The Silvarite core began to hum.
No—sing. A sharp, subtle tone, like the stone itself was vibrating to the rhythm of a scream trapped for ages.
The Ferralume reacted next, glowing with thin lines like veins of liquid metal being drawn in real time. An electromagnetic field formed around it, pulling dust, shards, and loose runic fragments as if the air had turned electric.
And the Alveary Crystal?
It wept.
The sound that came from it was… human. A sob. Voices collected over centuries, stored in silence, released in mental waves that knocked me back a step.
Down below, the Fractured Guardians stopped for a moment. Some screeched. One of them shattered mid-leap, as if it had heard something it couldn't bear.
And then… everything converged.
The Ferralume conducted.
The core erupted in heat.
And the Alveary broke.
BAAAAAAAAAAM!
The entire staircase shuddered. The runic wall imploded inward like it had collapsed into itself. Energy surged sideways, climbing the walls, flowing through dormant runes, reactivating forgotten markings like the whole temple was… waking up.
Cracking stone. Imploding ceiling. An arcane roar burst from the depths of the structure—like the stone itself was screaming.
I was slammed into a wall. My shoulder protested loudly, and I only avoided being flung back down the staircase because a fallen beam lodged in my path and caught me by pure chance.
Below, a white burst of light swept through everything. Not fire. Not wind.
Runic disintegration.
The Guardians tried to run. They didn't make it.
One by one, they evaporated.
The blue smoke that remained twisted upward slowly, spiraling into the ceiling before vanishing.
The traps, on the other hand… lost their minds.
Darts fired in every direction, even without targets. Pressure plates triggered randomly. Blades appeared in midair only to shatter seconds later, as if the runes were being forcibly unprogrammed.
And me?
I crawled.
Amid loose stones, unstable energy, and arcane smoke, I dragged my body away from the edge of the staircase, wedging myself behind a broken column.
The entire world trembled.
Ceiling collapsing. Runes screaming. Magic spitting sparks like it was being ripped out of the earth by force.
I couldn't hear anything with my right ear. Blood ran hot down my forehead. And with each breath, I tasted burning metal.
But I was alive.
I survived.
Barely.
And then… the ground stopped trembling.
The runes… went dark.
And an artificial silence settled in, as heavy as mourning.
Until something moved in the darkness ahead.Not stone. Not vapor.A sound—wet. Careful. Alive.
I blinked, trying to focus my eyes.There was a faint light—not magical. Natural.Maybe… an opening?
But in the middle of the path, between me and that late-spring hope, something blocked the way. Something… bigger.
Crawling. Breathing.
And then I heard it.
A sound no living lungs should ever make.
"...shhrrraaah…"
I stopped breathing.
And I thought:
If that thing owns this corridor……I'm going to need more than cheap tricks to get out of here in one piece.
I tried not to move.
But the thing emerging from the dark didn't care about movement.
It felt.
First came the sound—Like flesh being dragged across wet stone.Heavy, irregular, as if parts of it were being pulled while others crawled of their own accord.
Then, the shadow—Tall. Misshapen. Almost no defined silhouette, like it had been stitched together from several creatures by accident… or by the grudge of a cruel god.
The ceiling fungi quivered when it passed underneath.As if even the bioluminescence refused to touch it.
And then I saw the eyes.
Many of them.
They weren't aligned like a spider's eyes.
They were scattered. Chaotic. Some too wide open. Others still growing. They blinked at different rhythms, like each one lived in its own mental time zone.
And then… all of them looked at me at once.
The thing stopped. It took a deep breath—or at least something inside it moved like a breath, inflating pulsating slabs of flesh that resembled deformed lungs.
And then... it spoke.
Not with a voice.
With intent.
With presence.
With a single word that tore through my chest like it had been whispered directly into the bone.
"Survived…"
It wasn't surprise.It wasn't respect.It was... acknowledgment.
I stood up slowly, every joint in my body protesting. I gripped my pickaxe with a trembling hand, more like a memory of combat than any real threat.
And then the system chimed in:
| NEW ENEMY DETECTED || ENTITY: BONE WHISPERER| TYPE: Ancestral Aberration / Memory Parasite| LEVEL: 9| RANK: S (High-Tier Local Threat)
| ATTRIBUTES |→ Strength: 22 (Multiple limbs, unpredictable strikes)→ Dexterity: 15 (Erratic movements, imprecise but fast)→ Constitution: 20 (Highly resistant to physical impact and heat magic)→ Perception: 19 (Senses thoughts, emotions, and magical echoes)
| ABILITIES |→ Resonant Whisper [Passive]Emits mental echoes that cause confusion, doubt, and light hallucinations within 10m.
→ Consume Memories [Active – Contact]Upon touch, absorbs part of the victim's memory. Can use these fragments to mimic past strategies or attacks.
→ Reflex Mutation [Passive]Its body adapts to types of damage received more than once. Repeated attacks lose effectiveness.
→ Scream of Living Bone [Cooldown: 5 turns]Releases a sonic blast that destabilizes rock, metal, and nerves. Paralyzes targets caught directly for 3 seconds.
| WEAKNESSES |→ Vulnerable to direct, intense light sources.→ Unstable against sound-based magic (or chaotic noise).→ Exposed during "static mode" (regeneration phase).
The Bone Whisperer—or whatever that thing was—stared at me with its misaligned eyes, each one pulsing at its own tempo like the out-of-sync instruments of some ancient, broken choir.
It stepped forward. The stone beneath it sank. One limb—something like the fused shape of two femurs and a jawbone—stabbed the floor beside a faded rune.
And the rune lit up.
Not from magic.From fear.
My fear.
But what really got to me wasn't the shape.Not the smell.Not even the wet sound of its mangled limbs dragging across stone.
It was the way it looked at me.
Not with curiosity.Not with hunger.
With access.
As if it already knew who I was.As if it had opened up my head like an old book and was flipping through the pages with its finger.
And that made me sick.
Not at it.At myself.
Because for a moment, I could tell it was right.
I've always hated therapists.
Even as a kid.
They asked questions with that face—like they already knew the answer. They read your gestures. Took apart your logic. Always ended with that goddamn "I understand you" look that made me want to scream.
I was good at hiding intentions. Always had been.Negotiation, social lying, soft manipulation—the refined art of surviving among idiots.
But people who really understood you…The kind who saw inward...Those knocked the floor out from under me.
Maybe that's why I hated the very idea of mental reading, emotional analysis—anything that got too close to my backstage.
And there it was. That thing, reading me like an open diary.
I refused.
I shut my eyes. Clenched my fists. Focused on breathing—on the sting of the wound in my arm, the warmth of my blood, the bitter taste of smoke in the air.
"You don't get in here. This is mine. The last thing that's mine."
I tried to resist.
Built imaginary walls.Sarcastic barricades. Disjointed memories. Emotional math.
I visualized old charts. Stock prices. Percent swings from companies nobody remembered anymore. As if my mind had turned into such a boring spreadsheet that even an aberration would give up trying to poke through it.
And for a moment... it worked.
The creature hesitated.Or maybe it laughed.Hard to tell.
And then it screamed.
| Active Skill: SCREAM OF LIVING BONE |→ Effect: Neural shock + structural disarray→ Damage: Moderate + emotional collateral→ Result: You were hit directly
It felt like the world screamed through me.
The ground shook. The staircase behind collapsed. But none of that mattered.
The sound didn't hit my ears—it hit my thoughts.
My posture gave out instantly. Knees buckled like poorly assembled furniture. The pickaxe slipped from my hand without a sound. My body stopped listening to commands. My mouth opened without permission—and something came out, halfway between a gasp and a sob.
My eyes burned. My tongue felt like it had folded into my throat.
I couldn't even curse.
I dropped to my knees, then to my side, my head hitting the stone with a dull, indecent thud.
The monster approached.Slow.Calm.Like it was just coming to collect me, a half-resolved thought crawling back to haunt me.
The physical pain was manageable.But the feeling of being invaded...
That broke me more.
Lying there on the floor, unable to move a muscle, saliva sliding down my chin and legs twitching, only one thought pounded through my brain:
I swore no one would ever read me again.And now a monster was reading me better than I ever could.