It happened all at once.
One moment, Elais lay on the ground near the outpost in pain, his body refusing to move; the next, he lost all control, his armour clanking as his body twisted beneath it, a hoarse groan escaping between clenched teeth. Damien shouted for a healer while gripping Elias's shoulder, trying to still his commander's convulsing frame. The cracked wooden mask had been discarded, revealing the wound beneath.
Riley couldn't look away. He felt every tremor, every white-hot pulse threading through Elias's nerves. The sunlight beat down on his figure, and as it did.
The seizure stopped.
Just like that.
Stillness, sudden and unnatural, settled in. Damien exhaled, relieved. "He's out cold," he muttered, wiping sweat from his brow. "Get him inside."
Two soldiers stepped forward. Together, they heaved Elias up and carried him into the outpost, laying him across a table. The healer arrived moments later, sitting beside him.
He looked at the wound across Elias's face first, thin black tendrils now creeping outward beneath the skin from the site of the dragon's strike. "What the hell..." the healer murmured. He dabbed it carefully with alcohol, watching Elias's face tense under the sting.
"Remove his armour," the healer said sharply. "All of it. I need to see if it's spreading."
As the soldiers began undoing the straps, more signs of infection revealed themselves. Under the chest plate, under the vambraces, beneath every layer of his armour: the same black tendrils, like ink crawling under skin, faint but growing, pulsing slightly, as if alive.
Riley felt it through Elias like a fever—a heat curling under the surface, not just physical but mental. His thoughts were beginning to blur.
Then Elias's eyes snapped open.
Not slowly, not with the haze of waking. They burst open. Wide. Bright. A single, blazing instant.
Riley watched as Elias blinked—and the room around them twisted.
The walls bent. The air vibrated. The faces staring down at them… contorted.
The healer leaned in again, eyes narrowed in concern—but Elias didn't see concern. He saw something wrong. A face too thin. Skin sagging and grey. Eyes ringed in black.
The man reeked of decay.
Riley's breath caught. What is that? he thought. What is that thing doing near us?
Elias moved before anyone else could.
With inhuman speed, his hand shot forward, grabbed the healer by the throat, and slammed him backwards. The table cracked. Screams echoed off stone.
Another soldier lunged forward—an abomination, mask twisted like a skull—and Elias met him with a fist that shattered bone and metal alike. Blood sprayed across the wall.
They were infested—all of them.
Riley could feel it—smell it. That sick-slick scent of rot, smoke, and flesh trying to pass as human. It was wrong. All wrong.
The others shouted, trying to stop him, but he couldn't hear them—not through the fog flooding their shared mind. It was all snarling and shrieking, and the drumbeat of "kill it, kill it, kill it" rang through bone.
He didn't even remember crossing the room. Just the feeling of the muscle snapping forward. Rage twisting every nerve. Boots crunching over blood and broken steel.
They fell, one by one, until only Elias stood among the carnage.
Chest heaving.
Hands soaked in black blood.
And Riley didn't feel horror.
He felt relief.
Home, he thought. We have to get home. If these things are here—
Elias bolted.
Out the door. Into the sun.
Blood splattered his chest as he ran in nothing but his undergarments.
He left the scene of the massacre and headed for his home.
No one stopped him.
Not a single one of the soldiers was there to stop him as he had butchered everyone present.
But long after he left… their bodies began to move.
Limbs twitched. Fingers clawed against stone.
One by one, as the sun danced over their bodies, they rose—black tendrils coiling through flesh and metal, animating the dead like puppets on tangled strings. And with a soundless howl, they turned their faces toward the town.
And began to march.
It was utter carnage. Riley followed Elias' gaze, but nowhere seemed safe. The whole street was full of these grotesque, decaying creatures. The world reeked of them. Elias began butchering them all one by one. Some tried to flee, but his inhuman speed caught up to them.
Behind him, soldiers he recognised joined in the fight. Though they walked awkwardly, they still began butchering the infected creatures. With them dealing with all the creatures here, Elias felt reassured that this place was okay to leave them and instead booted off toward his home.
When he got there, he found one sitting on the porch, where the old man sat staring at him with sunken eyes. In its hands were the pages of charcoal drawings he had made.
Although neither Elias nor Riley had ever liked the old man on the porch, seeing something else taking his place like that was unbearable. The creature sat hunched, slack-jawed, its fingers thumbing through smudged pages of charcoal sketches. The eyes that met theirs were sunken, glassy, void of the man who once sketched the town's faces with silent judgment.
Elias struck hard and fast. Bone shattered under his fist. Black blood splashed the porch steps, staining the pages as they scattered to the wind.
Inside, it was worse.
Two more figures turned at the sound of the door—shambling, twitching, as if puppeted from within. Elias moved without pause. The first tall with dark hair tied into a bun. It went down quickly, crashing against the kitchen table in a splinter of wood and wetness. Behind it, a smaller shape emerged—one that shouldn't have been there.
As the first body slumped to the floor, a silver ring slipped free from one of its fingers.
Elias stopped cold.
He knew that ring.
He reached down, fingers trembling as they closed around the metal band. It was hers. It had never left her hand.
Movement flickered in the corner of his eye. The smaller figure darted for the door, barefoot and silent. Elias turned just in time to see it vanish down the steps. In its tiny hand, clutched tightly, was the carved wooden bird he had given his son.
The grief was instant. Sharp. Total.
Tears blurred his vision. His knees gave out. For a heartbeat, the world tilted. How had these creatures got here so fast?
He heard more strange sounds outside and knew he had to stop what was happening. There was no time to collapse. He put the ring in his pocket. His hope.
He ran back outside, and the fighting continued for hours.
The strange creatures in Riley's vision fell one after another. After a few seconds, the corpses of those grotesque creatures would get up, looking like townsfolk and joining the fray. To Riley, the once-confused people were now rallied to Elias's side.
Not once did he think that he was the confused one.
They called it a cleansing. A defence. And through it all, Riley could feel only a numb, heavy pressure—like his heart had gone cold and swollen in his chest. They kept moving. Kept killing—street by street. Elias hoped to find signs of his wife and child, but he didn't see anything throughout the day.
And then the sun began to fall.
As the light dimmed, so did the rage gripping Elias's limbs. A stillness settled over the town. The people he'd been fighting with turned quickly, changing appearance, turning into grotesque abominations as his vision began to clear. The creatures dropped where they stood, like strings had been cut from above. Elias stood in the centre of it all, panting, arms heavy, clothes soaked with black blood.
He looked down and to his horror.
It wasn't black anymore.
It was red.
A body lay at his feet. A soldier. One of his own men.
A haunting thought crossed Riley's mind; he couldn't breathe. He couldn't even think. The fog in their shared mind began to peel away, and with it came the truth.
A plague had clouded their vision. Everything they thought they'd seen was distorted. Wrong. The screams weren't roars. The creatures weren't monsters. They were neighbours. Friends. Loved ones.
Memories surged back in a wave, unstoppable.
The porch. The sketches. The small figure with the bird. The ring.
His family.
His home.
Elias dropped to his knees. He fumbled in his pocket with shaking hands and pulled out the ring—Thalia's ring—the one he'd carried with him like a lifeline during that fight.
He stared at it. Then, with a cry that tore his throat raw, he hurled it into the dark.
It clattered against stone, lost in shadow.
Riley could barely hold it together. Though he hadn't been in control, he had felt everything and chosen it. Lived it. He couldn't escape the guilt that wrapped around him like iron.
They had believed they were saving the town.
But all they had done was destroy it.
Elias wandered, hollow and slow, through the broken shell of the town. Blood—some of it his—dripped from his fingers. His feet moved without intention, driven only by grief and the need to keep moving, not to collapse where the memories might catch him.
Then, ahead, the chapel appeared.
The tall spires reached toward the sky like they were pleading. The circular gap carved into the front wall let the moon pour in—soft, pale, unbroken. A divine silver light stretched through the doors, down the aisle, across the floor.
Elias stepped inside.
His steps echoed softly against the wood. The pews sat empty now, ghostly in the moonlight. He walked to the front, to the space beneath the aperture, and dropped to his knees.
He didn't speak at first—only the quiet of his breath, the tremble in his shoulders.
Then, his voice cracked through the silence, raw and low.
"They say time… can heal… any wound…"
His chest hitched, and the following sob broke something open inside Riley.
Elias sucked in a breath, trembling. "But I don't… I don't think time… can heal a wound like this."
The moonlight surged—bright, impossibly bright—and swallowed everything.
Riley felt himself torn free.
His body was hurled backward, like breath escaping lungs too full to hold it. He hit the ground hard—stone beneath him, the world spinning too fast to catch.
He gasped, heart pounding, vision swimming.
Then came the panel:
[New Core Talent Unlocked]
[Wisps Flame: Light-Class] (Passive)
- A Wisp's Flame interacts with the world, unseen, like a knife and a chisel.
Riley clutched his chest as bile surged up his throat. He dropped to his hands and knees and vomited—canned beans, half-digested, splattering the dirt with a sour splash. He spat, wiped his mouth on his sleeve, and stayed there, shaking.
His senses returned in fragments. He could finally move on his own again.
The square was still. The jagged crack that once split the earth had vanished without a trace, the veils of white light along with it. Like the ground had forgotten. But Riley hadn't. His muscles ached like he'd been flung through glass. His chest throbbed as if something had torn loose and never quite settled back in place.
He rose to unsteady feet, his limbs sluggish with weight that wasn't his own.
He walked.
Aimless at first—dragging himself forward, head down, like movement might keep the memories from catching up. But they clung to him. Blood. Screams. The child with the wooden bird. Thalia's ring in a monster's hand.
Without thinking, he slipped his fingers into his jeans pocket.
And felt them embrace something small, cold, and metallic.
He didn't need to pull it out to know what it was. The shape was too familiar. The metal pressed against his fingertips like it belonged there. A lump caught in his throat. He didn't cry. Not yet. He wasn't sure if he deserved to.
His steps carried him through the ruins until something old and broken loomed ahead—weathered stone, leaning walls, the remains of a chapel.
The spires had long since cracked, and the wood was splintered and brittle. But the circular gap in the front wall was still wide, open to the night sky.
Moonlight spilled through like a blessing.
Riley stepped inside.
Dust floated like ash. The pews sat in solemn silence. The air felt heavier here, but clearer too—like something sacred had once passed through and never quite left. He walked the centre aisle, boots scuffing wood, until he reached the final pew.
There, hunched over, lay a skeleton.
His heart stopped.
He didn't need confirmation.
He knew who it was.
Quietly, Riley sat beside the remains. He didn't speak. He just let the silence hold him, and for a while, that was enough.
Then, slowly, he reached into his pocket and pulled out the silver ring.
The strange engravings shimmered faintly in the moonlight, the script unreadable yet familiar. Riley turned it over in his hand, feeling the weight of it. Not just the metal. The story.
Elias.
He'd lived with that man and bled with him. Fought with him and lost with him.
They had never truly met.
But Riley would remember him.
Tears finally came, slow and steady.
For Elias.
For Thalia.
For the child who ran with a wooden bird clutched in their hands.
For a town that suffered.
What a cruel fate, Riley thought, for a man I barely knew—but would've trusted with my life.