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Chapter 289: The Requiem [2]

I The Requiem.

The final part.

There was no hypnosis this time. No invisible thread guiding my fingers, no soft numbness in my mind keeping the pain at bay, no unnatural will dragging me forward when I faltered.

There was only me, my shaking hands, and the piano in front of me.

I could not miss.

I could not stumble.

If I did, the performance would end.

If it ended, so would I.

’Steady. Keep steady.’

“…Haa…”

The sound of my breath filled my head as the silence stretched.

The conductor stood in front of me, its back perfectly straight, the baton raised high. The air in the theater had grown heavy.

It pressed down against my shoulders, sank into my lungs, and coiled around my throat.

The quiet was suffocating, so absolute that I swore even the audience had stopped breathing.

My fingers hovered over the keys.

They trembled despite how hard I tried to steady them. I could feel the slickness of sweat forming between my fingers and the keys, as though my own hands wanted to betray me before I had even played a single note.

’Still. Remain still.’

I couldn’t hit the keys prema—

Swoosh!

The baton slashed downward.

Wam—!

The orchestra thundered alive, a violent wave of sound that tore the silence apart.

My hands crashed onto the keys.

The tempo was merciless from the very start, faster and louder than anything that had come before.

The music sheet before me blurred, the black marks of notation writhing on the paper, sliding across the staves as if they wanted to escape the sheet of paper. My eyes burned, straining to force them still as they moved from one line to another.

Da! Da! Da-da-da!

Each press of my finger sent a sharp ache stabbing through my skull.

The pain had returned, but it was not the dull pressure from before. It was sharper now, cutting through the inside of my head with each sound I made.

My vision shook.

The keys doubled, then tripled, until I no longer trusted what I saw. My hands split into overlapping shadows across the keyboard, and I had to decide, desperately and without pause, which ones were real.

I couldn’t fail.

The wrong note… meant failure

And failure meant death.

I clenched my teeth until my jaw hurt, forcing my body to keep moving.

I couldn’t see properly, but I had burned the keys in my mind through the hourglass gate. I knew where each key was, like it was second nature to me.

Swoosh!

The conductor’s baton slashed sideways, violently shifting the tempo.

The orchestra followed immediately, veering into jagged rhythms that threatened to throw me from the piece.

My chest trembled.

My wrist screamed as I twisted hard to keep pace. My fingernails scraped the side of the keys, a sharp sting following suit, but I did not stop.

’Stay with it. Don’t slip. Don’t slip—’

The audience had fallen silent.

I could feel the weight of their stares pressing against my skin.

Not a cough, not a whisper, not the sound of movement from a single chair… Their collective silence was unbearable.

Bang!

The key roared under my hand. Shit! Too forceful…! Too close to breaking the rhythm.

My stomach flipped with panic as the sound echoed louder than I intended, and for a single heartbeat, I thought I had lost it.

But I caught it.

Barely.

The rhythm held. The chain of sound remained fluent.

Sweat poured into my eyes, stinging, almost blinding me.

My arms burned as every tendon pulled taut and every muscle strained against the constant pace.

My bones felt brittle beneath the constant impact of my fingers. The skin at my fingertips split, hot blood smearing across the ivory, making the surface slippery, yet I forced my hands down again and again.

I could not stop.

I could not falter.

Not once.

Swoosh. Swoosh.

The conductor’s baton moved in erratic arcs, slicing the air in patterns that defied rhythm and reason, but the orchestra followed without hesitation, dragging the music into uneven fragments.

My heart stuttered as I scrambled to match it, my mind splitting under the pressure. My chest burned with every note, and yet I refused to fall behind.

The conductor was laughing at me.

Not with sound, but through movement. Through the grotesque curl of its lips as it turned its head ever so slightly toward me. Every flick of its hand was a taunt. Every shift in tempo was on purpose. Almost as if it was trying to say, ’One mistake is all it takes…’

“Kh!”

I clenched my teeth, my breath coming out unevenly.

My body screamed to give up, to collapse forward onto the keys and let the piece devour itself without me.

But I did not.

I could not.

The piano was all I could see.

Da-da-da-da-da—!

The final sequence unfurled across my vision, the notes crammed together, faster than I could think.

My fingers flew across the keyboard, moving with desperate speed, scraping the ivory, slipping on my own blood, but never faltering.

The orchestra roared in its crescendo, the sound so vast it felt like it had swallowed the entire theater, pressing down from every wall, every surface, every shadow.

My vision swam with dark spots.

The world pulsed in and out of focus. My lungs begged for air that would not come.

I had long forgotten to breathe.

My arms trembled with exhaustion, yet still I forced them forward, faster, harder, because if I slowed for even a second, it would all collapse.

The conductor moved with growing frenzy.

Its baton whipped through the air like a weapon, dragging the music into sharper peaks, harsher turns, trying its best to make me falter.

Its head twisted further than it should have been able to turn, the curve of its neck grotesque, its empty eyes fixed directly on me.

The smile widened… and I shuddered.

I could feel my mind tearing. My body had been reduced to nothing but a vessel for the keys, my thoughts consumed entirely by the need to play the piano.

Faster!

Harder!

Louder!

The piano rattled beneath the sheer violence of my playing, my fingers sliding across the red-stained keys.

My shoulders spasmed, my back bent forward.

The final pages of the score fell to the ground, but I no longer needed to see.

I played by instinct, by fear, by the desperate need to keep up.

This…

This was no different than my experience in the hourglass.

The sound rose to its peak, the notes vibrating in the air. The orchestra surged in a storm that threatened to crush me, and I slammed my hands into the keys with everything I had left, dragging the piece to its last, violent breath.

WAM!

And then—

Silence.

The final chord rang out, trembling, reverberating through the theater until it faded into nothing.

My hands froze above the keys. My chest heaved so violently I thought it would burst. Sweat dripped freely from my chin, darkening the wood below.

My vision swam, the world tilting continuously beneath me.

“…Haa… Haa…”

And amidst my heavy breaths, a smile formed.

I had not made a mistake.

Not one.

I forced my gaze upward, my muscles trembling and tensing.

The conductor was looking at me.

Its lips were no longer smiling. It was just staring at me, its entire demeanor and presence different than before. I knew that I had passed its test.

I had not broken.

But that was never the point.

The Requiem was never about the music.

It was about breaking me.

And as the silence lingered, heavier than the sound had ever been, I realized that while the piece had ended, the performance had not.

One more.

There was still one more piece.

Mine.

My perfect piece.

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