All the pain Max had to endure became impossible to handle, to the point where his whole body started to go numb. His vision blurred, the throne before him turning into nothing more than a pale shape in the darkness, and his arms fully dropped to his sides as his steps finally halted when it was only a few steps before him.

His breathing had grown heavy, every inhale feeling like dragging glass through his chest, and every exhale left him shaking slightly, not because he wanted to fall, but because his body had simply been wounded too many times to obey him properly anymore. Blades, spears, claws, arrows, and teeth had all pierced him again and again, each wound disappearing from his flesh but leaving the pain somewhere deeper, somewhere his body could not heal so easily.

"Stop... I’m sorry... spare me..."

A voice echoed behind Max.

It appeared to be the last person in line, yet in truth, it was the very first person he had ever killed.

"That voice..."

Max’s eyes grew dark, the whites slowly painting themselves in void. He tried to fight it, tried to remain conscious, but no matter what he did, he kept sinking deeper and deeper into that abyss inside him, as if every wound he had taken had finally dragged him to the lowest part of himself.

A small skeleton stood behind him, holding a simple knife in its bony hands.

At first, Max stared at it without saying anything. The figure was small, pitiful even, with thin bones, trembling fingers, and empty sockets that somehow still seemed to look at him with fear. But then that voice settled properly inside his ears, and the memory returned, not as a clear picture, but as the smell of cold concrete, bloody snot, children laughing, and a fat boy standing above him with bruised knuckles.

"Jason..." Max muttered.

"Why did you kill me? Why?" the kid cried, despite no tears flowing from the empty sockets. "I had such a bright future ahead of me, so why?"

The voice was still childish. Weak. Trembling. Almost the same as the boy Max remembered from that day, only now there was no fat face, no cruel smile, no group of children laughing around him. Only bones, a knife, and the same pathetic voice begging for an answer after everything had already ended.

Max’s shoulders shook once.

Then his lips slowly curled.

"Because you were a dipshit."

He laughed, and the darkness in his eyes increased even more.

"Die!"

Jason roared and plunged the knife into Max’s spine.

The blade went in deep, sending a sharp pain up his back and into the back of his skull, but the small skeleton did not stop there. It twisted the knife mercilessly, pulled it out, and stabbed another spot, then another, each thrust wild and messy, like a child throwing all of his hatred through the only weapon he had left.

Max’s body trembled from the pain.

His fingers twitched. His knees nearly gave in. His teeth clenched so tightly that the sound echoed in his own skull, yet the smile on his face only kept growing wider, stranger, almost pleased, as if something inside him had finally broken loose.

"I don’t regret killing even a single one of you," Max said, his voice low and rough from pain, but still filled with that same cruel certainty. "You all deserved what you got."

The moment those words left his mouth, the darkness surrounding him began to crack.

At first, it was only a thin line above his head, a faint split in the endless black, but then another appeared, and another, stretching across the void like broken glass. Rays of light spilled through those cracks and shone down on Max, covering his body in a bloody glow.

Every single drop of blood on him began to burn.

It did not burn like normal fire. It hissed first, then smoked, then ignited all at once as if the blood itself had been waiting for his answer. Flames crawled across his chest, his arms, his face, and his back, sinking into every wound where a weapon had entered him. The pain grew hotter.

The fire did not touch the throne. But the blood behind him caught flame all at once.

Every footprint he had left in the darkness ignited, one after another, until the entire path behind him became a long burning trail leading back to the very beginning of his bloody path. The red flames mixed with violet light, turning darker where the blood was thicker, brighter where the wounds had been deeper, and the whole path looked like a river of burning sin stretching through the void.

Then the dead behind him began to burn as well.

The elves went first, their rotten bodies shaking as violet flames climbed their legs, crawled over their armor, and entered through their empty mouths and hollow eyes. They made no sound, but their bodies still reacted. Fingers curled. Backs bent. Skulls lifted toward the darkness as if they wanted to scream but had forgotten how. Their golden weapons melted into light, dripping down their hands before vanishing into smoke.

The dragons followed.

Their broken wings caught fire, the flames eating through the torn membranes first, then crawling into their scales, their horns, their exposed ribs. Some still had their spears buried in Max’s flesh, but as the flames reached them, the weapons began to tremble, cracking apart like dry branches thrown into a furnace. One by one, the figures behind him were set ablaze by the same blood they had forced him to walk through.

Jason’s small skeleton was the last to catch fire.

The knife in his hand glowed red, then violet, and his tiny bones began to blacken from the fingers upward. He still stood there with the blade buried in Max’s back, still trying to twist it, still trying to make him suffer, but the flames swallowed his arm, then his shoulder, then his skull, until those empty sockets were filled with burning light.

Max slowly turned his head, looking back at all of them through the corner of his eye. 𝘧𝓇𝑒𝑒𝑤ℯ𝑏𝓃𝘰𝑣ℯ𝘭.𝘤ℴ𝘮

His wounds were blazing now, every cut and stab mark shining with that violent violet flame, spreading in all directions and setting fire to every being who still had their weapons plunged into his body. The heat wrapped around him, the smell of blood and smoke filled the darkness, and the trail behind him burned brighter than the throne before him.

It looked as if a demon had been born from blood and fire.

Max stood in the middle of it all, his body trembling, his face stained with blood, his eyes completely swallowed by the void, and still, his smile only widened.