With the next steps confirmed, Raphael exhaled. The Hunting Ground’s presence in his system gave him an intuition he couldn’t quite articulate, that whatever a trial looked like for an ordinary person, it would likely look different for him.

He went back to the room and recalled the translucent parchment contract. He wrote his name in the last blank space.

The parchment caught a sourceless flame and burned. In the same instant his consciousness dropped, not a fall, more like sliding into sleep, and the room was gone.

---

Darkness, complete and total, with scattered points of light suspended inside it. Like stars against a night sky, each one isolated and quiet.

Alp’s Shadow had returned to his true form here, a horned shadow Demon, silhouette clear and angular. He turned slowly and looked at what the trial had assembled around him.

The Trial of Fear worked with what it found: those points of light were fear itself, each one a different source, the density reflecting how much of it was present, the size reflecting how intense.

He looked. And looked again. And frowned.

The stars were sparse. Approximately equal in size to each other. And the largest among them, the brightest, the most prominent, was barely the size of a fingertip.

He’d run this trial before, many times, with many different people.

Everyone had at least one or two stars large as a sun, that was the category reserved for the things a person feared most deeply.

The loss of someone beloved. Bankruptcy. Death. Everyone had at least one.

There were none here.

A sky full of modest stars, none of them dominant, none of them elevated above the rest.

Which meant even death registered as an ordinary fear for this person. Not suppressed, simply weighed the same as everything else.

Abnormal. Vanishingly rare. The fact that this person had died once and returned was perhaps the only explanation that made sense.

This was a problem. The stronger the peak fear, the greater the leverage Alp held in the contract, the more dominant his position, the more unfavorable the terms locked in for the other side. Here the leverage was nearly flat.

He’d be working without that advantage.

The mechanics of every trial were the same regardless of type. Battle, fear, anything else, the structure was a challenge match.

The Demon’s level determined the number of rounds. The challenger’s category set the rules of the field.

Raphael was defending. In a fear trial, if the Demon broke through the defender’s psychological defenses, the consequence ranged from losing the contract’s favorable terms to losing control entirely.

But if the defense held through all rounds, the Demon fell into absolute disadvantage in the contract structure.

Alp was Lv4. Four rounds.

If he couldn’t land a meaningful psychological blow in four attempts, the contract’s terms would lock against him.

He surveyed the available stars, found nothing obviously workable, selected one more or less at random, and projected himself into it.

The star descended, dropping through the dark toward the ocean of Raphael’s consciousness, and became a dream. 𝚏𝗿𝗲𝐞𝚠𝕖𝐛𝗻𝗼𝐯𝕖𝚕.𝚌𝗼𝗺

---

A gym. Late light coming through the windows.

Raphael, younger, broad-shouldered, at the end of what had clearly been a serious training session, wiped sweat from his forehead, looked at himself in the full-length mirror, and nodded once with something that was plainly satisfaction.

Every line of the body visible. Not an ounce wasted.

Then Alp’s Shadow arrived, slipping into the scene as shadow, settling into the space behind perception.

The mirror changed.

Raphael blinked. The gym was gone.

A rented room, curtains drawn against daylight, the smell of mold sitting in layers over the smell of unwashed fabric and stale food. The bed was a heap of clothing and sheets without distinction.

The desk held half-eaten snacks that had attracted insects. Empty bags in the corner. Cans with things growing in them, white filaments, dense and thick.

He dragged himself upright. His body felt like it was made of something heavier than flesh.

He came to the mirror.

The face looking back had three days of patchy growth and several layers of chin and a surface that suggested water had been theoretical for some time.

He looked down. There was no seeing his feet. The stomach that obscured them shifted slightly as he breathed, the motion of something that had been accumulating for years.

Standing still required effort. Standing still produced sweat.

"Was the other thing a dream?"

A voice that wasn’t quite a voice, a presence in the back of the mind:

*Yes. Always was. You remember, don’t you? The high-sugar diet. The workouts you always planned to start tomorrow. The two minutes of walking that counts as exercise for the day.*

A flicker in his eyes, testing the source of it, determining whether it was his own depth or something inserted.

Alp’s low voice continued.

This is the real version. Doesn’t it feel familiar? The heavy limbs. The tiredness that’s already there when you wake up.

Wouldn’t it be easier to lie down? Just lie down and pick up the phone and eat something and let it continue until one day it doesn’t, and that’s that.

A pause.

Keep going. Rest. The exercise is exhausting, isn’t it? The diet is too hard, isn’t it? You’re hungry, aren’t you?

It doesn’t matter anyway. No one is watching. No one cares what you look like.

Raphael looked at his hands. Swollen, thick, the texture of something that had been submerged for a long time.

He’d processed corpses in this condition before. The word for it was specific.

Giant View

A word used to describe a corpse, yet at this moment, when used to describe a living person, seemed meaningless.

His whole body was swollen, no different from those corpses whose internal bacteria were multiplying wildly and causing them to swell up. Black spots were visible everywhere, and he had no vitality at all, looking lifeless.

He tried to move, and felt an unbearable heaviness in his knees. His large belly, big enough to hold a backpack, swayed back and forth, and his seriously off-center center of gravity caused him to stumble.

His airway was like a ventilation duct blocked by silt, making it difficult for air to enter and exit. No matter how he breathed, he could not achieve the comfortable state of a normal person and always felt like he was lacking oxygen.

His body was screaming with exhaustion; his limbs wanted him to lie down, his brain was clamoring for sugar, his stomach was rumbling with pain, bringing an unbearable feeling of hunger, but his heart kept pounding as if it were not getting enough blood.

Raphael is now in a state of near paralysis.

Alp waited. The trial’s logic was simple: let the weight of the body make standing unbearable, let the exhaustion make lying down irresistible, let the phone and the food and the comfortable surrender do the rest.

But Raphael thought about it for a short moment, picked up a bottle of water from the nightstand, and pushed the door open.

"No. If that was a dream, then it was what I want to become. Not this. I’m young. There’s still time to change anything. I won’t accept staying like this, I won’t let the difficulty of it and the tiredness of it become reasons to stop."

He ran.

The knees ached. The stomach lurched with every stride. The sweat came down like it had somewhere to be. His whole body filed complaints at volume.

He didn’t stop. He ran toward whatever edge the nightmare had, drank when he was thirsty, ignored the food that the trial materialized at the roadside to tempt him, and pushed toward an end that offered no visible reward.

One step. Ten. A hundred. The belly receded as he watched it. His stride grew steadier not less certain as the distance accumulated.

"One failure doesn’t end it. Ten don’t end it. A thousand don’t end it. As long as I’m willing to change, I haven’t reached my ending."

Maybe he ran for a day, maybe a week, maybe a month, maybe a year. Time is meaningless in dreams; his desire to start and his perseverance in running are the immediate rewards in dreams.

The more he ran, the lighter he felt, shedding his excess weight, faster and faster, until...

The last of the weight burned away. He was light again. He sprinted for the edge and broke through it, falling back into the deeper dark of his own consciousness.

---

Alp’s Shadow was ejected.

He felt the punishment for a failed round move through his spirit, not pleasant, and gathered himself, breathing hard in the way that incorporeal things sometimes did anyway.

A nightmare about physical deterioration and he simply ran through it.

He hadn’t expected that. The scenario had seemed a reliable choice for most people. It had accomplished nothing here.

"Too niche. That particular fear doesn’t have enough surface area. I need something with more leverage."

He moved immediately to the next point of light.

And stopped.

In this one, there was a woman.

She wore a nun’s traveling cloak over a dark combat uniform, and her hair was silver in a way that wasn’t common.

Her eyes were the color of green glass, clear, still, the kind of eyes that looked like they were holding something back.