Allen’s feet pounded against the ground in a full sprint. His whole body was trembling as he ran, though it wasn’t from the cold of the night. Only fear occupied his mind, along with desperate thoughts of where he could possibly hide.

“The Shadow Watch would take me back, y-yes!” he thought, still quickly moving through the dark forest without any aim. He only needed to get away from that monster. Tears streamed from his eyes as pictures of horrible cruelty flickered by. He bit back the hysteria that rose from the pit of his stomach and struggled to keep his eyes open. “I can’t go back… there, I can’t I can’t I can’t I CAN’T I CAN’T!!!”

Allen struggled under branches and through the forest undergrowth. A cry of terror threatened to come out at the sight of every shadow he saw. His Ranger class wasn’t leveled enough after the last time he had been killed. All he could do was run as fast as possible and not look back. Only, deep down, he knew there was no escape.

“They’re all dead… dead, that whole city is doomed. There’s nothing they can do against—”

Allen tripped and landed hard on his stomach, cracking a rib on an exposed root sprouting through the forest floor. With a shriek and more tears, he looked back and met a tendril of bone, vile flesh, and dark miasma highlighted in a sickly violet.

He couldn’t think. He couldn’t scream. The bone limb shuddered in place before it shot towards Allen with a voracious flick and impaled him to the ground through his back.

Allen cried out, shaking uncontrollably, though it wasn’t from pain. He only felt a coldness where the limb pinned him to the dirt. He was shaking with overpowering fear, clawing at the ground as more tears mixed with snot. He struggled with all his heart, but there was nothing he could do.

“Where are you going?” came a voice. A smooth, friendly tenor. “You weren’t planning on skipping the show, were you Jeremiah?”

“Don’t… look back.” The feeble rationality of that thought could do nothing to keep Allen from turning to face the horror that casually drifted up behind him, propelled by more limbs of death and eldritch power. The glint of two circular lenses emerged from the darkness first, followed then by a mask with a crooked smile covering the face of a figured garbed in black rags. More violet miasma swirled around… it, each eddy containing more death than a lifetime.

Allen could only let out a pitiful croak; the fear he felt was paralyzing. The power of the creature known as the Black Healer was unfathomable to one such as Allen. It was enough to break the minds of the weak and inexperienced.

Name: Doc

[unknown] – Healer – Level [unknown] Reaper

“Come on now,” Doc began again in a calm tone, “We haven’t got all night.”

Allen could only sob quietly as the limb lifted him limply into the air. He no longer bothered to resist. The bone limb brought Allen close, then the world spun around him as miasma flooded everything. He felt a force pull on him from the inside, like someone had wrenched is very soul from his body.

Then, with a bright flash, the two were at the top of a hill, back where Allen had started running. He didn’t even bother to wonder how the Healer had teleported them both with the Death Aspect.

The hill overlooked a valley that entombed the doomed city of Mambara. However, just a few paces away from the Healer and the Ranger, there was a line of men and women. Though rather badly abused, bound and gagged by appendages of death, each and every one of them were dressed ostentatiously, like royalty. They shook in their restraints, feeling the very same fear that Allen felt as he hung from Doc’s bone limb like a dead animal.

“Which one should I choose?” Doc playfully asked, chuckling through his mask.

Allen didn’t say anything. His eyes brushed over the nobles, their eyes filled with terror and circled by running makeup. “Bodies,” Allen thought.

Doc hummed after a moment of silence. “I guess I’ll choose then,” he said.

Without even a second of hesitation, the Healer sent one of the captives hurtling towards his outstretched hand with the limbs that held her. The noble woman shrieked through her gag as Doc buried his hand in her chest with a sickening crunch. Flesh and bone were ripped through until the Healer tore the heart free of her.

Miasma surged out of the woman’s body as her muffled screams and futile thrashing drowned out the cries of the other captives. Doc held the still-beating heart in his hand as the miasma funneled into it along with the woman’s very life and soul. It didn’t take long before she was reduced to a shriveled up and grey husk.

“Hm, quite healthy,” Doc said, turning the heart over in his hand as it pulsed with a sinister power. The noble’s dried out corpse was absently tossed aside like a used tissue. Then the Healer turned to Allen and gestured jovially with the organ. “A noble heart,” he said.

“I’ve been here for almost two years… I’m in hell.” Allen looked down at the grass as more tears streaked down his face. “I want to go back,” he mumbled out loud.

Doc laughed over the sounds of the nobles’ weeping. “To Terminus? Hah, I like to think we’re at least better than them. Unless you mean the Watch, in which case—” he trailed off with a sigh and turned back to the captives, causing them to go deathly silent. “Hold on for a moment.”

The Healer held up the pulsating organ; veins of black surrounded its shape as the violent miasma surged inward. It shuddered in his grasp before Doc uttered a single word with dreadful finality.

“Necroplast.”

A powerful magic flushed through the nearby area. Allen could practically feel his blood go still as his body froze. Then the Healer lightly tossed the heart at the nearest noble. Just before impact, the organ writhed and burst open, sending tendrils of flesh and blood streaming at the captive.

Allen gritted his teeth as they started screaming amidst the sounds of tearing flesh and crunching bone. He didn’t look up to see the abomination as it warped and consumed the captives, growing in size and power. The cries of agony ended after only a few seconds, followed by the sound of some gurgling beast running off in the direction of Mambara.

“So, as I was saying,” Doc started again, spinning around to face Allen. The Ranger didn’t look up from the ground. “You can’t go back to the Watch. That organization is funded and controlled by the noble elite for the sake of enforcing their justice. My boy, they sent you on a suicide mission to bait Terminus. You were supposed to die with the rest of your team.”

“N-no, that’s not… that’s…” Allen fell to his knees as Doc finally set him down on the ground. The limb slid out of his chest smoothly, not even leaving a mark. “I was there… t-they…”

In the distance, the wails of terror and death began again.

His eyes stayed stuck to the ground, though he could no longer hold back the flood of tears and grief. Ugly sobs came out as he squeezed his eyes shut.

A long time passed before Allen wiped his eyes. The sounds had stopped, and he was blinded by a light. He blinked his wet eyes and stared up at a ceiling. The light he hadn’t turned off last night flickered to the right of his bed.

Allen groaned as he sat up and looked around the empty hotel-style room in the temple barracks. He slid to the side of the bed and looked down at his hands, clenching them into fists to stop the shaking.

“Fuck me, this is why I hate sleeping.” Allen got up, and with a thought, changed his clothes through his inventory. “…Heh, noble heart… that’s a good one,” he mumbled to himself as he walked to the door.

A quick glance at the clock on the far wall told him it was nearly ten in the morning. He opened the door to the hall to check on the others. Shuffling came from his left, and he turned to find Amelia sitting against the wall outside another room. Her expression went from casual acknowledgement to a face of concern thinly veiled by confusion.

“A-are you okay?” she asked, standing up.

Allen’s brain fumbled for a moment. “Shit, I should have checked a mirror.” He hastily raked his hair back and rubbed his still-puffy eyes on a sleeve. “Just… allergies,” he said.

Amelia returned a blank, unamused look when Allen dropped his arm.

“…”

“What?”

Allen sighed, “nightmare,” he said in resignation.

The Healer looked away, seemingly arriving at some kind of understanding. She didn’t make any attempt to ask further of Allen, so he took a deep breath and changed the subject. “So um, are the others awake yet?”

Amelia hummed and made her way over to the next door down from her own. “Yes, everybody’s been awake,” she said. She reached out and knocked on the door three times before looking back at Allen with a tint of guilt in her eyes. “You can talk to me… if you want,” she said hesitantly.

Allen flashed a grin, “Thanks, but your pretty face is all the therapy I need.”

Amelia rolled her eyes as the door opened and the three others streamed out.

“A’ight, let’s fucking go!” Camila shouted for no reason. Allen winced as the Berker threw her head back and took a gulp of some hard liquor.

Ty groaned, “Gear first, then you can fight some shit.”

“I’m just as eager to level up as you are, but there’s no need to yell,” Christopher said, nimbly wheeling himself through the threshold.

Allen chuckled to himself and turned towards the double doors at the near end of the hall. “Alright, to the workshop, Shoam will find us there, I’ll bet.” Then, with a knock of his ring, the doors opened.