Chapter 14: The Debt Unspoken

The Hero woke choking on the taste of iron. His tongue was thick with it, raw, as if he had bitten down too hard, too many times, gnashing against something he couldn't remember. A hollow, rasping breath forced its way through his throat—dry, though the ground beneath him was wet. Not water. Not blood. Something warmer. Thicker. His limbs twitched, but they didn't feel his, responding not to his commands but to some distant, foreign pull.

Why am I moving like this?

The sensation was slow, wrong, as though his body was moving of its own accord, following instructions from a place beyond his mind. Muscles clenched a half-second too late, like they were too tired to obey, too fatigued to react in sync. The stiffness in his limbs was alien, unfamiliar. Each breath was forced, dragging itself into his chest out of obligation rather than instinct. He should've been gasping, struggling to breathe, yet it was measured. Calm. His heartbeat pulsed too slowly, like an echo of a rhythm that wasn't his at all. It should have pounded in his ears, should have been racing, frantic, desperate to make sense of the world around him. But it wasn't. It was steady. Even. Measured. The way a heartbeat should be when the body was still alive, but the soul had already slipped away.

The cathedral was gone. No stone. No shattered pews. No bodies. Nothing but a tunnel. Alive. The walls pulsed in time with a beat that did not belong to the living. Folds of something not quite flesh, not quite stone, twitched at the edges of his vision, too subtle to grasp, too thick to ignore. Veins, dark and swollen, throbbed in slow, wet rhythms. The air was thick, humid with a rancid, ancient smell—not rot, but the memory of rot. The stale residue of something long dead. Something wrong.

He should be dead. The thought thrummed through his skull, sharp and unyielding. He was dead. He had been. Or had something taken him? The question clung to him, gnawing at the edges of his thoughts, the fragments of his memory scraping against one another, never quite fitting. There was no pain, no final moment of breaking. Just a sudden and absolute cessation of everything that had been. Then… nothing.

"You're awake."

A voice. A presence. His mind snapped toward it like a trap snapping shut. Erasmus stood there, untouched by the unsettling glow of the tunnel's pulse, his form unhurried, waiting. The flickering light around him seemed to bend around his figure, reluctant to make contact, as if even the space itself feared him. The priest looked… untouchable. Something about his golden gaze caught the Hero's breath, suspended in his chest. Not cruelty. Not warmth. Just certainty. An overwhelming, suffocating certainty. It was as if everything had unfolded exactly as expected, as if this moment had been written long before he had drawn breath.

"You," the Hero rasped, the word scraping his dry throat. His voice was thin, like he hadn't spoken in years. "You did something."

Erasmus tilted his head, his expression as calm as the unchanging pulse of the tunnel. "I acted."

Two words. Barely an answer. But the Hero could hear the weight of them. The implication settled into his bones like a verdict, something irreversibly tied to his survival. The world around him seemed to twist again, and he realized it wasn't just the landscape that had changed. It was him. Something had shifted inside of him, deep in the core of his being, but what it was, he couldn't understand.

"I should be dead," the Hero muttered, staring at the priest, at the stranger who felt far too familiar.

"You should," Erasmus agreed, stepping closer. His steps were deliberate, unhurried. "And yet, here you are."

The words were like an anchor dropped deep into his chest. A weight, unyielding and cold. There was no question in them, no sorrow, no relief. Only… something like inevitability. Like death had already claimed him, and yet here he remained—alive but not alive. The quiet that followed was unnatural, pressing down on the Hero's chest with a pressure that made it hard to breathe. Not just the absence of sound, but the feeling of it. A silence too perfect, too deliberate. The kind of silence that could only come from something watching, waiting for the right moment to strike.

"You do have a way out, don't you?"

The question slid through the stillness too easily, too cleanly, like it had always been part of the air. The Hero turned toward Erasmus, his mind fumbling for something—anything—more solid to grasp. His throat tightened as he met the priest's steady gaze, and in that moment, he understood with a sickening clarity: Erasmus wasn't just waiting for an answer. He expected one. The expectation was heavy, thick with meaning. It settled on the Hero's chest like a stone.

"What?"

"A way out," Erasmus repeated, without impatience, without worry. He didn't even look like he was asking. He simply knew. "You wouldn't have come here without one, would you?"

The Hero's heart skipped, the silence in his chest now replaced with the sudden rush of fear. He had never come here with an escape. This wasn't supposed to be a place where anyone survived. This place was a graveyard. His graveyard.

Something cold twisted inside him, an unsettling realization spreading like oil in water. Erasmus had known this. He had known that there was no way out, but he had said it anyway. The thought caught like a shard of glass in his mind, cutting through his confusion, through the numbness that had been slowly bleeding into him. There was something wrong about this place. About him. About Erasmus.

The priest's lips quirked up, a faint, satisfied smile pulling at the corners of his mouth. "You owe me a great debt, you know."

The words hit like a slap. It took a moment for them to sink in, to unearth the depths of their meaning. The Hero's gaze snapped back to him, the weight of those words sinking into his bones, heavy and unyielding. His mind grappled with the truth of them, the terrible, inevitable truth.

"Debt?" The word was barely a whisper.

"You were meant to die in there," Erasmus gestured vaguely toward the ruins behind them, as though speaking of something inconsequential, something already forgotten. "And yet, here you stand. Breathing. Thinking. Speaking my name."

It wasn't a question. It wasn't even a statement. It was a declaration. A judgment. And in that moment, something shifted in the Hero. Something he couldn't name, couldn't hold onto. A tether, unseen but undeniable, had been hooked into his soul. He could feel it, stretching taut, as if Erasmus was pulling on it, drawing him deeper into a trap he couldn't escape.

"Why do you think that is?"

The Hero swallowed against the growing pressure in his chest. His voice barely escaped him. "I… I don't understand."

Erasmus studied him for a long moment, his eyes glinting with something dangerous and knowing. Then, with a soft sigh, he took a step forward. His voice dropped, low and soothing, as though he were speaking to a child in need of comfort.

"What's your name?" he asked instead.

"Names hold power, don't they?" Erasmus murmured. "They are burdens. Chains."

The words wrapped around the Hero like a heavy cloak, smothering him with their implications. But the silence was unbearable. The weight of it pressed harder, suffocating, until he was gasping again.

Erasmus' smile lingered, cold and patient. "Veridion Luthais."

The name hung in the air like an anchor, too solid, too real, as though it had always existed, waiting to be spoken. The Hero shuddered. There was something wrong with the name. Not in the way a lie might taste, but in the deeper, more insidious way of something lost, something forgotten, something that should never have been known. A hesitation rippled in his chest, but the exhaustion was too deep, the pull too strong.

"…Rei."

Erasmus inclined his head slightly, as if pleased. "A fitting name."

And the way he said it, as though he had known it all along, made the Hero's blood run cold. It was too final, too certain. It wasn't just a name. It was a marker. A tether. An unspoken contract.

Then—click.

A sound. Sharp. Hollow. Rhythmic. Click-click. Not footsteps. Not breathing. Something deliberate. The air wasn't silent anymore. It had a shape, like something was pressing against it from the wrong side of existence.

Then—click-click-click-click.

The sound grew louder, unfolding. It was the sound of something shifting. Something unfolding into existence, crawling through the cracks of reality.

Click-click-click.

The silence was gone. The air was filled with it now, the clicking rhythm taking on a life of its own. His breath hitched. He had heard this sound before. In the cathedral. In the trees. Something had been watching. Moving just beyond sight. Always there, lurking. And now—

It was here.

Erasmus turned, his gaze steady, his tone oddly calm. "How expected," he murmured, almost amused. "I was wondering when they'd finally stop lurking."

The tunnel pulsed again, as though something in the dark had heard him, responding with a growing sense of awareness. The air thickened. The clicking intensified.

They were not alone.