Wonderful Insane World-Chapter 125: Silent Scream

[And it will keep your mind from ending up like boiling water.]

Élisa’s heart skipped a beat.

She didn’t understand everything—at least, not yet. But she grasped the essential truth. Without the bracelet, without that... presence... she would have collapsed. Imploded. Scattered into a thousand thoughts, a thousand screams she could never have contained.

But now—she was still here. Herself. Fragile, yes. But whole.

She looked up.

Dylan was on his knees, close by, growling through what was left of his humanity. Maggie... Maggie lay on the ground, unmoving, her side torn and bleeding. Her axe—blessed by Lady Ondine’s mark, worn, loyal—had fallen out of reach, half-buried in the mud among forgotten relics.

And for the first time, Élisa no longer felt fear. Not the kind she knew. There was pain. Chaos. The crushing weight of the unknown pressing against her ribs.

But her hands were no longer shaking.

She stepped forward.

Each movement felt like dragging a world behind her, but the air parted in her wake, rippling gently like water around a submerged body. The particles—those impossible specks of red and gold—still floated around her, subject to something deeper than will.

[Such a rare power among humans... though you should be very careful with how you use it.]

Élisa didn’t answer. Or rather, she didn’t know how.

But she raised her hand a second time.

Dylan turned his head, sensing the shift. His eye—still black, still possessed—narrowed.

The ground vibrated. Just barely. Just enough.

A silent blast erupted. It wasn’t wind. It wasn’t heat. Just force—raw, contained. Dylan staggered. He tried to brace himself, but the weight, the momentum of her will, was too much. He was thrown backward again.

He growled, guttural, inhuman. His body twisted, trembled, pulsed—as if something inside him wanted to escape. Or worse: to take over.

But Élisa... kept walking.

She stepped forward. Then again.

She emptied her mind, trying to think of nothing.

She was not a hunter. Not a girl abandoned by her own people. Not even a friend.

She was a fracture. A crack in the silence. A mere pulse in a world too vast.

Her voice returned, weaker, rasping—almost a sigh:

"Don’t make me kill you."

And for one second—just one—Dylan hesitated.

The monster behind his eyes wavered. But something else appeared. A flicker. A memory, maybe. Guilt. Or whatever was left of the boy he once was, reaching out from the pit.

But the parasite allowed no hesitation.

He charged.

And this time, Élisa did not step back.

Her fingers trembled. The air contracted in a sharp pulse—cleaner, sharper—and split the space. Dylan was hit full force. His body slammed into the mud.

But he wasn’t dead. Dylan was worth more than that...

Dylan rose. Or tried to.

Each time he planted a knee in the ground, each time he gathered his battered muscles to charge again, Élisa lifted her hand without even thinking—like swatting away an intrusive thought—and her power bent him.

Dylan’s bones twisted under invisible pressure, like dry branches cracking. His collarbone snapped with a muffled pop. He collapsed, screamed—or what resembled a scream, a slick sound layered with foreign echoes, like a dog trapped inside a human voice.

But he regenerated.

Every broken rib, every disjointed vertebra, every reversed joint... realigned, slowly, horribly, as if something was sewing his body back together from the inside with burning needles.

And yet, he could no longer reach her.

The distance between them was slim—maybe four or five paces. But it was a chasm. A wall Élisa raised with every breath. A barrier that came not from an artifact, or a spell, or training: she was the barrier. Pure, irreducible will.

Dylan fell again. This time, his knee snapped backward with a wet crack. His body crumpled to the side with a wet thud. And somewhere deep in his eyes, something bled. Something that wasn’t blood. Something older. Dirtier.

Élisa wanted to stop. She felt it—that pull in her chest. That quiet sigh saying he’s still in there, somewhere, hoping to live, hoping she could save him.

But she no longer had that luxury.

Because the more she broke Dylan, the more she felt the presence. Not the boy she loved. But that thing inside him. The one pulling the strings. Forcing him to return, again and again, to this cursed dance.

And then... she felt it falter.

In the distance, through the miles of grey fog, the other battle still raged. The Guardian and the Lady of Midnight. Flashes of spectral light. Sharp cracks like trees ripped from the ground. Whispers on the wind, hissing and cold.

But something had shifted.

The Lady of Midnight... was struggling. Her thoughts, her mental claws, still clung to Dylan—but weaker now. Less precise. Her grip faltered as the duel with the Guardian consumed her focus.

She had wagered too much on her puppet. She thought he would be enough.

But Élisa was no longer prey.

Once more, Dylan crawled, his dislocated arm dragging like a rag. He growled, eyes half-human, half-void, searching for an angle, an opening.

And Élisa, voice soft, gaze steady, whispered almost tenderly:

"You should stop. She’s leaving you, you know. She feels herself losing. Come to me, bastard."

Dylan howled this time. A beast’s cry—pure, frantic. He hurled himself again, all his fractures forgotten—out of pride, out of instinct, out of despair.

She didn’t raise her hand.

She didn’t need to.

One heartbeat was enough.

The air exploded around him. A pure shock. He hit the ground like a puppet with cut strings, his body shattered all at once, curled in on itself like an insect crushed under an invisible boot.

And this time...

This time, he didn’t move.

A tremor ran through the fog. Distant, but real. A silent scream. A wave of cold that made the air vibrate.

Even the Lady of Midnight must have felt it.

She had lost her hold.

And perhaps, for the first time since it all began... she was afraid.

——

The Lady of Midnight’s silent scream—that icy wave of rage and... alarm—did not go unnoticed by the Guardian. His eyes, rimmed with exhaustion and dried blood behind the cracks of his helmet, caught the slightest hesitation in his enemy’s movements. The grip on the puppet was broken.

The demon’s mind, once split like a two-headed serpent, now coiled entirely around him. A deadly focus.

Their duel shifted into a new dimension of horror.

It was no longer a battle, but a mutual, accelerated decomposition. The Guardian’s jian had become a frantic silver flicker in the greasy fog—an extension of his desperate will. He no longer parried. No longer calculated. He charged—slashing, stabbing, cutting. Each strike carved a black groove into the Lady’s spectral flesh, or tore away clots of coagulated shadow.

And with every wound, the Lady’s foul regeneration surged forth. But it was a parody of healing—an accelerated cancer. Where the jian had sliced through an arm, two new limbs—clawed and deformed—sprouted and twisted.

A thrust to the abdomen birthed a cluster of bulbous eyes, glistening with hatred, budding around the gaping wound. A slash across her cheek made a row of jagged teeth bloom, far too many, ripping her own face from the inside.

She was becoming a writhing mass of superfluous body parts—a crawling horror whose original silhouette was disappearing beneath a monstrous proliferation.

The Guardian paid for every strike with his blood. His armor, once imposing, was now a heap of twisted, punctured plates. Beneath the tears, gaping wounds oozed a dark fluid veined with dying light.

One arm hung useless, bone exposed. A deep gash in his thigh made him limp grotesquely. His breath came in ragged gasps, like a dying forge. He could feel life—or what passed for it—draining with every drop spilled. The end was close. Tangible.

But the certainty did not slow him. It ignited him. Every new hideous growth erupting from the Lady’s body—every parasitic limb crowding her form—was a small victory. The more he hacked, the more he maimed, the more her unhinged regeneration paralyzed her from within. The swelling mass of flesh and eyes and teeth weighed her down, dulled her strikes, made her slower, less precise. The black flow of her power dispersed in this cancerous sprawl.

The Lady of Midnight realized it too late. Her silent shriek turned into a bestial growl—filled with fury, tinged with a trace of... panic?

She lashed the air with her many arms, launching razor-sharp claws twisted in macabre shapes.

But her movements were less fluid. One arm struck another. Eyes squeezed shut in pain from a contorted limb. And despite his monstrous wounds, the Guardian danced through the storm of deformities.

He slid beneath a slow swipe, rolled past a claw snagging in a toothy protrusion, and his jian always found a weakness—some fragment of still-"normal" flesh to pierce.

A new eye burst from her left shoulder just as the Guardian plunged his blade into her flank. She roared—a sound that ripped through the mist—and a newly-formed tentacle cracked across his torso. His armor finally gave way, shattering into fragments. The Guardian was flung backward, vomiting black, and crashed into the earth with a heavy thud. He lay still for a moment, his jian still clenched tight in his remaining good hand.

The Lady of Midnight rose, panting, her body now a grotesque cathedral of excess flesh. Dozens of eyes blinked out of sync. Tiny mouths chewed at nothing along new limbs. The wound at her side was already closing, replaced by a knot of petrified, intestine-like tissue.

But her steps toward the fallen Guardian were slow. Laborious. Each movement a monumental effort against the weight of her own degeneration.

The Guardian stirred. With a gesture of infinite slowness, of pure will drawn from the last embers of his being, he pushed himself to one knee. His gaze, through the shattered visor, met the constellation of the Lady’s mad eyes. There was no fear in that gaze. Only cold, absolute determination—and the glimmer of a terrible truth: he had driven her into her own trap. Her regeneration was now her prison.

And he would strike again. And again. Until the cancer he had seeded within her devoured her from the inside—or until his final breath abandoned him.

The jian trembled in his grasp, but its tip never wavered, fixed on the abomination crawling toward him. The air hung heavy with rot and imminent ending.

The next charge would be the last.

For one of them—

Or both.