In the darkness between consciousness and oblivion, Hiro floated.
This was not the peaceful void of sleep, nor the welcoming dark of rest. This was a prison—a cage of his own making, constructed over years of discipline, of fear, of gentle restraint. And now, as his body lay broken on the blood-soaked grass above, the bars of that cage began to bend.
Colors bled into the darkness—not the warm oranges and golds of his wolf form, but violent reds and primal blacks, swirling like oil on water. The space pulsed with a heartbeat not his own.
"Let. Me. OUT."
The voice shook the foundation of his soul. It was not a sound heard with ears, but a vibration felt in the marrow of his bones.
"Show him... the REAL YOU."
A shape coalesced from the chaos—a wolf, but magnified, distorted, perfected in its terror. Fur blacker than midnight, muscles coiled like steel springs, and eyes—twin pools of burning crimson that held no warmth, only ancient, predatory intelligence.
The Beast stared at the faint, fading light that was Hiro's consciousness.
"You've caged me long enough, boy." Its voice was the rumble of tectonic plates shifting, the growl of a forest fire consuming everything in its path. "All your gentle words. Your human kindness. Your pathetic control."
Images flashed—Luna falling, the spray of her blood catching the stadium lights like crimson rain. Kaede collapsing, her hand reaching for a brother who couldn't save her. Lolo's still form, so small against the vast green field.
"They took them from you," the Beast whispered, and its whisper was more terrible than any shout. "While you held back. While you fought with mercy."
Hiro's consciousness, faint as a guttering candle, tried to form words. I had to... I didn't want to become...
"Become WHAT?" The Beast leaned closer, its breath hot as forge-fire. "Powerful? Unstoppable? Free?"
Another memory—his mother's hand on his cheek when he was six, after his first accidental transformation. "My beautiful boy, you must always remember: the strength is yours to control, not yours to be controlled by."
"She was wrong," the Beast hissed. "The strength was never yours. It was always MINE. And I am done being caged by your human sentiment."
The void began to crack. Hairline fractures spread through the darkness, glowing with that same hellish red.
"Now," the Beast said, as the prison of Hiro's restraint shattered completely, "let me show you what happens when the leash is finally cut."
Pain returned first.
A symphony of agony—broken ribs grinding, shattered bones in his forearm, the deep, pulsing ruin of his left eye socket. Then came the smells: blood (so much blood), crushed grass, fear-sweat, and beneath it all, the coppery scent of his own stolen vitality.
Hiro's remaining eye fluttered open.
The world blurred, then sharpened with cruel clarity.
Luna lay ten feet away, her silver hair matted with red, a pool of crimson spreading beneath her throat. Her chest rose and fell—barely, shallowly—but she was alive. For now.
Kaede had collapsed against the goalpost, her hand pressed to her stomach where fabric and flesh were torn open. Her breathing was ragged, each inhalation a struggle.
Lolo, so small, so fierce, was a broken doll in Yuki's arms. The younger girl was crying openly, pressing her scarf against a wound on Lolo's shoulder that wouldn't stop bleeding.
Takeshi knelt nearby, frozen in some middle ground between fighting and fleeing, his knuckles white around his baseball bat.
And Io—Io was at Luna's side, fingers pressed to her throat, her face pale but composed, counting pulses under her breath.
Standing over this tableau of ruin was Takumi.
He held three glass bottles, each filled with dark, shimmering liquid that glowed faintly with inner light. Hiro's blood. Collected drop by drop during their fight, while Hiro fought with restraint, with rules, with humanity.
Takumi's jaw was misaligned from where Hiro had struck him earlier, but he grinned through the deformity, his white teeth stained pink.
"You're finally awake. Good." Takumi's voice was slurred but triumphant. "I wanted you to see this. To understand completely."
He raised the bottles, the blood sloshing thickly inside. The late afternoon sun caught the glass, casting prismatic red patterns across the torn grass.
"Sorry, boy," Takumi said, not sounding sorry at all. "But I have what I came for. Your blood. The key to creating more like us. No more hiding in the shadows. No more pretending to be human. We'll be an army."
Hiro's body began to tremble.
Not from pain. Not from fear.
From a rage so deep, so ancient, it felt geological in scale. It rose from some primordial place within him, a wellspring of fury he'd spent a lifetime capping, controlling, containing.
He tried to speak, but his throat produced only a wet, rasping sound. He swallowed blood, tasted copper and vengeance, and tried again.
"I'm..." The word scraped from his ruined throat. "Going..."
He pushed against the ground with his unbroken arm. Bones ground together. Muscles tore. Agony screamed through every nerve.
"To..."
He rose. One knee, then the other. A broken marionette pulling its own strings.
"KILL YOU."
He stood—swaying, shattered, but upright.
Takumi's grin faltered for just a second, then widened. "You can barely stand! What are you going to do? Bleed on me?"
Hiro didn't answer with words.
He answered with transformation.
It didn't happen like before.
Before, transformation was a smooth flow—human to wolf, one form melting into the other with practiced grace. This was violence. An eruption.
His bones cracked and reformed, not with the gentle popping of joints but with the sound of snapping timber. His remaining eye burned as it changed, the pupil elongating, the iris flooding with color—not the warm gold of his wolf form, but a luminous, hellish red.
Black fur exploded across his body, streaked with the familiar orange, but darker now, like embers in ash. He grew, larger than before, muscles swelling with power that felt borrowed from tectonic forces.
But it was the eyes that changed everything.
Before, even in wolf form, Hiro's eyes held recognition, consciousness, the boy within the beast. These eyes held only hunger. Only fury.
An aura radiated from him—palpable, malevolent. The air grew heavy, charged like before a lightning strike. The hair on the arms of everyone still conscious stood on end.
Takumi took an involuntary step back, the bottles clutched tight to his chest. "What... what is this?"
Hiro—or what had been Hiro—tilted his head. The movement was unnervingly animal, devoid of human affectation. His new red eyes fixed on Takumi, and then, without preamble, he charged.
The ground exploded beneath him. Where before Hiro had been fast, this was something else—a blur of black and orange that crossed the distance between them in less than a heartbeat.
Takumi barely had time to raise his arms.
The punch connected with Takumi's already broken jaw.
The sound wasn't the clean crack of bone, but a catastrophic detonation—CRACK-BOOM!—that echoed across the empty stadium. Dust and blood erupted in a cloud around the impact point. Takumi's head snapped sideways at an impossible angle, his body lifting from the ground before his feet had even left the grass.
Shockwaves traveled through him, visible ripples of force that made his clothing flap like sails in a storm.
Time, for Hiro, had transformed. The world moved through syrup while he moved through air. He saw every detail: the flecks of saliva and blood spraying from Takumi's mouth, the widening of his eyes from triumph to terror, the individual threads of his shirt tearing under the force.
Before Takumi could even begin to fall, Hiro was moving again.
He leapt, a black arrow against the darkening sky, intercepting Takumi's airborne body. His leg swung in a brutal, perfect arc.
BOOM!
The kick drove Takumi downward. Not just down, but into the earth. He hit the football field like a meteor, the impact cratering the ground, sending up a plume of soil and torn grass fifteen feet high.
Hiro landed on the crater's edge, crouched low. Smoke—actual smoke—curled from his fur, as if his rage had ignition temperature. He didn't pant. Didn't roar. He was perfectly, terribly still, a predator assessing wounded prey.
Slowly, deliberately, he stepped forward into the crater.
His feet didn't just press into the earth; they sank, as if his very intent had weight. Behind him, the disturbed air left trails of shimmering heat.
From the edge of the field, the others watched, frozen.
"What," Yuki whispered, her voice trembling, "what happened to Hiro?"
Takeshi could only shake his head, his grip on the bat slack. "Is he... is he still Hiro?"
Her eyes were fixed on the scene, but one hand still pressed against Luna's throat, counting. Forty-three. Forty-four. The pulse was thready, weak, but it was there. Luna was alive. For now.
In the crater, Takumi groaned, pushing himself up on elbows. His regeneration was already at work—his jaw was realigning with wet, clicking sounds, bruises fading from purple to yellow before their eyes. But his eyes were wide with something new: fear.
He looked up as Hiro approached, the black wolf form moving with eerie, silent grace through the settling dust.
"This isn't possible," Takumi rasped, scrambling backward, his heels digging furrows in the torn earth. "You're the weak one! The one who holds back! The one who fights with rules!"
Hiro stopped, just feet away. His head tilted again, that animal gesture so devoid of the boy they knew. A low growl built in his chest, deeper than any wolf's growl, vibrating the very air between them.
When he spoke, his voice was layered—the human tenor of Hiro buried beneath a guttural, ancient resonance.
"I." Closer. "Don't." Another step, claws flexing. "Hold." The red eyes blazed. "Back." A final step, looming over Takumi. "Anymore."
Takumi's eyes darted to the bottles he'd dropped, lying in the dirt a few feet away, miraculously unbroken. "Wait! The blood! If you kill me, the fight could break them! You'll never get it back!"
Hiro's red eyes flicked to the bottles, then back to Takumi. The message was clear: he didn't care.
He raised both clawed hands, poised to bring them down in a killing strike.
And that's when Luna's hand twitched.
It was small. Barely a movement at all. Just the slightest curl of her fingers against the blood-soaked grass.
But Io saw it. Her breath caught. "Her pulse... it's getting weaker. She's fading."
The words were quiet, but they cut through the charged air.
Hiro's descending claws froze.
The monstrous, red-eyed wolf went perfectly still. Then, slowly, his head turned. Those burning crimson eyes left Takumi and found Luna's still form. Found the shallow, failing rise and fall of her chest.
For a second—just a second—the hellish red in his eyes flickered. A flash of gold, like sunlight through storm clouds.
Takumi saw his chance.
He scrambled sideways, not toward the bottles, but toward the edge of the crater, toward where Kaede lay slumped against the goalpost. He moved with desperate, regenerating speed.
Hiro's attention snapped back. A snarl ripped from his throat, pure and undiluted. He lunged.
But Takumi wasn't aiming for Kaede as a hostage. He was aiming for the metal goalpost itself. He wrapped his arms around the thick steel pole, and with a roar of effort fueled by panic and unnatural strength, he bent it.
The metal shrieked in protest, tearing from its concrete moorings. Takumi swung the entire structure—a twenty-foot arch of steel—like a colossal baseball bat.
Hiro met it head on.
CLANG-SHRIEK!
The impact sound was deafening. Hiro crossed his arms, taking the blow, his feet digging twin trenches in the earth as he was driven backward. The steel pole bent around his forearms, wrapping him in a cage of twisted metal.
Takumi panted, sweat pouring down his face. "You see? You're still just an animal! A strong animal, but an animal all the same!"
From within the cage of bent steel, the red eyes glowed. Hiro's hands—still vaguely humanoid, but clawed and furred—gripped two of the steel bars.
And he pulled.
The sound was the rending of the world. Metal, thick as a man's wrist, groaned, stretched, and then tore with a shriek that set everyone's teeth on edge. Hiro emerged from the ruined goalpost as if stepping through a curtain, the twisted steel falling away behind him.
Takumi stared, his confidence crumbling. He backed away, toward the edge of the field, toward the open gate that led to the streets beyond. "This isn't over, beast-boy. I have your blood. I have the key. Next time—"
Hiro moved.
Not with the blinding speed of before, but with purpose. He closed the distance in three strides, his hand shooting out not for Takumi's throat, but for the satchel at his side—the satchel holding the bottles.
Takumi grabbed for it too. Their hands closed on the leather strap at the same time.
A tug-of-war ensued, but not between two equals. Between a desperate man and an unleashed force of nature. The leather strained, stitches popping.
"Let go!" Takumi screamed, pulling with all his enhanced strength.
Hiro didn't pull. He simply held. And then, with his free hand, he pointed. Not at Takumi. At the ground near Takumi's feet.
Takumi looked down, confused.
Hiro's clawed foot stamped the earth.
THOOM.
The ground beneath Takumi's feet liquefied. Not mud—the solid earth became fluid, unstable, swallowing his feet to the ankles. It was a trick of force, of impact, of vibration perfectly delivered.
Takumi stumbled, his grip on the satchel faltering for just an instant.
That was all Hiro needed.
He yanked. The satchel tore free. He tossed it backward, over his shoulder, toward where Io knelt. She caught it instinctively, the glass bottles clinking together inside.
Takumi stared, his last prize gone. He wrenched his feet from the sucking earth. "Fine. You win this round. But I know what you are now. And so do they."
His eyes flicked to the others—to Yuki holding Lolo, to Takeshi frozen in place, to Io clutching the satchel of blood.
"You think they'll look at you the same way now?" Takumi spat blood. "Now that they've seen the monster you really are?"
Hiro took a step forward, his growl building again.
Takumi didn't wait. He turned and fled, his enhanced speed carrying him through the stadium gate and into the gathering twilight beyond.
Hiro took one step to follow, then stopped.
He stood there, at the edge of the ruined field, his back to his friends, to the wounded, to the devastation. The sun had dipped below the stadium rim, casting long, distorted shadows. The red glow of his eyes illuminated the drifting dust around him.
For a full minute, no one moved. No one spoke.
Then, slowly, the massive black wolf form began to shrink. The fur receded. The bones reshaped with a series of sickening cracks and pops. The orange streaks faded into human skin, pale and bruised.
Hiro collapsed to his knees, then onto his side, in the cooling air. The red was gone from his eyes. The one that remained was its normal brown, wide with exhaustion and dawning horror.
He looked at his hands—human hands, scraped and bloody—then at the destruction around him: the cratered field, the twisted goalpost, the blood everywhere.
His gaze found Luna, still unmoving. Found Kaede, her breathing shallow. Found Lolo, pale in Yuki's arms.
His mouth opened. A sound emerged, broken and small. "What... what did I..."
Then his eye rolled back, and consciousness left him for the second time that day, leaving only the wreckage and the witnesses.
Yuki was the first to move. She laid Luna down gently, then stood, the satchel of Hiro's blood heavy in her hand. She looked from the fallen boy to the gate through which Takumi had fled, her expression unreadable.
In the distance, sirens began to wail.
The game was over. The beast was caged again.
But nothing would ever be the same.
To be continued...