No light pierced the core's chamber, no fire or holy glow to break the gloom.
Only a slow, red pulse throbbed from the cracked crystal, like a heart too stubborn to quit, like a warning carved in blood.
For four hundred years, that pulse had echoed through him, a tolling knell for every stab, every jeer, every slime gutted by children's giggling blades.
Each wound had shuddered the same—dull, endless, inevitable.
But this was different.
Steady. Sharp. Alive.
This was anger.
Not the loud, frothing rage of a cornered beast.
No, this was cold, precise, a scalpel honed in the dark.
The dungeon's thoughts cut through centuries of silence, clear and unyielding.
"My first mistake was watching."
"My second was thinking the world would be better without me."
Once, he'd clung to a fool's hope, the kind that festers in dying men.
That his suffering, chained to this cursed stone, might mean something.
That the gods' verdict—eternal pain, no escape—served a greater good.
Peace, perhaps.
A world free of his shadow.
"Let the kings play their games," he'd thought, long ago.
"Let the children grow without my name in their nightmares. Let my absence be their salvation."
He'd believed, in his weakest moments, that he was the poison.
That his death, his torment, was justice.
Then they killed Elia.
Not for war or vengeance.
Not even for hate.
They slit her throat because she was weak, because her kindness was a joke, because her blood boosted their XP.
A giggle, a blade, and she was gone, her body cooling on his stone.
That's when the lie shattered.
"The world isn't better without me," he thought, the words burning like acid in his core. "It's just worse—without discipline."
He'd killed kings, yes, but with purpose, each throat a step toward victory.
He'd burned cities to end wars, betrayed gods to break armies.
His hands were black with blood, but never careless, never petty.
"They kill for loot tables," he seethed.
"They desecrate for drop rates. They piss on suffering because no one stops them. They're not better than I was—they're just liars."
No more.
He was done dying quietly, done bleeding for gods who feared him.
The gods could choke on their own light.
"I'm through suffering," he vowed.
"Now they bleed."
His focus sharpened, a blade finding its edge.
In the next chamber, a slime respawned, quivering, its instincts dull and hungry.
He felt it, a faint thread of control, like flexing a withered muscle.
Weak, clumsy, but his.
The trap, reset beneath the stone, creaked in his senses—brittle metal, ready to shift, to delay, just enough.
He counted his assets, cold as a general before battle.
One slime, two spike traps, Elia's fresh corpse, her blood pooling at his core's base.
No magic, no army, but he had time, and time was a weapon.
"I'm not a boss fight," he thought, the pulse of his core quickening.
"Not a challenge rating. I am punishment."
Someone would die tonight.
Not by chance, not by system.
By him.