I woke.
The first thing my eyes found was Luna—whole, unscarred, the moonlight stitching silver along her forged spine. Relief braided through my chest like slow smoke, but the edges of my memory were gone: fragments of something vast moving while I slept, impressions that dissolved whenever I reached for them.
Hours later, as I stood beneath a sky smeared with cloud and cold, she rose and ran into my arms. Her embrace was fierce, trembling; her words were razors softened by concern.
"You idiot… you idiot."
She struck my chest, part anger, part relief. I told her not to worry, but my calm only stoked her fury.
"Why wouldn't I worry?" she snapped. "You were meant to wield me, not fall into death's hands."
I laid a hand on her head. "I won't let it happen again." Even as I spoke, something in me thrummed with change—an odd lightness, a new edge under the skin. When I asked how long I'd been gone, her voice broke.
"Three weeks."
I said nothing, not from shock but because my mind already bent toward what came next. In that silence she saw something she once saw in her former master: a shadow of decision, a patient reckoning. I told her I would stay two more weeks—train, mend, sharpen.
She frowned. "You just woke from a coma. Rest. You need it."
"No," I said. "Something is different. I feel… stronger. Lighter."
She leaned forward until her eyes searched mine as if to plumb my soul. For a moment her face went pale. When I asked what she saw she only forced a smile. "Nothing. Don't worry." But when I turned away I heard the soft mutter she thought no one could hear: "You're still healing… idiot."
Time thinned like breath. I hollowed myself out for meditation, forcing mana through the fractured channels of flesh and spirit. Some passages opened with a soft, wet sigh; others held like tombstones—sealed, patient, immovable. The sealed place within me was a cold core, untouched by light or shape, a weight that watched in silence.
Luna trained me with the blade. She cursed my recklessness and praised the small gains with a voice that couldn't hide a hard sort of pride. My reactions quickened; my stamina became a slow, steady furnace; my strikes hit with the satisfaction of iron meeting bone. Meditation and muscle braided together until thought and motion were the same thing.
When she slept I stole hours—reading charred scrolls, practicing forms that bent the fog in my veins into blades. I pushed until my body felt like something tempered rather than merely living. Pride never took root; strength without purpose is a rusted thing.
On the last night of seclusion she stood and unmade herself. Metal unspooled from muscle and sinew; Luna became sword. She was beautiful enough to make the air thin—dark lacquer, a vein of shadow running through the fuller, a low hum like a throat clearing. When my hand closed on the hilt a hunger brushed me: not for blood, but for the clean ache of being used.
Her voice threaded into my head. "Your desires… how delicious."
I frowned. "Explain."
She answered plainly: "I grow when your thirst for vengeance sharpens. Your hate is my whetstone."
Before argument could take shape, the world shifted. Something peeled itself out of shadow and stepped forward—skeleton wrapped in tatters, claws that spoke of long, dark work. The thing named itself with a brittle pride: Belwick, second hand to his liege. His voice tried for calm and found only venom. "I am tasked with killing you."
I exhaled slow and sharp, and the laugh that escaped was low and animal. "Then you came to die."
He lunged. His claws cracked the air. For a moment his blow seemed sure, but it met nothing. Confusion spread across his face like a wound.
"Where are you—?" he spat.
My voice answered from above his shoulder. "Here."
He turned; his gaze found me—mud on my palms, Luna's hilt cold across my fist, a smile that did not touch my eyes. "How? Why are you alive?"
"I trained with Luna and I must say She is stronger than you."
He roared and struck again, and I moved—not as a man but as a storm folding in on itself. I breathed the world and became mist. Wing manifestation—Fog Slayer. I slid through him like winter through glass. For a heartbeat he thought I had done nothing. Then his limbs fell away, severed clean as if the air itself carried a blade: hands, forearms, collapsing from the shoulders in a rain of ragged cloth and dark ichor. His scream shattered the night.
I walked to him slowly because there is a politeness to ruin. His body convulsed in terror and a small, human thought clawed out—I was meant to stand at his right hand.
It broke like old parchment. I crouched, touched a ruined jaw. "You make a poor right hand," I said, quiet and merciless. "But your mind will do."
He tried to form words; the sounds were wet and useless. "I… the message—" He choked on the thought as if it had become poison.
Beyond the veil, the Abyss Guardian waited. Its patience was the grind of stone on stone; its voice, when it spoke, hollowed the air. "What is taking Belwick so long?" it demanded, each syllable a command wrapped in smoke.
Belwick opened his mouth to answer, but my voice threaded into the line as if it were a seam I could split. I let my tone mimic his for a breath, the imitation a blade in a child's hand. "Oh, sorry. I am Belwick. I am the reaper," I said, and the words were a mockery that tasted like iron.
A great growl rolled back: "What do you want, Experiment 1007?"
I let silence stretch until it felt like an answer of its own. Then, cold and considered: "Your head."
Before the channel closed I offered a thing—ugly and cunning. Belwick's upper torso snapped into the guardian's sight like a token and immediately ignited in black flame. The blaze did not merely consume flesh; it burned memory, turned structure to ash. The torso crumbled and left letters scorched in the air, words that hung like a dare: I hope he tastes sweet as a souvenir.
The Guardian howled—a sound older than wrath, full of plans interrupted. "I will kill him," it vowed, thunder rolling under the world. "I will kill him for sure."