The world had ended for Elric Avelar.
Days passed, but the span seemed meaningless to him. Its rural landscape is a ruin, reduced to ash and stillness. Where there had once been laughter, spar Tinder, and a steady rhythm in his sister's second football practice, there was now only emptiness. The training materials were black, the countryside was lacerated, and the home's hearth was nothing more than a blur of dust. His father, mother, brother, and sister are gone. Since childhood had been swallowed up by the cursed shadow, he had every face familiar.
And he alone remained.
He's trying to sit in the charred remains of his house, waiting. Wait for a man to come; wait for a man to wake him from his nightmares. The world, however, was merciless. Nobody's coming back. The steam spewed smoke and blood, and the tranquillity was louder than the shouts.
He prayed, though he had never been before. Elric clasped his own hands tightly as he kneeled on the blackened ground where his own relatives once dined.
"Why me?" his voice shook. "If you could spare me, and not those who assumed that death was coming because it hadn't acquired itself otherwise?".
No rejoin will come. Only the cold wind, blowing over his cheek, carried the faint smell of ash with it.
Elric's mad at himself for breathing. His chest rose and fell throughout the span, his compassion grew, and his guilt gnawed deep within him. I've been the weak one. I've been an individual; they all seem to be a little lower than me. Why do I leave the individual alive?
He could no longer afford to travel to a learning institution either. The money for his own education always came from the hard work of his father and the admiration of his brother and sister. Despite not having a father at the moment,. Neither household. Nor in the countryside. To get him back on the student bus, they never come back. Elric was genuinely, utterly, completely right.
He'd been roaming the outskirts of the ruin for days, looking for trash, trying to make sense of the insignificance. Its mental capacity circles the same concerns infinitely: whereabouts are these shadows coming from, motives for killing, and causes for eating people; how can such a thing therefore exist?
Yes, his private academy taught those who were interested in shadows, but they had never really understood their true nature. The teacher hands out a wooden sword to his student, whose tactics are infinitely tenacious, and tells him to flee when danger approaches. But they did not reveal the extent of the shadow's influence. "You've never been robust enough so far," the teachers said. "Your job is to survive, not to fight. 'It's not about the money. '.
And Elric, he wasn't even properly stopping the endurance race properly. His movement was slow, his position unbalanced, and his brainpower a distraction. He could barely hold a sword heterosexual without his personal weapons trembling. His own schoolmate's memory travels gracefully, hits the target with precision, and only exacerbates his embarrassment.
Now, those half-learned lessons were all he had left.
With nothing binding him to ruin, Elric gathered up whatever scraps of food he could salvage and piled it up on the mountain. He didn't know why, perhaps to escape memory, perhaps to be alone, perhaps to wait until the shadow set him.
The nights in the mountains were merciless. The wind roared across the rock, freezing his flesh. He huddled beneath some kind of impromptu shelter, shuddered, and gnawed on hunger and despair. He looked up at the star that night and whispered to himself, perhaps he would reach out to me too much tonight.
But the shadows didn't come.
Instead, on the fourth night, something else did.
At the time when he'd been experiencing it, Elric'd also been a slog, a narrow road, the atmosphere itself changing. Oxygen's going to be heavier and colder. The jungle was calm, as if it had kept its breath. His skin was stinging, and his chest was tightening.
Then he heard it. Footsteps.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,. These steps were steady, steady, brimming with authority that seemed to be directing the night away from them.
Elric turned.
A figure comes out of the darkness ahead. It's tall, it's disassembled, and it's carrying a sword that's not like Elric's ever had. See. The razor blade glowed faintly, nay with reflected light, but alongside its own radiance, a shrewd silver freshness that cut through the shadows, illuminating the way. The man steps forward; the sword pulses, as if it were alive, projecting the encroaching darkness.
Elric froze, eyes wide. His breath was stuck in his throat. He wanted to talk, to call out, but the language was shut down. There was something about the figure, an aura that both reassured and frightened, a presence that screamed with influence.
The man didn't glance at him. His own gaze was repaired in advance, keen and determined, preferring the second Marauder.
And then Elric saw why.
From the second row of the woods, item 123. The cursed shadow had come back again. The individual slithers into the path, his shape writhing, and his eyes glowed with hunger. It was quick, faster than Elric had ever seen before. They flew toward the figure, their claws wide.
Elric's heart leapt into his throat. "Watch out—!"
But the man was already moving.
In an individual gesture, too quick for Elric to follow, the Radiance Sword penetrated the gas. An explosion of silver light flares, and the cursed shadow allows an ear-splitting scream outside. Their bodies separated from each other, dissolving in a whirlpool of black fog.
A calm descended over him. The man shaved his razor blade, but the dimming of the lights still did not destroy it. His cloak glinted in the cold wind, his view unshaken, as if he'd just swatted away an insect.
Elric was standing motionless, his mouth slightly exposed, his brain space empty. He'd seen the shadow swallow the land, watched the souls he loved, and still here, before his eyes, the individual of these monsters had been destroyed as if nothing had existed.
Near the end, the man glances at him. They met for a brief instant, Elric's second eye wide with incredulity, the man's calm and steady, though the transport was more profound. It's an indecipherable thing.
Elric couldn't make a move. I couldn't talk to Thymine. He was fighting with his personal psyche toward the procedure he'd discovered. A murderer. A man who could face the darkness head-on. A sword that burns brightly instead of fear.
He shifted without any words and went on, disappearing into the shadows of the night as if he had never been there before. Elric's vision is confined to the faint glow of his own sword.
Elric sank to his knees. His chest heaved, his thoughts racing.
"That's the truth, that's the truth," he presses his trembling hands against his chest as he tries to grasp it. "The shadows... may exist as slaughter:). 'It's not about the money. '.
During the first period of its relatives' demise, the object stirred within him—not exactly faith, although the object near. A flicker.
A man and a sword weren't ordinary. And assuming they could stand up to the pit, then maybe, just maybe, Elric could be too.
He didn't even know how to do that. He didn't even know when it was. But as the night drew nearer to him, one truth emerged from it.
The shadows weren't invincible. And neither was his despair.
From the ashes of grief, the spark of resolve was born.