The descent into the northern catacombs was not a gradual fading of light and sound; it was an abrupt, violent execution of the senses.
Three steps past the ancient stone archway, the ambient noise of the outside world—the nervous rustling of the assistant's clipboard, the distant morning wind of Oakhaven—was instantly severed. It felt as though a heavy, invisible velvet blanket had been aggressively slammed over Shin'ya's head, sealing him away in a vacuum.
Shin'ya stopped walking, his boots resting on the damp, cold stone steps. He raised his left hand and aggressively snapped his fingers right next to his ear.
Nothing.
He didn't even feel the vibration of the sound wave. He opened his mouth, drawing in a sharp breath of the cold, metallic air, and tried to let out a small hum. His throat vibrated, his vocal cords stretched, but the air leaving his lips was entirely dead. The thick, swirling black fog of the Sound-Eater Miasma literally consumed the kinetic energy of sound before it could travel a millimeter.
This is psychological warfare Shin'ya thought, his eyes widening slightly as a cold sweat began to form on the back of his neck.
In the modern world, true silence didn't exist. There was always a hum of electricity, the wind, or the distant thrum of life. But here, the silence was a physical weight. It made his inner ears throb and ring, a maddening phantom buzzing born from his brain desperately begging for auditory input. If a normal person spent an hour down here, they would likely claw their own eyes out from the sheer isolation.
Calm down, he scolded himself, pulling his gray hood lower. You didn't survive Yuki's hellish survival training just to get freaked out by a quiet room. Trust the grind.
Closing his eyes for a brief second, Shin'ya shifted his focus away from his useless ears. He extended his Ketsugai outward, letting his Shadow Affinity bleed into the ambient darkness. The shadows on the floorboards and walls became his auxiliary nerve endings, mapping out the architecture of the ancient, ruined corridor ahead.
He moved forward like a ghost, keeping his posture low and using the tactical, rolled footsteps he had practiced in the forest.
The corridor stretched on for what felt like an eternity, winding deeper into the subterranean belly of the ruins. The black fog drifted lazily around his ankles, thick and suffocating. As he rounded a massive, crumbling pillar etched with forgotten runes, his shadow-sensing suddenly spiked with a cold, unnatural static.
Shin'ya instantly melted into the recess of a broken wall, pressing his back against the stone.
Through the veil of the swirling miasma, a pale, sickeningly white shape drifted into the center of the corridor. It was the first patrol.
Shin'ya's breath caught in his throat. Gideon Vance's description hadn't done these things justice. The Calcified Stalker didn't look like a standard fantasy skeleton. Its bones weren't yellowed or brittle; they were a thick, porous, chalk-white volcanic stone, fused together without joints or ligaments. It drifted an inch above the ground, moving with a fluid, terrifying grace that defied gravity.
And there, suspended directly inside its hollow, ash-filled ribcage, was a heavily rusted, ancient brass bell, hanging from a calcified spine.
The stalker stopped. It had no eyes, no flesh, and no ears, but its eyeless skull slowly tilted to the left. The porous stone of its neck didn't make a single grinding sound as it rotated. It was scanning.
Suddenly, a second stalker drifted out from the darkness behind the first, followed by a third. They were moving in a tight triangle formation, directly blocking the path leading to the lower chambers where the Titan slept.
Shin'ya felt his pulse spike. His chest tightened, and his heart began to hammer violently against his ribs—Thump-thump, thump-thump In this maddening silence, he could swear the physical vibration of his own chest was loud enough to vibrate the stone walls.
The lead stalker's skull snapped directly toward the broken wall where Shin'ya was hiding. Its jaw unhinged, opening in a silent, horrific scream, and its upper torso began to violently tremble.
It was preparing to shake its ribs. It was about to ring the alarm.
Oh no, you don't! Shin'ya didn't hesitate. He willed his shadow mana to erupt from his skin, tightly wrapping around his torso like a vacuum-sealed corset, instantly absorbing the frantic thumping of his heart. In the exact same fraction of a second, his body dissolved into the pitch-black shadow beneath his feet.
Shadow Slip
The world turned into a monochrome blur of liquid darkness. Shin'ya traveled through the floor, bypassing the first two monsters entirely, and surfaced directly behind the third stalker.
He popped out of the darkness, applying the exact momentum-dispersion technique he had bled for in the forest. His boots touched the stone floor with a completely silent, weightless puff.
Before the displaced air could even form a whistle, the heavy, pitch-black blade of the Ketsugai was already in motion. Fueled by pure shadow aura, the black tachi cut through the silent fog like a scalpel through silk.
Slice.
The blade sheared perfectly through the lead stalker's calcified spine, severing the ribcage from the legs. As the upper torso detached and began to fall toward the hard stone floor—carrying the deadly brass bell with it—Shin'ya lunged forward.
His left hand shot out like a striking viper, catching the falling, rusted bell by its clapper, while his right foot slid under the collapsing stone skull, catching it before it could impact the ground.
The entire sequence lasted less than two seconds.
Shin'ya stood frozen in a low crouch, holding the severed, volcanic-stone remains of an S-rank vanguard monster in his hands, completely breathless, his lungs burning from the lack of oxygen inside the shadow dimension. He didn't dare move a single muscle.
He looked up through the dark fog. The other two stalkers were still facing the wall, completely oblivious to the fact that their leader had just been silently erased from existence right behind their backs.
Shin'ya's deadpan eyes narrowed through the dark, a cold, predatory confidence settling deep into his chest.
One down, he thought, his inner mastermind smirk returning. Two to go.