Bayu's body lay still, his breath shallow, but his eyes were open. Hollow. Dead.
The darkness of the room pressed in on him, suffocating, but it wasn't just the room. It was the corruption. The disease that had spread through his veins like a poison. A curse. He could feel it crawling beneath his skin, writhing, burning him from the inside out. The same thing that had taken Kael.
His hands, once steady, now trembled, fingers twitching with the lingering agony of the transformation. His body, a battlefield of his own, fought to remain human while the monster clawed to take over. He had failed. His mind was still his, but the creature—it—was winning.
He didn't know when the change had begun. He didn't know when he had lost control. But in the end, he had become everything he had once feared.
Bayu's last thought was of the city that had once been his home. Velmira the city of peace.
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Velmira had once stood as a beacon of light, a shining city where the people believed their walls would protect them from the dangers of the world. But what they did not know was that the greatest threat wasn't the monsters beyond their gates—it was the darkness within.
No one had seen it coming. No one had understood how it had begun. It was a sickness that crept slowly, invisibly, through the city. A corruption of the mind and soul. And as it spread, it poisoned not just the bodies of its people but their hearts as well. The walls could not protect them from what was inside.
The monster within Velmira was not a beast, nor a creature that could be slain. It was something deeper, more insidious. A force of nature, an ancient curse buried beneath the city's foundation. Perhaps it had always been there, waiting for the right moment to awaken. Or perhaps it had come from the very city itself, born of secrets long kept hidden by those in power.
By the time the people began to notice, it was already too late. The first signs were small—whispers in the dark, strange behavior, fear in the streets. Then the disappearances began, people lost to something no one could explain. But the city's leaders dismissed it. They insisted it was just paranoia, just the stress of the times.
But Bayu had known. He had felt the change in the air, in the people, in the streets. Something was wrong. He had seen his friends change, had watched them succumb to the monster they couldn't even name. The fear they'd tried to ignore had come to life.
And when Velmira fell, it didn't fall to the monsters outside the walls—it fell to something far worse. The corruption, the curse, the darkness that had been feeding on the city's very soul.
By the time Bayu had realized it was no longer just a city, it was a trap, it was too late. He fought to escape, to understand what was happening to Kael, to himself. But the walls had come crashing down, and there was no way out.
Velmira had been destroyed by the unknown. The very thing that had destroyed it was the thing that had taken him, that had claimed Kael and turned him into a monster.
And in its ashes, the seeds of Bayu's corruption had been sown.