In the world tainted in red, Seraph didn't know where the Warlord was. He didn't know where anything was. Everything bled into 'everything' else.
Aura. Life. Spiritual power. Not as separate streams, but layers, smears of light and intent stacked atop each other, superimposed like hundreds of frantic brushstrokes fighting for space on the same twitching canvas.
Color coded madness. Lines upon lines pulsed and shapes twitched uncontrollable. Some glowed bright, others flickered, dim and dying.
And Seraph… couldn't tell one from the other. Enemy or ally. Living or already dead. Fortunately, there were no allies nearby. And all other than them?
Didn't matter.
To him, they were all just motion. All just prey. A blur of heat, color, and movement.
But some part of him, even deep in the madness, still understood:
If the color didn't move, it was already dead. If it oozed into the earth, it was bleeding. Dying on its last breath.
Everything else?
Just a target.
In his hunger to kill, he struck at everything that moved, Everything that flared with power, Everything that dared to attack him. He dove into them without hesitation.
His wings tearing the air, his claws stretched wide.
One closed eye is still human, if barely. The other, a slit of silver wrath, stained with Mystic corruption, radiating fractured judgment.
The first to rise against him died before they could speak. The second tried to cast something, and their throat was already gone. The third? He never even saw it. But his claws did.
Seraph moved like a star collapsing in on itself, dense with wrath, pulling everything into his orbit and leaving only destruction behind.
He laughed again and again, a jagged bestial of broken sound. Not of cruelty. But it's just wrong.
A Galuga screamed in challenge. And he answered with a fist through its chest.
Another tried to retreat or maybe, just changed its position. Seraph followed it mid-air, tackled it to the ground, and kept hitting it long after it stopped moving.
The blood soaked into his aura tainted hands. He didn't care. It all looked the same.
The battlefield had become a mural of slaughter.
Still, the Mystic pulsed in him. Unstable but glorious. Wings cracked with golden force. Each flap thundered with momentum. Each strike tore open land and limbs alike.
Beyond the battlefield, the Warlord watched, still calm. Still cold. Waiting for the right timing. It wasn't afraid. But it understood now.
This was no longer a duel or war. This was a wrathful catastrophe given form.
Seraph's laugh echoed. Loud and unrestrained. A sound that split the night, jagged, holy and wrong.
The prayer still echoed faintly in his ears, "Oh Seraph of End…" But now it was buried beneath the roar of blood, and the thrill of violence.
He moved like light twisted by fury.
Another Galuga tried to run. And Seraph was already behind it, his claws slashing clean through its back.
Another raised an aura shield, flaring the aura. It didn't matter. His wing shattered the defense, his claws shredded the flesh.
Three more leapt together, coordinating their strikes. He didn't stop. He broke them. One with a knee to the chest. Another with a swipe that removed its head. The last tried to crawl away, he stomped it into the sand with a golden glow around his foot.
Their screams didn't reach him. Nothing did.
The battlefield was red and gold, black and burning.
And behind it all…
The Warlord watched.
It had slid back into the shadows, no longer leading, no longer testing. It watched from a rise of coral, head tilted just slightly, black blood still trickling down one side of its chest.
Its eyes narrowed. Its crystal tail glowed.
And the War Generals moved again.
The wind cracked as they broke through the chaos, one diving from above, the other rising like a shadow from the blood-soaked sand.
Seraph met them in mid-air, his laugh still curling in his throat.
Claws clashed with tails. Aura cracked through the sky in jagged bursts.
This time, the Generals didn't try to break his defense. They aimed to overwhelm. One spun, tail glowing with carved runes, creating a spiraling field of pressure that bent Seraph's flight path mid-charge.
The other crashed into him directly, claws aiming for the joints of his wings, tail slicing toward his spine.
He twisted mid-air, golden mist flaring. One claw missed. Another grazed his shoulder. Blood sprayed, his own. Seraph didn't flinch.
He just smiled.
Then slammed both hands together, his claws, wrapped in golden Aura, crushed the war general's shoulder in mid-grapple.
The creature shrieked, its arm going limp, but before Seraph could finish it, the second General struck from behind, a tail slicing a shallow wound across his ribs.
Seraph spun, snarling, caught the tail mid-motion, and with a burst of wrath-fueled strength, hurled the General downward. It crashed into the sand like a divine comet, shaking the ground where it fell.
The first General twitched on the ground, buried half in a crater of sand and shattered coral. Its limbs spasmed as it tried to rise, tail flailing weakly.
The second, the one with the ruined arm, staggered back, snarling, its movements slower now, and the rhythm of their perfect coordination broken.
Seraph descended. Not with grace. But with intent to kill.
His wings flared once again, gold trailing behind him like streaks of molten sun, and then he was there, claws-first, smashing into the fallen General below. A brutal crack echoed across the blood-soaked shore as his foot landed on the creature's chest, pinning it down. His hand gripped the edge of its skull, aura twisting like a spiraling storm.
"End."
He didn't say it aloud.
But the force behind his motion made the word real, and his title resonated with his intent. With one motion, he drove his claw down into the beast's throat, past the hardened scales, into the pulse of its life, its bloodstone core.
The body jerked once. Then fell limp.
Before the other could react, Seraph was already moving. A blur of gold and blood. He shot forward, claws aimed like spears. The General raised its tails to defend, in a desperate motion.
Too slow.
Seraph broke through the defense, slammed both claws into its chest, then pulled them apart in a wide arc. Ripping it open. Flesh. Bone. Pressure-sealed organs. All torn asunder in one final act of divine rage.
The creature didn't scream. There was no time. It died with its mouth open, mid-roar, silenced by the force of Seraph's wrath.
He stood there, chest rising and falling, surrounded by broken bodies and leaking cores. The War Generals, the finest of the Galuga army, were no more. And Seraph… Still wasn't satisfied.
But then… Silence. The battlefield… had gone still.
No more charges. No more screams. No more magic howling through the air. No more colorful movement in his vision.
The wind hung heavy with the scent of blood and burnt aura. But the ground no longer trembled. The sky no longer burned. Everything, everyone, had stopped.
Except for him.
Seraph hovered once again above the broken sand, his wings half-spread, and his silver slit-eye glowing faintly. His claws were dripped with ichor. While his chest rose and fell with ragged, uneven breaths.
And still… he looked around. He turned his head slowly, scanning the sea of color that wrapped around his vision.
Aura. Life force. Spirit trails.
All of it… Gone quiet. No flickers. No motion. No more threat.
He blinked once, twice.
'Why aren't they moving?'
He didn't know the War Generals had fallen. He didn't care. In his head there are only voices that tell him to kill more, let the world bleed in red of blood, let the flower of flesh and bone blossom in the ocean.
His mind still didn't register the serenity of silence as victory. Only emptiness.
'Where did the prey go?'
'Why… is it over?'
In his confusion of senseless victory, his body shook, not from pain, but from something worse.
Hunger.
His golden Mystic shroud, once blazing with divine intensity, now flickered low, pulsing faintly like a dying ember.
One breath.
Two.
[Mystic: 3 / 9 → 2 / 9]
Another point faded. Not from an attack. Nor from a technique. But because he had forced his body to hold too much for too long.
He had pushed the usage of his Mystic beyond his own natural limits, not just to fight, but to sustain his body. And to keep his mystic tainted aura active, he naturally needs to spend more points.
His new body of Myth is also enhanced. All of it amplified, to the further and beyond what a young Myth like him can handle. And now… That overload was starting to eat him away.
His aura was still present, but it no longer surged. The divine glow on his skin had dulled, cracked, and faded beneath layers of blood and dust. The strength remained, but it was no longer limitless.
And then, the stillness came. No more movement. No more enemies.
For the first time in what felt like hours, his body loosened. The tension he hadn't even noticed, the taut cords of muscle, the coiled readiness to strike, dodge, and kill. All of it unwound.
And that's when he felt it.
The hunger, rising by the second.
Before, it had been drowned beneath his killing intent. Hidden by focus. Smothered by his rage.
But now that his enemies had fallen… Now that the battlefield had fallen quiet… The emptiness surged forward.
His stomach twisted. Not in pain, but in craving. His whole body ached, not from wounds, but from need. His body wasn't asking for rest.
It was screaming for fuel. For something to fill the hollow left behind by burned-out power.
He dropped to the ground like a falling god, landing amid the corpses. His eyes were vacant, hands twitching, but still he moved toward the nearest fallen Galuga. The claws slid through its chest, splitting bone and muscle with ease.
Then, he dug deeper.
His fingers curled around something dense, warm, and pulsing faintly even in death.
The Bloodstone. A crimson crystalize stone, pulsing with the echo of life.
Every Flesh-path creature held one in their heart. Just like a core. A forge of their path.
And now… It belonged to him.
He ripped it free. And without much thought, he bit into it.
A crack.
A squelch.
A burn of pure vitality ripped down his throat. It tasted of iron, salt, and corruption.
Still, he devoured it.
Another corpse. Another heart.
Each one he cracked open, pulled free the Bloodstone, and fed the screaming void inside him.
'This is wrong.'
'This is not how it should be.'
Something told him that, still he didn't care.
The unprocessed cores should never be consumed directly. Not without cleansing, not without rituals of purification. They were unstable and tainted. Prone to infect the soul with madness, nightmares, or worse, uncontrollable mutation.
But in their raw form, they held more power than anything else. More energy. More than just food. They were the essence of the might of the creature killed.
And Seraph was starving.
Even now, his body began reacting, trembling with unstable energy, aura flickering erratically, his breath growing louder and heavier with each bite.
Still… He needed more.
Near one of the mages' corpses, he saw something else.
A flicker. Like a glint of light on its broken head. He moved over it, knelt, and this time cracked open the skull with his claw. Inside, nestled between remnants of bone and dissolved thought, pulsed a shard of bluish-white crystal.
The Spirit Stone.
Unlike the Flesh-path's Bloodstone, this was not an engine of muscle or endurance.
It was a crystal of clarity. Control and focus. The distilled soul of a spellcaster.
And just like the Bloodstone, it, too, was forbidden to consume raw. Unrefined Spirit Stones were dangerous, more dangerous than Bloodstones, even. One false pull, and a fragment of someone else's mind could leak into your own.
Madness, yes. But also memories about the trauma of death and despair.
Still… Seraph reached for it.
His fingers twitched.
He did not know why. But part of him wanted to taste it.
He bit into the Spirit Stone.
The moment his teeth cracked its crystal shell, a surge of searing light exploded behind his eyes. Memories that were not his, flooded in.
And Screams.
A child's lullaby in a language he didn't know.
The feeling of drowning while laughing.
Hands burning with spirituality and grief.
The final thought of a dying Galuga mage.
His reality fractured.
The world twisted sideways.
He was no longer on a battlefield.
He was somewhere else.
In a deep chamber of coral. On a ritual circle.
He could feel other minds pressing against his, whispering nonsense and truth alike.
'Was this real?'
'Was he real?'
He stood, or maybe he was falling. His wings were gone. Or maybe they had always been there, just couldn't feel it.
He was Seraph.
He was someone else.
He was William.
He was…
Until something stirred behind him.
From the mist of the shattered tide line, the Warlord finally moved. It walked slowly. Deliberately movement with no more roars or command. Just silence of purpose and timing, the weight of a predator that knew the exact moment to strike.
It knew.
The army was gone. The Generals were broken. But there were no more obstacles. And the golden divine fire from this creature had dimmed.
Now was the moment.
The Warlord's form shimmered as it approached, its body tensed, aura coiling around its frame in rhythmic pulses. It narrowed its glowing eyes. One of its tails, the crystal-tipped one, rose like a spear behind it.
It crept within striking distance.
And lunged.
The tail drove forward with the force of a sea-current, clean, fast, and deadly. It pierced through Seraph's back, cracking through skin, muscle, and bone, shattering through the remnants of aura that tried to shield his core.
The impact drove him forward, blood exploded from his lips.
The Spiritstone he had been feeding on dropped from his hand, half-eaten.
The Warlord leaned in, breathing heavily, ready to twist the tail, to end the myth before it could rise again.
Still in the madness colored world, Seraph smiled.
Not in surprise.
Not in pain.
But in recognition.
His single open eye met the beast's gaze, silver, wild, and crazed.
'There you are.'
The words never left his lips. But the thought echoed through the burning remnants of his mind like a whisper of thunder. And his weak aura flexed once more.
But then… The pain hit.
Ugh!
Sound of pain leaked from his mouth.
Raw. Real. Unfiltered.
The Mystic-enhanced aura that had once wrapped his body, that had dulled sensation of pain and drowned his thought, was gone now. Spent and burned out.
There was no divine shield between his nerves and the agony. He felt everything. The crystal tail buried in his chest. The muscle tearing. The bone cracking. The heat of his own blood sliding down on his ribs.
And with that pain, his clarity returned. Like a blade of cold air cutting through fire. The haze of madness retreated.
Cough!
He coughed crimson red blood from his mouth. And the red-tinted chaos in his vision sharpened. The weight of instincts lifted. In the pain of a broken body. Seraph was awake. The god of wrath dimmed and the man beneath it stood again.
And this time, while he gritted his teeth in pain, his aura flexed once more.
No more wild. No more erratic. But a focused force. With golden light shimmered to his hand, not as flame, nor claw. But as a sword.
Controlling Mystic Power has always been easier for Seraph, even in pain, but this time, after experiencing madness tainted by Mystic power on his body, he chose his aura as extension rather than to enhance his body again.
[Level 3 Aura Control: Shape]
Less than a second later, the sword had already formed. While the Warlord was still submerging in its false victory. Unaware of its Ending getting closer.
He didn't choose the sword because it was powerful. He chose it because it was familiar. Because he knew it, it was his. And he also doesn't have time to think much. His fingers gripped the golden hilt as the blade aura took form, with a clean, simple, and perfectly fit frame.
But the tail still pierced his chest. The pain still screamed through his body. Yet, this time, Seraph did not retreat from it.
He used it.
The warlord lifts Seraph bodies above its head as if it wants to watch the struggle of a dying creature, burning the memory of his enemies that annihilate its army.
It was a mistake.
Seraph's left hand closed around the Warlord's tail. And he dragged it forward.
The Warlord tensed, sensing something shift, but it was too late. Seraph forces twist his body, his golden sword slicing through the tail like a butter met hot knife. One clean arc severing its tail, then using the gravity and last bit of his strength, Seraph flapped his wings. Pulling himself closer to the Warlord.
And with a clean slash, from head to tails. Aura tainted with Mystic power tore through the hardened scale of the Warlord Galuga.
The flesh split and its bone snapped. The Warlord froze, eyes wide, mouth parted in disbelief, as its body fell apart.
Unwillingness could be seen from its eyes.
Black ichor sprayed into the air. Dyeing Seraph body in filth of blood. He exhaled.
Not with relief. Not with victory. But with stillness of exhaustion. Closing his silver eyes, the red then faded from his vision. The battlefield was becoming more silent.
'Coward,' Seraph commented to the Warlord in his tired mind.
From start to finish, the Warlord played nothing big in the fight, only watching and commanding from the backlines.
Even the confrontation with him started with a mental ambush, and then after it saw that Seraph can still counter attack and mad with Mystic power, it slid once more to the backlines, letting the other Galuga to exhaust him.
'Unbecoming… Unworthy.'
Seraph thought.
But then.
Cough! Cough!
More blood streamed from his mouth. His battered body is already on its limit even as a Mythical being. Not to mention in his crazed state, he didn't care about his body at all.
Next, the crystal tail slid free from his chest with a wet, bone-deep crack. Seraph gripped the base and pulled it out himself, with his jaw clenched and shallow breath. His fingers trembled as it slid loose, leaving a gaping wound, hissing with steam and torn aura threads.
[Mystic: 2 / 9 → 0 / 9]
The last golden light flickered… then vanished silently. And with it, the storm ended. His knees hit the blood-soaked sand. His arms hung limp, feeling weakness filled his body. Then his vision became blurred.
The sword of golden aura dissolved into glowing ash between his fingers.
Still he didn't fall.
He simply… folded. His mind caved in under the weight of silence.
No more voices of prayers. No more madness on his head. And no more power through his body.
Then, in that quiet collapse. The System spoke. Still cold and lifeless as ever. A soft, silver-blue glow blooming across his fractured vision.
[Personal Quest Completed.]
High-Difficulty Challenge: Cleared.
Unique-Class Monster Eliminated: Deep Sea Warlord.
Performance Evaluation: Outstanding.
Bonus Granted for Unassisted Completion + Combat Efficiency:
[Regeneration Pulse: Body Restored (25%)] (Fatal wounds stabilized. Player will not die.)
A soft pulse of light passed through his body, cool, and weightless. And The burning hole in his chest began to seal. Slowly, not perfectly.
But enough. Enough to survive.
Seraph felt the pain dulled as his pulse steadied.
And then more rewards rolled in:
[Major Reward Granted: ]
[Class Card ×10: Double-Lined Class(Polled From Dead Enemies)]
[Blank Card ×10] [Rare Equipment Token ×5]
[Materials Acquired: Oceania Heart(Medium), Deep Sea Stone(Small), Blood Soaked Wood 10x, Crystal Pearls 5x...]
[Unique Class Card: Deep Sea Warlord]
[Skill: Unnamed]
The words hovered in the air, like an achievement, not just messages.
Seraph couldn't answer.
He couldn't move.
But then one more thing caught in his fading consciousness:
[You Have Claimed the Skill You Need.]
System Has Integrated [Unnamed Skill] To Player.
(SystemNote: Name it yourself, so that you.. May remember who you are.)
With that Seraph smiled as his goal had been achieved, the System even helped him to integrate with the skill, just like a seed of meaning. A tether that wrapped around him.
And he feels himself becoming… More whole.
As One… As Seraph… And Williams…
A reminder that beneath that wrath, beneath the Mystic, and beneath the player…
There was still The System that backed them up… And as long as they are brave enough, there will be a man who can choose the shape of the sword.
Then.
The System faded.
The glow vanished.
And Seraph…
Collapsed in exhaustion of mind.