"Death can wait. I haven't lived my life yet."
Spinning
Richter watched the blood stain his shirt. He put his hand over the open wound to stop the bleeding, but it didn't work. Too weak to use his healing arts to himself, he sat against the wall. Alone. Abandoned.
No, not abandoned. It was his fault he was alone now. He told Aqua to look after Emil while he searched for a secret passage leading to the mausoleum (he was worried Emil might accidentally activate a trap). Then he found it, fell into an opening and got separated from the rest of the party. And as if that wasn't enough, he landed right onto a sharp metal spike that immediately cut open his wound.
Breathing only became harder. He was sucking in as much air as he could, but his lungs kept lacking oxygen. The spike had done more damage than he thought. The pain was indescribable, nothing compared to it. He had suffered from it before several times. It was no different from then. It was still just as painful. Even when he didn't move and tried to breathe through his mouth, it hurt.
His leather glove was now covered in blood too. It seeped through his clothes and slowly painted his purple jacket red. Everything around him was spinning, from the walls to the ceiling to the spikes on the ground. He saw it move in circles around him. Fast. Even faster. It was making him dizzy and nauseous. Black and grey smudges blurred his eyesight and he thought he'd lose consciousness, but everything stayed the same.
It just kept spinning. And spinning.
He thought about death. He had thought about it many times. What happened to Aster made him realise he had never wondered what his purpose was in life. There wasn't much to it, because he was always doing research. Aster just made his life less of a torture. And when he died, a part of Richter died with him. The part of Richter that believed life had a meaning. The only part of him that was happy to be alive.
But Richter was able to find a new purpose in life: avenging Aster by killing the summon spirit Ratatosk, the monster that had killed Aster in cold blood. He wouldn't rest until he had fulfilled his purpose. That promise had he made when he turned Ratatosk to his core state after seeing the murderer at work.
So he couldn't give up yet. He had to fight Ratatosk and kill Marta so that his core couldn't draw life energy from her body anymore. A little blood wasn't going to be stop him. Distorted eyesight couldn't keep him from fighting.
I can't die here. Not yet.
He saw something that wasn't there before. A living being, either a monster or a human. He, she or it (whatever it was, Richter couldn't see) was spinning along with everything else. Richter tried to watch the unknown passerby, but everything before his eyes was fading to darkness.
Mere moments of pointless staring were lost in the past while he was slipping away. He heard a voice calling his name before he lost consciousness. Aster's voice. No, Emil's voice. There were hard to tell apart, but he heard the difference. Emil found him.
It was too dark to see if the room was still spinning. Emil's voice sounded hollow and got softer until Richter could hear it no more. And then there was nothing.