The Desperate Charge!

Sean felt his body growing heavier and heavier.

Every step squeezed the last of his body's potential, while his torn muscles and cells cried out at the brink of their limits.

He clutched the terrible, twisted wound in his chest.

He tried to keep his shattered heart, lungs, spleen, and stomach from spilling out through the wound. As for how much blood he had lost, he no longer cared.

His body far surpassed that of an ordinary human, and it had been implanted with twenty biological organs, yet even they couldn't keep his life from slipping away.

Coarse sand and air filled Sean's nostrils and throat. But his shattered windpipe, clogged with blood, made every breath feel like the most horrific torture and torment.

The coarse sand poured into his mangled throat, then followed the air into his two ruined lungs.

Pain?

Those external sensations had long since ceased to matter to Sean.

His mind grew increasingly hazy, and his body felt as heavy as a mountain. Pits he once could have crossed with ease now sent him sprawling to the ground.

"How...much farther?"

He raised his head in a daze, trying to find that familiar patch of color amid the desolate, sand-swept wasteland.

But that hope was doomed to fail.

Every inch of Dragon Forest Star's surface was steeped in the Warp's foul sorcery. A mountain that looked imposing in the distance might become a Chaos fortress the next second, while a water source nearby could suddenly twist into a swamp.

Distances, space, and perception in the real world had all lost their meaning here.

So tired...so very tired... Sean had never felt this exhausted. It seemed that if he let his will falter for even a moment, he would fall into eternal sleep the next second and return