Death was not unfamiliar to the wastelands surrounding the city of Elysium.

But the death that occurred here, in this forgotten patch, carried a different taste; a taste like burnt copper and festering flesh.

The battle had just ended.

A crushing, savage, and epic battle by every measure. An alliance of three elite guilds—one hundred of the finest A- and B-rank hunters—stood as an impenetrable human wall to repel a massive horde of Ruin Abominations that had nearly breached the city’s outer walls.

The battlefield was no longer natural terrain.

It had transformed into an abstract painting of hell.

The ground had been pulverized until it turned into sticky black mud, riddled with deep craters filled with a viscous mixture of the monsters’ acidic green blood and the pure crimson blood of humans.

Bodies—human and abominable—were piled like hills, shattered luxurious armor tangled with torn limbs and spilled entrails writhing with earthworms.

The air was suffocating, heavy with the smell of ozone, burnt metal, and methane gas.

Because of the high etherial density of the blood spilling from one hundred elite hunters, that blood began to slowly evaporate, forming a thin red mist that covered the massacre site like a curtain of liquid agate, giving the place a faint nightmarish illumination beneath a clouded, starless sky.

Amid this silent devastation, there were around one hundred survivors.

Their bodies were shattered. Some had lost limbs, others had crushed ribs, but they were breathing.

They lay across the wreckage of the battle, or leaned against the corpses of their comrades, panting heavily, blood covering their faces.

Despite the pain tearing through their cells, faint, exhausted, yet proud smiles formed on their broken lips.

They had won. They had slaughtered the nightmare and lived to see another dawn.

They were only waiting for the sound of evacuation helicopters to return them to the warmth of hospitals and medals of glory.

One veteran hunter, a man named "Barn," had lost his left arm up to the shoulder, yet he laughed hoarsely, spitting blood as he blew the smoke of his final cigarette into the red mist.

"We crushed them... guys... we crushed them..."

Barn whispered, his laughter echoing between the groans of the wounded.

But... in the world of Elysium, laughter after battle was rarely an ending; it was often the deceptive calm that preceded the flood of the abyss.

Suddenly... without any physical change in the weather, and without any movement of wind... the temperature dropped to absolute zero.

It was not cold that touched the skin, but "etherial ice" that pierced the chest and froze the heartbeat directly.

Barn stopped laughing.

The cigarette slipped from between his trembling lips, but it did not fall to the ground... it remained suspended in the air.

The air itself became heavy in a way that shattered the mind.

It was no longer a gas that could be breathed, but turned into a viscous liquid, then into an invisible solid pressing on lungs and skulls.

Drops of blood that had been falling from Barn’s severed arm... stopped mid-air.

The crimson droplets remained suspended like necklaces of frozen rubies.

The red mist that had covered the area stopped rippling, solidifying completely like a glass panel stained with blood.

Then... the "violation" began.

The hundred hunters saw no one.

They did not know who was coming.

But their minds... minds forged in hundreds of battles against the most horrific monsters... began to be penetrated.

It was not a normal magical intrusion or mind reading; it was pure "psychological violation," caused merely by the approach of that dark aura.

An inaudible frequency began scratching the inner walls of their skulls.

As if millions of black insects with rusted claws crawled inside their brains, devouring their memories and secreting in their place a pumpkin of raw, primal terror.

"W-what... is this... my head... my head is exploding!" one hunter screamed, clutching his skull as his eyes rolled back.

They began hearing voices. Not the enemy’s voices, but the voices of their dearest loved ones screaming in an eternal hell.

They saw their mothers being skinned alive at the corners of their vision. They saw their children burning.

The aura preceding the arrival did not herald death; it heralded something worse than death:

"Stripping a human of his humanity and sanity."

They all realized, with the instinct of an animal cornered, that something was coming to devour not their bodies... but their souls, to immortalize them in endless torment.

They did not know who it was, but absolute certainty seized them that they must not look at his face.

Madness began devouring the battlefield.

The hunters, who seconds ago had been brave heroes ready to sacrifice themselves for humanity... turned into trembling masses of weeping flesh searching for salvation in the mouth of death.

An A-rank hunter, a man nicknamed "The Destroyer," who was crawling on his stomach after losing his lower half, began screaming hysterically as tears of blood streamed from his eyes.

"Don’t let him look at me! Don’t let him enter my mind! The worms... the worms are eating my thoughts!"

With his only remaining hand, he searched through the black sludge and found a broken dagger, its serrated blade covered in abomination pus.

He did not hesitate.

He did not think of the physical pain, insignificant compared to the torment of his mind being ground apart.

He raised the dagger, and with savage force born of pure terror, drove the wide, rusted blade directly into his right eye!

Squeeelsh!

The sound of the eyeball bursting was disgusting.

He did not stop. He pushed the dagger’s handle with the full weight of his arm, piercing the optic nerve and plunging deep upward toward the frontal lobe of his brain, shattering his skull from the inside.

He died instantly, blood and pus leaking from his hollow eye socket, but on his dead lips... a deep smile of relief formed, because he had escaped, he had fled into the comforting void.

But the suicidal massacre was only just beginning.