The scream that finally erupted from the young hunter was no longer human.

​It was a guttural, wet howl that seemed to tear at the very fabric of reality, a sound so unnatural it would have scratched the eardrums and induced madness in anyone still alive to hear it.

​He screamed with such savage, involuntary force that his vocal cords literally snapped and tore apart inside his throat like over-tightened guitar strings. The audible, piercing scream abruptly turned into a sickening, bloody gurgle and a wet choking rasp as his throat filled with his own boiling blood.

​But the horror did not stop at the destruction of his voice.

​The psychological and spiritual pressure imposed by the unbroken eye contact caused the boy’s central nervous system to completely and irreversibly collapse. The brain, unable to process the cosmic horror, began sending frantic, self-destructive signals to the rest of the body.

​The veins on his face—striking across his forehead, down his neck, and webbing around his eyes—swelled grotesquely. They bulged outward against the skin until they turned a deep, necrotic black, looking like thick, parasitic worms writhing just beneath the surface.

​Then... the pressure peaked.

​Pop! Pop! Pop!

​The veins burst simultaneously beneath his skin.

​Hot, dark blood sprayed violently from the pores of his face. It flowed like miniature, high-pressure fountains from his exploding tear ducts, streaming from his ears and bursting from his nasal cavity.

​His stomach, reacting to the violent surge of corrupted Eitral energy now flooding his system, contracted with bone-breaking violence. The boy’s jaw snapped open, and he began vomiting a thick, viscous stream of congested black blood. Mixed within the horrific purge were chunks of his own torn stomach lining and highly acidic digestive fluids that immediately began to dissolve his own lips and chin upon contact.

​The young hunter’s body suddenly stiffened as rigor mortis set in while he was still technically alive. His spine arched backward at a sickening, impossible angle, nearly snapping in half as the sheer force of the muscle spasms crushed his own vertebrae together.

​His mind—once filled with the bright dreams of becoming a high-ranking hunter, filled with the warm memories of his childhood, the taste of his favorite food, and the comforting image of his mother’s face—was snuffed out. It evaporated instantly, like a fragile candle flame forcefully drowned in a vat of liquid nitrogen.

​In less than five seconds, the boy was entirely gone. He turned into a trembling, ruined mass of flesh—paralyzed, blind, deaf, and completely devoid of awareness or comprehension.

​He became nothing more than a biological shell. A meat sack that mechanically drew shallow, rattling breaths and twitched in the mud, while his soul had already been violently dragged away, condemned to live its absolute worst nightmares in an eternal, inescapable coma that he would never awaken from, even long after his physical heart finally stopped beating.

​The black-eyed young man watched this catastrophic physical and mental collapse with complete, unnerving coldness. There was no pity, no disgust, and no manic joy. Only a deep, hidden sense of artistic enjoyment.

​His infinite eyes did not blink.

His calm, gentle, plastic smile did not waver for a fraction of a second.

​He considered the boy’s horrific demise a small, intimate piece of art. A minor compensation for the large, grand painting the other hunters had ruined by cowardly taking their own lives before he could play with them.

​He slowly stood upright, smoothing invisible wrinkles from his jacket. Below him, the broken hunter continued vomiting black blood onto the toe of the young man’s luxurious, polished shoe. Yet, in a display of impossible physics—as if matter itself was terrified of staining him—the black blood actively diverted its path, sliding off the leather without leaving a single microscopic mark or smear.

​The young man lifted his slender head, his pale neck exposed to the freezing wind. He looked toward the dark, turbulent sky, his gaze piercing through the heavy clouds, looking precisely in the direction of the distant city of Elysium. Its faint, artificial lights glimmered weakly against the horizon, ignorant of the doom standing just outside its borders.

​The toxic wind picked up, gently moving the silky strands of his pitch-black hair. The heavy red mist of vaporized blood that had settled over the battlefield rose once more, swirling and wrapping around his tall figure like a royal cloak woven from spilled life. 𝒇𝓻𝓮𝓮𝙬𝙚𝒃𝒏𝓸𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝓬𝓸𝒎

​He smiled a very faint smile. It was almost invisible, yet it carried the absolute, crushing confidence of a being who viewed the entire world not as a battlefield, but as a small, fragile game board placed on his personal table.

​Slowly, without looking down, his pale hand reached out. From the mud nearby, an object floated upward, encased in a faint, dark aura. It was a playing card, likely dropped from the pocket of a dead hunter who had been passing time before the monsters attacked.

​The card hovered gracefully into the young man’s pristine hand.

​It was the Joker. The colorful, grinning face of the jester stared back at him, stained with a single drop of a dead man’s blood.

​He looked at the grinning face on the cardboard. He had heard the whispers traveling through the dark currents of the underworld. Whispers of a ’Joker’ operating in the shadows of Elysium. A weak, insignificant human who somehow believed he held the hidden cards, moving chess pieces in the dark, thinking himself the true architect of chaos.

​The young man’s black, void-like eyes narrowed slightly, focusing on the painted smile of the Joker card.

​He did not utter a single threat. He did not speak a word of grand monologue to the empty air.

​He simply smiled back at the card.

​Instantly, the Joker card in his hand began to decay. It didn’t burn with fire; it simply ceased to exist, turning into fine, grey ash that trickled through his pale fingers and was immediately carried away by the toxic wind, erasing the smiling jester from reality entirely.

​The message to the universe was silent, yet deafeningly clear.

​The young man turned, placing his hands neatly into the pockets of his tailored trousers, and walked back into the absolute darkness from which he came. His silent, elegant steps left behind a field of broken heroes, marking the definitive beginning of a new, inescapable Chapter of terror for Elysium. A Chapter where the true monsters no longer dwelled exclusively in deep, underground dungeons, but now walked elegantly in luxurious suits beneath the open sky, coming to violate the minds and souls of the entire world.