Tap. Tap.
Stark stepped gingerly onto the ground, the dry leaves crunching beneath his feet, followed by the sharp snap of twigs.
his eyes flicking left and right. Nothing but darkness and misty fog filled his sight. Thick, swirling fog hung, occasionally parting to reveal the looming silhouettes of trees before swallowing them up again.
Stark took a few more steps before abruptly stopping. He looked back and narrowed his eyes.
'I'm lost.'
That tree. And that one. This one, too.
He was sure of it—he had seen them before. It wasn't as if he hadn't been paying attention because of his exhaustion. But something was wrong. Deeply, disturbingly wrong.
It felt as if the ground itself subtly shifted beneath him, the trees were rearranging themselves when he wasn't looking. He couldn't confirm it, just had slight an inkling.
'This is creepy.'
A slight shiver ran down his spine. He exhaled slowly, steeling himself, and pressed forward.
He was in bad shape. The Blood loss was already taking its toll. If he collapsed from exhaustion, what then? Freeze to death?
As Stark felt these unsettling thoughts surface, he shook his head slightly and moved his body while shouting:
"Miss. Sia! Mr. Shin!"
Stark waited for a moment and then drew in a breath to call again—
Whoosh!
A sudden gust of wind tore through the air, grazing past his cheek.
Stark reeled back.
A sharp sting flared beneath his left eye. His right hand flew to the spot. When he pulled it away, his fingers were smeared with blood.
'It cut me, Whatever it was'
Stark suddenly became paralyzed in fear. Wide eyed Stark, stiffened his posture and observed.
There was tense a silence--
Whoosh!
Another gust of wind tore through the air, making a whistling sound on its track.
Before Stark could register anything, An unbearable pain exploded through his right knee. a strangled gasp escaped his lips as he crashed onto the ground.
Grasping for air, Stark's gaze snapped to his aching knee.
A sharp obsidian spike impaled straight through the flesh. His breath hitched as his trembling fingers reached for it, only to freeze halfway.
It had torn clean through. The jagged tip protruded from the back of his leg, embedded deep, stuck halfway.
A wave of nausea churned in his stomach. Few pained breaths fell from his mouth. The more he looked at it the more his heart threatened to burst out of his rib cage. Stark closed his eyes tight, moved his head away and bit his lip lest a pained scream escapes from his mouth.
Straining every ounce of his muscles, Stark forced his upper body upright. But just as he was about to lift his right hand to touch the wound—
Whoosh!
Another spike tore through the air.
Agony exploded in his palm as the blackened projectile pierced straight through his right hand. Crimson blood smeared the ground under it like splinters.
This time, he couldn't hold back. A raw, ear-piercing scream ripped from his throat, the sheer force of it making his head spin. His vision blurred, his skull pounded, but before he could take another breath—
A third spike shot toward him from the swirling fog.
This time though, Stark somehow managed to tilt his head at the last possible moment.
Yes, The spike missed his skull. But, he did not entirely doge it. A searing pain slashed through his right ear, carving a bloody hole before embedding itself in the tree behind him with a sickening thunk.
His consciousness wavered. The world around him flickered. His limbs grew heavy, his eyesight darkened. But Stark persisted.
Stark clenched his teeth, forced himself to move. His left hand clawed at the dirt as he dragged his battered body forward. For a fleeting second, he thought he had managed to crawl out of the spikes line of sight, But—
Another one of those obsidian spikes tore through the air and struck his left shoulder, ripping through muscle and bone. He felt Pain. Unbearable, mind-numbing pain.
But even so, as blood gushed from his wounds, even as every part of his body screamed in protest, Stark didn't stop.
He clenched his jaw so tightly his teeth ached, his nails tore into the earth, but he kept crawling.
"Agh..."
More spikes rained down. One after another.
After sometime, He couldn't feel his wounds anymore. Couldn't tell where the pain ended and numbness began. His breath came in ragged gasps, his vision swam, in a blurry pond on vagueness. But he moved...
And moved.
And moved.
His body, refusing to give in, Refusing to let any stray thought take shape.
"Shit, Shit, Shit..."
However, After a while, Stark suddenly noticed that the Spikes stopped raining. They stopped Suddenly. Abruptly.
But before he could feel any relief, He realized with a shock, He couldn't move. He couldn't move anything. Not his arms, not his legs. Not even a single finger.
He tried. He willed his body to respond. But Nothing happned.
It was as if every inch of him had been drained, spent.
His head fell back, landing limply against the cold earth. His gaze tilted upward—toward the sky. Or at least, where the sky should have been.
But there was only fog. Thick. Endless. Suffocating.
A pained groan escaped his lips.
Then, all of a sudden out of nowhere, His lips abruptly twisted upwards, in his deathly pale face, covered in thick blood and sooth an unholy smile was painted in deep crimson.
Stark was smiling.
No, that's not it.
Stark... He was not particularly happy, right now. Nor was he resigned to his fate. He just felt that, for some absurd reason it would lessen the pain.
"What an idiot..." he mocked himself.
His dark, hollow eyes stared blankly into the mist as his mind drifted.
'What should I do now?'
Whilst thinking that, Somewhere in the distant fog, he registered something, From the corner of his dark hollow eye, he saw A figure of a Human? Maybe. It was coming closer. And closer.
Hope flickering in his chest like a dying ember, Stark stared at the approaching figure, his blooded lips barely parting as he forced out a whisper—
"Help…"
'Did I say it out loud? Was it audible? Did the person hear it?'
He wasn't sure. He didn't know if the person had heard him. But in that moment, he was pleading, begging that they had.
However, just as his dark hollow eyes strained upwards and looked at the figure a little clearly than before, His breath got stuck in his lung.
His pupils shrank. A cold, suffocating dread wrapped around his whole body.
'No...'
Body of a teenage boy, white-haired, deathly pale. Four eyes. No nose. A smile that stretched unnaturally wide, reaching from ear to ear, behind that grin lay a set of jagged, spiked obsidian teeth.
Stark's mind reeled in horror. 'The Name Eater's Vessel.'
Fear unlike anything he had ever known consumed him. Every nerve in his body screamed at him in cold apprehension.
He watched in silent terror as the creature lifted a pale, delicate hand and touched one of its razor-sharp teeth. Then slowly, effortlessly, it bent the tooth backward.
With a sickening ease, the obsidian fang slid out of its jaw like butter.
Stark saw wide eyed, A fresh one was already beginning to push up in its place.
The Name Eater's Vessel held the severed tooth in its hand, gripping it like a dagger.
It raised it high above its head. Both hands clenched tight around the obsidian spike like tooth. Then With terrifying speed...
It slashed downwards.
—SHK!