Rather than merely becoming conjoined or one devouring the other, Victor’s and Koschei’s souls were forge-welded in the enantiomorph’s crucible, folded in on one another, reforged again and again, until a damascened, unified entity emerged. The Left Eye itself had acted as a buffer, the process harnessing gem’s latent antediluvian energies and eldritch forces of a prophecy being fulfilled to allow for the merging of both their existences to such a degree that even the world could no longer discern them.

“Meat and bones… Livers, marrow… Bring them, please,” he struggled out through gritted teeth. Zefaris sprinted off and soon returned, piling a wooden plate high with the requested substances from her Tablet. Still struggling to even move and with assistance from Zelsys, Victor moved over to the pool’s edge. He tore his right hand from his chest and clapped both palms together.

“Dgh…. Devour all without recourse…” he hissed, pulling his hands apart. The magic circle on his left hand shone with a colour and runes similar to his normal Bone-eating Hand, but the right was filled with altogether other symbols and glowed a fleshy pink, only accentuated by the gaping, bleeding hole in the palm’s center.

With his hands, he devoured enough flesh, bone, and organs to feed several men. One could see the new flesh flowing up his arms, stretches of skin sloughing away and growing back in seconds with nary a trace.

The struggle lasted for hours to come.

Zel hated having to leave him to keep up her own training, but not an iota of worry dwelt in her mind as to the final outcome of the boy’s tribulation.

Eventually, when she had already returned and left several times, it ended. Jorfr was absent; he had called over Torhild to take his place in preparing yet further doses Vitae elixir, himself having gone to the Hulson clan’s crypt to commune with his ancestors.

Victor had floated in the water face-up for a good hour now, motionless and empty-eyes, quietly breathing and blinking maybe once every five minutes. The cracks in his chestplate had mended. No longer were his veins filled with light, yet the Antediluvian Gem still glowed; its edges had been grown over with bone, as if it were being absorbed into his body.

Eventually, the gem’s light died down, the redhead’s eyes fluttering closed with its dimming. For a moment, Zel was concerned that it meant Victor’s heart had stopped, as the gem’s light had heretofore followed the oft-frantic rhythm of his heart.

However, he still breathed and moved, slowly raising a hand and reaching for it. A soft tug.

Slowly, the Antediluvian Gem emerged, the bone closing behind it. With a pull as if he were ripping a sword from the stone, he tore the gemstone out of himself the rest of the way, and from the end which had been stabbed into him now stemmed a key of bone. With its emergence, something ripped through the chamber. All present could feel it; like a tiny piece of the world had been uprooted, settling down slightly different.

His eyes drifted open. His gaze went right past the key and to Zel’s face.

Her eyes met his. Cruciform pupils, just like Koschei’s third eye… And yet, she knew that it was Victor in there.

“...Fucked up how the pain is the easiest part of a tribulation, huh?” he struggled out. His pupils dilated, turning from crosses to four-pointed stars.

Zel chuckled.

“Yeah.”

She hoisted him out of the water, cautiously putting him on his feet in case he collapsed, but found that he stood on his own just fine.

“How’d you feel?” she asked him yet again.

“Right now? Like a living corpse. I wager I’ll feel amazing once I eat enough to feed five men and sleep for a full day, though…” he responded, stretching in place. The way his veins and tendons pushed against his skin looked a little off, a notably minor degree of change considering just how violent his transformation had seemed. The key in his hand pulsed a faint light once again, and he stopped, bringing it in front of his face.

“...Right. This.”

He just pressed it against his chest, and when he pulled his hand back, the key had seamlessly melded into his chestplate.

Zefaris had been staring at him in total silence this whole time, her left eye wide open, face scrunched up in an expression that one would expect when looking at a trainwreck or a mutant with an anatomy bizarre beyond reckoning. Victor, in turn, picked up on Zel’s shifting attention, and himself brought it up, sighing: “Alright, what fucked up change do you see?”

“What fucked up change didn’t I see?” the blonde laughed. “You looked like a human-shaped bag of snakes for a while there, and don’t get me started on how bizarre whatever happened with your soul looked from the outside looking in, even with my barely-passable spirit-sight. And your eyes…”

The blonde shuddered.

“Somehow even more unsettling than one of those brass eye-plugs.”

“I… Yeah. I need to sleep. Everything is sharp and my mind is running a thousand kph, I just need to go unconscious for… A day.”

Zel chuckled again.

She understood.

At that moment, Victor, too, understood; that his previous breakthroughs had been eased by circumstance, and that pushing further away from the limits of nature would only get harder. That the breakthrough’s aftermath would oft be a tribulation in and of itself.

“Yeah. You get some sleep, you’ll need it. Tomorrow, after the holmgang, I mean to leave for the Immortal Throne; and you will go to Teutobochus.”

She was just going over what was already known, but the redhead nodded with an eager glint to his eyes. Those cross-pupils looked truly strange.

As Victor made his way to his room, with Zelsys supporting him despite his insistence that he was fine, he couldn’t stop himself from thinking. The fog of exhaustion and depletion hung heavy over his thoughts, yet even despite it, his mind surged ahead as if he were hopped up on three bottles of DDLV with none of the side effects.