Chapter 163: Only One is Worthy
The room resonated with an infernal cacophony that seemed to defy the very laws of nature itself.
The screams, initially isolated like discordant notes in a macabre concert, had intertwined into a strident and dissonant symphony that rose toward the stone vaults. The millennial walls, still imbued with the humidity of centuries and witnesses to so many horrors, vibrated under the impact of cries, death rattles, moans, and the convulsions of tortured flesh consuming itself from within.
The air itself seemed thick, charged with a deadly essence that burned the lungs and stuck to the skin like a second epidermis. The flagstone floor, once noble and cold, was now covered with an ignoble mixture of sweat, coagulated blood, bloody sputum, and sometimes a strange black foam that spurted from the twisted lips of the unfortunate. The draconic blood, incompatible with their fragile human nature, triggered an irreversible chain reaction organs retracted in atrocious spasms, bones ground themselves from within with dull cracking sounds, veins blackened like burnt glass under the effect of infernal heat.
Mordred stood at the center of this chaos, impassive as a statue of black marble. His incandescent orange gaze, like two burning embers in the darkness, swept over the bodies on the ground one by one with clinical coldness. He knew this pain he had suffered it, endured it, transcended it in the flames of his own transformation. If they couldn’t do the same, they would not be worthy.
A first body froze in a grotesque spasm near the eastern wall. The man, a former mercenary with arms covered in tribal tattoos, had his eyes rolled back, his jaw dislocated in a scream frozen for eternity. Blood gushed from his ears like a crimson fountain, then his heart exploded in his chest with a dull and sickening sound, like an overripe fruit bursting. Dead.
Another followed almost immediately. His arms beat the air as if seeking to escape an invisible drowning, his fingers clawing at the void with animal desperation. His spine curved into an impossible position, defying all human anatomy, his ribcage broke with an atrocious crack that resonated throughout the room. Black blood flowed from his mouth like a river of death. Dead.
The deaths followed one another in a macabre dance. Each cry became shriller, more desperate, more inhuman. They fought by survival instinct, by powerless rage, by primitive fear. But the outcome remained invariable. Failure. Failure, then death in atrocious suffering.
In a dark corner of the room, Elena was now clutching her stomach where the draconic blood was creating unspeakable havoc. She raised blood-shot eyes toward Mordred, and in a hateful and desperate breath, she spat:
- "Monster... We shouldn’t have trusted you." Her voice was nothing more than a guttural rattle. "You have... condemned us... for your... morbid pleasure... I hope that... demons... drag you to hell..."
Her words were lost in an atrocious gurgling as her lungs filled with her own blood. Her gaze froze in an expression of pure hatred before death carried Elena away in its merciless arms.
On the other side of the room, Marcus was still trying to crawl toward the exit. His legs no longer responded, paralyzed by the failed transformation, but his iron will pushed him to continue. He left behind him a bloody trail, his entrails spreading on the floor like a sinister red riding hood.