It was by some unworldly miracle that Kenji and his party managed to escape the shapeshifters, having been fooled by their illusions many times. The creatures had mimicked their voices, calling out to them as if scared; they morphed into familiar people, begging them to stop or wait. And whenever this happened, it was so realistic Kenji wanted to shrug off his better judgement and believe it every time. However, as they regrouped in a corridor of sandstone brick and shining sapphire, emerald, and ruby ceilings, their minds were focused on something else entirely: a godawful noise that screamed down the hallways.

“What is it?” winced Misumi, cupping both hands over her ears and raising her voice. “It sounds kinda like music.”

Cleo echoed the same thing, while Amelia stated that it sounded like a pipe organ.

But where was it coming from? And why?

It was Kenji who them suggested it might have been another illusion, but that idea was shaken—quite literally—when the floor started to tremble like an earthquake. In response, he proposed they get out of there as soon as possible.

“Yes, I do agree,” Amelia replied. “We must not delay in our escape. We can resume our search for Unknown at a later time.”

Unfortunately, escaping The Hallways of Illusion was not an easy affair, nor was it guaranteed to be safe, and yet as they absconded in the direction from which they previously came, they noticed that not a single shapeshifter was in sight. The portraits were perfectly still, not rippling or stirring. It was as if the monsters were afraid and had retreated during the pipe organ’s rusty, train-engine howls.

Like something had been triggered deeper in the Spire, like someone was running amuck and deliberately stirring up chaos, the mother of all quakes began rattling the hallway, cracking the windows, chipping the walls. If Kenji didn’t know any better, he would have thought the Spire was collapsing. But that couldn’t have been the case; nothing could critically damage a structure as mighty and powerful as it.

As they hurried through the hallways, passing many corridors along the way, Cleo asked: “Hey, Bonehead—do you have any clue where we’re going? You did remember to map our path, right?”

Kenji let his brain do the talking by blurting out the first thing that came to mind, “Did you map our path? You’re so perfect all the time, I assumed you’d take care of it.”

“My god, you imbecile!” she screeched. “We have no idea how to get out of here now!”

On the verge of pulling out her own hair, Cleo growled nonsense through her teeth and basically screamed without fully opening her mouth.

“You’re the stupidest person in existence!” she hurled at Kenji.

“Right back at you, Princess!”

Finally, he made the decision to split off from the current hallway and run into another, seeing that any direction they ran might be the right one, and suddenly, they found themselves in a desert passage, a corridor with ancient walls and a sand-sprinkled floor. It was far thinner than the others, and had a threshold every ten meters or so where they passed beneath an archway. Each one felt like the gateway to a barren palace where skeletons roamed the inner sanctums and outer courtyards.

Yet that hall did not last forever.

In less than a minute of dashing through, Kenji stumbled over a crevice in the floor and went crashing down, only for the ground itself to give way further and collapse entirely, and not only he, but his whole party could not escape from falling to a dark abyss. And as he clung on to an edge of the floor with his forearms, trying hard to pull himself back up, Misumi’s scream rang up from the darkness below:

“Kenji!” she cried, falling ever faster.

Cleo and Amelia also shouted for salvation.

But the shadows consumed them all like flames burning everything in their path, and as he called out their names, he too plunged into the unforeseen pit as the floor fractured again. As he fell, the hideous pipe organ music echoed in the black, it reverberated off distant walls and came roaring back, crashing into him with such ferocity he could literally feel the sound. In seconds, Kenji gazed upward as the previous hallway faded in the distance, like the light at the end of a tunnel moving further away instead of closer, and he knew one thing:

His dreams, his nightmares, and everything in between—all of it had come to end. For if he wanted to make it out of the Spire alive that day, he’d have to turn back time and stop himself from ever entering in the first place.

 

******

 

The water was almost sinewy, thick with an ungodly slush so foul it was nearly sinful, and Kenji bubbled out panicked words from below the surface. Everything was so dark. So abandoned. He was disoriented in every way. Even so, he kicked his feet and swept his arms, bringing him back up to stale but breathable air, and while gasping for oxygen, he noticed that the organ music had ceased. Whether that was a good or bad thing remained to be seen, but it couldn’t hurt to expect the worst. That’s all the Spire ever threw his way to begin with.

“Misumi!” he called out. His voiced echoed evermore and his vision was hazy. “Are you guys there? Can you hear me?”

Struggling to compose himself, Kenji swam but flailed somewhat, and at one point his hand reached out and touched something rugged—wood. And after slowing himself down and wiping his eyes, he saw that it was not just rubble or debris from the hallway, but a shabby wooden dock that would put the ruins of Whitevale to shame. Instinctively, he used his remaining strength to grab on to its edge and pull himself up and out of the water.

“Amelia!” he coughed. “Cleo!”

But the moment his voice resonated in the chamber, someone else called back—Misumi. She was gasping from the water. And after a brief look around the cave, Kenji found her, and he dove back into the liquid, swam to her and grabbed her, then guided her back to the dock and helped her climb up. It was a few moments after that that Amelia and Cleo resurfaced, and they too were on the verge of drowning, but they regained equanimity much faster and swam to the dock themselves. When all four of them were safely on the lousy excuse for a manmade structure, Kenji caught his breath and hunched over, letting the exhaustion course through his veins one heartbeat at a time.

“That was close,” he huffed. “For a second, I thought we were goners.”

Amelia lay curled up, and between coughs she responded, “As did I.”

On the other hand, Cleo wasn’t the least bit forgiving, and she blamed the entire situation on Kenji’s lack of a brain. To her, he was an ignorant buffoon who should have been tracking their journey through the district—but he hadn’t.

“How many times are we gonna have this conversation?” he confronted her with a tone of accusation. “I’m sorry. Maybe I should have been mapping this place out, but I didn’t. And neither did you. So can we drop it? Can we focus on getting out of here instead of arguing?”

She protested, “Sure. But I want you to admit it was entirely your fault.”

“Hell no! Go eat a bag of dicks!”

“Then it looks like we’re at an impasse.” She muttered under her breath, “…asshole.”

Despite his objections, Cleo wouldn’t cave. No matter what. Once she was on her feet, she just crossed her arms and refused to cooperate until she got her way, and though it clawed at the interior of Kenji’s brain to do so, he begrudgingly admitted to causing their current predicament. It was all his fault. Everything was. That’s how Cleo saw the world.

It wasn’t long after his apology that they were up and ready to move, to find out how much trouble they were in. And of course, that led them studying the area.

A cave haunted by the imaginations of a schizophrenic child, it was something out of horror novel, where the stalagmites and stalactites formed a diabolical jaw and the darkness beyond it seemed unending. There was pale light stemming from torches of blue fire along an old path. Bats dangled from the fire’s shadows, their eyes beady in the glow.

“Where are we?” asked Misumi as her mouth fell open.

Kenji made a suggestion, “Cthulhu’s summer home, maybe?”

She just glared at him with an emotionless face, uninterested in humor at the moment.

Without further comment, they moved on and didn’t have the patience to sit around and wait for something to happen. So, they proceeded down the only path in sight, following the azure torches that dotted the cave’s natural wall every ten meters or so. If there was a dock, then surely there was a way out somewhere.

That place was so different from other districts of the Spire, so briny and full of atmosphere—the kind that prodded them to leave. With every step, all Kenji could think about were the monsters that might jump out at them, or how they might have discovered a chamber nobody had visited in a thousand years, meaning they were permanently stuck. But when they reached the bottom of stairwell, he gazed up a tunnel carved out of the rock, and felt a chill burden his spine so heavily it almost caused the fluid within to curdle.

A hoarse, monstrous cry echoed from far away, not loud enough to be considered more than whisper, but it freaked him out nonetheless. In fact, it scared them all.

“What was that?” Misumi hissed, eyes glaring up the stairwell.

“Beats me,” Kenji answered. “Why don’t you go check it out?”

“Me? Why me? You go check it out! You’re the man here, aren’t you?”

He chuckled and worked the kinks out of his neck. “Well if you say so…I guess I am. Still, its customary in some societies for the women to hunt and gather, while the men stay at home and cook, you know? I’d make a good housewife.”

Cleo let her eyes roll to the back of her head. “You’ve got to be kidding me. Look, dumbass. Either you climb up those stairs, or I’m gonna reach in that water back there and whatever I pull out I’m gonna shove in your mouth by the fistful, got it?” She clapped both hands twice. “Chop chop. We don’t have all day.”

“If I may,” Amelia intervened. “I would very much appreciate it if someone could tell me why Kenji is a dumbass. Please, I beg of you—I must know. It is quite confusing.”

At that point, Misumi began to snicker so vixenly that she had to cover her mouth with both hands; meanwhile, Kenji and Cleo heaved a collective sigh and gave up on arguing altogether, and he just deadpanned before hiking ahead of them up the stairs.

The ascent was daunting, to say the least. Not because it was difficult, but because the cries of some distant creature grew closer and closer, and the stairs winded gradually to the left, as if they were ascending up a tower. When at last they reached the summit, Kenji poked his head out and noticed a vacant dungeon hallway, with rusty iron cells, a moaning draft, and the same howls from before echoing in the distance like dry throats screaming out. Whatever creature made those awful sounds…it was in pain.

He stepped out and dusted off his hands successfully, then put both behind his head and sauntered into the corridor. “Guess my abundant manhood scared everything off.”

“Shut it, weasel,” Cleo barked. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but that noise is getting close, which means that thing—whatever it is—could be coming after us.”

“Well, if it gets here, I’ll just push you down and run for it. How’s that sound?”

Cleo’s mouth hung open as she went speechless, on the verge of slapping his face off. However, Misumi calmed their ire and insisted they focus on getting out of there; after all, none of them knew if there was even a way out. And thus, the whole group proceeded further into the dungeon, aspiring to make a lucky escape.

They passed by empty cells filled with rot, with fungi, with heaping mounds of flesh-like goop that stunk so bad it nearly made them hurl. Kenji led the way, and in every cell he found something new, but it was the last one—whose barred door was left open—where his heart nearly jumped out of his chest and made a run for it.

Humanoid creatures were huddled inside, their bodies naked, their skin raw and bloody, their limbs thin and ragged, their breaths erratic. It appeared they were hiding from something, and the moment one of the noticed Kenji, it snarled like a jungle cat, revealing chipped teeth from which saliva oozed to the floor. Yet it did not attack. Instead, it slunk back in with the others, trying to escape the distant cries of some much greater beast.

Amelia pulled Kenji away from the entrance. “These are high-level undead,” she stated. “To my knowledge, they are only found in Dark Castle.”

He glared at her. “Wait. Then that would mean…”

“Yes, it would appear we are no longer in The Hallways of Illusion.”

Kenji turned back to the undead creatures, many of which stared back at him with a desire to kill. “But why aren’t they attacking? We’re weak compared to them. There’s no reason for them to cower like this.”

She answered, “Because it is not us they are afraid of.”

Kenji and all three of his friends paused and listened to the cries, which were now loud enough to be at the same volume as their voices. The sounds were deep, guttural. Something big was coming.

In a fit of prudence, Kenji shut the cell door and locked it, sealing the undead within. Now they couldn’t be followed or flanked. And as he gulped, fearful of what lay ahead, he knew he wouldn’t be satisfied until they discovered what howled so loudly from deeper in.

“Let’s find out what it is,” he asserted.

Naturally, his friends protested, saying it would be wiser to head the opposite direction whenever they got the chance, but at the end of they day, it was obvious how curious they all were. Dark Castle was new to them. It was the most dangerous area of the Spire. And whether they like it or not, they could use the experience for when they entered the next time. Plus, Unknown was spotted there multiple times in the past. It wouldn’t be too farfetched of an idea for them to run into him. Kenji’s reasoning convinced them, and from the dungeon they fled, following the uproarious sounds of a beast in frenzy.

Indeed, Dark Castle lived up to its name, for every chamber, corridor, and secret passage was like the interior of a haunted fortress, a bastion where the dead roamed freely. Based on what Kenji knew, there were dragons and minotaurs stalking those chambers, but it seemed they had gone into hiding. Was it even possible for creatures like that to get scared?

As the roars grew louder, they began to hear other noises too, like beating on the walls, rumbling in the floors, hard scratches like metal scraping against stone. Through passage after passage, they grew nearer. Their hearts beat louder. Their goosebumps spread faster. But finally, Kenji’s hairs stood up on his arms when they broke through to a massive hallway, one large enough for the Cathedral to fit inside of, for the frenzied cries were ear-piercing at that point, and reverberating off every wall.

“The Path of Weeping Skulls…” he whispered, perusing the corridor with his eyes. “I heard about this place from Desmond. This is where—”

Before he could finish that sentence, the ground-shaking footsteps of a giant beast forced him into silence, and like a cloud of smoke spreading outward after an explosion, an enormous creature emerged—white in color, twenty-five to thirty meters tall, enraged and booming out its deafening cry. It dug claws into the walls, hurled massive chunks of stone. It opened its mouth wide and blared from its gullet, completely out of its mind. And for a split second, Kenji couldn’t believe what he was seeing, but when he found the beast’s gaze—that empty, pure white gaze with no soul—he knew exactly what monster stood before him. It was infamous. Known to all who dwelled in Duncaster and beyond. And to every Adventurer in Kathra, it was the most deadly and important prey they hoped to one day eliminate from the Spire, and from history itself:

Dead-Eyes.