ESSENCE]
[SKILL ACQUIRED: CALAMITY SIGHT - HOST CAN PERCEIVE TRUE NATURE OF MATERIALS]
[SKILL ACQUIRED: ESSENCE MANIPULATION - HOST CAN FORGE WITHOUT TRADITIONAL TOOLS]
[WARNING: ALL SKILLS UNSTABLE]
[WARNING: HOST BODY ADAPTING TO NEW CLASS]
[WARNING: REJECT REACTION POSSIBLE IF ESSENCE CONCENTRATION EXCEEDS THRESHOLD]
[CURRENT ESSENCE LOAD: 23%]
[MAXIMUM SAFE THRESHOLD: 40%]
Reven dismissed the interface with a thought.
His body obeyed. Slowly. Painfully. But it obeyed finally.
He looked down at his hands.
The crimson veins were still visible, pulsing faintly beneath skin that looked... different. Slightly paler. Slightly more translucent. As if his body was becoming less purely physical and more something else.
His chest wounds—the shrapnel damage, the torn armor, the flowing blood—had stopped bleeding. The wounds were still there. But the blood loss had halted, as if his body had decided bleeding was no longer an acceptable response to injury.
He flexed his fingers, watching the veins pulse brighter with the movement.
He felt power—raw, undirected, hungry power—flowing through channels that hadn't existed five minutes ago.
And then he looked up.
Vyraxes stared down at him.
All three heads. Motionless now. The Sovereign Maw's faceted eyes studied him with what might have been curiosity or with something that had no human equivalent.
For a long moment—seconds or minutes or hours, time had stopped being reliable—hunter and Calamity regarded each other.
Then, slowly, the central head tilted.
A fractional movement. Barely perceptible.
But Reven felt the weight of meaning behind it. Something deeper than language could convey. Recognition, perhaps. Or acknowledgment. Or the cosmic equivalent of a nod.
You survived.
Not spoken. Not transmitted. Just... known. The way you know your own name. The way you know which direction is up.
Vyraxes had expected him to die. Most would have after one second in its presence. The blood wasn't meant to create whatever he is now. It was meant to unmake whatever it touched, to break down matter into component essences.
But Reven had survived.
And Vyraxes, ancient and terrible and operating on scales human minds couldn't comprehend, found that... interesting.
The three heads began to withdraw.
Slowly. With the ponderous grace of something that had never known urgency because urgency implied time mattered.
The Devourer Twins descended first, their eyeless sockets somehow conveying a final glance in Reven's direction before they disappeared below the chasm's edge. The Sovereign Maw remained longer, its seven horns still burning with reality-warping light, its eyes still fixed on the human who had drawn its blood and lived.
Then it too descended.
The crimson light faded. The pressure—that horrible existential pressure—evaporated. The chamber returned to normal darkness, normal space, normal physics.
Vyraxes was gone.
But Reven knew—with certainty that went beyond logic, beyond reason—that it wasn't truly gone. It had simply returned to whatever space it occupied when it wasn't making reality scream. Dormant again. Waiting.
And now, through the blood flowing in his veins, Reven was connected to it. Could feel its presence like a vast shape moving in distant waters. Could sense when it stirred. Could taste the edges of its consciousness like smoke from a fire beyond the horizon.
He was carrying a fragment of Vyraxes the Crimson Abyss inside his body.
And Vyraxes, in turn, was carrying a fragment of him.
His System interface flickered one final time:
[STATUS UPDATE]
NAME: Reven
CLASS: ████████ ████████ (Corrupted Data)
TITLE: ███ ██████████ ██████████ (Hidden)
LEVEL: 1
STATUS: [̴C̶O̵R̷R̸U̵P̷T̸E̷D̴]
ESSENCE TYPE: Calamity-Touched
INTEGRATION STABILITY: Unstable
CURRENT ESSENCE LOAD: 1%
ANALYSIS COMPLETE.
WARNING: HUNTER REVEN HAS BECOME A CHIMERIC ENTITY.
WARNING: STANDARD GUILD CLASSIFICATION NO LONGER APPLIES.
WARNING: RECOMMEND IMMEDIATE QUARANTINE AND OBSERVATION.
WARNING: ENTITY NOW EMITS LOW-LEVEL CALAMITY SIGNATURE.
WARNING: OTHER HUNTERS MAY PERCEIVE HOST AS THREAT.
SURVIVAL PROBABILITY: RECALCULATING...
SURVIVAL PROBABILITY: UNKNOWN.
[GOOD LUCK, HUNTER.]
The System went silent.
Reven sat in the dark chamber, surrounded by shattered weapons and cooling glass, listened to his heart beat in seven rhythms.
Thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-thump.
Then darkness took him.
Something that felt like his body and mind shutting down to process what had just happened. To integrate the changes. To rebuild neural pathways and reinforce cellular structures and generally perform the impossible task of reconciling "human" with "Calamity-touched."
His last conscious thought, before the darkness claimed him completely, was surprisingly coherent:
Dravin tried to kill me.
He's going to regret that.
Then nothing.
Just the sound of seven heartbeats, echoing in the empty dark.