Dane's pulse thrummed in time with the faint, pulsing light of the shards ahead. This pit at the bottom of his soul was pitch black and felt like a void. At the heart of the darkness, the creature waited. It was massive and hunched, unlike anything he had seen before. Its scales shimmered like black glass, and his own opal eyes reflected in the creature's. A single jagged line ran across them. Between its claws lay the shards, the fractured fragments of his spiritual body, vibrating with unstable energy.

  A low, guttural rumble rolled through the void, not from the beast's throat but from the space around him. "Mine," it claimed, and the shards resonated and glew in response.

  Dane's chest tightened as he felt the tug of power, foreign and familiar. Draka's voice wove through the tension, steady and firm. "This is the consequence of improper mana channels. When power is left in small pockets, it stagnates and becomes corrupt. The shards are the body's natural purifiers. As a soul projection, you won't be able to kill the beast. You need to tame it.”

  Dane inhaled slowly, expanding his senses to cover a 20-foot radius. The beast moved with a slow, deliberate pace; each step was calculated, like a lion on a routine hunt. Dane met its predatory gaze. Something about the beast felt familiar. Dane had felt this presence since he was freed. If he let it, this thing would take over. Dane thought back to the animals on Earth. Was this how the monsters were created?

  He circled the beast, never taking his eyes off it. His dagger, resonating with time-fire, flickered with afterimages as he tested the creature's reaction, lashing out in quick feints. A hiss and a snap of claws followed, sending shards skittering in a chaotic shimmer. Each movement of the beast was unpredictable, but Dane noted the patterns in its aggression: it flinched when he drew mana deliberately, it hesitated when he changed the direction he was circling.

  The first shard floated just beyond its reach, tethered by dark threads of unstable energy. Dane shifted his weight, allowing the temporal flow to bend the instant. He darted forward, a strike that was a blur across space and time, and his dagger sliced through the threads with precision. The shard detached, hovering in a soft pulse before he caught it in his hand. A jolt ran through his chest, a tiny spark of stability threading into his channels.

  The beast roared, a sound that was more like a wave of energy rippling outward. Tentacles of corruption lashed out at him, probing and testing, but Dane moved with the rhythm of a hunter. Each shard retrieved felt like a small victory, a restoration of the fractured lattice within his spirit body.

  Draka's voice echoed beside him. "Notice its reactions. It mirrors your mana and your control. It does not think; it instinctively responds.”

  The beast grew restless. Each shard he claimed made it more desperate, more erratic. The environment around them shifted, dark forms sprouting like twisted branches, reaching to ensnare him. Dane leapt and spun, using his fang of the Magaladon. He lashed out but found himself overextended. The beast took the opportunity and landed a critical blow on his shoulder. The pain wasn't his typical physical pain, but it shook his core. It felt like a piece of his soul was missing.

  LVL 176 decreased to LVL 175

  The soul damage had Dane leaking experience; he could not afford another hit, and he didn't want to see what would happen if he was forcibly taken back to D rank.

  Dane steadied himself, his breath harsh in the void. The beast's claws tore gouges into the obsidian ground, and the impact sent splinters of his soul into the abyss. Every shard he reclaimed made the pit just a little less stable, and he could see that there was only one shard left.

  The beast's movements grew less patient. Its body rippled with tension, scales catching faint pulses of light as if they drank in his fear. When Dane darted across a splitting platform to reach the final shard, the monster lunged.

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  Teeth as sharp as glass pierced through his spirit body, tearing his side open. Dane felt a white hot pain as the beast sank its teeth further down, the flesh began to rot in the area, as though a vital piece of his soul was ground between those serrated fangs. His vision blurred, and he dropped his fang dagger.

  LVL 175 decreased to LVL 174.Rank regression: C to D.

  Dane collapsed out of its maw, tumoring across a collapsing shelf of black stone. He pushed himself to his knees, shaking, and felt the truth of it: he was smaller. Slower. His muscles carried none of the tempered strength he had bled for. His veins burned with clogged mana channels, narrow and fragile like they had been when he first clawed out of the mines. Even his senses dulled as the beast loomed larger, heavier, more insurmountable than it had moments ago.

  A harsh laugh tore from his throat. "Back to the bottom, huh?" His voice shook with both rage and bitter amusement.

  The beast didn't answer. It threw back its head and snapped its jaws shut around the final shard, swallowing it in one gulp. The light winked out as it slid into the dark of its throat.

  Dane's heart stopped. Without that shard, he wasn't whole. Draka hadn't explained what the shards did, but he knew that if he lost it, then his journey would be a whole lot more difficult.

  The ground beneath him split wide, the ledge giving way. There was nowhere left to stand, no plan, no choice. He hurled himself forward, straight toward the beast's mouth, and vanished into its jaws.

  The plunge was suffocating. Heat and pressure crushed him as though he'd been dropped into tar. The stomach walls writhed with black corruption, squeezing, trying to dissolve him. Each movement stole his air, each breath clogged his throat with bile. His body, his D-Rank body, was too weak to resist for long.

  But there. A faint pulse ahead. A glimmer through the dark.

  The shard.

  Dane clawed through the sludge; his body was on fire, and his soul was unraveling. He reached until his fingers closed around that shard of himself, that stubborn spark that refused to die. The instant he touched it, it fused into his chest with a blinding surge.

  His lattice locked. Strength roared back into him. The void steadied in his veins like fire tempered into steel. He screamed and summoned a spectral fang dagger into his hand.

  The beast convulsed, but Dane was already moving. He carved upward, a desperate, brutal cut, slicing through the writhing walls until light tore through. With a final thrust, he ripped himself free, bursting from the beast's chest in a spray of black ichor.

  The void collapsed around them, half-consumed shards raining out of the monster. The beast shrieked as it fell, its massive frame unraveling into smoke and fragments that bled into Dane's body. He stood in the wreckage, chest heaving, veins glowing faintly with black-glass shimmer.

  Draka emerged from the dark as if she had always been there, arms folded, her scales gleaming faintly with the same black-glass shimmer that now traced through Dane's veins. Her amber eyes swept him once, and her mouth tightened.

  "You shouldn't have been able to kill it." Her voice was calm, but edged with something between awe and reproach. "That creature was the corruption born from your own channels. It was meant to be tamed, not destroyed. To end it outright should have been impossible.”

  Dane swallowed against the iron taste still clinging to his tongue. "It swallowed me," he rasped. "I didn't have a choice."

  Draka tilted her head, gaze narrowing. "Perhaps not. But what you cut free of its stomach wasn't just a shard that was instinct given form. The beast that should have grown with you, guided your strength, tempered your rage. By tearing it apart, you forced a fusion it wasn't ready for.”

  Dane glanced at his hands. They still shook, faint lines of black shimmer crawling beneath his skin like veins of glass. He flexed his fingers, but the weight of the beast's presence remained, coiled somewhere in his chest.

  "So… what does that mean?"

  Draka's lips pulled into the faintest, sharpest grin. "It means you will not walk alone in your soul again. The beast is inside you now. It will take time, months, maybe even years, but when the pieces reassemble, it will rechallenge you, and next time there will be no cage to lock it in.”

  Dane's heart thudded. For a moment, he saw again the glint of black-glass scales, the jagged line through mirrored eyes that had been his own.

  Draka stepped closer, her voice lowering. "Power born in violence only breeds more violence. Until then, you have a new beast form to master."