The earthsplitter wolf lunged—an obsidian blur slicing the dark, muscles taut, talons gleaming with surgical intent.
Leon didn't think. His body reacted first, coiling, bracing—then impact. A tidal force slammed into him, rattling his spine, hurling him into stone.
Crack. Dust. Darkness.
The trench wall fractured beneath the blow. Air fled his lungs. Pain bloomed white-hot in his ribs as he collapsed in a haze of grit and instinct.
But he didn't fall. He stood—barely.
"No way…" he rasped, breath scraped raw. "First-Stage Espers are this strong?"
He should've been broken. Bones shattered. Muscles torn. Yet somehow, the body held. Not out of resilience—out of refusal.
The pain wasn't weakness. It was ignition.
Maybe… I can actually win.
Madness. E-Class Shadowbeasts weren't prey. They were massacres wrapped in muscle and myth. The Federation drilled it into every soldier: Hesitate, and you die.
But hesitation had already burned away.
The wolf circled. Obsidian plates flexed across its shoulders, each step deliberate, each breath calculated. It wasn't angry. It was patient.
Predators didn't rage. They waited.
Something changed in Leon's vision. The world slowed. Edges sharpened. He saw every twitch beneath the beast's skin—the slight tension before a lunge, the measured drag of claws against stone.
It was baiting him. Trying to make him flinch.
But Leon didn't flinch.
He didn't just see the attack. He remembered it.
The wolf's eyes narrowed. It moved.
Fangs flashed.
Leon moved faster.
His body flowed—unnatural, precise, as if puppeted by memory. The Cursed Sword swung on instinct, catching the beast's ribs. Sparks burst like dying stars.
His spine arced. He twisted beneath the jaws. The air split where his throat had been.
That footwork… that blade angle…
They weren't his.
They were echoes. Violence carved into the bones of a thousand dead men—and somehow, into him.
His grip steadied. His breath slowed. His fear unraveled.
A grin cut across his face, all teeth.
"Let's see how deep this goes."
He surged.
The wolf struck to kill.
Leon struck to end.
His blade buried deep into the foreleg. Cartilage crunched. The beast collapsed with a broken snarl.
It tried to rise.
Leon didn't let it.
He drove the sword deeper. Muscle tore. Bone cracked. The wolf writhed once, heart pounding against steel—then silence.
Its body withered.
Dark tendrils peeled off its flesh, sucked into the blade's runes like breath into embers. The sword drank deep. The warmth flooded Leon's palm.
Power. Not stolen. Claimed.
He exhaled slowly, felt the strength settle into his limbs.
"Unworthy," he muttered. "Their essence taints the steel."
The sword responded, dry with contempt. Even carrion has limits.
Leon snorted. Even cursed artifacts had standards.
A rough snarl rolled out of the dark.
Then came the others—three wolves, scarred and limping, but their eyes burned with the same cold hunger. Their scars told stories of survival, their fangs glistened with fresh hunger. But it was the alpha that caught his eye—a monstrous thing, blind in one socket, its remaining eye cold with intelligence. It did not snarl. It simply watched.
Leon grinned, instincts calculating even before the thought registered. This time, he didn't wait.
He lunged.
The sword flowed with him, a rhythm not learned but remembered. Every motion felt honed, every step precise—he was not learning to fight. He was remembering.
The alpha reacted. Too slow.
The pack's coordination fractured.
A shadow leapt at him—Leon met it mid-air. His blade carved through fur and flesh, severing throat from spine in a single stroke. The force of its momentum carried it forward, lifeless before it hit the ground.
He wrenched the blade free and pivoted just as the second wolf lunged. Steel met flesh. A downward stroke split the beast from collarbone to gut, entrails steaming as they spilled across the frostbitten earth.
The third wolf hesitated.
Leon didn't smile—he bared his teeth. The moment had already slipped past saving.
The creature lunged from the side, fast and silent, its weight crashing into him like a thrown wall of flesh and bone.
The third lunged from behind. Leon didn't turn. One flick of the blade—and silence. The head rolled into the abyss.
The blade slid through tendon and bone with obscene ease—more breath than blow.
The severed head rolled once across the stone before plummeting into the abyss.
Twelve seconds.
Three E-Class Shadowbeasts.
All dead.
Leon stood among the bodies, chest rising unevenly, lungs dragging in air that stank of iron and smoke. The trench was silent now—broken shapes scattered around him, limbs twisted where they'd fallen, steam rising off open wounds into the cold night.
His grip tightened around the Cursed Sword. The runes along its surface glimmered faintly, faint threads of light drawn toward it from the blood-soaked dirt. A low hum vibrated through the blade—deep, steady, and disturbingly content.
"Pathetic whelps." The sword's voice slithered through his mind, laced with disdain. "But their rage makes decent kindling."
Leon didn't linger. His eyes were already searching past the torn ground, past the silence, toward the glow of battle where Delta Stratos was barely holding the line.
Gunfire blinked along the horizon—brief sparks against the dark. Shadows surged against the city's walls, too many to count, dragging screams with them. The sound came in waves, faint but constant.
He tightened his grip on the sword.
"Still more out there," he muttered, not to anyone, maybe not even to himself. Just a truth that settled heavy in his throat.
Then he moved.
Not like a soldier. Not like a warrior.
Like a predator.
His figure blurred into motion, slipping between the chaos like a shadow unbound. The Cursed Sword came alive in his hands, its edge carving a crimson path through the horde. Flesh tore. Bone splintered. Blood sprayed in wild arcs, catching the light in grotesque halos.
A Shadowbeast lunged—his blade met it mid-air, severing ribs from spine in a single merciless stroke.
Another roared from behind—Leon twisted, the motion fluid, instinctive. The Cursed Sword sang, biting through its throat before it could even register its own death.
The battlefield screamed, torn wide and bleeding. And Leon cut through it like memory sharpened into steel.
The sword pulsed in his grasp, its veins thrumming with a hunger that resonated deep in his bones, an echo of something far older than himself. Each kill fed the ancient steel, each severed life force sinking into its insatiable core.
And with every drop of stolen strength, something inside him shifted.
He was shedding the weight of hesitation. Shedding weakness.
"I. Am. No. Weakling."
The words left him in a growl, more instinct than thought.
The world dissolved into steel, blood, and motion. Raptor-wolves lunged, only to be carved apart before their claws found purchase. Chimeras, mid-pounce, met death in the air—limbs severed, torsos split clean in two. Leon moved like a shadow, slipping between the chaos, a blade of pure destruction cutting through a tide of beasts.
Their deaths burned through him, each kill igniting his blood like wildfire.
The earth cracked.
A roar split the battlefield, deep and seismic, as the ground tore itself open. Lava veins split the trench floor in jagged lines—and then it rose.
The Goliath.
A titan hewn from volcanic stone, five meters tall and wider than a transport truck. Each step split the earth. Its lone eye burned like molten coal, locked onto Leon with a sentience that didn't belong in beasts.
The lesser Shadowbeasts froze.
They knew this thing.
The air grew heavy, oxygen thinning under the weight of something ancient. Then came the roar—louder than artillery, more pressure wave than sound. It shattered the sky. Leon's bones vibrated with it.
Then came the club.
He moved—too slow.
The world detonated.
Stone split. Ground vanished. Leon went flying. Pain stole his breath before he even hit the rock wall. The impact cracked something deep in his ribs, drove the air from his lungs, left his ears ringing. Darkness pushed in around the edges of his vision.
And then—its shadow.
The Goliath loomed above the crater like a god of old war myths. Its voice rolled through the smoke, low and merciless:
"You reek of borrowed power."
It raised the club again. Gravity surged.
Leon couldn't move.
Blood soaked the ground beneath him, his limbs numb, his mind blank. Was this it?
No. Not yet.
He gritted his teeth and reached—not outward, but inward.
"Cursed Sword," he rasped. "Give me something."
Silence.
Then, a whisper.
[The Blade of Fate.]
The flood came all at once.
Memory that wasn't his. Movements burned into muscle. Runes. Footwork. Lethal stances. The sword took his body before his mind could catch up.
He moved.
The club missed by inches, tearing the trench apart behind him.
"Now," the sword hissed.
Leon rose, pain screaming through his ribs, but it didn't matter. The Goliath raised its club again—slower this time, but with the same crushing inevitability.
Leon struck.
The Cursed Sword howled—its edge bathed in violet fire. The slash ripped reality open in its path. When the blade connected, it didn't cut—it erased.
The Goliath split apart. No scream. No resistance. Just obliteration. Embers where limbs had been. Ash where its heart should have been. It died before it could fall.
And the deathwave kept going.
Hundreds of beasts vaporized in a breath. The battlefield fell silent, blanketed in mist that used to be flesh.
The quiet broke.
Something hit the trench—hard. Not loud, but enough to shift the air around him. The pressure changed, heavier somehow, like the sky had leaned in.
Leon didn't need to look to know it wasn't just another beast.
A sound followed. Not quite a growl, more like a low tremor threading through the dirt and into his spine. It settled there, deep and cold.
Then it stepped into view.
Not a tiger—at least not in any natural sense. This was something darker, something sculpted from fear and memory. Its form rippled with obsidian stripes that moved like living ink, muscles shifting beneath them with the coiled precision of a predator that had never once missed its mark. It didn't charge. It didn't need to.
It moved like it didn't need to hurry. Each step slow, steady—like it already knew how this would end.
One eye flickered faintly, more heat than light. The other was just a socket, dark and raw, as if something important had been torn out long ago.
Then its lips pulled back—not a snarl, not a growl. A grin.
Leon barely had time to react.
The hit came fast and heavy. A paw slammed into his chest, knocking the wind out of him and sending him flying. He didn't feel the ground—just the impact, the sharp snap somewhere under his ribs, the rush of blood in his throat.
And then it was on him.
Teeth tore into his shoulder, deep and slow. It didn't snap. It crushed. A hot wave of pain tore up his spine and set his nerves on fire.
He couldn't scream. His body was too busy surviving.
The world tilted sideways, and everything collapsed into black.
He hit the ground like a discarded weapon—silent, broken, done.
His left arm hung at an unnatural angle, dead weight. Nerves severed. Blood seeped through torn flesh, pooling around him as the night pressed in.
The tiger moved closer with slow inevitability, its single eye gleaming, its expression one of calm certainty.
It didn't pounce. It didn't roar.
It savored.
It knew he couldn't move. Knew he couldn't fight. It knew this kill belonged to it, and it had all the time in the world to take it.
But just as it stepped forward, a sharp crack tore through the air—a sound like glass breaking under frost.
Leon blinked, struggling to lift his head.
And then, like a spear cast from the void, a sliver of silver-blue light sliced through the trench. It flew with precision born not of rage, but cold execution.
The tiger's head snapped back as the crystal spike drove clean through its remaining eye.
There was no scream. No final howl. Just stillness.
Then, like the illusion it had always been, the creature dissolved into mist—its body vanishing in a slow collapse, silent and absolute.
And once more, the world went still.