- Kyle Valtier’s POV -

I walked past the closed doors.

Tick... that was my first step on the decaying wood.

Tick... my second step.

Tick... my third step.

I stopped.

A cold drop of sweat slid from my forehead down my temple despite the freezing air around me.

My heightened auditory senses—always my greatest weapon—picked up a terrifying anomaly that couldn’t be explained.

I began walking again, this time very slowly, focusing every ounce of my concentration on the sound of my footsteps.

Tick... the sound of my leather shoe striking the wood.

Tak... my blood froze in my veins, and my heart skipped an entire beat.

There was another set of footsteps.

Footsteps that matched the rhythm of mine exactly, following me from behind.

My tactical mind immediately tried to find a logical explanation.

An echo? No. An echo follows a sound by a fraction of a second, is fainter, and gradually fades.

This wasn’t an echo.

It was an independent, physical sound. Someone—or something—was walking directly behind me in this dark corridor, mimicking my rhythm with perfectly matched timing, as if it could read my muscular movement before I made it.

The hair on my neck stood on end, and I felt an icy current brush against the back of my neck, as if someone was silently breathing behind me.

A hidden assassin? A creature from this dimension? Or did the house itself possess a body?

The rules of survival in the world of assassins are strict: in tight spaces, turning suddenly can disrupt your balance and expose your neck to a fatal strike. I had to test the opponent first.

I summoned the "Forgotten Blade" into my right hand.

The familiar icy Eitra energy flowed through my veins, giving me a sense of stability.

The faint pain caused by the Forgotten Blade was comforting—it reassured me that I still held my strongest weapon.

I took a sudden, quick step forward.

Tick!

An immediate response came from behind me, no more than a meter away:

Tak!

I took two rapid consecutive steps, then deliberately let my foot slide slightly.

Tick! Tick! Shhhk... 𝒇𝙧𝙚𝓮𝔀𝓮𝒃𝙣𝓸𝒗𝒆𝒍.𝙘𝒐𝒎

Tak! Tak! Shhhk...

The entity behind me didn’t just mimic the number of steps—it even replicated the sound of my shoe scraping against the wood.

Then... I stopped suddenly, like a statue carved from ice.

I held my breath tightly in my chest until my lungs ached. I didn’t blink, didn’t allow my clothes to make the slightest rustle. Every muscle in my body was locked in place.

The sound behind me... Tak... stopped at the exact same fraction of a second.

Absolute silence filled the corridor.

A heavy, suffocating silence—to the point where I could hear the faint buzz of blood flowing through the vessels in my head.

No sound of breathing from the entity behind me. No rustle of clothing.

No heartbeat.

Only a deadly cold... and the overwhelming sense of a presence—dark, consuming light and heat—standing just centimeters behind me, staring at the back of my head, waiting for the slightest movement.

In that impossible corridor, which twisted my perception and forced my body into a sick sense of belonging, I realized the truth.

I hadn’t just entered an abandoned house in an alley.

I had stepped into the stomach of an entity that might be older than Zirathion City itself.

And the thing standing behind me now—mimicking my steps and toying with my nerves—was definitely not the little thief girl I had come here to find.

It was something else... something that belonged to the world of shadows just as much as I belonged to death.

I tightened my grip on the handle of the Forgotten Blade until my knuckles turned white.

And I allowed a mad smile—the Joker’s smile, born from the womb of despair and pure terror—to form on my dark face.

"Fine..." I whispered, my voice trembling in the cold air, yet saturated with pure killing intent.

"If you want to play and dance in this damned corridor... let’s see which of us reaches the abyss first!"

With speed beyond the limits of human logic, Eitra energy exploding through my legs, I spun a full 180 degrees.

I swung the Forgotten Blade in a horizontal arc—a strike meant to cleave the torso of anything behind me into two equal halves, whether human, monster, or demon.

Swoooooosh!

The blade sliced through the black air with a sound like tearing silk.

But... it hit nothing.

There was no resistance of flesh. No blood splattered.

The blade stopped midair as I remained in an offensive stance, breathing slightly heavier, my eyes scanning the space.

The corridor behind me was completely empty.

Hundreds of meters of identical closed doors and nebulous darkness stretching into the unknown.

There was no shadowy entity, no hidden assassin, no creature standing behind me.

Just an empty, cold void mocking my attack.

I slowly lowered my blade, frowning.

Was it just auditory hallucinations? Was the house manipulating my mind to this extent?

But as I prepared to turn back again and continue forward... my gaze fell upon the dusty wooden floor right at the tip of my shoes, in the exact spot where I thought the creature had been standing.

My eyes froze.

On the thick layer of dust covering the floor... there were footprints.

Small footprints... very small, like those of a child around eight years old.

They were facing toward me... and stopped exactly behind where I had been standing.

But that wasn’t what made my blood run cold.

In the middle of those footprints... lay something familiar.

The mechanical toy I had bought for that little mouse in the market days ago... the broken wooden monkey.

The monkey lay on its back, its cracked glass eyes staring upward—staring at me with a horrifying stillness in the middle of that darkness.

As if it were silently laughing at my fear... as if it were telling me that the rules of this game... were not mine to set.