Leo Thorne landed hard, not with the deafening clang he’d anticipated on a metal sub-floor, but with a sickening crunch. Pain flared through his newly enhanced nervous system, quickly subdued by the Echo's rapid self-correction, as his feet found purchase not on concrete, but on a vast, shifting expanse of… bone. Dust, heavy and ancient, billowed around him, tasting of desiccated despair and something far older than mere decay – the ghost of countless ritualistic endings.His crimson eyes, now almost painfully sharp in the gloom, swept over the macabre landscape. This wasn’t a cavern, or a deep shaft. It was a purpose-built pit. Walls, smooth and cold, disappeared into the suffocating darkness above, etched with faded, intricate glyphs that pulsed with barely contained residual mana. The ground, an unending mosaic of broken femurs, splintered ribs, and cracked skulls, stretched as far as his enhanced vision could penetrate. Bones of hundreds. Thousands. Perhaps millions, crushed and f