The air grew colder as Kai and Venri moved toward the corrupted valley. Each step closer to the newborn Spire of Sin made the world feel... wrong. The sky above had darkened—not with clouds, but with a strange stillness, as if time itself hesitated.
The black spire loomed in the distance, pulsing like a beating heart. Around it, reality warped. Stones floated. Trees twisted into grotesque shapes. The dungeon hadn't just emerged—it had replaced everything nearby, rewriting the land in its image.
Venri drew her weapon, hands trembling. "This isn't like any dungeon I've seen. This is something else."
Kai stared ahead, his Sentinel glyphs glowing faintly under his skin. The Wyrm-Sigil on his chest was hotter than before—tense. Uneasy. Inside him, the new echo-dragon shifted, restless.
"Let's finish this before the corruption spreads," he muttered.
They stepped into the dungeon's threshold, and the world snapped. Sound twisted. Color inverted. The ground cracked beneath them, revealing pulsating veins of dark emotion.
Despair. Rage. Betrayal.
Screams echoed across the distorted halls—some human, others monstrous. Wraith-like figures moved through the mist. Each wore remnants of armor or robes, their cosmic stones glowing a sickly purple, their eyes empty.
"These are fallen users," Venri whispered. "They were devoured by their emotions."
Suddenly, something stirred behind the fog.
A colossus stepped forward—ten feet tall, formed from shattered cosmic armor and bound by chains of shadow. Its chest bore not one, but three corrupted cosmic stones, each glowing with a different color: crimson, violet, and pitch-black. A helm of bone covered its face, and from its back stretched wings made of stitched darkness.
Kai's breath caught. "That's no ordinary corrupted."
"No…" Venri said, her voice nearly a whisper. "It's a Warden. A dungeon guardian born from fused emotions and stones."
The Warden roared—an echoing, thunderous sound that shook the walls. The dungeon itself reacted, pulsing in rhythm. Then, the Warden charged.
Kai met it head-on. Flames erupted from his hands—one burning gold, the other cold blue—but the Warden's wings deflected them with a scream of broken energy. Venri launched crystalline spikes that shattered against its armor.
They were being overwhelmed.
Kai gritted his teeth and reached deeper into the Wyrm-Sigil. The echo-dragon answered, rising from the depths of his soul. With a surge of resonance, Kai unleashed a sonic pulse—a vibration keyed to sorrow.
The Warden staggered.
"Now!" Kai yelled.
Venri threw a spear of light into its cracked chest. The Warden shrieked—one of the corrupted stones splintered—but the creature didn't fall.
Instead, it spoke.
Not in words.
In thought.
"You are too late. The Spires have begun to awaken. The First has already fed."
Kai froze. "The First…?"
Suddenly, the dungeon shuddered.
A deep growl echoed from beneath them—no, from everywhere. The air thickened. The shadows stretched. Venri looked around wildly. "What's happening?!"
The Warden laughed—a hollow, broken sound—as its body began to dissolve into black ash. But the laughter remained. So did its voice.
"The Eater was only the beginning. The next will not whisper. It will scream."
The ground cracked open beneath Kai's feet. A spiral of runes blazed outward, and a second black spire erupted in the distance, far across the horizon.
But it wasn't alone.
Five more lights blinked to life—red, green, white, blue, gold—each tainted, each pulsing with the rhythm of a cosmic stone pushed beyond its breaking point.
Kai's eyes widened.
"They're not just spreading…"
Venri turned to him, her face pale.
"…they're calling to each other."
Then came the final blow: a voice in Kai's mind—not from the dungeon, not from the Warden, but from something far deeper.
"Come, child of flame. Let us see if your dragons can roar louder than our grief."
The dungeon collapsed inward—dragging Kai and Venri with it.