The Gambler Folds

"Minsk!"

Xia Lin's voice seemed to come from very, very far away, piercing through the echoes of hell, through the fog of memory, through those cries that could never be forgotten.

"Minsk! Hey!"

Minsk suddenly sucked in a breath, like a drowning man finally breaking the surface.

Huff, huff—his ragged breathing echoed through the illusion-crafted space.

He could still hear it.

God, he could still hear it.

Elena's final scream when she was crushed beneath the ceiling—a sound no human vocal cords should have been capable of making, a despairing shriek from a soul being torn apart.

And when Celestine fell into the abyss, there was the sound of chains tightening, that cold scrape of metal, that hopeless dragging sound, followed at last by a faint whisper, almost too weak to hear, carrying a prayer: "Minsk..."

"Urgh."

Minsk dry-heaved.

His body was shaking. No, convulsing. It was a stress reaction. Just as skin burned by a branding iron forever remembered that searing pain, his soul would forever remember how that moment had felt.

The feeling of losing everything.

The fork in the road still stood silently before him.

The passage on the left was shrouded in sinister darkness, as though the abyss itself had opened its maw there. A rotten, icy aura seeped from within, like the sighs of countless dead souls condensed into something tangible.

The passage on the right roiled with suffocating heat. Crimson light leaked from its depths, and the air twisted into rippling waves.

These two roads.

Damn it, they were exactly the same.

Exactly like they had been in the Hell Labyrinth all those years ago.

Minsk felt as though his lungs were burning and his heart was being torn apart. Every breath felt like swallowing shattered glass.

"Hey, what are you spacing out for?"