The double-bladed battle axe was an extension of Isaiah Valkareth's resolve. Almost fourteen years old, but forged in the crucible of the Outlands, carved from scars and battlefield grit, he moved through the panicked tide of Type-0 Scuttlers like a scythe through rotten wheat. His weapon, Whisperer, sang its only song: a wet, crunching thud. The Scuttlers – dog-sized, chitinous horrors with too many legs – weren't attacking. They were fleeing. Pouring out of the shadowed Outlands and into the grimy edges of Veridia's outer districts. That meant only one thing: something worse had stirred in the deep woods. Something Isaiah's battered battalion, Sector Seven – the dumping ground for the unwanted and the unlucky, the one with the highest number of casualties, – was now ordered to hunt and purge.
Let it be the one that ends this, Isaiah thought, his onyx eyes, gold-rimmed and utterly devoid of warmth, scanning the tide.
Around him, his fighters surged. Ansley blurred into a streak of violet light, her form elongated, limbs impossibly articulated – her advanced state granting speed that defied physics. She carved through Scuttlers like a ghostly reaper. Tripp, hovering a foot off the ground, his blonde hair undisturbed by the carnage, gestured lazily. A sphere of distorted gravity collapsed a dozen Scuttlers into a pulsing, grotesque ball of chitin and ichor before exploding outwards.
"Talon formation! Centre holds!" Isaiah's voice, rough and utterly devoid of youth, cut through the shrieks and roars. He planted himself as the vortex point. Scuttlers broke against him, shattered by brutal sweeps of the axe. He felt no surge of Aether as his fighters plunged fingers into the fallen carcasses, drawing power. Wisps of shimmering Aether– the lifeblood of magic – flowed from the dead creatures into their bodies, visibly reinvigorating them.
Isaiah watched, a familiar envy grew as a phantom in his chest. He felt no surge. Only the ache in his muscles and the weight of Whisperer. He had no magic, no aether, just flesh and bone against the tide. He hated it, always had, but also envied what his fighters and almost every other person in the dominion could do.
He was lean muscle over whipcord sinew, skin mapped with pale scars, movements honed by four years of cheating death on the front lines. He looked less like a teenager and more like a statue of war weathered by acid rain, a statue of scar tissue and fury, looking decades older than his years. Cold, emotionless, and ruthless was how people described him, and Isaiah knew it to be the only truth.
They pushed into the woods, the unnatural silence after the Scuttlers' flight more oppressive than the noise. Fifteen minutes in, all the fighters held their breath as they sensed the increase in aether there. Something moved in the gloom, something massive and rotting and so, so wrong. A Type-2 Render emerged from the darkness. Hulking, easily ten feet tall at the shoulder, its hide was knotted bone and weeping, necrotic flesh. Six milky eyes swiveled independently. A low, subsonic growl vibrated the earth.
"Spread! Flank disruption! Ansley, harry its joints! Tripp, destabilize footing!" Isaiah barked, not even giving himself the luxury of appearing shocked, which he knew would only let terror grow, he had to think as a commander even in the face of his own death. Terror was a contagion; he couldn't afford the first symptom. He was already moving, a lateral dash calculated to intercept the Render's burning gaze, drawing its focus like a magnet. A heartbeat of hesitation rippled through the others – raw instinct screaming flee – before discipline, hammered into them by survival, snapped them into motion.
The fight detonated. Ansley zipped in a violet blur, leaving shallow, sizzling cuts on tendon-thick legs. Tripp slammed concussive gravity waves, trying to buckle the beast's footing.
Bolts of corrupted Aether lashed out from other transformed fighters, sizzling against the Render's hide. A wall of rippling granite interposed itself between the beast and a cluster of fighters, taking a thunderous swipe that sparked off stone skin.
A wave of psychic disorientation from who Isaiah knew was Yulian, pulsed out, making its cluster of milky eyes momentarily swim and its roar stutter into confusion– "Rend-field building left!" a voice hissed sharply.
The render recovered with terrifying speed, rage overriding disorientation. Another colossal claw, faster than the first, ripped through the space where three Sector Seven fighters had been regrouping. Crimson mist and shattered armor bloomed in the air, gone in an instant. To Isaiah, it was just routine attrition.
Yulian screamed, "TRANCE! LUCAS! LEFT!" Silas's vines lashed around the beast's rear legs, thorns biting deep.
But the Render was fury incarnate. It roared, ignoring the vines, its attention snapping to where Lucas – the newest recruit, face pale beneath grime – stood frozen, locked in terrified paralysis.
"Lucas! MOVE!" Isaiah snarled, the command sharp as a knife thrust. Lucas's eyes met Isaiah's, filled not with hope, but with raw, undisguised hatred.
Lucas flinched but remained rooted, hatred warring with paralyzing fear. The Render slammed down.
They couldn't lose Lucas, no matter how disrespectful or cowardly he seemed, his abilities with blood made him precious and so, Isaiah moved. Not with magic, but with pure, suicidal instinct honed by a thousand near-misses. He dove under the descending limb, Whisperer held vertically. The impact was colossal. Bone met enchanted steel. Isaiah felt ribs scream in protest, the breath crushed from his lungs. But Whisperer held, biting deep into the beast's rotten flesh. Using the beast's own momentum, Isaiah wrenched the axe sideways with every ounce of strength, tearing through sinew and bone. The Render's limb sheared off with a sickening crack, spraying black ichor.
The beast staggered, bellowing in agony and surprise. Isaiah rolled clear, gasping, blood trickling from his lip. Before the Render could recover, Ansley blurred across its face, blinding two of its eyes. Tripp slammed a concentrated gravity well onto its wounded shoulder.
And Isaiah was already moving again. He sprinted up the beast's heaving flank, boots finding precarious purchase on bone protrusions, and brought Whisperer down in a two-handed arc directly onto the junction of its thick neck. The axe head sank deep, severing spine. The Render collapsed, shaking the earth, dead.
Heavy silence fell over the bloodied clearing. Three dead. Lucas, spattered in black ichor and trembling violently, stared at Isaiah, the dislike momentarily obliterated by pure, dumbfounded awe. Ansley solidified, breathing hard, looking at Isaiah with fierce respect, just like the other warriors. They'd seen impossible speed, gravity defiance, elemental fury. But this? A human boy, devoid of Aether, climbing a nightmare and killing it with steel and sheer, terrifying will? It bordered on blasphemy. Reverence filled the eyes of the survivors. If only he were a mage, he'd bring the world to his knees.
Isaiah ignored it. He wiped ichor from his face with a torn sleeve, cataloging his own injuries. A deep gash on his forearm, bruised ribs, countless scrapes. Six months, twenty-three days since the Menders, he thought distantly. He hated the sterile tents and the menders' prying hands, he wouldn't go back. Not for this. The wounds were his. They'd scar, like the others.
Back at Sector Seven's encampment – a grim collection of fortified tents and watchfires on the city's bleeding edge – the usual murmurs died as Isaiah walked in. Bloodied, limping slightly, Whisperer slung over his shoulder, he radiated an authority, cold and harsh enough to silence even the rowdiest veterans. Disliked elsewhere, perhaps. Feared by some. But here, on the line between Veridia and the devouring dark, Isaiah Valkareth commanded a silence thick with respect. He'd done what men fueled by Aether could not, not once, not twice, but countless times.
He sat on a scarred log near the central fire, pulling hardtack from his pack. The meager meal tasted of dust and blood. He was tracking the battle he had just been in, thinking about what could've saved them time and manpower, how could he have saved the three casualties, when he felt someone walk towards him. It was a new recruit with the same sneer Lucas wore days ago, same misplaced sense of superiority. Gerard, Isaiah recalled vaguely. Gerard strode up, the sneer firmly in place, and thrust a folded parchment towards Isaiah. It bore the heavy, blood-red wax seal of the Sovereign.
"Looks like it's finally time for you to die, Valkareth," Gerard announced, loud enough for nearby fighters to hear. "Summons."
The camp's ambient noise vanished. Eyes flicked from Gerard's defiant smirk to Isaiah's impassive face. Isaiah didn't look at Gerard. He didn't react to the taunt. His expression remained utterly blank, a mask of profound boredom. He broke the seal with a dirty thumbnail, unfolded the parchment, and scanned the familiar, formal script.
Annual Affinity Assessment. Present yourself at the Grand Athenaeum at dawn, three days hence.
His 11th. His 12th. His 13th. Three years of public humiliation disguised as ceremony. Three years of kneeling before the cold gaze of the Sovereign and the cause of his ruin, placing his hand on the dead boxes, feeling nothing. Three years confirming the absence everyone already knew. It changed nothing. It meant nothing.
But what could he do? Nothing. Having lost his parents when he was only eight, Isaiah had seen firsthand the cruelty of his world. Being the direct descendant of the first Vitalis to grace the dying world six centuries ago, greatness was expected from him as it was expected of his father. But his father had delivered it and Isaiah on the other hand, was a disappointment to his dominion.
Everyone like to remind him of it, unaware that it was all that he ever thought about. To escape his predicament, the eight year old boy had begun his martial training, proven himself time and again. Even after arriving at the front lines when he was only ten to face the terrors of the Outlands. He had done the impossible, felled creatures that made grown men piss their pants, and escaped death more times than he could count. He had survived four years here, that wasn't something even the quarter of those present could say. But his time here was over, if he didn't show any affinities this time, which he wouldn't, he knew he'd be discarded. Fourteen was the last, after that, there was only the certainty that Isaiah was broken.
Isaiah took a long, slow drink from his waterskin, the only sound the crackle of the fire and Gerard's tense breathing. He finished reading, refolded the parchment with deliberate care, and tucked it inside his worn jerkin. Then he stood, ignoring the protesting ache in his ribs. He turned and walked away towards his solitary tent, his movements weary but precise nonetheless.
"Hey!" Gerard called after him, voice tight with anger at being ignored. "Aren't you going to read it aloud? Share the good news?"
Isaiah didn't pause. Didn't glance back. Gerard's voice, like the summons, like the hatred, like the monsters, was just another insignificant noise in the endless grind towards death. He never cared what others thought of him, they couldn't hate him any more than he did himself.
The onyx eyed boy vanished into the gloom of his tent, the silence of the camp deepening in his wake. The only answer was the heavy thud of Whisperer being leaned against the tent pole.