The Tree of Woe rose like a cathedral built by a madman who’d run out of stone and started using people.

Corpses fused into bark, mouths stretched into leaves, eyes blinking in the wind that came from nowhere.

Roots of arms and legs burrowed into the meat-floor, drinking.

Jax stopped ten paces out, cigarette dangling.

“Jesus… you people are fucked up.”

He wrinkled his nose, flicked ash onto a tongue that tried to lick his shoe.

“Guess extremes are your whole deal.”

He lit another smoke off the butt of the first, cupped the flame with a blood-crusted hand, and walked forward like he was late for a meeting.

The guardian birthed itself from the Tree’s shadow with a sound like glaciers calving.

Ten feet tall, plated in basalt skin veined with screaming faces.

Each step left craters that filled with black bile.

It charged.

Jax sidestepped at the last second, knife lashing out.

The blade skated off the creature’s forearm with a shower of orange sparks.

“Tsk.”

He vaulted, landed on a mound of cracked ribs.

A sword jutted from the pile—silver, radiant, humming with the kind of light that made his skin crawl.

He yanked it free.

The hilt burned.

Holy fire licked up his wrist, branding sigils into his palm.

Jax hissed, dropped it.

The sword clattered away, still singing.

“Yeah, no choirboy bullshit for me.”

His bowie knife vibrated in his grip, hungry.

He pressed it to the bone mound, siphoned.

Aura flooded in—thin, sour, but enough.

STR: ??? → 63 AGI: ??? → 112 END: ??? → 89

The guardian roared, swung a fist the size of a car hood.

Jax ducked under, rolled across its back, boots finding purchase between plates of stone-skin.

The thing bucked like a bronco.

He rode it, scanning.

There—beneath the jaw, a puckered gill-slit pulsing with wet heat.

The only soft spot on the whole damn mountain.

Jax grinned around the cigarette.

“Assassination Skill: Deathblow.”

The knife lit up black-white, edges fractal.

He drove it home.

The blade punched through cartilage and kept going, twisting until the hilt kissed flesh.

The guardian froze.

A low, wet note rolled out of it—brown, subsonic, the sound of every toilet in hell flushing at once.

The ground jumped.

Faces stitched into the Tree’s trunk burst like overripe fruit.

Gore rained in sheets.

Jax rode the thrashing corpse down, knife still buried to the guard.

When the guardian finally slumped, he wrenched the blade free with a wet shluck.

Aura geysered into him, thick and electric.

STR: 63 → 214 AGI: 112 → 301 END: 89 → 177 LCK: ??? → 41

The status screen stuttered, then gave up entirely—blank white, like a TV tuned to a dead god.

Jax wiped the knife on the creature’s hide, took a final drag, and flicked the cigarette into the gill-slit.

It hissed, burrowed, detonated.

The guardian’s head came off in a lazy spiral, rolled to a stop at the Tree’s roots.

The Tree of Woe shivered.

Every mouth opened at once.

“YOU ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO WIN.”

Veyra’s voice, layered a thousand deep, cracked like breaking glaciers.

Jax lit another smoke off the burning stump of the last.

“Yeah, well,” he exhaled, “I’m full of surprises.”

He stepped over the headless corpse, boots squelching, and walked straight into the shadow of the Tree.

Branches of flayed arms reached for him.

He didn’t flinch.

Somewhere above, the Chaos Weaver leaned so close its breath fogged the scrying pool.

“The glitch is learning the rules,” it whispered, delighted.

“And then breaking them in half.”

The branches came in a wave, pale arms tipped with fingers that ended in screaming mouths.

Jax twisted through them like a man dancing with drunks, bowie knife singing.

“Cut it out. No touching on the first date.”

He severed a wrist that tried to grab his collar.

The hand kept crawling, nails scraping.

He crushed it under a heel.

A low, velvet chuckle rolled around him, no longer brass horns but something colder, like a cello strung with vocal cords.

“You’ve murdered my discordant knights.

You’ve turned my choir into sour notes.

Tell me, little glitch, are you content with simple destruction… or is there meaning behind your madness?”

The Tree’s trunk split open, revealing a woman-shaped hollow.

Inside: Veyra.

Skin of stitched faces, eyes milk-white, smile too wide for one skull.

Jax kept walking, carving a path through torsos that sprouted from the floor like flowers.

Each slash released a chord that made his molars buzz.

“Oh, you want a backstory?”

He flicked blood off the blade.

“Nah. I don’t think I will.”

A child’s torso lunged, mouth gaping wide enough to swallow his head.

Jax jammed the cigarette into its tongue, then punched the knife through the roof of its mouth.

The body popped like a water balloon full of teeth.

“See, therapy’s expensive,” he continued, conversational, “and I’m self-employed.”

Another branch—this one a braid of spines—whipped for his throat.

He caught it bare-handed.

The thorns sank deep.

Black-white aura flared; the branch withered to ash in his grip.

Veyra’s hollow tilted, curious.

“You feel nothing?”

Jax pried a thorn out of his palm, examined the blood, shrugged.

“I feel annoyed. My suit’s ruined. These stains don’t come out.”

He stepped into the hollow’s shadow.

The air thickened, syrupy with screams.

Veyra leaned forward, stitched faces whispering in languages that predated pain.

“Then why fight? Why climb my branches when you could kneel and be unmade gently?”

Jax lit a fresh smoke off a burning ribcage someone had left smoldering.

“Because kneeling’s boring,” he said, exhaling into her face.

Smoke curled through the hollow, found every open mouth, made them cough blood.

“And I hate being bored.”

He flicked the cigarette past her cheek.

It landed in the dark behind her, where something vast and rooted shifted.

Veyra’s smile faltered, just a millimeter.

“Careful, pet,” she crooned. “Some roots go deeper than you can cut.”

Jax rolled his shoulder, knife humming like a tuning fork.

“Good.

Means there’s more to steal.”

He stepped fully into the hollow.

The Tree screamed with a thousand throats.

The darkness swallowed him whole.

Somewhere high above, the Chaos Weaver licked its lips.

“Round two,” it whispered, voice wet with anticipation.

“Let’s see how deep the glitch can dig before he learns what he actually is.”

The hollow at the heart of the Tree was a cathedral built from screams.

Bone arches ribbed the ceiling.

Stitched faces wept black tears that hissed where they landed.

At the center, Veyra waited—spindly as a spider made of piano wire and grief, her lower half fused into a pulsating brood-sack the size of a city bus.

Every throb birthed another knight that crawled out half-formed and screaming.

“Welcome, pet,” she sang, and the words punched Jax in the sternum like a subwoofer made of knives.

“Most don’t make it this far.

You’re… different.

What drives a man to carve his way through my children?”

She tilted her head, a hundred stolen eyes blinking out of sync.

Jax flicked the bowie open and shut, testing the edge.

“Oh, we’re doing the villain monologue? Cool. I always skip to the part where I stab the monologue.”

He stepped over a crawling infant-thing with too many teeth.

Crushed its skull under one Italian loafer without looking down.

“See, normal people got morals.

Me? I got a very short list of ‘nope’.”

He counted on his fingers, cigarette dangling from his lips.

“One: kids. Off-limits. They haven’t marinated in the world’s bullshit long enough to deserve this.”

He gestured at the meat cathedral with the knife.

“Everything else? Fair game. Especially if it’s wearing people like a discount Halloween costume.”

Veyra’s brood-sack pulsed.

A wave of fresh knights peeled off it, dripping.

“You speak of taint,” she purred, “yet you reek of it.”

“Yeah, well, I shower in gasoline and regret. Keeps the smell authentic.”

He spun the knife, caught it reverse-grip.

“Look, lady, I’m not your therapist, your priest, or your AA sponsor.

I’m the guy who’s about to turn your uterus into confetti.

Any last words, or should we skip to the part where you scream in F-minor?”

Veyra smiled with every mouth at once.

“Then come, little glitch.

Let me show you what happens when a man with no soul tries to kill a god.”

Jax took a long drag, exhaled a perfect smoke ring that drifted straight into her central face and came out the back of her skull as a swarm of locusts.

“Cute,” he said, cracking his neck.

“But I’ve killed bigger assholes for less dental work.”

He flicked the cigarette away, rolled his shoulders, and walked forward like a man strolling into a bar he already planned to burn down.

“Try not to bleed on my shoes, sweetheart.

These are Italian.”