Chapter 177: CURSE YOU CORRUPTION!

In that very short but long instant...

Malik’s body had been shut down by the monstrosity before him.

Shut down, the way a machine might have its power source severed mid-motion, every system it depended on suddenly, violently offline.

His eyes bled black.

He felt it happen in real time, a cold sensation crawling up from somewhere behind his sockets, consuming gold and replacing it with something that didn’t belong to him anymore.

Malik couldn’t see properly through it. Couldn’t see much of anything, really, beyond the vague impression of white eyes staring into something deeper than skin.

He could barely think.

Breathing had already stopped being automatic.

’...Think.’

The word surfaced through static, through a fog thicker than anything he’d experienced even during the darkest moments of his descent through the Abyss... through any time before that.

His lungs sat still in his chest, refusing to expand, refusing to contract, utterly unresponsive to whatever reflex should have triggered them.

Nothing was automatic anymore.

Nothing in his body remembered how to simply exist without being told to.

’Breathe.’

Malik forced Rukh into the thought, channeling it toward his diaphragm, willing the muscle to contract through sheer stubbornness alone.

It moved... barely.

A fraction of the expansion a normal breath should have produced, but it was something, a trickle of air scraping down his throat and into lungs that felt like they belonged to someone else entirely.

’Push.’

His heart hadn’t beaten in several seconds.

He realized that with a distant clarity.

This realization should have sent panic screaming through every nerve he had left, except panic required a functioning nervous system to properly process, and his nervous system was currently offline along with everything else.

Malik pushed Rukh toward his chest instead, forcing the muscle to contract through will alone, the same way he’d forced his lungs to move a moment earlier.

Thump.

One beat.

Weak, irregular, nothing like the steady rhythm his heart had kept his entire life without needing conscious direction.

But a beat.

’Circulate.’

Blood needed to move. He understood that much, some distant medical knowledge surfacing through the chaos, telling him that a single heartbeat meant nothing if the blood it pushed had nowhere useful to go.

Malik directed Rukh toward his veins next, toward the pathways blood was supposed to travel through without him ever needing to think about it.

It moved, sluggish and uneven, but moving.

’Think. Breathe. Push. Circulate.’

He repeated it, building the sequence into something resembling a rhythm, a mantra, the only framework he had left to keep himself from simply ceasing to exist in the space of a few more heartbeats.

Think. Breathe. Push. Circulate.

Think. Breathe. Push. Circulate.

Think. Breathe. Push. Circulate.

Each repetition cost him something.

Rukh, obviously, was bleeding out of him faster than he could track, but also of some fundamental reserve of Will that he’d always assumed was bottomless until this exact moment proved otherwise.

His liver came next, demanding attention he barely had left to give. He felt it sitting heavy and still inside him, filtering nothing, processing nothing, another organ that had simply forgotten its purpose the moment that black figure had looked at him.

Malik forced Rukh towards it anyway.

’Function.’

The liver twitched back into something resembling activity, and Malik felt a fresh wave of exhaustion roll through whatever remained of his consciousness.

This wasn’t sustainable.

He understood that even through the fog clouding every other thought he tried to form.

He was running four separate systems manually, each one requiring constant, active attention, each one threatening to collapse the moment his focus wavered even slightly.

And his focus was already wavering.

His nerves came next, screaming for the same manual intervention, signals that should have traveled instantly now crawling at a fraction of their normal speed, forcing him to consciously push each impulse toward whatever destination it needed to reach.

Think. Breathe. Push. Circulate. Function. Signal.

The mantra expanded, growing heavier with every addition, and Malik felt himself slipping further from whatever baseline of consciousness he’d been clinging to since this nightmare began.

The black figure hadn’t moved.

It simply watched, patient in a way that felt infinitely more terrifying than any aggressive assault could have been, those pure white eyes fixed on him, enjoying his torture.

’LONG LIVE THE SULTAN~.’

The words echoed through whatever remained of his mind, mocking and delivered with none of the genuine warmth the real version of that phrase carried when his people shouted it from the streets below.

Malik hated it.

He hated the mockery, the casual cruelty of having his victory, his moment of triumph, turned into something twisted and small by this creature’s presence.

But hatred required energy he didn’t have to spare.

Maliki redirected that flicker of emotion back into the mantra instead, back into keeping his heart beating, his lungs working, his blood moving, every system he could still consciously control fighting against a tide that wanted nothing more than for all of it to simply stop.

Think. Breathe. Push. Circulate. Function. Signal.

Think. Breathe. Push. Circulate. Function. Signal.

His vision, what little remained of it through the black bleeding across his eyes, had started narrowing at the edges.

A tunnel, closing inward, the darkness beyond it not the comforting kind that came with sleep but something colder, final.

’I’m dying.’

The thought cut through the fog for just a moment, undeniable.

He’d faced death before. Many millions of times, across many lives he barely remembered properly, across every layer of the Abyss and every gate of Hell he’d crawled through to get here.

But this felt different.

This felt like death arriving through simple erasure.

A candle’s flame casually snuffed out by two fingers.

Malik refused to accept that.

Whatever strength remained in him, whatever fragment of Will he could still summon through the collapsing wreckage of his own consciousness, he gathered it all toward a single thought.

His final thought.

He needed to move.

Devil’s Footsteps required Rukh he barely had left, required focus he was actively losing with every passing second, but it was the only option remaining.

The only path back toward something resembling safety.

’Buy it.’

He didn’t have time to properly activate the Rune through normal means.

So instead, with the very last sliver of conscious thought he could scrape together, Malik reached towards the Fear System itself, towards the shop still technically accessible even through the chaos consuming his mind.

A single purchase.

Devil’s Footsteps, single use, the cheapest, fastest option available.

He felt the purchase complete somewhere in the back of his collapsing awareness, a trickle of Fear Points draining, and with the very last fragment of Will he had left, Malik activated it.

Golden fire traced beneath whatever remained of his physical form.

He moved.

It wasn’t far.

It wasn’t even fast.

The Rune, even with the system, barely activated.

But... it was enough to put distance between himself and that watching figure.

Or so he thought.

Because, well, his consciousness was starting to fade.

Devil’s Maw blurred past him in fragments his dying senses could barely register, familiar shapes and colors smearing together into something unrecognizable.

That was when his consciousness gave out entirely.

The last coherent thought Malik managed to form, before the darkness swallowed him completely, carried more fury than fear.

Fury that burned all.

’CURSE YOU, CORRUPTION!’