Not the Hero, Not the Villain — Just the One Who Wins-Chapter 83: The Abyss

The chamber was a tableau of hell.

In front of me, a scene of such profound, abject horror unfolded that my mind, the mind of Kai from a world of sterile comforts and distant tragedies, simply refused to process it. People, dozens of them, were scattered across the cavern floor. Some were dead, their bodies torn and broken in ways that defied imagination. Others were barely breathing, their whimpers a faint, ghostly chorus in the suffocating silence. And the women... some were pregnant, their bellies grotesquely large, their eyes wide with a madness born from a suffering I couldn’t even begin to comprehend. They were screaming, not for help, but to be killed, to be granted the mercy of an end to their torment. The air was thick and heavy with the coppery tang of blood and the foul, cloying stench of death and filth.

I vomited. A violent, retching heave that emptied the contents of my stomach onto the cold, damp stone.

There were no male villagers alive. A few naked women, their bodies a canvas of bruises and cuts, were chained to the walls, their eyes vacant, their spirits broken. One of the pregnant women, her face a mask of tear-streaked grime, looked at the shadow sword that had just materialized in my hand. "Please," she whispered, her voice a raw, broken thing. "Kill me. I beg of you."

I moved, my own body feeling clumsy and useless, and cut the ropes that bound her. "You’re fine now," I said, my voice trembling. "We’ll save you. We’ll get you out of here."

"No," she sobbed, shaking her head, her matted hair falling across her face. "I don’t want to be saved. I can’t live with this."

"No, you can," I insisted, my own voice a desperate, pleading thing. "You just have to endure for a little while longer. You’ll be fine."

"My husband," she whispered, her gaze distant, lost in a world of pain I could never know. "He will never take me back. Even if I am saved, even if I manage to cope with this... this..." She pointed a trembling hand to her swollen belly.

"But there will always be someone who will love you," I said, the words feeling hollow and naive even as I spoke them.

And then, another scream, sharp and piercing, ripped through the cavern from a tunnel just ahead. I dashed forward, my heart a frantic, panicked drum in my chest. The scene that greeted me was one of pure, unadulterated evil. A group of goblins, their faces twisted in a leering, sadistic glee, were forcing themselves upon a woman, her own cries a weak, pathetic whimper. And beside her, a small child, a girl no older than four, was huddled against the wall, her small body shaking violently, her breath coming in short, ragged gasps. She was scared to death.

The moment I entered, the goblins’ attention shifted. They left the woman, their cruel, beady eyes fixing on me, and began to walk toward me, their movements slow, deliberate, confident.

I was ready to fight. But mentally, I was broken.

Then I heard another scream from behind me, a sound of such profound, absolute despair that it shattered the last vestiges of my composure. I looked back and saw her—the pregnant woman I had just freed. She had picked up the sword of a goblin we had killed earlier, its blade a crude, jagged thing. And with a final, desperate cry, she had sliced it deep into her own gut.

My mind... it broke. I was from Earth, a world where such horrors were confined to the pages of books and the flickering images on a screen. We lived in a world of peace, of order, of a fundamental belief in the sanctity of life. This... this was something I never wanted to see. Something my soul was not equipped to handle.

My mind was lost, a swirling vortex of sadness, of rage, of a profound, soul-deep helplessness. My aura, the raw, untamed power that I had struggled for so long to control, began to overflow, a torrent of shadow and flame that poured from my body in a visible, suffocating wave.

I could hear Liora and Aurelia screaming my name from a great distance. "Snap out of it, Ashen!" Aurelia cried, her voice a faint, desperate echo in the roaring storm of my own mind.

But it was too late. The next moment, my hands, my feet, my very being, went on its own.

The world dissolved into a blur of red and black. There were no thoughts, no strategies, no clever tricks. There was only a primal, all-consuming rage. My body moved with a speed and a brutality that was not my own. A shadow, darker and more menacing than any I had ever summoned, erupted from my back, its form a twisted, monstrous parody of the Phoenix’s wings.

The first goblin didn’t even have time to raise its club. I was on it in an instant, my shadow blade a blur of motion. I didn’t just kill it. I dismembered it, my blade a whirlwind of pure, unadulterated violence. The second and third met the same fate, their bodies torn apart before they could even register what was happening.

The others, their stupid, arrogant confidence shattered, turned to flee. But there was no escape. Tendrils of pure, solidified shadow shot from the walls, the floor, the ceiling, impaling them, crushing them, tearing them to pieces.

I moved through the cavern like a god of death, my every movement a symphony of destruction. I didn’t just kill them. I annihilated them. I tore them limb from limb, my hands and my shadows working in a brutal, terrifying harmony. I crushed their skulls, snapped their spines, and ripped the very life from their bodies with a cold, detached efficiency that was utterly inhuman.

The cavern, once a den of filth and suffering, was now a slaughterhouse. The walls were painted with blood, the floor a carpet of gore and viscera. And in the center of it all, I stood, my body wreathed in a swirling vortex of shadow and flame, my eyes glowing with a cold, dead light. The boy from Earth was gone. The calculating, arrogant noble was gone. All that remained was a monster.