Eternal Malediction (RE)

Chapter 115: Welcome to...

Roy opened his eyes. It was silent.

Not complete silence: there was still the faint sound of dust shifting somewhere in the distance and the soft creak of old stone settling under its own weight, but compared to the chaos from before, it felt unnaturally still.

His vision focused slowly.

A wall.

Light brown stone stretched before him, old and fractured with age. Cracks spread across its surface-like veins, splitting through the structure in uneven patterns. Thin vines crawled through the openings, threading themselves deep into the ruined masonry. Moss clung stubbornly to the damp edges.

It felt ancient and neglected but not abandoned.

Roy’s eyes narrowed slightly as he pushed himself upright from the floor while brushing the dust off of his clothes.

The air smelt stale. Dry earth mixed with something older like rotting vegetation, maybe. The kind of scent trapped in places untouched by sunlight for too long.

Then he noticed the floor beneath him, where he was lying on top of, and Roy stepped back instinctively, glancing down.

The words were carved directly into the stone.

WELCOME TO THE TRIAL CHAMBERS

He stared at it for a moment.

"...Huh."

Not fear, but just confusion.

The beams of light. The selection. The disappearance and now this?

Roy rubbed the back of his neck once before exhaling softly. "Right. Because that explains everything."

No answer came, of course not, because he had no idea what the hell was going on.

His gaze swept across the corridor around him. Narrow. Aged. The walls stretched forward into dim torchlight, though the flames themselves burnt strangely steady, unaffected by air movement.

As if it were artificially made. Everything here felt deliberate from the way it was constructed like a place designed with purpose rather than habitation.

Roy slipped his hands into his pockets and started walking.

His footsteps echoed softly against the stone as he moved deeper into the corridor. Vines hung from the ceiling in loose strands, brushing faintly against his shoulders as he passed. Dust coated nearly everything untouched.

At least there were no bodies, but there were also no signs of recent movement, meaning no one came or went this way, which was unfortunate. However, Prana lingered faintly in the air. Not enough to fully identify but just enough to feel like static beneath the skin.

Roy’s expression sharpened slightly, so this place is active. Alive possibly. That meant the people taken by the beams were probably here somewhere too.

Separated? Maybe.

He came around a corner and then stopped, and a massive stone door stood ahead of him. At least four times his height.

Dark engravings stretched across its surface in circular patterns, worn down by time to the point of being nearly unreadable. Thick roots crawled over the frame like restraints trying to keep it shut.

Roy placed a hand against it; it was cold. Then he pushed forward; for a moment, nothing happened.

The door groaned.

Stone scraped against stone as it slowly opened inward, dust spilling from the edges with light piercing through the gap immediately.

Sunlight. Real sunlight. Roy narrowed his eyes as he stepped inside.

The room was enormous. Far larger than the corridor outside suggested, it also had 4 other doors leading into this room as well. Broken stone pillars lined the edges like the remains of some forgotten temple, and above, the ceiling had collapsed.

Partially, at least.

Massive holes exposed the sky overhead, allowing thick beams of sunlight to pour down into the chamber, and at the centre of the room was a tree.

Deep brown oak. It was massive and a beauty to behold.

Its roots spread outward across the brown stone floor like tangled veins, splitting apart the ancient tiles beneath it. Leaves barely clung to its branches, brittle and dying.

But that wasn’t what caught Roy’s attention; it was the bodies that lie around it. Can you even call them bodies anymore?

Dozens of them. Scattered around the base of the tree.

No... Not bodies anymore. Corpses.

Shrivelled down to skin and bone, their flesh hollowed out as though something had drained everything from them. Torn clothing clung loosely to skeletal frames.

And the wounds were deep, violent slashes. Roy’s eyes sharpened instantly.

They were not natural; it was as if something attacked them to kill them. The room felt colder suddenly. Then... there was movement, and a branch snapped downward.

Fast.

Roy reacted immediately, stepping sideways as something slammed into the floor where he’d been standing moments earlier.

Wood. No... A wooden branch.

His gaze snapped upward. The tree was moving.

The bark along its trunk split apart slowly with a wet cracking sound as shapes began forcing themselves outward from within the wood itself.

A head. Shoulders. Limbs.

Human. Or trying to be.

The figure peeled itself from the trunk in twitching motions, bark cracking apart like tearing skin. Its body resembled one of the corpses scattered around the room but was distorted and was stretched unnaturally thin with wooden growths piercing through exposed flesh.

Its face was blank. Featureless except for a mouth split too wide.

Roy stared at it for half a second and grimaced. "...That’s hella ugly."

The creature lunged. Probably personally offended by the normative statement.

Fast.

Far faster than its appearance suggested. Its arm elongated violently, bark twisting into a blade-like shape aimed directly for Roy’s throat.

Roy ducked underneath it smoothly.

The attack cut through the air above him, slamming into stone hard enough to leave a deep gash.

Strong too.

Roy pivoted instantly and drove his elbow into the creature’s ribs, or where ribs should have been. The impact cracked bark apart, but the thing barely reacted.

It swung again, and Roy stepped back.

Another slash tore through the air. It was direct and aggressive; it had absolutely no technique behind it, just pure instinct to do harm, or was it something else?

An animal perhaps?

Roy’s eyes tracked every movement carefully. The creature wasn’t fighting intelligently; it was hunting.

That made things easier. Another lunge and Roy waited for it to get closer and closer.

Now.

He shifted sideways at the last second, grabbed the creature’s extended arm, and redirected its momentum straight into the tree behind it.

The impact shattered part of its torso against the trunk, and right before it could recover, Prana surged through Roy’s arm. A sharp, controlled burst, and he struck once directly through the centre of its chest.

The creature froze. Cracks spread rapidly across its body and then collapsed.

Not into flesh, not into bark, but it disintegrated into fragments. The remains folded inward unnaturally, compressing tighter and tighter before suddenly condensing into a small brown cube that dropped onto the stone floor with a soft clack.

Silence returned.

Roy stared at it. "...Seriously?"

He crouched slightly, poking the cube once with his shoe. Nothing. He kicked it lightly. The cube rolled across the floor before wobbling to a stop.

Still nothing. "No dramatic explosion? No hidden mechanism?"

Silence.

Roy clicked his tongue softly as he sighed. "How boring."

Disappointing even.

He glanced upward briefly toward the collapsed ceiling. Technically, he could probably climb out. The openings weren’t unreachable. But... His gaze lingered on the stone around the broken ceiling.

Then narrowed.

Prana was dense, layered throughout the structure itself, not inside the stone but around it like a coating.

Reinforcement, one could say. If someone tried breaking through, they wouldn’t hit rock, they’d hit the Prana first, judging from the density. Yeah. That’s intentional.

This place didn’t want people leaving freely, Roy looked back toward the chamber and then toward the second door opposite the entrance.

It wasn’t that Roy didn’t have the capability to break through the dense layer of Prana; he just wanted to do what felt like what came next.

So, there’s only one real path forward. Without another word, he turned and started walking toward the opposite exit.

Behind him, the cube wobbled.

Roy stopped.

Roy turns slightly to look back at the cube that is now still again; he then looks forward and goes through another set of doors.