Chapter Text
The Abyss had not swallowed Illuga all at once.
No—first it screamed.
The sky had cracked like rotting glass above the expedition site, shadows twisting through the snowfields of Nod-Krai like living veins, the cold suddenly wrong in a way no winter had any right to be. Illuga remembered shouting orders to the Nightmare Orioles, remembering shoving one of his younger soldiers backward before the ground beneath him split open into something endless and starving. He remembered reaching for the ledge, fingers scraping frozen stone, hearing distant screaming somewhere above him.
Then came the silence.
And the fall.
The Wild Hunt dimension—if one could even call it a dimension—was not a place meant for mortals. It breathed down his neck, It watched like a hunter hunting its prey. It changed shape whenever Illuga thought he had learned its rules. Forests made of black bone stretched for miles beneath skies stitched together from bleeding stars, and rivers of something thick and silver moved uphill with no beginning or end. Sometimes he heard voices calling his name from places where nobody stood. Sometimes he saw shapes wearing the faces of his comrades, standing at impossible distances before collapsing into smoke whenever he approached.
Time ceased to matter, you can't even tell the time cause all you see is really purple, black and hallucinations. Days became months and months perhaps became years.
Illuga survived because he had no choice.
He learned to eat what little the Abyss allowed without poisoning himself; occasionally the abyss swallowed up radiant beasts and some things…it's weird really. He learned to fight things that moved too quickly to understand, creatures stitched from antlers and teeth and grief, beasts that wore human faces stretched too wide over snarling mouths. His Geo Vision dimmed until it barely answered him, as if even the gods themselves had forgotten he existed.
Still, he endured, even if Illuga really just wanted to end it all and…die
Because somewhere beyond this hell— Lohen was waiting.
Or at least, Illuga desperately hoped he still was. “I really hope he is….” Illuga thinks to himself.
“Come on,” Illuga rasped one night, dragging himself against a shattered cliffside, blood soaking through his coat. “You’d yell at me for dying.” His voice cracked embarrassingly halfway through the sentence.
The laugh that escaped him sounded closer to sobbing than an actual laugh
His body trembled violently as corruption spread beneath his skin like frostbite, black veins crawling faintly beneath pale flesh whenever exhaustion weakened him enough. His lungs burned whenever he breathed too deeply, and some days he swore he could hear whispers living inside his ribs. Yet every time his knees buckled, every time death nearly dragged him under, one thought kept him moving: Lohen would not forgive him for giving up first, Lohen will NEVER forgive him for dying.
“You dramatic bastard,” Illuga muttered weakly, coughing blood into the abyss contaminated grounds. “You’re probably still alive.”
His fingers tightened around the haft of his spear. “You’d better still be alive.” The words disappeared into the endless darkness and corruption
No answer came.
Only wind, is it though?
—
Eventually, the corruption began speaking back. At first, Illuga thought he had simply gone mad.
He would hear footsteps behind him when nobody stood there. Sometimes reflections stared back at him from pools of silver water, except the reflection blinked too slowly and smiled when he did not. There were moments he woke violently from sleep only to realize he had apparently spent hours speaking aloud to someone who did not exist.
Then came the laughter, tired yet mocking
“You look like shit.”
Illuga froze at the voice and got up and tried to see where it came from, The voice came from behind him. Illuga was still gripping the spear still in his hands though it was slightly shaking…
The voice was commanding, sharp, and sounded exactly like himself, just colder and more distant. Yet familiar in a way that made the hair on his neck rise.
Slowly, painfully, he turned and stared.
The man standing before him looked exactly like him.
And not at all.
His hair mirrored Illuga’s shape and length but fell in sharper layers, black as burnt ash streaked faintly with pale silver near the ends like frost crawling over charcoal. Ember-red eyes glowed beneath heavy lashes, cold and unreadable, made harsher by the permanent expression of disappointment carved into his face. A stark white combat jacket reinforced with matte-black armor sat over tactical straps lined with weapons, while a dark asymmetrical cloak shifted behind him like living smoke.
At his side rested a brutal black-and-silver scythe.
It hummed, it was alive and dangerously violent.
Illuga instinctively tightens the grip for his spear and asks in a tone full of warning and caution“…Who are you?”
The stranger stared at him for a moment, looking up and down at Illuga, then sighed.
“Gods,” he muttered. “You are pathetic.” The figure folded his arms and blew some hair off his face. “The name’s Illhan Lycon.” He tilted his head slightly. “And apparently, five hundred years after my death, someone thought making you captain of the Nightmare Orioles was a good idea.”
Illuga blinked. “…What?”
Silence.
Then Illhan pinched the bridge of his nose. “Oh, this is going to be exhausting.”
His expression shifted into something dangerously unimpressed. Despite his sarcasm, there was something strangely tired in the way he stood, like someone who had fought far too long to care about appearances anymore. Yet beneath all the sharp edges, Illuga caught something impossible—a familiarity so instinctive it unsettled him.
“You’re me,” Illuga said slowly. For a long moment, the words did not feel real leaving his mouth. His thoughts dragged behind his own voice, sluggish and fractured, as though the Abyss itself had reached into his skull and wrapped cold fingers around his mind.
Illuga stood rigid, utterly still save for the minute tremor in his hand wrapped around his weapon. The thing before him—him—stood wrong and yet impossibly familiar, as if someone had taken his reflection and left it submerged beneath black water for far too long. His thoughts snagged uselessly against details he recognized: the posture, the shape of his face, the sharp set of his shoulders, all twisted into something the Abyss had sharpened into cruel familiarity.
His pulse stumbled once, hard enough to make his chest ache.
The Abyss swallowed everything—the edges of light, the certainty in his thoughts, the fragile confidence that reality still obeyed reason. Illuga tried to force logic into place, tried to fit this impossible thing into something understandable, but his mind kept circling the same impossible conclusion with mounting disbelief.
“No,” he said after a beat, quieter now, voice rough around the edges. “No, that’s—” He stopped, jaw tightening as he stared harder, as though enough scrutiny would unravel whatever cruel trick this was. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
Illhan barked a laugh. “Unfortunately.”
He crouched in front of him. “You’re my successor and unfortunately me as well….” His red eyes narrowed. “And you’re about three bad decisions away from dying.” Illhan looked at Illluga’s semi corrupted state
Illuga frowned. “I’m still standing.”
“Barely.” Illhan kicked lightly at his injured leg, and scoffed while Lygacon just stared.
“You’re bleeding out, corrupted, mentally unraveling, and talking to shadows.” Illhan tilted his head slightly, eyeing Illuga with the unimpressed scrutiny of someone cataloguing damage after a particularly disappointing battle. “Frankly, I’ve seen corpses in better condition.”
A pause.
“You’ve also cried at least twice.” Illhan crossed his arms, looking vaguely offended on behalf of their shared dignity. Gods above, he thought dryly, five hundred years and this is what the legacy becomes? A captain who sobs dramatically into the rain over his feelings.
Illuga flushed immediately. “…I was emotional.” He looked stubbornly away afterward, ears faintly pink beneath the grime and exhaustion, as though saying it confidently might somehow make the statement less embarrassing.
“You were pathetic.” Illhan sounded completely serious. He did not even blink while saying it, which somehow made the insult worse. “I mean genuinely tragic to witness. If I still possessed standards, if I'm still alive in a sense but I'm a soul here!”
The insult somehow felt deeply personal, and Illuga hated how familiar it sounded.
“You’re rude,” Illuga muttered.
“You’re alive because I’m rude.” Illhan stood again, dusting imaginary ash from one glove before glancing back toward the shifting dark of the Abyss with visible impatience. In his mind, the calculation had already been made—standing still meant dying, and sentimentality only got people killed in places like this.
“Now get up.” His tone shifted into something sharper, colder, unmistakably captain-like.
Illuga stared. “…Why?”
Illhan gestured vaguely around the Abyss. “Because this place is hungry.” His voice loses its sarcasm and points out Illuga's condition “And it has already started eating pieces of you.”
The shift in tone unsettled Illuga immediately. Something colder entered Illhan’s expression then—not cruelty, but experience. The kind carved into someone who had seen too much suffering and learned to survive anyway. For the first time, Illuga noticed faint scars covering Illhan’s hands, old and brutal enough to suggest centuries of violence.
“There’s a way out,” Illhan finally said.
Illuga’s breath caught. “…There is?”
Hope hit him so suddenly it almost hurt. His chest tightened with something fragile and desperate, something he had long since stopped allowing himself to feel in this endless, devouring place. Even surrounded by the Abyss—the shifting dark, the distant screams swallowed by impossible distance—he found himself leaning forward without realizing it.
“Yes.” Illhan’s voice remained flat.
He said it without hesitation, without comfort, as though discussing the weather instead of salvation. Yet there was something unreadable beneath the monotone, something old and exhausted lingering behind ember-red eyes that had seen far too much.
“But it comes with a price.”
Illhan watched the immediate spark of relief ignite in Illuga and felt something bitter twist in his chest. Gods, he knew that look—the reckless desperation, the stubborn willingness to bleed for even the slightest chance of protecting someone. He had worn that expression once, five hundred years ago, before the Abyss hollowed him out and left something sharper in his place.
Illuga immediately straightened.
“I’ll pay it.”
The response came without hesitation, immediate and instinctive. His exhaustion vanished beneath sudden resolve, shoulders squaring despite the blood staining his clothes and the weariness dragging at his limbs.
“You don’t even know what it is.”
Illhan crossed his arms loosely, one brow lifting ever so slightly. There was no judgment in his tone—only tired amusement, as if he had expected exactly this answer and hated that he had been right.
“I don’t care.”
The answer came too quickly, too desperately and the words left Illuga before fear could stop them. Because if there was a way out—if there was even the slightest chance he could return—he would crawl through hell itself to take it.
Illhan stared at him for a long moment and then sighed, though a crooked grin slowly pulled at his mouth as he tipped his head upward.
“…Ah.”
There it was again.
That painfully familiar recklessness.
For a fleeting second, Illhan saw not the battered stranger standing before him but fragments of himself—the same impossible stubbornness, the same tendency to throw everything away if it meant protecting what mattered. Five hundred years had changed him beyond recognition, yet somehow, standing here, he could still see Illuga lingering inside himself.
His expression softened.
Just slightly.
“There it is.”
Illuga frowned. “There what is?”
“That stupid self-sacrificing thing we apparently never grew out of.” Illhan crouched again. “Listen carefully.” His ember-red gaze sharpened. “If I pull you out, the Abyss won’t let you leave unchanged.”
His hand tapped against his own chest.
“Our souls merge.”
The words settled heavy between them. Illhan’s fingers lingered briefly against his sternum, expression unreadable, as though speaking of something far more intimate than survival.
“You inherit my power.”
His voice remained calm, almost detached, but the Abyss around them seemed to stir at the statement. Something ancient coiled beneath the air itself, recognizing the promise before it was even spoken aloud.
“My curse.”
A shadow crossed Illhan’s expression then—small, fleeting, but unmistakable. Whatever he carried had long since stopped feeling like power and started feeling like punishment.
“My companion.”
At his side, a massive creature shifted from the darkness—a Lycagon with ember-lit eyes and fur touched by the Abyss itself. It moved closer to Illhan with quiet familiarity, pressing briefly against him like an old companion that no longer needed words.
“My weapon.”
Illhan tapped the jagged spear-scythe gun thing resting beside him, its edges humming faintly with something unnatural. The metal looked wrong somehow, alive in the same way wounds sometimes were.
A pause.
“And the Abyss takes payment.”
His gaze hardened.
“Nothing leaves here freely.”
Illuga swallowed hard. “…What payment?”
Unease finally crept into his voice, slow and reluctant. Something instinctive curled cold in his stomach, warning him that this would hurt more than death ever could.
Illhan looked away briefly.
Then back.
“Your memories.”
The answer came quietly.
Too quietly.
Silence.
“Not all of them,” Illhan continued quietly. “But enough.”
His tone lacked cruelty, which somehow made it worse. There was no threat in his voice—only certainty.
“Faces.”
People who mattered.
“Names.”
Things once precious are reduced to fragments.
“Things you love.”
The words landed heavier than anything else.
His voice lowered. “You’ll lose pieces of yourself.”
Illuga went completely still, and this time— He hesitated bacuase there was one face that mattered most.
Those eyes.
Battle scars.
A grin too reckless for his own good.
Lohen.
“What if…” Illuga stopped.
His voice shook. “What if I forget him?”
Illhan’s expression shifted. Something almost pitying crossed his face.
“…You might.”
The answer hit like a blade.
Illuga lowered his head.
His hands trembled.
His fingers curled tightly into fists, nails biting into his palms hard enough to sting, as though pain alone might steady whatever was cracking open inside him. The thought settled like poison in his chest—not dying, not suffering, but forgetting him.
The silence stretched painfully between them.
Then—
“…Can I still go back?”
The question came so quietly it barely sounded like him. Hope and grief tangled together in something raw enough to ache.
Illhan frowned. “What?”
“If I forget,” Illuga whispered, “can I still go back to him?”
His voice cracked.
“Even if I don’t remember?”
Something desperate broke loose in the question, ugly in its honesty. Because maybe memory did not matter—not if he could still somehow stand beside him again.
Illhan stared at him and then looked away. “…You really love him.”
His hand drifted absently to the Lycagon beside him, fingers threading slowly through dark fur as the creature leaned into the touch. Illhan’s expression turned strangely distant, sadness flickering briefly across his features, because he remembered loving someone like that once—before centuries and the Abyss stripped pieces of him away until even grief became dull.
Illuga laughed weakly. “Unfortunately.”For the first time since meeting him— Illhan smiled, small crooked and very tired
“…Yeah,” Illhan muttered. “That sounds like us.”
The grin lingered only briefly before soft melancholy settled over his expression again. He scratched absently behind the Lycagon’s ears and let out a quiet exhale through his nose, equal parts fondness and resignation.
“Stupid enough to burn the world down for one person,” Illhan said softly. “And stupid enough to call it a fair trade.”
Illhan then offers his hand and says “So do we have a deal?”
Illuga looked at the stretched out hand and says “You have a deal, Illhan Lycon”