Despite injuries that should have been fatal, he stood to his full, towering height. His breath escaped in bursts of searing vapor, as if an inner fire consud his very core. His eyes, a blazing crimson, burned with pure, absolute, inhuman hatred. His fangs glead in a grimace twisted by pain and boundless rage.
- "You... will... pay..." he articulated, each word seeming to cost him a superhuman effort, his voice distorted into a guttural echo that resonated against the collapsed walls.
He raised his still-intact fist a mass of muscle and razor-sharp claws and slamd it down with unimaginable force onto the already tortured ground. A shockwave rippled across the blackened tiles, cracking the stone into a complex network of fissures from which acrid smoke curled. The ground trembled under the impact, the remaining fragnts of walls swayed dangerously, and even the air itself seed to vibrate under the effect of his unbridled rage.
- "AKANEEEEEE!"
His roar because it was no longer a re cry tore through the silence like a white-hot blade. That na, pronounced with such hatred it was almost unrecognizable, bounced off the shattered walls, reverberating through the collapsed corridors, carrying with it a promise of destruction that even death could not halt.
The dust slowly settled, shrouding Belgaroth’s massive silhouette in a gray veil. But through that funerary haze, his eyes continued to burn—two infernal furnaces in a disfigured face. A mutilated arm, a lacerated body, but a gaze that promised the apocalypse. He had not been defeated. He had not been destroyed. Not yet.
His breathing gradually stabilized, and in his one good eye, a calculating light flickered cold as death itself. A smile, or at least sothing that resembled one on that partially destroyed face, twisted his charred lips, revealing yellowed fangs glimring in the shadows.
- "You will pay... I swear it by the ancient gods..."
His voice had changed, more controlled but just as terrifying.
- "I will hunt them to the ends of this world... I will destroy them to the last... I will reduce their hopes to ashes, just as they tried to do to ."
His claws slowly closed, crushing a fragnt of stone as if it were an overripe fruit. Drops of black blood beaded between his fingers, dripping onto the ground in a macabre rhythm. The dungeon continued to groan, its last foundations crumbling inexorably. Belgaroth raised his gaze to the partially collapsed ceiling, his smile widening into an expression of pure madness.
- "Isaac... I will find you wherever you go... And on that day..."
He paused, savoring in advance the vision forming in his sick mind.
- "On that day, you will beg to grant you death as a rcy."
A final tremor, more violent than the previous ones, shook the dungeon’s foundations. Entire blocks of stone detached from the ceiling, crashing all around the creature that did not even bother to avoid them. Then silence returned, heavy and oppressive, leaving Belgaroth alone in the shadows of the ruins, his incandescent hatred burning more fiercely than all the fires of Hell.
The portal closed with an electric crackle, like the universe’s strangled scream. A trail of residual energy cobalt and silver lingered for a mont in the air before dissolving into evanescent particles.
Isaac erged into reality like a castaway spat out by the waves, his feet slamming brutally onto the asphalt cold, wet, rcilessly real. The abandoned industrial zone stretched out around him like a cetery of forsaken dreams. Rusted warehouses stood against the night sky, fallen cathedrals of a bygone era, their tal structures groaning under the assaults of a relentless wind. The air bit into his skin like icy teeth, each breath searing his battered lungs. A spectral mist rose from the ground, wrapping around his ankles as if the ghosts of this place sought to hold him back.
Isaac remained frozen, a statue of flesh and pain. His breath heavy, ragged, almost tangible escaped in white tendrils that dissipated as soon as they were born. Slowly, inexorably, his fists clenched until the tendons stood out beneath his skin, until his knuckles whitened like exposed bone. In his eyes, still red from tears he would shed no more, a new light had ignited wild, relentless, dangerous. He stared at the spot where the portal had just disappeared, that tear in the fabric of the world now sealed forever. The void had claid that space, just as it had claid his heart. Akane was gone.
Without a word for words now belonged to a world he no longer recognized he tore himself from his stillness and began to walk.
The city swallowed him up like a beast devours its prey. Isaac moved through it with chanical steps, his gaze locked onto an invisible horizon, his hands buried so deeply in the pockets of his coat that they seed to want to dissolve there. The urban arteries stretched out, deserted, at this hour when even the darkness seed to sleep. Only the flickering neon lights stood watch, epileptic sentinels casting sickly hues over the asphalt slick with recent rain. Each of his steps echoed like a funereal trono, punctuating the silent requiem playing in his mind.
His entire being was numb, as if anesthetized by a poison more potent than any substance the poison of irrevocable loss. He moved like an automaton, propelled by a force that was neither will nor instinct, but sothing more primal, more visceral. Each stride was another blade plunging deeper into the gaping wound of his soul. His muscles, already tortured by the ordeal of the portal, protested in vain, stretched to the breaking point. His breathing remained labored, rasping, as if the air itself refused to enter his lungs. Yet he did not stop. Not once. The arctic cold bit into his cheeks until they bled, the wind slipped beneath his clothes like a cruel lover, but these sensations slid off him without truly reaching him insignificant compared to the storm raging within.
In the macabre theater of his mind, a never-ending play unfolded. Akane appeared, a luminous ghost with blurred edges. Her mocking smile in the arena that perfect blend of defiance and veiled admiration. Her voice, crystalline even in her monts of anger, when she ordered him to get back up, again and again. Her tiny but formidable fists striking the ground in an act of defiance against destiny itself. Her gaze that final look before the light consud her where unyielding determination burned and, perhaps, sothing he would never have the ti to decipher. Her voice his na exhaled like a final prayer on her lips.
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