PART 1:- THE QUIET BEFORE
The city of Lunareth had learned to breathe again but only in whispers.
Months had passed since the eclipse that shattered its heart. The once-blackened skyline now glimmered faintly with new lanterns, flickering like fragile hopes stitched into the dark. Streets that had been littered with ash now carried the scent of rain and rebuilding. Yet beneath the cobblestone, beneath the murmurs of merchants and the laughter of children, the city still trembled with the memory of fire.
And so did I.
I walked alone beneath the fractured moonlight, hood drawn, hands buried in the pockets of a coat that wasn't mine. The collar brushed against my jaw, rough and familiar, like the ghosts that never stopped following me.
Adrien Blackwood.That name was both armor and curse. These days, I went by "Aren." It was easier that way names carried weight, and mine carried death.
Lunareth's marketplace was louder than I remembered. Vendors called out in half-cheerful voices, selling roasted chestnuts and old trinkets salvaged from ruins. The air buzzed with desperate normalcy. People wanted to believe the world had healed.
But I could feel it the "pulse" beneath everything. Mana currents tangled with something else, something colder. The sky felt heavier, as if the eclipse still watched from behind invisible clouds.
A paperboy ran past me, barefoot, his voice slicing through the noise.
"CRIMSON STORM STRIKES AGAIN!" he shouted, waving a crimson-stained sheet. "Witnesses say he leveled an entire district last night! Survivors talk of "a man burning with red lightning!"
I froze.
That title.
That power.
I didn't need to read the paper to know who it was.
The second Chosen.
Once, he had been my friend my mirror in destiny. We were both marked by the celestial fracture, both given power we didn't ask for. But he let it consume him. And I... I ran.
I bought the paper anyway. The boy's fingers brushed mine, cold with dust and hunger. When I looked down, I saw the headline carved across the front:
"THE CRIMSON STORM DEVOURS THE EAST QUARTER"
Dozens missing. Buildings turned to glass. Unidentified energy signatures detected.
"Energy signatures…" I muttered. "Mana, Aether… and LNX."
The Law of Shadow. My curse and now, his.
How did it reach him?
I crumpled the paper and kept walking. The wind tugged at my coat, carrying the ash-scent of distant fire.
I ended up in the outskirts by dusk. The light turned violet, bleeding into blue like the city's heartbeat slowing down. Children played near the broken fountain, their laughter cutting through the gloom. For a second, it almost felt like peace.
Then I saw 'her.'
A mother kneeling beside her little boy, tying the strap of his sandal. Her hands were rough from work, her smile tired but gentle. The scene froze me mid-step.
A memory surged another mother, another street, another world before the eclipse.
My mother.
"Adrien, don't run too far," she had said once, chasing after me in the golden dust of a summer evening. "You'll trip on your own dreams if you rush too much."
That line still echoed in my head every time I tried to move on.
I blinked, the present melting into that memory. When the wind shifted again, the laughter faded, replaced by a low hum that prickled along my skin.
Not a sound.
A vibration.
Mana tremors.
Someone was channeling energy a lot of it.
The lanterns flickered. The air thickened. The violet sky bled crimson for an instant, then snapped back, leaving a metallic taste in my mouth.
"Not again…" I whispered.
The hum grew louder, trembling through the ground like the city's bones were groaning. A scream rang out from the southern plaza. Then another.
I turned.
Flames of no, 'energy' rising in spirals from the rooftops, red lightning devouring the air. The marketplace erupted into chaos. People ran, stumbled, collided. Merchants abandoned stalls, their fruits spilling like blood onto the stones.
The "Crimson Storm" had come.
And with him, the beginning of the end.
I sprinted.
Each step felt heavier, not from exhaustion, but from the gravity of inevitability. I could feel his aura before I even saw him the sky bending around it, the way light fractured near a dying star.
When I reached the plaza, I stopped dead.
He stood there, at the heart of destruction, surrounded by floating debris and embers that refused to fall. His hair was longer now, his cloak torn and stained with dried energy burns. His eyes once warm, human now glowed with scarlet veins that pulsed like lightning trapped in glass.
"...You," I breathed.
He turned slowly, as if the world itself obeyed his pace.
"Aren?" His voice cracked between disbelief and venom. "No… Adrien Blackwood. You still live."
The name burned in the air like a curse.
I said nothing. The wind carried ash between us. The smell of ozone and blood clung to the stones.
He tilted his head, a twisted smile creeping up.
"They call me "Crimson Storm."Funny, isn't it? How the city names its nightmares."
"You became one," I said quietly.
"I became what this world made me," he answered, spreading his hands. Sparks flared between his fingers. "The gods gave me power, Adrien. Power to erase everything that rotted this place. Power you were too afraid to use."
I stepped closer.
"And what's left after you erase it all?"
He laughed a hollow, broken sound that echoed off the ruined walls. "Purity."
Then his laughter died. His voice dropped to a whisper.
"Tell me… when your mother died that night, did you "feel" it? The moment the light left her eyes?"
My chest tightened. "Stop."
"She screamed your name." His tone twisted into mockery. "So did the others. Maybe I'm doing them a favor ending the screams before they start."
"Stop."
The air cracked. My LNX energy surged instinctively, coiling through my veins like living smoke. He noticed and grinned wider.
"There it is," he said. "The Law of Shadow. You still hide it. Still pretend you're not one of us."
"I don't hide it," I said. "I *control* it."
"Control?" His aura exploded outward. "Then control *this!*"
The world blurred.
Crimson bolts erupted from his hands, ripping through the plaza. I threw myself sideways, shadows blooming from my palm to swallow the impact. The explosion carved a crater where I had stood, scattering fragments of marble like snow.
The fight had begun.
The air over Lunareth was still that morning unnaturally still.
The usual hum of life, the clatter of markets and ringing bells, had vanished as though the city itself was holding its breath.
Adrien stood on a rooftop overlooking the silver canal. The reflection of the pale sun shimmered faintly across the water, yet nothing in him felt alive.
For months, he had wandered. From alley to alley, city to city searching for meaning that no longer existed.
The second chosen one the boy they once called "Lucien Vale" had vanished after the night of the eclipse. But the world hadn't forgotten. Whispers spread across kingdoms: "A man with silver eyes and crimson veins who burns everything he touches."
Adrien's gloved fingers tightened around the cold railing.
"Lucien…" he muttered, his breath faint against the wind. "So it's true. You couldn't escape it either."
He looked down at the street below where children played between ruins, pretending not to notice the soldiers setting up barricades.
Something was coming. Everyone felt it. The calm before the storm had a taste metallic, electric, wrong.
He could feel it too.
The "Lnx energy" pulsed faintly in his chest, resonating with the strange pull in the air the same hum he had felt months ago, the day everything had fallen apart.
"Adrien… sometimes to protect, you must choose what you destroy."
His mother's voice echoed faintly not a memory, but a scar.
He turned away.
But destiny has a habit of circling back always at the wrong time.
PART 2:- THE UNRSVELING
By dusk, the sky above Lunareth turned scarlet.
Then purple.
Then black.
And then… "crimson lightning" fell.
Adrien looked up just as a bolt tore through the clock tower, splitting it in half.
The crowd screamed. Soldiers raised rifles useless gestures against the thing descending through the smoke.
Lucien.
His once-golden hair was now streaked with red light, veins glowing like molten cracks across marble skin. His eyes silver, fractured, shimmering with madness and sorrow.
He hovered midair, silent, surrounded by orbs of unstable mana that spiraled outward in chaos.
The ground beneath him shattered. Buildings folded like paper.
Children cried, parents ran and through it all, Adrien stood unmoving.
For a moment, he saw not a monster.
But a reflection.
The same loneliness.
The same hunger.
The same curse.
"Lucien…" Adrien called, voice calm but heavy. "Stop. You'll destroy everything."
Lucien's head snapped toward him. A grin cold, broken stretched across his face.
"Stop?" he said, voice trembling with restrained laughter. "Why should I stop, Adrien? They deserve it. Every last one of them. You saw it too how they looked at us. Like *we* were the monsters."
"Maybe we are," Adrien said quietly. "But that doesn't make them any less human."
"Human?" Lucien barked a laugh that cracked into a scream. "They killed my sister for being "chosen"! You think I'll let that go?"
Adrien took a step forward, the air rippling around him.
"Then what are you now, Lucien? A god? Or just a boy pretending to be one?"
For a heartbeat, silence.
Then the world exploded.
PART 3:- THE FIRST STRIKE
Lucien's aura erupted a storm of red light tearing through the plaza.
Adrien leapt back, shadows bursting from beneath his feet as the "Lnx energy" flared. Aether and mana fused in his veins, forming a black-and-violet halo behind him.
Their clash shattered the air itself.
Lucien swung first a beam of searing flame-like mana that split the ground in two. Adrien raised his arm, conjuring a wall of shadow that devoured the attack, then countered his eyes glowing with blue-violet energy.
Their powers collided midair red against violet, destruction against control.
The shockwave rippled across the city, toppling towers, scattering debris like sand.
Adrien landed hard on the cobblestone, his hand bleeding from the impact.
Lucien descended slowly, his laughter echoing in the hollow air.
"You've grown strong," Lucien said, voice sharp as glass. "But strength doesn't change truth. The world doesn't need redemption it needs cleansing."
Adrien stood, panting, his coat torn and eyes burning.
"You sound just like them," he said. "The ones who took everything from us."
Lucien's smile faltered for just a second.
Then fury replaced it.
"Don't compare me to them!" he roared, launching forward.
Adrien met him head-on.
Their fists collided, a burst of light consuming the plaza.
PART 4:- THE MEMORY THAT BURNS
Each strike felt like thunder.
Each breath like fire.
Adrien's vision blurred as Lucien's attacks grew wilder, uncontrolled.
Through the chaos, a glimpse a mother clutching her children, shielding them beneath a shattered cart.
For an instant, time froze.
He saw his mother again her hand reaching out through smoke. Her voice trembling as she whispered his name before the eclipse swallowed her.
Adrien's heartbeat echoed in his ears.
He looked at Lucien saw the rage, the grief, the broken humanity behind the chaos.
And he knew if he didn't stop him now, "everything"would burn again.
"Lucien," Adrien said softly, shadows gathering behind him like wings. "You're not saving her this way."
Lucien's eyes widened. "What did you say?"
Adrien's voice was calm, heavy final.
"She wouldn't want this."
For the first time, Lucien hesitated.
And that was enough.
Adrien's body blurred vanishing into shadow. A second later, he reappeared behind Lucien, hand outstretched.
"Lnx: Shadow Law Eclipse Devour."
A surge of violet-black light engulfed them both.
The plaza vanished.
PART 5 :- THE VANISHING
When the dust settled, the city was silent.
Only smoke rose. Only ash fell.
Lucien's body lay still at the center eyes empty, a faint smile on his lips.
Adrien stood over him, trembling, his breath shallow.
A whisper echoed in his head the same voice from before.
"Power demands balance. Balance demands loss."
His vision flickered. The world felt distant, fading.
Then came the voices hundreds of them, whispering through the cracks of reality.
"You are chosen… You are cursed… You are one of us…"
Adrien dropped to his knees, clutching his head.
The "Lnx energy" pulsed violently, forming patterns across his skin ancient sigils glowing faintly beneath the torn fabric.
And then silence.
When the soldiers arrived, there was nothing left.
Only dust.
And a shadow burned into the ground, shaped like wings.
Adrien Blackwood had vanished from Lunareth.