"Your Highness… Hero… Please wake up."
The voice drifted toward him, distant but persistent, like fingers pulling him up from deep water.
Weight pressed against him first, grounding him to something solid. Then came the cold bite of damp earth on his skin.
Leon Chase opened his eyes to a world that didn't feel real.
Grass stuck to his fingers—wet, cold. He breathed in, and the smell hit him. Flowers. Thick and sweet, like too much perfume in a room with no windows.
Above, the sky held an unnatural kind of blue. Too clean. Too still. It didn't move, didn't breathe. Just hung there, polished and silent.
He stayed on the ground for a while, unsure what part of him still worked. His chest rose and fell, but the feeling didn't reach very far.
"I…" The word sounded wrong in his mouth. Like it belonged to someone else. Like he hadn't spoken in years.
He remembered fire. His body tearing apart. Bone gone to ash. That should've been the end.
So where was he now?
"Hero?"
A voice—light, unsure. He turned, slowly. The world spun a little.
She stood in the sunlight. Blonde hair catching light in a way that didn't feel real. Her face was beautiful, almost painfully so, like someone had tried too hard to get every part of it right. Not fake—but unnatural in its balance.
Her dress looked like something from a painting. Intricate, expensive, untouched by dirt or time. She didn't belong in the kind of place where things broke or bled.
His fingers twitched toward an empty space where a weapon might have been.
"Who—?"
Seraphina pouted a precise, practiced motion, as if she had done it a hundred times before. "You're doing that thing again, aren't you? Making me repeat myself?"
Her voice was bright, practiced—almost playful—but her eyes told a different story. Warm, sincere—too perfect perhaps, or was it just his paranoia?
Leon forced a chuckle, though sweat still chilled his spine. His throat was parched, words stuck on his tongue. "Where… are we?"
Her smile flickered, just briefly—a subtle hesitation swiftly masked by practiced warmth. She knelt, gently pressing a hand to his forehead, touch comforting yet oddly mechanical, like repeating a familiar ritual.
"Fever?" she teased lightly, her voice bright. "Or are you playing amnesiac again?"
Leon swallowed against the bile rising in his throat and forced a fool's grin. "Maybe."
Seraphina huffed. "This is the Radiant Kingdom of Eland! Three years since the Holy Maiden summoned you to slay the Demon God, and you still sneak off to nap!"
Three years. The words landed like a distant bell, the sound stretching thin across his mind, half-heard, half-remembered. Fire had consumed him—yet here he stood, impossibly whole. But how? Was this truly life, or merely a cruel illusion? His thoughts spun in a whirlpool of disbelief, as Seraphina's words cut through the haze.
"Is this what death feels like?"
The thought curled in his mind, heavy as iron, cold as the space between heartbeats.
But no, he could taste the acrid air, feel the pull of breath in his lungs, the ache of limbs not yet accustomed to their own weight. Even the ghost of pain—phantom, yet real—throbbed through a body that should not exist.
Shael Ninor.
The name whispered at the edges of his thoughts, a distortion of his own. A mistake of fate? Or something else—a crueler jest, a story written without his consent?
Seraphina's fingers tightened around his wrist—light as a whisper, firm as a chain. "Come on!" she laughed, voice ringing hollow in his ears. "Today you draw the Holy Sword."
The Holy Sword. A weapon steeped in prophecy. A ceremony suffocating in the weight of predestination.
Leon's teeth ground against each other, drowning out the script already written for him.
The throne room yawned open before him—grand, but airless. Not a symbol of strength, but a cage of gold and prophecy.
Gold adorned the walls, its sheen casting a sterile glow over polished marble, yet the grandeur only heightened the sense of entrapment, as if this place was less a hall of kings and more a tomb of the living. And within it stood those who called themselves his "comrades."
They stood like statues carved from the stone of destiny, their fates bound in unbreakable chains.
Nia Frostbane and Evelyn were reflections of each other in form—tall, poised, and striking. But where Nia was frost, with platinum hair and silver eyes as cold as sculpted ice, Evelyn was tempered steel, dark-haired and sharp-featured, her presence defined by quiet control rather than detachment. One was winter's edge; the other, the will that wielded it.
Reiz Ignis was fire incarnate—reckless, unrestrained, his existence a constant battle between destruction and control. Tousled crimson hair and ember-like eyes burned with a heat that never truly faded. There was no containing him, only guiding the inferno before it consumed everything.
Zalmin Sentinel moved like a shadow draped in human form, a perfect reflection of Leo Zhao—sharp-featured, dark-eyed, his presence as precise as a blade slipping through the cracks of perception. He did not linger in the light unless he meant to be seen.
Kern Ironwall was the shield, the fortress—a reflection of Maxin, both in build and bearing. Towering, immovable, his weathered face and broad frame seemed carved from the same stone that held up the heavens. He spoke little, yet his presence settled over the room like iron shackles, heavy with inevitability.
And Leon…no, Shael Ninor—stood among them. A stranger in borrowed skin. An actor thrust into a role he had not sought, surrounded by figures whose shapes, whose very existence, echoed specters from another life.
His fingers twitched involuntarily as the brand pulsed. The feeling was faint, but unmistakable—recognition. A feeling that gnawed at the edges of his consciousness, pulling him back to a past that never felt his own. Was he truly Shael Ninor now? Or was he just some echo of someone else's story? His breath hitched, and the pull of destiny dragged him onward, even as a piece of his soul screamed to break free.
The thought clawed through his skull, relentless, inescapable. This place—this world—was a grotesque imitation, a fevered imitation of things once known. Shadows of the past, reshaped, repurposed. Replicas. Puppets. Each face twisted in just enough detail to unsettle, each voice carrying the cadence of ghosts who should have long since faded.
Seraphina laughed—light, lilting, artificial in its ease. It rang through the air like a bell with a hairline fracture, bright yet hollow. She reached for him, her fingers curling lightly around his wrist, leading him forward, deeper into the dying light of the forest.
"There!" she declared, all breathless reverence. "The Holy Sword awaits."
And there it stood.
A sword embedded in stone, its blade aglow with an unnatural golden light—too immaculate, too unreal. A tale worn thin by centuries of repetition, dulled by its own predictability.
A myth made manifest. A lie given form.
Leon felt his breath slow, his pulse steadying into something measured, something cold.
A joke. A farce played by the gods, cruel in its precision.
The sword stood half-buried in stone, its golden glow untouched by time. Not just familiar. The same.
It wasn't just familiar. It was identical—the same weapon that had once ended him.
A perfect mirror of the weapon that had ended him.
This is not possible.
A cold dread twisted sharply in his gut, though he knew it was irrational. Seraphina's smile remained gentle, her innocence untouched, yet his own doubts cast shadows where none should exist.
This was no divine blessing, no holy relic born of fate's design.
It was a trap. A noose disguised as a relic of destiny.
Seraphina's voice lilted with saccharine warmth, each syllable precise, deliberate. "Come, Hero," she urged, her hand lifting in an elegant sweep toward the stone. "Draw forth Lucidus."
The name slithered through the air, coiling around him like an incantation.
Leon exhaled, forcing steadiness into his breath. The sword came first. Questions could wait.
Leon stepped forward, fingers closing around the sword's hilt. Cold surged through him—an ancient sensation that didn't belong to this world. It burned into his palm, branding something deeper than flesh. A voice whispered from the void, cold and amused,
"Hero, yet not a hero. Draw it."
Mockery twisted in his gut. Hero? Godslayer? The titles felt bitter now, hollow echoes of a story he never asked to be part of.
Then everything shattered. His vision splintered, reality torn away by the radiant power of Lucidus clashing violently against the darkness hidden within him. The mark on his palm flared once, like recognition—then silence.
When consciousness returned, the dream had fractured, leaving him sprawled on scorched earth, tasting ash and breathing smoke. Gone were the gilded halls, the holy sword, the artificial beauty of the kingdom. Now only grim reality remained—unforgiving and absolute.
Yet within him stirred something new, something powerful born from the flames that had tried to consume him.
No answer came, only the overwhelming blaze of light, erasing everything in its path—flesh, thought, even the sense of time—until nothing remained but silence.
And in that silence—
The emberlight swam in his vision, blurring the edges of a figure that might have been a man—or what was left of one. There was something familiar in the way it stood, hunched and burned out, like a version of himself left too long in the fire.
Whatever he'd been before… it was gone.
Not with a scream, not even with ceremony. Just gone.
He should've slipped away with it. Should've faded. But something clung to him. A breath. A twitch. The uncomfortable awareness that he was still here, still tethered to a body that refused to finish dying.
His skin scraped against the ground as he moved. The surface was rough, jagged in places, biting into him with every shift. Air dragged into his chest in a jagged pull—smoke and something worse, something chemical and wrong. It burned in his throat, coated his teeth.
He coughed, tried to sit up, failed.
The world stank of ruin.
And somehow, so did he.
Darkness clung to the edges of his sight. The dream—if it had been a dream—was gone. No forests. No swords. No light. Just ash. Just breath. Just him.
He lay still. Cold settled on his skin. Not the chill of wind, but the kind that comes when everything inside goes quiet.
His fingers moved. Barely. Enough to tell him he was alive. Enough to ruin the silence.
Then something else made itself known.
Not pain. Not a wound. But a feeling beneath everything—buried deep, somewhere between bone and blood. Like a hum. Like a pressure building behind a wall that was never meant to hold anything.
It wasn't natural. But it was his now.
Ash clung to his skin. The ground stank of smoke and endings. Whatever he'd been wearing was gone, burned away, but his body remained. Whole. Breathing. Wrong.
He should've been dead.
But instead… whatever the fire had been, it had left something behind. It hadn't killed him. It had filled him.
He sat up slowly. Breathing steady. Eyes open.
The pressure didn't fade. It moved with him.
He looked at his hands. No burns. Just a faint tremor. Not fear—something else.
Whatever this was, it wasn't going anywhere.
He let out a slow breath.
"…Yeah," he muttered. "So much for logic."
The thought didn't surprise him. It just sat there, heavy and quiet—like something he'd already known, long before he opened his eyes.
His heartbeat found a rhythm. Not calm, exactly. Just steady. Grounded. Focused. There was heat inside him now, but it didn't rage. It waited.
Then the voices came.
Not whispers. Not ghosts. Just memories.
Old ones, worn at the edges, but still sharp where it mattered. Faces. Words. That sideways look. That laugh behind the hand. The silence that meant more than anything said out loud.
They thought he'd never stand again.
Maybe he'd thought that too, once.
But not now.
His hands curled into fists—not in anger, not in fear. Just a response. Like a step taken toward something that couldn't be walked away from anymore.
Whatever the fire had done to him, it hadn't burned him out. It had lit something deeper.
It wasn't grief, or even rage—just something in his gut, low and steady, like gravity shifting toward a storm.
something is coming.
War loomed on the horizon, but this time, he would meet it standing, not as prey but as something forged in the fire he had once feared.
When his voice broke the stillness, it was neither a whisper nor a vow to gods, nor fate, nor the nameless forces that had conspired against him for so long. It was a declaration, cold and absolute, shaped in steel and flame, carrying the weight of something that had been buried for far too long.
"The Chase Clan still stands. The world may have forgotten, but not for long."
He did not rise for vengeance, nor for retribution, but for the ones stolen from him—the family whose name would no longer be spoken in grief, but in power.
For the ones who had been lost to treachery.
For the name Chase, which would be etched into the bones of this world, undeniable, unforgotten.
But first—he had to escape this wretched pit.
His gaze drifted, settling upon the grotesque mass of flesh and ruin lying before him—the Rat King, its bloated carcass slumped in death, its hide thick with grime, hardened over years of filth and necessity, its form an embodiment of the very world that had sought to consume him.
The fight had ended, but what lay ahead was no victory—only the beginning of something far worse.
But first—he had to escape this wretched pit.
Leon's gaze settled on the corpse.
The Rat King lay in a grotesque heap—a ruin of muscle and filth, its bloated form collapsed in death. Layers of grime and hardened flesh had formed an armor of necessity, a shield born from survival.
He was naked. That wouldn't do.
But there was a problem.
No tools.
A whisper coiled through the silence. Not a memory. Not the abyss. Something else—rasping, slow, like smoke unspooling in the dark.
"Use me, Godslayer."
His breath stilled. His gaze dropped to his palm.
The brand, seared into his flesh, lay cold and silent.
A heartbeat passed—
Steel screamed into existence.
His right arm jerked downward, suddenly heavy, as metal tore through the stillness.
A blade.
Not forged. Not found. Summoned.
Born from the void, its surface dark as abyssal glass, veined with a streak of crimson light—watching, waiting.
Leon exhaled. "So… you were always there."
The Cursed Sword-Tenebris. A shadow bound to his soul. A weapon shaped by cruelty.
No time to hesitate.
He lifted the blade. The first cut was deep, parting fur and flesh with brutal efficiency. The second peeled back the hide in strips, thin as parchment. He worked swiftly, not with finesse, but with the precision of necessity. The carcass yielded beneath his hands, stripped down to something useful.
Fifteen minutes later, he stood wrapped in his crude creation.
The battle suit was hideous—functional, but grotesque. Strips of gray flesh lashed together with sinew, barely holding against the chill. A hood fashioned from the Rat King's skull rested atop his head, the hollow sockets gaping, as if mocking him.
He caught his reflection in a stagnant pool. A specter stared back, wrapped in the skin of something best left forgotten.
"If anyone sees this, I'll never live it down."
The thought almost made him laugh. Almost.
Survival first. Vanity could rot.
His attention shifted to the crater walls—sheer, unbroken stone, stretching two hundred meters into the sky. He had searched earlier. No footholds, no ledges, nothing to aid the climb. No convenient roots to grasp, no hidden passages leading out.
There was only one way up.
It was madness. A forgotten art from a time when humans tested death for sport— parkour.
His body still hummed with something new, something foreign. Strength that coiled beneath his skin, waiting to be unleashed. He felt it in his bones, a deep, thrumming certainty that had not been there before.
The Cursed Sword vanished from his grasp.
Leon stepped back, bracing himself.
He exhaled. And jumped.
The ground gave under his feet, stone cracking loud beneath the pressure. He pushed off hard, body whipping upward along the wall. Dust scattered in his wake, dry grit stinging his eyes. His chest tightened with each breath, heartbeat hammering steady in his ears—but it wasn't fear.
Just movement. Just need.
Twenty meters. Fifty. A hundred.
Pain surged through his muscles, burning with exertion. His lungs fought for air. He was moving too fast, pushing too hard, and the strain began to claw at him. He felt his body falter, legs trembling, gravity reaching for him.
No. His fingers caught stone, nails cracking as he dug in, his body dangling over the abyss. Above, salvation. Below, ruin. He climbed—each movement raw defiance, a battle against failure itself.
A final lunge—Solid ground.
Leon collapsed onto the rocky surface, chest heaving, limbs quaking from exhaustion. The sky stretched wide and indifferent above him, but he had won.
He lay still, breath catching at the back of his throat. Each inhale scraped against bruised ribs, and his arms felt heavy, slow to respond. The stone beneath him held a strange warmth—not comforting, not alive, just... leftover, like something that should've burned out long ago but hadn't.
Then the air changed.
Not a sound at first, but a shift—something stirring, something vast. Dust trembled at the edges of his vision. A whisper of movement, just beyond the ruins.
The silence shattered. First, the distant clatter of stone knocked loose. Then, a murmur—no, a growl, rising from below, from beyond.
Leon turned his head, and the first shadows unfurled.
They came in fragments at first—shapes moving through smoke, eyes catching the light in quick flashes. A claw scraped stone. Wings beat the air with a hiss. Then the rest followed. Dozens. Hundreds. Wolves with armored hides that swallowed the light, jaws parted in silence. Vultures wheeled above, their feathers slick with some burning fluid. Insects crawled up from the rubble, the size of horses, their shells ridged like broken metal. Not a battle. Not a charge. Just something old and merciless, closing in.
Leon's mouth went dry. His pulse slowed, thoughts narrowing into sharp, cutting angles.
Three kilometers to Delta Stratos City.
One kilometer to annihilation.
What fresh hell was this?
Something stirred in his skull, a whisper curling at the edges of his thoughts—smooth, insidious.
"Fight," the voice whispered, silk-soft yet insistent. Leon recoiled, a cold shiver running down his spine.
His gaze dropped to the mark seared into his palm. A slow, boiling fury coiled in his gut.
"Fight? That's a goddamn extinction event."
"Trust me," the voice whispered, the words slithering into his bones like a slow, inevitable poison.
Run? Dead. Hide? Dead. The numbers ran in circles, offering no way out.
He exhaled slowly, adjusting his stance in the grotesque battle suit. The Cursed Sword pulsed in his grip, its weight not just metal but memory—an unsettling tether to his past and a grim promise of what was coming. No time for hesitation. No time for regret. If the only way forward was through blood, so be it.
His vision flickered—an abandoned trench, half-buried ruins from a war long forgotten. A remnant of human arrogance. A coffin with walls.
No choice.
His body protested, but he forced it to move. He sprinted, the wind howling in his ears, carrying not echoes, but the tremors of slaughter.
The horde closed in.
A thousand Shadowbeasts had nearly shattered Delta Stratos during the Purple Star Incident.
Tonight, ten thousand stormed across the plains.
Leon dove into the trench.
The ground shook as something massive landed in front of him. A groan of shifting stone, a rush of stale, venom-tainted air.
He looked up.
The earthsplitter wolf landed with a ground-shaking thud, its massive form eclipsing the dim light. Obsidian plating covered its grotesque frame, jagged as volcanic glass, while claws like daggers raked the dirt beneath it. A slow exhale, thick with decay and venom, curled through the air—hot, suffocating, a death-scent before the kill.
It moved—fast. Too fast.
Leon didn't hesitate.
His fingers locked around the Cursed Sword. The metal wasn't just cold; it exhaled against his palm, pulsing with a rhythm that felt disturbingly alive. A flicker of dark veins surfaced along his wrist, burning like ink bleeding beneath his skin.
Tonight, the prey bore its fangs.