The inside of the gate struck like a hammer to the chest—heat, dryness, and disorientation all at once. Three sensations immediately overwhelmed me: Sand, Sun, and Salt.

Every breath scraped against the back of my throat. Every step sucked the strength from my legs. The air wasn't just hot—it was thirsty, like it stole moisture and willpower in equal measure. The sun above was merciless, glaring down like a watchful god with no compassion for flesh or thought.

The entire realm seemed designed to devour me. My stamina. My clarity. My purpose.

Even the rare breeze, when it came, offered no relief. Instead, it brought more grit—sand and salt flaying across my face, sticking to sweat and stinging like small cuts. It was like the world was trying to sand me down to nothing.

"Okay," I muttered, squinting into the shimmering horizon. "This was… not what I expected."

And then, realization hit like a slap.

Who are you talking to, Alexander?

Just me.

Shut up, I told myself. Focus.

I summoned Lunarias into my left hand, the weapon's familiar weight and shape offering something close to comfort. Even in this heat, the quasi-ethereal bow shimmered faintly, as though it resisted the very concept of decay. My fingers moved without thinking, already nocking a quasi-arrow into the string.

This was no simple scouting trip. No random skirmish in the woods. This was an Otherrealm.

My first one.

The thought rooted itself, solid and heavy.

My first official Otherrealm expedition. The first since becoming a Walker. After all the training. All the battles inside Danatallion's Halls. All the pain. The blood. The books.

This is it.

And for a brief, shining second, I felt proud.

Not just anxious. Not terrified. Not furious.

Proud.

I was no longer a Walker in name alone. I was one in practice. In purpose. In presence.

So I began to Walk.

Each step into the dunes was heavier than the last. There was no shade here, no mercy in the topography. The landscape was monotonous—endless waves of bone-pale sand, peppered with strange glitters that I realized were not mineral shards, but crystals of salt. Cracked, jagged, and bleeding with ancient minerals. It felt like even the ground beneath me had once been alive, and had since been preserved in the world's hunger.

The wind carried with it the scent of ash and dry decay, so faint it felt more like memory than smell. Every so often, the dunes would shift, subtly rearranged by currents of air that didn't obey the usual patterns. Wind here didn't just blow—it circled, judged, pulled.

Like time itself was unraveling in loops.

Sand. Salt. Sun.

Time. Hunger. Heat.

I didn't know how long I walked—minutes, hours? It blurred. The realm didn't care about Demeterra's definitions. This was its own world. With its own rules. Its own cruelty.

Still, I pushed forward. The fabric of my clothes itched against my skin, already soaked and stiff with salt. My boots left prints that disappeared as soon as they formed, swallowed by wind or by something else.

I scanned constantly, drawing on my Arte and training, searching for leyline fractures or signs of miasma surges. Every inch forward demanded vigilance. At any moment, something could rise from the dunes—an Other, a construct, a remnant, a trap left behind by whatever power shaped this place.

But I also listened to something deeper.

The quiet.

And beneath it, the thrum.

There was magic here. Old, sun-warped, buried deep—but it was there. Pinned beneath salt. Ground into the dunes. Humming along the edge of consciousness, like a name just out of reach.

I reached a higher dune, cresting it slowly, and looked out.

Nothing.

Just more horizon. More jagged salt flats, crumbling statues half-swallowed by time, and distant structures that might have been ruins—or mirages. It was hard to tell in this heat.

Then I heard it.

A scream.

High. Wet. Piercing.

Then another.

And another.

They came not from the sky or behind me, but from beneath—rising from the dunes like pus from a wound. A horde of goblins, their bodies barely holding together, clawed their way out from the salt-stained sand. Skin sloughing off. Eyes rotted. Their movements spasmodic, uncoordinated—yet they moved with hunger. Purpose.

They were afflicted. That much was clear. Each one bore the unmistakable signs of the Flayed—the blight that stripped away humanity, sanity, and even death itself. These weren't just undead. They were plagued.

"Damn it."

My fingers moved before the curse left my lips. One arrow loosed—pure instinct. It sailed through the salt-heavy air, striking the nearest goblin in the skull with a wet crack. It didn't stop there. The force carried the arrow clean through, driving into the chest of another behind it. One shot, two corpses.

But they weren't slowing down.

No time to think.

No time to breathe.

I let my sigil flare—Barbra's mark, blooming against my skin like frostbite made visible. Its magic hummed through me, syncing me to my next choice:

Laplace Function.

The world bent.

Colors fractured. Sound twisted. Time splintered.

The pain was immediate. My right eye burst a vessel. My nose started bleeding. My vision began to swim. The sheer information Laplace fed into my aura—it was overwhelming. Every goblin. Every step. Every motion. Every possible motion. All calculated. All anticipated.

But pain was the Price. And I was willing to pay.

My arm moved like clockwork—four, then three, arrows loosed in quick succession. Each one surged with Moonlight and Starfire. Each one struck true, digging into the collapsing, decaying flesh of more Flayed goblins.

Still… more came.

I grimaced.

"Lumivis. Serrate."

The words weren't a plea. They were an anchor. A declaration.

And my Machina answered.

Light surged beside me. Cards swirled—pages of spell and story coalescing into form. The Chancellor emerged in full. No words spoken—just immediate motion. Final Manuscript unsheathed.

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

Then… carnage.

Lumivis danced through them like a blade through water. Butchers were more graceful than what he became. Flesh, bone, salt, sand—all torn asunder and whipped into a blizzard of red and white. It wasn't a battle. It was a massacre. A corrective edit to a page that had rotted long ago.

I didn't stand idle.

With a flick of my hand, pages erupted from my sleeves—sharp, deliberate, beautiful. Confetti of war. They folded in the air, twitching, twisting, and reshaping into thousands of tiny paper wasps. Each buzzing with lexicon energy, each etched with commands written in moonlight ink.

They scattered.

They stabbed.

They pierced.

Goblin after goblin fell beneath my swarm.

And yet…

More.

For every one I dropped, five more clawed their way out of the sand. Unending. The dunes churned with writhing bodies, groaning throats, and those damned screams—screams that sounded like they came from someone who still remembered they used to be human.

The desert wasn't just cursed.

It was infested.

I could win every moment, every engagement—but this? This wasn't a fight for victory.

I kept firing.

Kept calculating.

Laplace fed me vectors and angles, speeds and stutters in their gait. I read every twitch of a muscle before it spasmed, every tilt of a decaying head before it screamed.

I was the battlefield.

But that didn't mean I could keep up with it forever.

The migraine finally screamed louder than the goblins.

My knees buckled.

My bow hand trembled.

A single moment—one breath too long—

—and Laplace broke.

A flicker. A static in the flow of causality.

I missed a shot.

I missed two.

Then a goblin's chipped axe grazed my shoulder. It didn't cut deep—but it cut, and more importantly—it broke my rhythm.

My focus snapped like a bowstring under strain.

"SHIT!"

I backpedaled, hard, reaching to my hip and yanking free the Odachi Temptation had returned to me. Its weight was familiar—but its length was built for mounted combat, not the tight, swarming mess I was now surrounded by.

No time to complain.

I pivoted, dragging the blade into a wide, sweeping arc. Its edge carved through two goblins in a single breath—but it bit into bone, into resistance. It didn't slice like paper. It didn't dance like my arrows. It was work.

I growled—low, primal—pulling the blade free with a sharp twist of my hips. Blood—thick and dark—splattered against the salt.

Another came.

Too fast.

Too close.

I let go of the sword with one hand and flung it open—a ripple of parchment burst from my sleeve. Origami insects, dormant until now, unfurled midair like petals blooming under pressure.

I didn't form wasps this time.

Mantises.

Long legs. Serrated claws. Wide, predatory eyes—folded from prayer pages and war songs.

They dropped on the goblins like wolves from above. Tearing. Gripping. Holding them in place long enough for my sword to catch up with their broken bodies.

One goblin lunged. I ducked low. Came up under its guard. My Odachi rose in a brutal vertical slash, parting it from groin to clavicle. A messy, burning cut. My arms screamed from the weight of it.

I couldn't stop.

I wouldn't.

The mantises multiplied—each slice I made, each drop of blood spilled fed the parchment. They swarmed around me, keeping the goblins at bay, giving me just enough space to keep swinging.

This was what I had been trained for.

Not precision.

Not perfection.

But survival.

Desperate. Dirty. Drenched in salt and blood and spite.

I turned. Slashed again. The odachi bit deep into another torso. I followed through with a knee to its skull. Another goblin tried to grab my blade mid-swing—only to have its arms ripped off by paper hawks I summoned with a thought.

More were coming.

I could see it in the dunes.

The land itself was beginning to rise.

But the blood on my sash, the heat in my breath, the tremble in my wrist—I could feel something else too.

I wasn't losing.

I was adapting.

The sand went still.

The wind—quiet.

The battlefield, now littered with twitching corpses and shredded parchment, exhaled a sickly breath as the final goblin collapsed at my feet. My odachi's edge gleamed, slick with dark, syrupy blood. The origami mantises fell still. Some crumpled into dust, others fluttered back to the folds of my sash, their paper limbs twitching like dying insects.

I dared to breathe.

Then the silence…twisted.

The ground beneath me pulsed.

Not like an earthquake.

Like a heartbeat.

I turned—ready to face another wave—but the corpses weren't moving in that way. They weren't rising.

They were melting.

Skin sloughed from bone.

Bone liquefied into paste.

Tattered muscles wriggled like worms and began crawling toward a single point in the center of the battlefield, drawn as if by a magnet. Blood soaked the sand and refused to disappear—pooling upward, defying gravity, as it followed the others.

"No…"

It was coalescing. Gathering.

The mangled limbs, the shredded flesh, the countless shards of decay—all of it rising into a form. Not large. Not monstrous in the traditional sense.

No.

Human-sized.

Sickly thin. Almost elegant in shape.

Like a duelist.

A black-red skeleton of tangled meat and twisted goblin sinew stood tall—its spine bent, its ribs exposed like a cage of jagged knives. One arm held a twisted length of bone like a rapier. The other was malformed, ending in a claw with too many joints.

Its face…was a skull stitched from dozens of smaller faces. And its eyes—two burning yellow coals, like stars screaming in hunger.

The thing bowed.

Mocking.

And then—it lunged.

I blocked.

Barely.

Its blade—no, its bone-sword—scraped against my odachi in a high arc, sparking where bone met steel. Its style was wrong. Wild. But it mimicked fencing form—moves it should not have known. Footwork that echoed Vanitas.

It danced around me, slashing, stabbing, pressing the assault with unnatural precision. My instincts screamed at me to back off, to create distance, to fire arrows again—but I knew I wouldn't get the space.

This wasn't a swarm.

This was a duel.

I parried. Deflected. Twisted my hips and caught the follow-up slash with the flat of my blade. Sweat poured down my brow, the salt stinging my eyes. I stepped back to reset—

—but it advanced with me. Never giving an inch.

It laughed. A wet, guttural gurgle. Not from its mouth, but from its chest—like blood boiling in a cauldron.

It spun.

I didn't see the feint until too late.

Pain.

A deep, clean slice across my right thigh. My leg buckled slightly, and I had to jam my sword into the ground to keep from falling.

I snarled. Forced mana into the limb, sealing it with a layer of aura and focus, but the Flayed fencer didn't stop.

Another lunge.

I blocked—too slowly.

It slashed across my shoulder. My blood joined the gore-stained sand, sizzling as it mixed with the salt.

It was laughing again. Mocking my technique.

Mimicking Vanitas was one thing—but it was like this thing had watched me. Studied me. It knew my tempo.

Fine.

Then I'd break tempo.

I kicked sand at its face and lunged, pivoting around with a sweeping arc that forced it to backflip away—yes, backflip—like a mantis twisting in midair. When it landed, I was already summoning paper.

I whispered a command.

"Inkleech. Fly."

The paper insects that emerged this time were smaller—flat, and almost invisible against the heat shimmer of the air. They latched onto the fencer's arms, sapping kinetic force with every movement. With every slash it tried to make, the inkleeches bloated—then burst—leaving trails of sticky script along its limbs.

It stumbled.

I advanced.

Steel met bone again, sparks flying, but now I had the edge. My sash rippled around my waist—I unleashed a burst of tiny stingers mid-swing, forcing the fencer to guard as I pressed forward.

I cut once—deep into its flank.

It shrieked. Not in pain. In excitement.

It lashed out.

Its claw-hand snapped forward and caught my wrist—twisting with inhuman strength.

Then—

It bit me.

Its head shot forward like a snake, its mismatched jaw clamping down on my shoulder. I screamed. Not from pain—though there was plenty of that—but from revulsion.

Its teeth were dozens of smaller teeth. From the goblins it had consumed. They moved, grinding, trying to chew through my flesh.

"No—NO—"

I slammed my forehead into its skull once—twice—three times, until I heard the crack of splintering bone. Blood poured down my face—but it let go.

That was enough.

I dropped the odachi.

My hands ignited with folded parchment—burning, jagged pages that took the shape of a butterfly, then morphed into a dagger.

Not for throwing.

For feeding.

I shoved it into the fencer's gut.

It gasped—a sick mimicry of breath—as the blade unfolded inside it like a blooming flower. Its torso tore open, and hundreds of paper locusts poured out, devouring it from the inside. Eating the goblin-flesh. Unwriting its stolen body.

It screamed.

Then it collapsed.

Not in pieces.

But as a singular, hollow form.

Like a paper doll that had its strings cut.

I stumbled back. Breathless. My body shook with blood loss and fury. My shoulder burned. My leg ached. My ribs throbbed from the clash.

But I was still standing.

Still breathing.

The fencer was not.

I retrieved my odachi, gripping it with a trembling hand. For a moment, I considered sheathing it—but no. Not here. Not yet. This was a cursed realm. Letting your guard down was an invitation to die.

I looked at the fallen creature, and whispered through blood-crusted lips:

"You learned how I fight…"

I turned away, eyes scanning the dunes.

"…but I learn faster."

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