"One... Two... Three..."
Nothing happened. Riven's eyes closed.
Just as the punch was about to land on his face, a metallic clang echoed, a sword swung past his cheek and collided with something hard. A deafening sound that cut through the silence.
For a few seconds, he heard a growl of pain that died instantly, followed by the smell of ash. Still, he refused to open his eyes.
"C'mon, open your damn eyes, fool."
Summoning all his courage, he finally did. Riven expected to be in the afterlife, surrounded by beautiful female angels in bikinis and a large, muscular male angel guarding him.
But no. He was welcomed with another unpleasant sight.
"What is going on...?"
In front of him, the woman's head—or what was left of it—slowly dissolved into ash. A sword hung right in front of him, a shadow covering him. Behind it stood a man.
Tall. Built like a swordsman, but dressed nothing like a knight. The stranger was covered in leather and metal, as if he'd stepped out of a story Riven wasn't brave enough to read. His white shirt, though worn and laced loosely at the chest, was mostly clean—apart from the new scorch mark at the edge. Brown leather armor wrapped his arms, shoulder to wrist, segmented and scarred from countless fights. A half-cape hung behind him, fluttering lightly even though the air was still.
Two belts crossed his waist, one holding a sheathed dagger, the other supporting a metal-engraved buckle shaped like a lion devouring a gear. A sword hung at his hip, but it wasn't the one in his hand. No—this one, the one that had just saved Riven's life, was taller than it should be, heavier than it looked, and impossibly fast.
But none of that compared to his face.
The man looked down with a quiet, unreadable expression. Cold amber eyes stared through him like he was just another splatter of dust. His dark, tousled hair framed a face both youthful and weathered, as if he'd aged without aging. No anger. No fear. Just... boredom. As if saving Riven had been less of a choice and more of a chore.
"Stand up and get out," the man said with a cold voice and unreadable expression.
Just as Riven was about to speak, he froze. Behind the man, five of the robed figures started to mutate. Their clothes tore and slowly burned from the heat radiating from their bodies. It was as if their skin was peeling off their bodies and faces. Their hair grew shorter and shorter until they were bald. Their bones started to show, taking over their skin. Their teeth elongated, and finally, they turned into the true definition of monsters.
"Holy crap..." Riven shuddered.
The man immediately turned and stared at the Wraiths with cold eyes. Riven noticed the last robed man trying to force Ashwyn to drink from a bottle. Ashwyn was relentless, moving her face, trying so hard not to drink it.
The man rolled the buckle, and it immediately spun with incredible speed. It began producing sparks of electricity that soon started showing around his body. He held his sword tightly, and it too began to spark with electricity.
Riven still had problems processing what he had seen, but there was no time to think. Immediately after the man moved, Riven moved as well. Not that he could keep up with the man's pace, but while the man was distracted with the mutated figures, he would handle the last one with Ashwyn and run away with her from this nightmarish chapel.
The man moved with incredible speed as he fought against the Wraiths.
Riven circled around them and got to the stone platform. He pushed the robed man away, the bottle flying mid-air and the liquid splashing onto an open bruise Riven got after smashing into the wall. Riven felt a sharp pain the moment the liquid touched the wound on his left arm, but he ignored it and tried to untie Ashwyn.
Meanwhile, the robed man also fully mutated in less than five seconds and charged at Riven. He punched Riven, who flew across the room and rolled on the floor. As if the robed man had totally forgotten about what he wanted to do to Ashwyn, he growled and charged at Riven. Riven immediately sidestepped the attack and jumped to the right.
He staggered up and was prepared to fight this beast. For some reason, he didn't know why he was doing all of this for a thief. It all felt stupid. He didn't even know much about her, and here he was, fighting for her as if they had known each other for years. It had only been hours since they had met, barely a day.
Just as Riven was about to charge, he felt a sharp pain in the wound the liquid had touched and fell to the ground. Inside his body, the liquid burst like a silent explosion and separated into thousands of black drops. The drops then started merging with his internal organs. Some of the drops made their way to his heart and warped around it, taking its shape. Riven felt like he was going to explode.
Then, the drops, after merging with his organs and polluting his blood, twisted every system in his body, dragging the outer skin inward and trying to push out the hardened parts of his body. Riven's outer skin was burning and slowly peeling, entering into his internal system. His bones and other hardened features were surfacing.
His arms snapped back with a crack and realigned—triple-jointed, like a spider learning to walk. His fingers stretched, thinning into elongated, needle-pointed digits that twitched involuntarily, twitching like antennae tasting the air.
Along his back, his spine jolted and arched unnaturally as lantern-like growths burst from beneath the skin, small glass orbs embedded along his vertebrae. They flickered with a sickly yellow light, pulsing like heartbeat monitors—reacting to his fear, his rage, his will.
His ribs split outward, warping into a semi-exposed loom-cage beneath the skin, like bone-wings trying to unfurl. Inside, strips of blackened fabric flickered between the ribs, twitching in sync with the heartbeat he could now hear everywhere.
And on his chest—right where the liquid had warped around his heart—an orb opened like a wound. A small, ticking clock-eye, glassy and cracked, stared outward with a secondhand that twitched out of rhythm. It ticked in fragments of time he couldn't understand.
His hair hung over his face in wet, slightly paler strands, and the whites of his eyes were laced with black veins.
Riven let out a growl and roared at the robed man, who had slowly transformed back into a human, kneeling and begging for his life.
"Curse... Born... Wraith... Forgive me... I didn't know you were a Xandros."
Riven growled with inhumane eyes, as though not understanding what the man was saying. In fact, he didn't; Riven was just growling and panting with murderous intent, as if his real self had been swallowed.
He ran past the robed man, but as he did, the man's head slowly fell from his body and rolled on the ground.
At that moment, the electricity man was done with the rest of the Wraiths. He wasn't even panting or sweating. The cold, unreadable expression remained on his face. He turned his gaze to the mutated Riven and sighed, ready to charge and kill him on the spot. But Riven's actions stopped him.
Riven ran toward Ashwyn, who was staring at him with fear in her eyes. Riven didn't pay her attention; instead, he cut the ropes and freed her from the stone platform. Then he stood in front of her, growling, as if trying to protect her from the man.
"Ri.. Ven?" Ashwyn whispered with fear in her voice.
The man tilted his head and finally gave a confused look.
"Is he protecting a human after turning into a Wraith?"
Apparently, Wraiths lose their humanity after transformation and do nothing except kill. Those who have the ability to control their transformation, like the robed man, were deemed to possess their human intelligence after the change, but even with this intelligence, protecting someone is the last thing they would do.
Riven just broke that rule.
But that didn't matter to him, killing Wraiths is his job and he had to finish that job.
"Hmm... What a hassle," the man said with boredom and charged at Riven.
He sent a sprawling kick to Riven, who staggered backward. Riven immediately charged back with impossible speed, ready to send a deadly punch to the man's torso.
Instead, the man's sword pierced through his stomach the moment he got closer. To the man's surprise, Riven didn't melt or dissolve like the others. Riven just removed his body from the sword as the wound regenerated and healed in an instant.
Ashwyn couldn't run. She didn't want to stay, but what was stopping her?
"Riven?" she whispered again.
Riven then charged forward again, but the man twisted on the floor and sent a kick toward Riven's neck, who somersaulted to the ground in a weird, defeated manner.
Riven collapsed to the ground, and his body started mutating again. His body started twisting back, and in an instant, he was back to his human form, lying on the floor, unconscious.