The Acidic Collar
The cold, metallic stench of rusted iron and brackish river water hung heavy over the dark expanse of the abandoned shipyard. On the concrete slipway, the mocking, multi-layered laughter of the Sovereign of the Abyss lingered like a foul poison in the night air, vibrating the very marrow of Mary’s bones long after the phantom entity had dissolved back into the dark. Then, the physical world went dead silent. No wind rattled the corrugated steel panels of the surrounding warehouses. No distant city hum broke through the static.
A sudden, blinding spike of heat erupted around Mary’s neck. The crimson collar—the heavy, unholy brand she had accepted in her moment of desperate ruthlessness—pulsed violently against her throat. It didn’t just burn; it sizzled, eating into her flesh like a band of white-hot iron dipped in raw, concentrated acid. She gasped, expecting the natural impulse of her arms to fly upward to rip the agonizing band away.
Her body completely ignored her.
Instead, Mary watched in detached, frozen horror as her own hands moved with a terrifying, fluid precision that did not belong to her. Her fingers wrapped around the ornate hilt of theAethelgard, lifting the dark-steel blade without a single tremor. With a slow, rhythmically perfect motion, her arms brought the weapon down, sliding it back into its scabbard until the crossguard clicked home against the leather. The movement was flawless, graceful, and entirely automated.
A suffocating realization pressed down on her chest, heavy as a collapsing mountain, driving the oxygen straight out of her lungs: everything was ruined. She had optimized her strength to the absolute limit. She had spent sleepless weeks grinding through hidden realms, training her muscles until they reacted at supersonic speeds, and harvesting every scrap of soul energy she could rip from the monsters of the void. She had done all of it to become strong enough to hunt down Victor Kane. But in her single-minded obsession for power, she had merely turned herself into the ultimate, flawless puppet.
Every upgrade she had unlocked in the interface, every point of agility she had painstakingly ground out in the dark, had not freed her. It had merely made her a more responsive, high-performance tool for the higher powers to command. Her body was no longer an extension of her soul; it was hardware running a foreign operating system.
Now, she was a thrall. Her physical shell belonged to the hunger of the Abyss, her daily calendar was owned by the cold celestial entities ruling the high spires of the Sanctuary of the Primeval, and she was trapped perfectly between two cosmic jaws, waiting to be crushed. As she stood motionless on the damp concrete, she could feel the faint, silver-and-crimson tethering strings of divine code woven directly into her central nervous system. They throbbed in tandem with her heartbeat, a network of parasitic roots wrapping around her spine.
Out of pure, unadulterated spite, Mary tried to ball her right hand into a fist. She poured every ounce of her mental energy into her knuckles, demanding they close. Nothing happened. The fingers remained perfectly straight, relaxed, and loose at her side. Her brain sent the electrical signal, but the divine code intercepted it, holding the command in queue until the system cleared the action. She was a passenger in her own skin, an engineered weapon with a mind of its own but absolutely no control over the trigger.
