Knight's hand froze, hovering above the golden box by no more than the width of a hair.
The air surrounding the object resonated, pulsing in a steady, rhythmic cadence as if the box itself were breathing as if it had been crouching here, waiting for him since the very first page of this nightmare. Its gold was an anomaly; its radiance was far too brilliant for a place as choked by darkness as this. It radiated a warmth that had no business existing in a derelict alleyway, amidst ruins smothered by the Goliath's abyssal energy. It cast no shadow. It reflected nothing. It simply endured, suspended in the void.
Touch it.
The whisper coiled through his mind like acrid smoke.
Touch it, and it all ends.
Knight knew exactly what that "end" implied. Every Welder had faced it. The moment they made contact, they would be pulled into a Trial, a gauntlet they had to survive to claim the power within. To fail was to embrace a singular reward: Death.
But should he dare?
Flashes of the captives surged behind his eyes: skeletal frames, ribs jutting like knives beneath paper-thin skin, eyes clouded by years of hollow, aching hunger. They were weaponless, powerless, and trapped. They had looked upon the Welders with a faith that bordered on delusion the desperate faith of those with nothing left to believe in. And the Welders had repaid that faith by dying. Only yards away, the Goliath was still a whirlwind of carnage. Even after being hurled back, it remained an apex predator. The Welders were dead. All of them.
Yet, Knight tried to lie to himself. They'll regroup, he thought. Reinforcements are coming.
But his own eyes betrayed the lie. From his place on the ground, broken and shivering, he had watched them be snuffed out like vermin beneath a boot. A Level 6 Goliath didn't tire. It didn't bleed. It didn't negotiate. It was a predator designed by something that harbored a profound, ancient hatred for humanity.
Now, he had nothing… save for a glowing box and a whisper that promised either salvation or the grave.
If he touched it, he entered the Trial. If he didn't, he died anyway. Not as a hero, not as a martyr, but as the pathetic footnote of a fool who chose a dead end while a door stood wide open. He would be crushed into the dirt alongside the Welders, and the world would spin on without a hitch. No monuments. No records. Just dried blood on a forgotten stone in a place no one would ever find.
It isn't fair.
The thought made him want to laugh, though his soul was devoid of humor. Since when did "fair" have anything to do with this? Since when did the world care what a man deserved before deciding his fate? Justice was a lie the living told themselves for comfort. His life had known only one rule: survival.
Knight slowly withdrew his hand. He turned his gaze toward the cage.
The boy should be there.
He was a hundred percent certain. He remembered the wide eyes, the parched, cracked lips, the small fingers white-knuckled against the bars. A face etched with terror.
Now, the cage was empty. Not just devoid of the boy, but vacant in a way that felt deliberate performative. The void seemed to be trying too hard to prove no one had ever been there. There were no footprints in the fine grey dust coating the floor. No scent. Not even the lingering swirl of air that follows a sudden movement. The iron bars stood silent, like the bleached ribs of a long-dead beast.
'Am I losing my mind?'
It was a sound hypothesis. He was shattered, soaked in blood from at least four wounds he hadn't even had the strength to check yet. His left eye was swollen shut, and something in his right side grated with every breath at least two broken ribs. A mind pushed to its absolute limit often conjures phantoms, summoning them from the depths of guilt, grief, and the desperate human need for something still worth protecting.
But then...
He hobbled toward the cage, each step a brutal negotiation between his will and his broken body. He reached out and gripped the bars. The freezing metal bit into his palm, the cold so sharp it momentarily cleared the fog in his brain. He used the bars to steady himself, sweeping his gaze across the empty floor again.
And in that split second, he felt it.
A smudge. Pressed against the bar at exactly the height of a child's hand. It was smaller than his own fingers, distinct as a signature and it was warm. Unnaturally warm. As if the heat had been left there mere seconds ago, preserved amidst the freezing iron like a coal cradled in a careful hand.
Knight recoiled as if scorched. He stared at the spot. A child's fingerprint, lingering on the cold steel, warmer than anything in this dead place had a right to be.
It wasn't a hallucination. You can't hallucinate a specific, tactile heat in a place where it shouldn't exist. He pressed his finger back against the spot and felt it again. Undeniable. Strange. It was a presence defined not by absence, but by existence.
But if it was real, where did the boy go? The cage had no open door. There were no gaps between the bars wide enough for a child's shoulders. No tunnels. No seams in the ceiling. No sound. No trail. Just a void that seemed to mock him, daring him to ignore what his senses confirmed to be true.
A violent tremor snapped him out of his trance. The ground tilted, and dust cascaded from the ceiling like a pale veil. Nearby, a stone cracked with the sound of a snapping bone. The screams of the surviving captives drifted on a hot wind thick with the scent of rust and raw meat. They weren't far away. They were close and getting closer.
[Wake up, little one!]
The voice in his head was no longer a whisper; it was a command, sharp and piercing, emanating from the golden box as it drifted through the air toward him.
[What you see is not reality! Look closer, little one!]
Knight blinked. The words struck him somewhere behind his eyes not heard, but experienced. His vision doubled for a nauseating second. The world split between what he had seen and what he had subconsciously refused to acknowledge.
Then, the veil was ripped away.
The cage wasn't empty. It never had been.
It was piled high with the corpses of captives, a heap of tangled limbs and hollowed faces. Their eyes were frozen open, staring into the abyss, staring at the dark sky the Goliath had claimed. They had been dead from the moment the Goliath tore the cage open.
They had chosen to end their own lives before their bodies fell into this macabre pile.
And the boy was nowhere among them.
Was the child I just saw a phantom? No, it was too real to be a hallucination. But how to explain it? Was the Goliath's purple haze poisoning his mind? Why would it show him that?
'Ugh... I can't think straight. My head is spinning and everything hurts!'
[It wants you to hesitate, little one!]
CRACK!
The ground split into a jagged maw, opening a yard-wide fissure between him and the cage. Stones fell like shrapnel. Debris the size of torsos hammered against the floor, choking the air with white dust. The theatre's roof groaned with a low-frequency rumble, a final warning.
[For buying time to recover!]
Knight spun around. The Goliath was hauling itself back up, standing tall once again.