The moment Elsie stepped across the threshold, the world changed.

  The hot desert air was swallowed in an instant, replaced by a thick, rotting cold that clung to the back of her throat. The darkness inside the cave wasn’t natural; it wasn’t the simple absence of light. It was heavy, viscous, like tar smearing itself across her skin, resisting the flicker of the torches jammed sporadically into the stone walls. Their orange flames guttered weakly, struggling to push back against the suffocating black, casting the cave not into light, but into a nightmare of half-seen horrors.

  Elsie’s footfalls slowed, her breath catching in her chest as her wide eyes adjusted. And the, she saw something.

  Pinned against the right wall, slumped and broken like a discarded puppet, was the figure of a man clad in what had once been pristine white armor. Once—because to call it white now would have been a mockery. The plating was ripped and shredded, chunks missing as if something had gnawed it like a beast, the metal warped and stained a sick, rotting black. His body was not just hung there; it was crucified. Dozens of black chains, thick as a man’s wrist and slick with some gleaming residue, had impaled him straight through the chest, shoulders, stomach, twisting around his limbs like the embrace of some monstrous spider.

  And one chain had been driven through the man’s mouth, bursting out through his right eye socket with such force that the delicate bones of the face had split and crumbled around it, leaving nothing but a gaping, ruined hole where his eye should have been. The sight alone churned Elsie’s stomach into knots. Blood—too much blood—pooled beneath him, congealing in thick, dark globs that barely moved even when the torches flickered and the shadows shifted.

  The chains weren’t just holding him, they were feeding on him, vibrating slightly, almost pulsing, as if they were draining something invisible from the dead man’s body, drinking whatever had been left behind.

  Elsie stumbled a step backward, her hands flying to her mouth to stifle the cry building in her throat. Her sharp green eyes, usually so lively, were wide and glassy now, reflecting the grotesque scene in perfect, horrifying detail. The bile rose higher, but she forced it down, clutching the edge of her costume like a drowning woman grabbing for anything solid.

  Kaiser stood in front of her, unmoving, staring up at the corpse with a cold, hollow kind of focus. His face was unreadable, cast in fractured shadows that made him look even less human, like a ghost that had seen too much to fear anymore. His breath was steady, slow. But even without turning, even without speaking, she could tell that whatever patience or mercy lived in him had been burned away by what he was seeing.

  Elsie found her voice only after what felt like a lifetime of standing in that graveyard of one. “Who... who could do this?” she whispered, her voice raw, barely more than a breath.

  Kaiser’s hand flexed once at his side, the frost crawling back up his knuckles in jagged, angry veins. He answered without looking at her, his tone colder than the dead air in the cave. “Someone worse than any villain you’ve ever seen before.”

  Elsie turned her head, green hair whipping behind her like a comet's trail, and her wide eyes caught sight of Regulus, now standing almost reverently before the mangled corpse pinned to the cave wall. His frame was rigid, his posture a soldier’s, but his stance had sharpened into something harsher, something less human. He did not flinch at the gore before him, did not shy from the sight of torn flesh and shattered armor, but the way his gauntleted fists tightened at his sides, slow and grinding, spoke of a nerve struck deep beneath all his polished steel and practiced calm.

  And then, with a suddenness that made even Elsie flinch, something in Regulus snapped.

  His head snapped violently toward the deeper shadows of the cave, like a hound scenting blood, his entire body jerking into a taut line of action. His voice cracked through the suffocating air, raw and urgent. “Move! Now! I beg you, please just keep up with me!” he barked, his tone leaving no room for hesitation.

  In a heartbeat, fire exploded from his back, not wild and raging, but clean and precise as a cape of burning crimson feathers that blazed outward with a roar that shook the sand underfoot. For one blazing moment, Regulus looked less like a man and more like some mythic beast called forth from legend. Then, before Elsie could even gasp, he vanished forward in a streak of fire, faster than anything she had ever seen, his flames leaving an afterimage in the air.

  Elsie skidded a half-step back, stunned, before turning to Kaiser, who was already moving toward her. His crimson eyes locked onto hers with a kind of grim humor even in the madness. “Can you keep up?” he asked, voice dry.

  Elsie cracked a reckless grin despite the pounding in her chest. “Probably not,” she chirped, her body already shifting into a sprinter's crouch, “But Elsie will try!”

  Without another word, she launched herself forward, sprinting at her maximum speed, her boots hitting the ground in rapid percussion, her sharp ears flattening against the rush of air. For a heartbeat, she was ahead of Kaiser, her smaller frame cutting cleaner through the thick atmosphere.

  But Kaiser, to her surprise, was struggling.

  Frost erupted from his steps, sheets of ice forming beneath every footfall, slick and treacherous. He cursed under his breath, low and guttural, frustration bleeding through his tightly clenched teeth as the frozen ground sabotaged every push forward. It was like he was fighting himself with every step.

  Elsie, risking a glance over her shoulder, barked out between breaths, “What the hell is Kaiser doing?!” She pointed ahead where the last fading embers of Regulus’s passage still glowed faintly, like dying stars swallowed by black.

  Kaiser did not answer immediately, grinding forward another step through the ice with a snarl. Then, with another muted curse, he altered his stance—his run transformed into a brutal, pounding charge. Each step now struck the ground with enough force to crack the floor underneath, launching him further with every stomp. It was violent. It was desperate. It was messy. But it seemed to work.

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  The ground blurred under their feet as they ran, the stale air of the cave slicing against their faces like invisible blades. Each step was a hammer blow against the stone, and yet even though Kaiser and Elsie pushed themselves to a pace most men would die to match, Regulus remained ahead of them, a streak of living flame tearing through the gloom with a speed so unnatural it almost seemed like the darkness recoiled from him. His fiery cape left fleeting ribbons of gold and red trailing through the shadows, vanishing just as quickly as they appeared.

  Kaiser’s boots thundered against the stone, the frost building underfoot cracking with every impact, and Elsie darted at his side, her movements sharp and nimble, though every few seconds she would flick her eyes sideways toward him, as if trying to match his insane focus with her own wild, erratic heartbeat.

  “So Kaiser’s really not scared?” Elsie breathed out, struggling to keep pace, her voice more shaken than she wanted it to be. “Not even after seeing... that?”

  Kaiser did not look at her immediately. His eyes stayed forward, locked onto the flicker of flame Regulus left behind, like a wolf chasing the last scent of a dying fire. When he finally spoke, it was low and even, the kind of voice born from too many nights walking into places no sane man returned from. "I’m not scared," Kaiser said, his voice slow and sharp, like a sword being drawn in the dark. "I’m wary. Fear clouds your mind. Caution sharpens it, especially in a situation as tense as this."

  The moment shattered as the tunnel opened wider, and they both saw two more figures nailed to the cave walls like grotesque trophies.

  The first was a woman, or what was left of her—her body slumped forward, head lolling at an unnatural angle, crimson staining what might once have been royal blue armor. Thick black chains punctured her torso at sickening angles, and where her eyes should have been were only gaping, bloody voids, like something had scooped them out and left the hollow shells to stare blindly into the dark.

  The second was worse—a younger man, his body broken and folded over itself in a way that defied all reason, his limbs crushed into odd angles, bound and nailed into the wall like some nightmarish art piece. Blood pooled at the base of the wall in a dark, sticky lake, and the smell of iron filled the air so thick it nearly choked Elsie.

  With this, her bravado cracked completely. With a small, desperate sound, she squeezed her eyes shut to block out the sight, but in doing so, she stumbled, her balance faltering dangerously.

  Without hesitation, a hand shot out. Kaiser’s fingers wrapped around her wrist like an iron chain, steadying her in mid-fall. Without breaking stride, he hoisted her up into his arms as if she weighed nothing at all, his pace never slowing, the ice still forming frantic spiderwebs across the ground beneath him.

  Pressed against his chest, Elsie blinked up at him, her green eyes wide and raw with emotion. “How can Kaiser—” she gasped between breaths, voice cracking. “How can Kaiser see that and not even flinch? Kaiser’s like—like a prince out of some old story... carrying Elsie like she is a princess, while charging through the nightmare to save the day…”

  Her voice softened, trembling now. “But at the same time he’s worse. Maybe he’s a villain so cruel even other villains would curse his name…”

  Kaiser’s grip did not loosen. His face was set in that same expressionless calm, the cold, inhuman focus of a man who had already walked through hell, and learned long ago that hesitation was just another kind of death.

  "I’m whatever I need to be," he said quietly, the words falling between them like iron weights. "And right now, that means being faster than your fear."

  But a second later, just as he finished his sentence, the entire cave seemed to inhale and exhale flame as a tidal wave of searing heat erupted from deep within the abyss, just from where they last saw Reguluses flames. Light devoured shadow, and air turned to roaring inferno.

  Upon seeing the fire, Kaisers body moved in the perfect calm of instinct, sharpened and honed through a lifetime of war. Without thought, he spun and threw himself between Elsie and the coming flames. The fire struck him like a hammer, but he did not flinch, did not even register the pain that would have broken another man. His nerves, long since deadened to agony, felt only the force and the weight of the heat trying and failing to break him.

  The blast tore across his back, shredding his shirt into ash, blackening the frost that spiderwebbed across his skin. Steam hissed from his shoulders, the raw heat battling the cold that bled from his body with every breath he took.

  Then, against his chest, he felt Elsie shudder, and then vanish. In a ripple of emerald light, her human form collapsed into a brilliant snake, coils of shimmering green twisting around him with the grace of water. She anchored herself tightly around his torso, her body cool and alive, a stark contrast to the smoldering air that whipped around them.

  "I’ll be easier to carry like this!" she hissed, breathless but determined—and before he could respond, her small fangs sank into his shoulder. He barely registered it. He felt the healing begin immediately, the torn muscle mending beneath her magic, the blistered skin cooling under her gift. It was efficient and tactical, but not needed on him.

  He grunted in approval, his crimson eyes locked dead ahead. "Neat trick," he muttered, voice low and steady, but his mind was already moving beyond her, calculating the terrain, measuring the growing storm ahead. "Save it for Regulus. Or whoever’s still breathing."

  The snake tightened around him, saying nothing, but he felt her pulse flutter against his ribs, felt the confusion and fear she buried beneath the brave act. He said nothing to comfort her, because there was no comfort to be found here.

  In the distance, Regulus’s burning cape, once a dying ember, now blazed like a comet tearing through the darkness, illuminating the jagged, broken cave around them in leaping, violent shadows.

  And as Kaiser moved ever so closer, the world opened wide.

  They broke into a vast hollow, a cavern so immense it seemed to have no ceiling, no walls, only an endless darkness pressing in from all sides. In the center of it all, Regulus stood like a titan clad in burning metal, his sword a pillar of fire, his cape cracking and writhing like the wings of some ancient evil.

  At Regulus’s back, collapsed but unmistakably defiant, laid a young woman clad in armor so ornate it seemed almost out of place in the raw brutality of the cavern. The plates were a blinding white, unmarred even by the grime of battle, edged with intricate gold trim that caught what little light there was and scattered it in gleaming shards. Her body was battered, her golden hair matted and tangled with blood, but even in her broken state, she radiated an otherworldly dignity.

  Blood pooled beneath her, but it was not the crimson of any normal wound. Instead, a glistening stream of pale white spilled from her side, laced with slow-curling threads of rainbow, as if the very essence of light itself had been poured into her veins. She looked less like a casualty of war and more like a fallen relic, something too pure and brilliant for the darkness now clawing at the edges of the world.

  Beside her, just as silent but no less striking, knelt a second figure. His armor was heavy and brutal, forged from dark steel that seemed to drink in Regulus’s flame rather than reflect it. Frost encased him in jagged plates, creeping up his legs, across his arms, locking him to the cracked stone floor as if he were being devoured by winter itself.

  Across his chest, where a badge of pride would have once rested, the remains of a shattered cobalt scale could be seen, the blue so deep it seemed to pulse faintly in the half-light. His sword, a massive and ugly thing, was buried tip-first into the ground, his frozen gauntlet still clutching the hilt with the desperate, unyielding strength of a man who would rather die standing than fall on his knees.

  Every victory counts! Whenever any of these milestones is reached, I’ll drop a Bonus Chapter as a reward! Hit them all, and you get even more!

  Total Views: 15,099 / 20,000 ?? (4,901 left!)

  ?? Followers: 136 / 250?? (114 more needed!)

  ? Favorites: 46 / 50 ? (4 more to go!)

  ?? Ratings: 11 / 25 ?? (14 more for victory!)