Magus Slayer

You are a Slayer. The magi hoarded emotion — siphoned it out of the living to fuel their work — and you are the one who takes it back. It comes out of them when they break. It goes into you. And every killing blow opens another eye somewhere on your flesh. The eyes see what you did. That is the guilt. BREAK THEM. SPARE THEM — OR TAKE THEIR EYES. Nothing dies at zero. It kneels. It looks at you. And the game stops and asks. SPARE it, and the weight eases. CLAIM it, and you cut the eye out and wear it — a permanent relic, taken the first time you ever met that breed. Some of them are abominations. Some of them were bound to the magi and never wanted any part of this. The game knows the difference, and it charges you accordingly. GUILT IS A THROTTLE, NOT WEATHER The second meter does not rise because the dungeon is cruel. It rises because you keep choosing it. Every card has a worse face underneath — turn it over for more damage and more guilt. The cursed hand ignores guardians entirely and charges guilt for the privilege. Hold an Eye in your hand and it sharpens every blow while it sits there, then feeds the meter when the turn ends. At 25, 50 and 75 an eye opens and offers you something powerful and ruinous. At 100 comes the RECKONING, and the Reckoning asks WHO PAYS: - THE FLESH PAYS — maximum health, gone, for the rest of the descent. - THE MEMORY PAYS — cards are erased from your deck and they do not come back. - THE WITNESS PAYS — if there is anyone left to charge. You can see it coming for ten minutes. That is the point. Good players schedule it. THE ARM THAT ISN'T YOURS There is an eye in your palm, and it is awake, and it has opinions. Feed it — eyes, hearts, the memories of the things you have killed — and it teaches you verbs: OPEN, CLOSE, POINT, CRUSH, STITCH, WITNESS, OFFER, BLIND, PRAY, DEVOUR. Set your claimed Relic Eyes into the arm's sockets for passives that change how a fight behaves, not what a number says. Pair the right two and a covenant forms between them. Earn a breed's deeds and its eye mutates into forms you can swap freely. The arm grows through eight stages, from Dormant to Ascended. It gets hungrier at every one. A DECK YOU KEEP, AND A DESCENT THAT EATS IT Your cards are copies — individual objects with their own brands and their own history, kept in a trunk between runs, packed fifteen at a time. Down in the dark the descent takes them apart. Cards exhaust and rest until the next fight. Cards get erased and are gone for the whole run. Every guilt threshold you cross unseals something strange and puts it in your hands whether you wanted it or not. One card a turn, no energy pool — so the whole question is which one, and which face. THE DESCENT, AND THEN THE STAIR Twenty to thirty minutes down: fights, elites, shrines, the Peddler who follows you into the dark to sell you what the dead dropped. A boss at the bottom — and under the boss's chamber, a stair. Take what you have earned and go home. Or go down into the Deeper Chantry, where the flesh is half again as thick and nothing banks until it is over. Somewhere down there is a door that only opens once, and what is behind it is not in any other deck. THE INN The last neutral house. The Innkeeper shelters slayers and pours for you anyway. Spend Emotion on your reflection, on research, on the Peddler's wares. Sit down and confess — it costs you, and what you choose to say becomes part of who you are, permanently. Sign a contract and dare yourself down a ladder of commandments you have to keep. Then walk back out. The ledger remembers what you did last time. NO PARTY. NO ROSTER. ONE BODY. There is nobody to send in ahead of you and nobody to replace you. Every point of damage is yours, every heal matters, and the arm you are building is on the end of your own shoulder. Break them. Spare them — or take their eyes.