The battlefield stank of iron and ash.
Smoke coiled in the night air, smothering the stars. Broken banners flapped in the wind, their colors unrecognizable beneath blood and soot. The earth was scorched black, the ground cracked open where fire had swept through. The silence was heavy, broken only by the distant cries of carrion birds and the occasional groan of the dying.
Amid the corpses, something stirred.
Kael Ardyn gasped awake.
The taste of ash filled his mouth. His body screamed with pain—bones fractured, skin split, muscles trembling with every breath. He lay on his back among the dead, his armor shattered, his sword arm twisted wrong. Blood caked his face, but the greater pain came from within. His chest burned, not with fire but with something alive, something hammering against his ribs like a forge gone mad.
He clawed at his chest, coughing blood. His fingers brushed something beneath the skin—a jagged shard, embedded deep, glowing faintly with an otherworldly heat.
And then he remembered. The last moments before darkness.
The clash of armies. The sky split by flame. The shattering of relics. And that fragment of blinding light that had pierced him when the world itself seemed to break.
The shard.
Now, it pulsed inside him like a heart not his own.
Kael staggered upright, his legs trembling. His sword lay nearby, the steel cracked but intact. He grabbed it, forcing his weight against the blade to steady himself. Around him, the battlefield stretched endless. Corpses lay in twisted heaps—soldiers, scavengers, even beasts bred for war. All dead. All silent.
Or so he thought.
A crunch of boots broke the quiet. Shadows moved between the smoke. Voices muttered, low and eager.
Scavengers.
"Check the bodies," one hissed. "Relics don't care if they're warm or cold."
"Strip the gear. Anyone breathing gets finished."
Kael's pulse quickened. His body was broken, his strength spent. If they found him, he would join the corpses.
The shard pulsed once, harder. For a heartbeat, Kael thought he heard something—like a voice buried in the heat of the forge. Survive.
He pressed against the rubble, trying to stay still. But blood dripped from his arm, spattering the stone. One of the scavengers froze.
"Wait. Over there."
A figure broke from the smoke, blade raised. His eyes gleamed with hunger when he saw Kael still breathing.
"Lucky bastard," the scavenger sneered. "Still alive. That shard glow's mine."
He lunged.
Kael barely had time to raise his cracked sword. Steel met steel with a shriek, the impact jolting his broken bones. He staggered, pain blinding him, but instinct shoved his arm forward. His blade slipped beneath the scavenger's guard and pierced his chest.
The man's eyes widened. He choked—but it was not blood that left his lips.
It was light.
A scream ripped from his throat, raw and formless, not of flesh but of soul. Kael's blade pulsed as the shard inside him flared, dragging the man's essence free. The scavenger's body collapsed, hollow and empty, even before the glow finished streaming into Kael's chest.
Kael convulsed as the soul struck him. Fire hammered into his veins, searing through his muscles, knitting broken fibers, flooding his blood with impossible strength. His vision cleared, the haze lifting. His heartbeat steadied. His body, which had been on the brink of collapse, now thrummed with stolen vitality.
The corpse at his feet was wrong—eyes wide, mouth open, but lifeless in a way no corpse should be. Empty.
Kael staggered back, horrified. His hand shook on the hilt. He had not just killed a man—he had devoured him.
And then, symbols carved themselves into the air before his eyes:
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
[ SOULFORGE INTERFACE ]
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Name: Kael Ardyn
Title: Fragment Bearer
Soul Count: 1,453 (+3)
Fragment: Soulforge Shard (Dormant)
────── Abilities ──────
• Wraith Claw – spectral claws devour fragments
• Edge of Decay – corrodes weapons and matter
• Aegis of the Broken – instinctive soul shield
• Entropy Spark – corrodes divine relics
────── Attributes ──────
Vitality: 12 → 15
Strength: 15 → 17
Will: 18 → 21
Forgecraft: 21 → 24
──────── Notes ────────
[ Warning ] – Soulforge remains unstable.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Kael froze, his breath ragged. Numbers. Words. A system etched in fire and shadow. And at its center, the shard—the Soulforge—hungered.
His body should have felt heavy. But instead, he felt stronger. Faster. Whole. The broken warrior who had crawled among corpses was gone. Something else stood in his place.
More voices shouted through the smoke.
"He's there! The shard-bearer!"
"Kill him before he feeds again!"
Figures emerged—three, four, maybe more. Greed burned in their eyes.
Kael raised his sword. His hands still trembled, but no longer from weakness. The shard pulsed in his chest, its whisper curling through his mind.
Feed me.
Kael's shadow stretched, claws twitching.
The scavengers charged.
And Kael, with no choice but forward, stepped to meet them.