Windrest City, Outer Ward.
Ethan Vale’s living room was still lit when the air went wrong.
Mist seeped out of the corners like it had a will, swallowing color until the world turned bruised-black and chalk-white. The fog thickened, folded in on itself, and a figure stepped through as if the room were a curtain.
Marsas.
He looked like a man who’d been starved for years—bones sharp, skin stretched tight, a robe hanging off him like a burial shroud. Yet his eyes were bright. Hungry. Excited.
“Surprised?” His voice rasped with amusement. “The whole Endless Sea is celebrating my death right now.”
Ethan didn’t flinch. “You’re supposed to be a corpse.”
“I was.” Marsas spread his hands, the fog stirring with him. “And now I’m not. That’s what happens when you touch divinity.”
He laughed softly, then leaned closer, almost conversational.
“Do you know what it felt like? Watching them cheer through Panglos Fell’s eyes. The Black & White Court. Violet Eye. Even that pack of hypocrites in the Ring of Earth.” His smile sharpened. “They’ll all pay. One by one.”
Ethan’s gaze stayed steady. “You didn’t come here to reminisce.”
“No.” Marsas’s mirth vanished, replaced by something cold. “I came for the other half.”
The half-divine spark inside him pulsed like an invisible heartbeat. Ethan could feel it—an instinctual pressure in the room, as if the air itself had learned to obey.
Marsas tapped his own chest. “Half a Divine Spark is enough to stitch a body back together and fake a death. Imagine what a complete one can do.”
Ethan kept his tone even. “If you think I know where it is, you’re wasting your time.”
Marsas’s yellowed nails flexed into a claw. “Don’t play dumb, Rhine. We’re both players. We both know how the System pushes.”
He didn’t say the word “System” out loud like it mattered. In this world, you didn’t—unless you wanted the universe to bite.
Marsas paced once, slow, predatory.
“Level-2 Players are allowed to compete for divinity. The hunt has started. Tasks, clues, bait.” His eyes narrowed. “I already have one half. Panglos already has the body and the authority. All that’s missing is the location of the other half.”
Ethan’s mind flicked to the countdown he’d been watching all night.
Fifteen minutes.
If he could survive until Cycle 11 ended, the rules changed. Bodies changed. The board reset.
Marsas misread Ethan’s silence as fear. His grin returned.
“You should be proud. You’re about to die to something historic.” He lifted a hand, and the fog condensed into a wall between them—thick, muffling, alive. “Tell me where it is, and I might leave you breathing.”
Ethan moved.
Shadow slid under his feet as he used Shadow Shift, ghosting behind the fog-wall and behind Marsas. Flint came up in a clean, practiced line, and Ethan fired through the haze.
The bullet should’ve taken Marsas in the skull.
Marsas turned at the last instant. His sleeve snapped like a whip, catching the shot and flicking it away. In the same motion, a dark-violet spike—sharp as a lance—shot from his palm, screaming through the air toward Ethan.
Ethan didn’t take it.
He triggered Spatial Escape.
The world blinked, and Ethan reappeared behind the partition near the fireplace—his pre-marked anchor point.
Spatial Escape was a Hunter skill with limits. You had to set the spot in advance, and you could only snap back to it from within range. Less flexible than Shadow Shift… but it didn’t need darkness, and it didn’t announce “Infiltrator” to the wrong kind of enemy.
Marsas’s gaze tracked him instantly.
“So you really are a Hunter.” Marsas sounded almost disappointed. “I’d hoped you’d show me something new.”
Ethan didn’t answer. He drank a Luck Potion in one swallow, then moved again—quick steps, short angles, refusing to give Marsas a straight line.
Marsas had once been an Infiltrator of the Black & White Court. Then he’d betrayed them, become an Abyss Thrall, and walked the Soul-Eater path. He’d abandoned the Infiltrator road… but the instincts never truly left.
And worse—he still carried Tier 3 Infiltrator techniques like a second skin.
Mist rolled. Shadows stretched wrong. Marsas vanished and reappeared inside the fog like a nightmare deciding where to stand.
Ethan tried to break distance, snapping Spatial Escape again and again—each time returning to the anchor point he’d set, each time buying a heartbeat.
But a heartbeat wasn’t enough.
Marsas was Tier 5 as a Soul-Eater. He moved like something that had already decided the ending.
A hit landed—Ethan felt it as a graze first, then pain blooming hot across his ribs. Blood dampened his shirt.
Marsas smiled. “You can’t keep doing that.”
Ethan fired. Flint barked. The shot tore into Marsas’s shoulder.
The wound opened—then closed.
Flesh knitted like time rewinding. The half-divine spark corrected reality with casual contempt.
Marsas spread his arms as if presenting a miracle. “See? That’s the difference. Your bullets are suggestions. Mine are laws.”
Ethan’s jaw tightened.
He let Marsas press him. Let the room shrink. Let the fog choke the exits.
While Marsas’s attention was on the obvious—on bullets, on movement—Ethan quietly changed the one thing that mattered.
He re-marked his Spatial Escape anchor.
Not here.
Somewhere else.
A darker place. A place with fewer witnesses. A place he’d prepared beneath Windrest Keep.
Marsas lunged. Ethan slipped, fired, missed, bled, and kept moving—playing the same desperate pattern until Marsas finally got impatient.
Marsas raised a hand, and the fog-wall tightened like a noose. The air thickened. Ethan’s lungs worked harder.
“Enough.” Marsas’s voice dropped. “Tell me.”
Ethan looked him in the eye.
He triggered Spatial Escape.
The living room vanished.
Cold stone and collapsed masonry rushed in as both of them snapped into a half-lit underground basement—Windrest Keep’s ruin-choked underbelly.
And cast Damage Transfer.
The spell latched—thin and invisible, like a hook in the soul.
Marsas’s expression flickered. Recognition.
“Infiltrator tricks?” he mocked, but his tone held a sliver of caution. “What are you going to do—push your pain onto me? With my spark? You’ll just exhaust yourself.”
Ethan didn’t correct him.
Instead, he raised a small sea-blue vial.
Purification Potion.
He drank the entire bottle in one gulp.
Coolness slid down his throat… then vanished before it reached his stomach, swallowed by the spell’s redirection.
Across from him, Marsas stiffened.
A chill traced his esophagus. Dropped into his gut. Bloomed outward like ice water flooding veins.
His withered, warped flesh began to heal—muscles swelling back into place, skin regaining elasticity, the forbidden deformities undoing themselves.
And at the same time, his supernatural power drained out as if someone had pulled the plug.
Marsas’s eyes went wide.
“No. No—NO!”
Bullets could be repaired by divinity. A body could be rewound. But Purification wasn’t damage.
It was correction.
And the price for that correction was everything Marsas had paid to become what he was.
In the dim basement air, the change finished in seconds.
Marsas was mortal again.
Worse—he could no longer feel the half Divine Spark inside him.
He staggered, shaking, staring at his own hands as if they belonged to a stranger.
Ethan exhaled once, steadying through pain.
“Out,” Ethan said quietly.
Marsas’s mouth worked soundlessly.
For the first time since he’d stepped through the fog, he looked afraid.