At the next opening of the cell, everything happened in a fraction of a second.

The guard had barely managed to twist the key in the lock when Yota’s hand burst out of the shadows. The short blade severed the runes of the shackles with brutal precision. The witchcraft symbols flickered one last time, then died with a dull sound, like a breath cut short.

Power surged back into Yota like a wave of fire.

Before the guard could scream, a fist slammed into his chest. The air was ripped from his lungs, and his body collapsed lifelessly to the ground. Yota did not stop.

The second guard managed to raise his weapon—too late.

The third fell with his neck crushed.

The fourth was hurled into the wall like a boneless puppet.

The fifth tried to run, but the desert caught up with him; and Yota shattered his skull with a short, hysterical laugh.

“Faster than I expected,” he muttered.

From the chaos, Yota tore a blood-soaked key from one of the bodies and hurled it down the corridor.

“Stag!”

The key slid across the stone floor and stopped at Toru’s feet. His chains trembled as the lock snapped open. For the first time in six months, the shackles fell heavily to the ground.

He was free.

The power of the Stag God flooded into him like a deep breath after drowning. His wounds burned, his muscles trembled, but he remained standing.

Toru turned his gaze toward Yota.

“The desert prisoner,” he said. “The one who helped you. You promised.”

For a moment, Yota’s arrogant smile vanished. His eyes narrowed, irritated.

“No,” he said flatly.

He turned and opened the cell of the man who had given him the knife. The man managed to smile… for a second.

Yota’s fist pierced his chest with inhuman force. A dull sound. Shattering bones. A life extinguished.

“He’d only get in the way,” Yota muttered, pulling his bloodied hand back. “I won’t allow myself to fail here.”

Toru froze. The Stag God stirred violently within him—not with rage, but with disgust. In that moment, something was sealed inside his soul: Yota was not an ally. He was a walking catastrophe.

Then the corridor shook.

Heavy footsteps. Rhythmic. The confirmation of a sentence.

The air grew suddenly cold, and frost crept across the walls. From the frozen mist emerged the massive silhouette of Kreia. His eyes were as cold as polar ice, and in his right hand the Whip of the Polar Bear God slowly unfurled, alive, hissing.

“Enough,” he said calmly.

His voice was low, without anger. Only certainty.

“You’ve had your fun.”

The whip struck the stone, and the impact froze the floor in a wide radius. Toru felt the cold biting into his soles. Yota grinned broadly, full of arrogance and madness.

“Finally,” he said. “The king of dogs.”

The power of the desert rose around Yota, the air becoming dry and suffocating. Around Toru, invisible antlers rose from his spirit, and a dark-green energy began to pulse.

Two stolen deities.

One created monster.

And between them—Alcum.

The fight had begun.

Disgusted by Yota’s act, Toru began to doubt his intentions more and more. Something in the way Yota smiled before the battle, in the false security of his own strength, made Toru feel a clear rupture between them. There was no room for regret. When Yota charged toward Commander Kreia, Toru remained still, watching him coldly for a moment, then turned his back.

Yota attacked with his massive fists—the same weapons with which he had brought down the desert camel-god. His blows shattered the air, heavy and confident. But the polar god’s whip in Kreia’s hands hissed like a living beast. It was Yota’s nightmare. Each touch froze the blood in his veins, slowed his muscles, numbed his reflexes. The ice did not kill him immediately—it stole him, piece by piece.

“Is that all?” Kreia muttered, spinning the whip with cruel precision. “You kill one god and already believe yourself invincible?”

Yota spat blood and laughed, arrogant and foolish.

“I’ll crush you with my bare hands. Gods all fall the same.”

“No,” Kreia replied without emotion. “Some just take longer to die.”

The whip cracked again. Yota took a step back. Then another. The fight had barely begun, yet the ground was already slipping from beneath his feet.

Meanwhile, Toru carved his way through the guards with cold ease. Short, precise movements. A strike to the throat, a swift cut, and bodies fell before they could make a sound. There was no rage in him—only efficiency. He was heading for the exit. Escape was close.

Then it struck him.

A deep, cold shiver—not like the whip’s frost, but like an invisible hand clenched around his heart. Fear. Pure fear. Toru stopped abruptly. He stood before the cell no one spoke of. The one no one approached without feeling exactly this.

The chaos of battle continued behind him, but the sound that reached his ears came from within. A low, distorted voice, like an echo pulled from an abyss.

“Free me, child.”

Toru clenched his jaw.

“No,” he whispered, more to himself than anything else.

But the words did not stop there. They seeped in. They settled into his mind like an order his body recognized before reason. His feet moved on their own. Slowly. Heavily. Every step was a struggle.

He reached the cell door. Ancient seals, the runes trembling faintly, as if sensing his presence. Toru raised his hand, hesitated for a fraction of a second, then forced the entrance.

Metal screamed. The seals shattered in a wave of cold air.

From the darkness, something smiled.

The darkness inside was no ordinary shadow—it was dense, like an ancient substance clinging to the skin. Toru’s torchlight seemed to be swallowed, not reflected. From the corners came constant, subtle sounds: the scuttle of tiny legs, sharp chitters, the damp breathing of insects. Spiders moved lazily, masters of the place, their webs hanging heavy, yellowed by time like forgotten shrouds. Some were so old they seemed fossilized, stretched between cracked walls burdened with dead runes.

The air smelled of mold, rust, and something deeper—flesh that no longer fully belonged to life.

At the center of the cell sat the man.

He was not lying down, not bound in torturous positions. He sat still, like an abandoned statue. An old man, perhaps nearing eighty, slightly hunched, his thin hands resting on his knees. His skin was gray, stretched too tightly over bone, as if time itself had tried and failed to flay him. A deep scar carved across his face, cutting through the socket of a lifeless eye—an old, brutal wound that had never healed.

His chest rose and fell barely perceptibly. If you didn’t look closely, you’d swear he wasn’t breathing. He did not seem alive. He seemed preserved. Embodied oblivion.

Thick shackles bound his body, anchored to the floor and walls, covered in runes that pulsed faintly like diseased veins. Toru felt his hand move toward them on its own, though every fiber of his being screamed for him to stop.

The voice came from the darkness—low, rusted, but clear.

“What is your name, child?”

Toru flinched. He swallowed hard.

“Toru…” he said.

The old man slowly raised his head. His remaining living eye opened fully—unblinking, piercing, far too lucid for such a ruined body.

“I am Aarota,” he said. “The first prisoner ever brought to Alcum.”

A faint smile cracked his dry lips. It was not human.

Toru clenched his fists.

Without waiting any longer, his will crushed beneath an alien force, he began tearing the runes from the shackles.

Many years ago, no one would have imagined that the small island battered by wind and waves—upon which Alcum Prison was built—would ever fall under a god’s protection. Guardian gods were rare entities, bound to lands, seas, or ancient cities, and divine law was clear: they could not reincarnate in humans. Only in simple living matter or animals devoid of conscious will.

Alcum was never meant to have any of this.

The prison’s first two inmates were Aarota and Maroth. Master thieves, raised in streets and shadows, bound not by blood but by survival. They stole to live and lived to steal. Maroth was as skilled as Aarota, but more impulsive, warmer. Where Aarota calculated, Maroth laughed.

The treatment in Alcum was not meant for humans. Days turned into weeks of hunger, beatings, and humiliation. Maroth’s body broke first. They left him to die on the cold stone of the cell, under Aarota’s helpless gaze.

With his final breaths, Maroth whispered:

“I won’t leave you alone. Wherever you are… I will be too.”

Those words were not comfort. They were a vow.

After Maroth’s death, something changed. The cell grew restless. The air vibrated. Shadows moved without light. Maroth’s spirit had not departed. It wandered, bound by his promise, unable to detach from Aarota.

Then the island’s guardian deity—an ancient, formless, starving entity—found a way. Not a living body. Not an animal. A wandering soul. Maroth’s ghost became the perfect vessel.

Divine energy poured into him, twisting his essence. The ghost-god was born, and its desire was simple and absolute: the death of all prisoners in Alcum. Their fear would be its nourishment. Terror—its prayer.

Deep within that spectral form, two wills collided.

Kill them, whispered the god. They are the source of your suffering. They are food.

“No,” Maroth answered. “I promised.”

You are weak.

“No. I am his.”

I will tear your memories away.

“Then I will fight without them.”

It was a silent war, fought not with weapons but with meaning. And Maroth won. The promise was stronger than divine hunger. The god was not destroyed, but subdued. Its energy remained, but its will was broken.

Maroth no longer needed chains.

He kept his oath.

He chose a form that would bind him to Aarota forever: the ring. A small, seemingly mundane object that became one of the oldest forms of a guardian god. Aarota could hide it, make it invisible—just as he hid his altered eye, the eye of the phantom god of Alcum Prison.

Over time, unseen by all, Aarota fed. Not on blood, but on fear. The dread of prisoners. The terror of guards. Panic whispered in the dark. When the truth surfaced, it was already too late.

The ring had reached its third form.

Aarota had become nearly unstoppable. His body could turn phantom, intangible. Weapons passed through him without effect. Death no longer recognized him. Only disease and age could still claim him.

Then came the long-awaited revenge. With a swift movement, he killed the old prison commander responsible for Maroth’s death—but, surprisingly, he did not escape. He returned to his cell, where the strongest and most complex runes were applied to his shackles, and they left him to rot, waiting for time to do what they could not.

(It was the night he received the title — The Phantom Killer.)

And time had done it.

Until now.

Because the seals were breaking.

And Aarota’s story was never meant to end in silence.

Meanwhile, the fight between Yota and Commander Kreia reached its peak. Kreia held Yota by the throat, lifting him off the ground, preparing to deliver the final blow. But Aarota’s release struck like a shockwave—time itself seemed to freeze. Fear spread instantly, paralyzing everyone in the prison. The air vibrated, every heartbeat around them stalling in anticipation.

Aarota did not hesitate. With near-invisible speed, he lunged at Kreia, seized him, and dragged him into his old cell, locking him inside. The polar bear god’s whip shattered beneath a single press of Aarota’s foot, breaking with a dull crack like silent thunder.

Yota, too arrogant to understand fear, felt none. He believed himself invincible, master of the situation. He began accusing Toru of not helping him, threatening him with death, then tried to attack Aarota.

There was no chance.

Without even resisting, Toru surged forward in a single breath, swift as the wind. From his palm erupted the stag antler—his strange, almost living weapon.

And then—

Toru lunged at Yota, using the stag antler from his palm, manifesting the ring’s second stage.

A short, lightning-fast gesture. Devoid of emotion. No mercy. No hesitation. Only finality.

Yota fell, unable to comprehend what had happened, his blind stare frozen in shock—an instant that felt like an eternity.

“Trash…” Toru whispered, looking at him without remorse.

The body lay on the floor, its head severed, biting into the old, cold metal of the prison. The antler in Toru’s palm glowed faintly in the dim light, a reminder of the absolute power just unleashed.

Aarota moved through the prison like a self-aware shadow. Cell doors slammed shut one by one—without keys, without visible touch. Prisoners and guards alike were forced back into cages, some crying, some screaming, most paralyzed by fear so pure it numbed their minds. Alcum was no longer a prison. It had become a stomach.

Aarota stopped in the central corridor, and his voice spread like a cold echo, sinking into everyone’s bones.

“I will rule here. I will feed on your fear.”

Then he turned his gaze to the old cell, where Kreia lay thrown into darkness, trembling for the first time in his life.

“And you,” Aarota said calmly, staring into the void, “will receive exactly what you gave. But multiplied. Fear. Horror. Without end.”

No answer came from the cell. Only muffled sobbing.

Toru remained still, watching in silence. Something didn’t fit. He approached slowly.

“Why don’t you leave?” he asked. “You could walk away from this place. You’re free now.”

Aarota lowered his gaze to him. For a moment, the god’s mask cracked, and the old man beneath surfaced.

“I can’t leave,” he said quietly. “A ghost can exist only if it haunts a place. And this ghost… is not only mine.”

His hand drifted toward the ring, barely perceptible.

“My friend, Maroth, has wandered only here all these years. He is bound to this place. And to me. I cannot leave Alcum without condemning him to oblivion.”

He raised his gaze again, resolute.

“I will rule here for the time I have left.”

Toru watched in silence, as if awaiting a verdict. He knew his fate was being decided in that moment.

Aarota studied him, then sighed deeply, like a man weary of centuries.

“Run, my son. I see it in your cold eyes. Go. Take revenge on those who wronged you.”

It was no longer an order.

It was permission.

Toru did not answer. He turned and walked toward the exit. The gates of Alcum opened before him like tired jaws. As he stepped outside, the sea wind struck his face—free for the first time.

Behind him, the screams had already begun.

Desperate cries, broken pleas, prayers that reached nowhere. Under Aarota’s new reign, fear was no longer an accident.

It was law.

And Alcum no longer slept.