The rusted blade cracked in his hands.
Lucien stood over the twitching corpse of yet another beast, his breath ragged, his white shirt torn and painted with streaks of black blood that burned like acid. He had no idea how many battles had passed. Days? Years? Or was it only a heartbeat ago? The White offered no answers.
He dropped the broken weapon, and the monsters did not wait. Two more emerged from the fog, their jaws snapping in perfect unison, their bodies twice as large as before.
Lucien raised his bare fists. He knew he couldn't win. He knew his body would shatter. But something in him refused to kneel.
The beasts lunged—
—and something inside him snapped.
Not the snap of bone, but the eruption of a force he had never touched before. His veins burned with searing light. His heartbeat echoed like a war drum. From his skin flared an invisible pressure, an aura that rippled the White itself.
The monsters froze mid-pounce, their bodies buckling under the unseen weight.
Lucien stared at his hands, trembling. Energy crackled faintly around him, neither flame nor lightning but something deeper—his will, given form.
"…Aura," he whispered.
The word felt right, as if it had always been inside him, waiting. He tightened his fist, and the pressure sharpened like a blade. The monsters screeched, but when he struck, the aura shredded them into motes of nothingness.
For the first time since arriving in this endless hell, the beasts did not multiply.
Lucien stood in silence, aura flickering around him, a faint glow like a crown above his fragile frame. A laugh slipped past his lips, dry and sharp.
"This place thought it could bury me under despair…" His voice trembled with triumph. "But it only forged me into something else. Something it can't control."
In the White, a lone figure stood cloaked in newfound power. The monsters stirred in the mist, sensing the shift. The rules had changed.
Lucien Dreamveil had discovered the first spark of what would one day make him feared across continents.
He was no longer prey.