Anthesis of Sadness
Chapter 128: The Crimson Tide

Chapter 128: The Crimson Tide

Around him, the air didn’t merely move — it vibrated, quivered, twisted like a living fabric wrung from the inside. It wasn’t wind. Nor a magical gust like those one feels stirring from incantations. It was something else. Something more precise, more cutting, more intimate. Like a hungry presence made of blades and whispers. A crimson tide, fluid and organic, rose around him in an inverted spiral, as if blood itself had learned to dance. A moving armor, drunken, throbbing. Sharpened.

Hundreds of red needles, thin as hair but hard as the desire of a god at war, levitated in unison around him. They pulsed. They lived. Each fragment, each shard vibrated with its own consciousness, as if their thirst no longer needed a master to strike. They did not float. They did not fall. They circled. In orbit. In trance. In waiting. Ready to pierce anything daring to breathe without his permission.

And he, in that silence heavy with omens, advanced. One step at a time. Without haste. Without anger. Not toward a chosen prey, not like a killer who selects. But like a certainty in motion, a judgment walking toward its fault line.

Toward the flank.

Toward the breach.

Toward that point he had already seen, sensed, guessed — as if he had always known it.

And suddenly, everything stopped.

No more presence.

No more shadow.

Nothing.

An immediate void, total, as if the universe had blinked, and he had taken the chance to vanish. And when reality adjusted again, when the world had time to admit the absence, he was already there. Reappeared farther away. Already bent. Already anchored. His fangs deeply sunk into a hobgoblin’s throat. A frontliner. A certain death. No cry. No startle. Only a breath cut short. A life taken before even realizing that death had arrived.

And while he drank — not as one feeds, but as one consumes, as one claims — the needles struck.

They swooped down on the still-warm body with the precision of a swarm guided by a single heartbeat. They didn’t rip open. They didn’t tear chaotically. They cut. Strategically. Surgically. Tendons. Ligaments. Nerves. Bones.

Not a drop was wasted. Not a cry survived.

The body, emptied from within, collapsed silently — or almost. It was no longer a corpse. It was a drained skin, shrunken, folded in on itself like a too-late offering. A flaccid, sickening shell, dropped to the ground with a soggy sound of entrails crushed against warm stone, as if even death was ashamed of what it left behind.

And he... didn’t stop.

But he had no time to savor, not even the shadow of a second to breathe between heartbeats, for already, five figures emerged from the chaos, propelled by a shared will bound only by fear and that animal hatred we no longer distinguish from courage when charging headlong into the obvious.

A centaur. A goblin. A dryad. A human. A demon.

Five races. Five cries. Five weapons stretched toward the same point, the same body, the same target they might not have fully understood, but had decided to bring down like a totem too large to remain standing. They charged without coordination, without strategy, but with that raw certainty that often precedes catastrophe. Their voices melded in a dissonant call, their blades rose in a confused burst of metal and light — and in that simultaneous, desperate but sincere gesture, they struck.

The blades sank in. All of them. Without deviation. Without error. Steel tore through flesh with blind obedience: the flank, the back, the collarbone, the abdomen, the neck — as many wounds as silent cries, for he, the bearer of these gashes, the one who should have screamed, fallen, collapsed under the impact, did none of that.

He didn’t scream. He didn’t waver. Not a breath louder than the other. Not a moan. Nothing.

He stood there, still, in an almost grotesque immobility, as if their weapons had pierced only a ghost, an empty shell or a stubborn illusion refusing to yield to the logic of wounds and blood. And yet, he bled. Yes. The blood, redder than night, flowed slowly — but not toward the ground. It rose. It levitated. It joined the already-formed needles, merged with them, added itself to the swirling sphere of suspended, living, hungry projectiles.

And it was there, in that silent pulse, that I understood: each blow received, each blade embedded in his flesh didn’t wound him — it fed him.

Then came an arrow.

A single one.

But shot with that precision that comes neither from training nor from chance, but from a steady gaze, a lucid mind, a memory too vivid to tremble. It tore through the air with disconcerting simplicity — no light, no cry, just a pure whistle, sharp, aimed at his forehead, at that exact point where perhaps a shred of humanity still remained.

And that’s when it happened.

Not a dodge. Not a move. But a refusal. A decision.

The blood around him contracted, hardened, materialized in a single moment into a vibrating, red, almost living shield, which intercepted the projectile effortlessly, swallowed it as fire would a drop of water — dense, fluid, absolute.

And for the first time, I saw him defend himself.

Not against sword strikes. Not against spells. Not against raw rage and enemies hurled at him with the blind force of despair.

No.

Against that arrow. That distant shot. Silent. Anonymous. A faceless gesture, but bearing something else. A distinct intention. Perhaps a memory. Perhaps a regret. Perhaps simply a hand he had known.

And meanwhile, around him, the five warriors still stood, frozen in the illusion of a successful assault, their weapons still planted in the body they thought they had subdued, unable to understand that they had cut nothing, overturned nothing, that they themselves had already crossed the line.

For that was when everything shifted.

There was no cry, no incantation, not even a perceptible change in the air.

Just... an end.

Instantaneous. Final.

Their bodies were pierced not by one blade, but by hundreds.

A thousand, perhaps.

The crimson needles erupted from everywhere and nowhere, emerging like nightmare shards through space itself, as if the world around them had been saturated with a trap from the start, a trap without cord or trigger, a trap of waiting, of will.

And their torsos exploded, not in noise, but in a kind of muffled, brutal silence that left only stupefaction behind.

The limbs were torn off.

The faces, erased.

Reduced to unreadable memories.

Nothing remained of them but pierced, emptied silhouettes, suspended in a death without panic. Even their blood no longer knew where to fall.

It looked as if the sky, enraged, had fired a thousand arrows in a single breath — and every one had found its mark.

And all of this... all of this happened too fast for the world to have time to protest.

He walked. Still. Body riddled, but stride intact, as if the wounds were only memories borne on skin that had forgotten what it meant to fall. Yet this time, his eyes had stopped. Fixed. Lucid. Aimed at a single point. A being among others. A centaur. An archer.

And I recognized him.

Jules.

Jules, with whom I had fought, lived, perhaps dreamed. Jules, whose arrows sang precision, discipline. Jules, whom I would never have wanted to face here. Not now. Not like this. No. Not him.

A breath escaped me, a mute refusal rose in me, knotting my thoughts, clawing at my guts. I didn’t want to. I couldn’t. But already, I understood. We were too far gone to retreat. Too tied to flee. Destined, not to survive together, but to face each other like two lines written on the same page, bound to meet, then erase.

I looked away.

But it was quick. Too quick.

Lukaris, without a word, without a glance, tore one of the blades from his own flank — a nearly lazy gesture, but charged with that dry power, that mute resolve that no longer seeks to persuade.

Then, without warning, he threw the weapon.

A gesture without apparent force. A sluggish trajectory. A provocation, it seemed. An absurdity, maybe. And Jules, like me, was caught in that doubt. He lowered his guard, just a little, just enough to believe in a harmless feint, in a useless bravado, in a message devoid of meaning.

But it wasn’t a warning. It wasn’t an attack.

It was a trap.

For while the weapon still flew, slow and almost grotesque, Lukaris surged. In one burst. One alone. An unreal, inhuman speed, a unleashed breath that swept the arena’s dust in a devastated trail. Was he running? No. He was tearing through air. Fracturing distance. Leaving behind not tracks, but vertigo.

He caught the sword.

Mid-air.

And in the same motion, without slowing, without hesitation, he was already there — in contact, at the throat, facing the beating heart of a centaur trapped by his own humanity.

The blade hissed. The line was clean.

And Jules... fell.

Cleanly cut. Without cry. Without anger. Just that absurd, irrevocable shift of a body that hasn’t yet realized it is already dead.

Then... the nightmare intensified. Not with a sudden rupture, but like a rising tide that nothing seemed able to contain. It was no longer a fight. No longer a display of power. It was an illusion of horror, a vision from beyond reality so distorted, so saturated with violence that it made you doubt your own senses, as if the world itself had cracked to let loose an entity that nothing was meant to hold.

The storm of needles grew. Again. Always. It coiled around him like a living armor gone rogue, like a whirlwind of starving weapons whose only logic was chaos. And he, at the center, at the exact heart of that scarlet spiral, tore out the four remaining blades still lodged in his flesh. With a sharp gesture. A lucid one. As if completing a molt.

His wounds immediately closed. But not slowly, not naturally. It was an absolute regeneration, grotesque, almost obscene, fed by the blood of the victims he had just eviscerated — a stream of power recycled through his veins, an echo of stolen existence regurgitated as raw strength. His body no longer obeyed the laws of the living. It had become a forge. A matrix. A sanctuary of pain and rebirth.

But the most terrifying part wasn’t the healing.

It was the needles.

They changed target.

They targeted him.

Him.

They lacerated him with ritual frenzy, as if the storm no longer obeyed his will, but a higher will, that of a cycle born in hatred itself. His flesh burst. His muscles detached in entire slabs. His bones cracked like overheated glass. He bled out his own blood — not in a tragic fountain, but piece by piece, as if his body willingly consented to its own dissection.

And each time, he was reborn. Instantly.

A breath. A burn. And everything closed again.

Only to reopen at once.

He lived a cycle of destruction and reconstruction, a perpetual torment that no cry interrupted, an insane mechanism, unbroken, inhuman — too perfect to be a curse, too atrocious to be a gift. Each second, his being unraveled. Each second, he returned. Sharper. Finer. Madder.

Around him, the crimson storm thickened, grew in volume, in density, in appetite. It was a maelstrom of blood, pain, flesh and screams that no one dared to utter. A silent cataclysm, where everything collapsed without a crash, in the absurd brutality of a world that had ceased to produce pity.

And thus, he moved forward.

Not by strategy. Not by mission. But as consequence.

He did not attack. He destroyed.

He did not absorb. He devoured.

He did not dominate. He dissolved.

Each enemy on his path fell, not slain, but emptied. Flayed from within, drained of blood, memory, meaning. Nothing survived. Nothing remained. Their life, their name, their reason for being were torn away with the same indifference as breath scattered in a desert of fire.

And he, at the center of this voiceless massacre, became something else.

Stronger.

Faster.

More monstrous.

Not a creature.

Not a legend.

But a living anomaly.

A sacred abomination born from the collision between raw will and the voluntary extinction of all that remained human.