Prologue: The Chrysalis of the Soul
Death was an insult. An abrupt and graceless end dictated by the deafening screech of tires on wet asphalt and a symphony of breaking glass.
There was an instant of white, searing pain, a crushing pressure that wiped out the world, and then, a silence so profound that it devoured the impact's own echo.
I woke up, not as a man, but as an idea. A naked consciousness, stripped of body and name, suspended in a place I could only describe as a chrysalis of light.
It was neither Heaven nor Hell. It was an in-between space, a celestial workshop where souls and miracles were forged into weapons. All around me, threads of golden energy, an incomprehensible divine code, wove and unwound into an infinite tapestry.
It was the Sacred Gear System, and I, somehow, had become one of its pieces.
There was no time, only a static existence. There was no movement, only the sensation of being submerged in an ocean of light and code, the pressure so immense that I could barely "flex" my will.
Every attempt to move, to assert my own existence, was met with the passive and unyielding resistance of the system. It was a cage without bars, a prison of divine purpose.
And I felt a need.
It was a compulsion etched into my new essence, a programmed hunger that gnawed at me. The need for a host.
I felt the gravitational pull of souls in the world of the living, a constant calling, an order to join, to fuse, to become another's power. Their tool.
The system was not holding me out of malice; it was merely keeping me in stasis, awaiting the proper vessel. The idea of that subjugation, of surrendering my will to another being, was an agony worse than oblivion itself.
Eons passed, or perhaps only seconds. In that timelessness, I fought in silence, a one-thought rebellion against an infinite system. I refused to yield, I refused to be merely a gift for a fortunate soul.
Then, something changed. A pulse ran through the system, a vibration of finality. The code around me lit up, the golden threads tightened and converged on a single point in the world of the living. The system had found a match.
A compatible soul.
A host.
I felt a celestial lock click into place, my destiny sealed by a divine machine that did not understand freedom. The pressure around me intensified, and then, it was released.
I was not guided; I was injected. The chrysalis of light shattered, and I was thrown into a dizzying plunge through reality, a comet of pure consciousness drawn to a beacon of nascent life.
The pull was irresistible, a sentence decreed and executed in the same instant.
I crashed against a new soul, a small, flickering soul, and the darkness of my prison was replaced by an avalanche of sensations.
For the first time in what felt like an eternity, I felt.
The warmth. The rhythmic and muffled thump-thump of a heart that was not my own.
The feeling of being enveloped in a warm liquid. Distant sounds, muffled voices that reached me through layers of flesh and water.
I could see, not with eyes, but through the closed eyelids of another, a reddish gloom. I was inside a mother's womb, anchored to the soul of an unborn child.
The chrysalis was gone. The suspended space had vanished. In a way, I was free. Free from the void, free from stasis.
But as I felt the confines of my new home —the growing bones, the developing skin—, I grasped the horrible truth.
I had escaped a cage of light only to be locked inside one of flesh and bone.
I was bound to a bearer. I was a part of him, a tool waiting to be discovered, a power waiting to be wielded.
A name, a fundamental truth of my new being, burned in my consciousness: Canis Lykaon.
The child moved in his mother's womb, a small spasm, and I felt it as if it were my own. In that moment, in the warmth of my new, biological prison, I made a silent promise.
I would not be anyone's weapon. I would find a way to break this chain, no matter the cost.
Absolute freedom would be my only hunt.