"We should have erased you when we had the chance!"
The red-haired old man's voice cracked as he stood amid ruin.
The battlefield stretched endlessly in every direction a graveyard of armor, shattered banners, and bodies burned beyond recognition. Smoke drifted through the air in thick spirals, stinging the eyes and choking the lungs.
His once-golden armor was split down the center. Blood ran from beneath it in slow, steady streams.
"You've annihilated ninety-nine percent of our army…" His sword trembled in his grip. "You MONSTER!"
Above them, the sky was wrong.
It was not dark. It was not bright.
It was fractured.
Cracks of white light split through the heavens like veins, spreading outward as if the world itself had been struck.
Before him stood a lone figure.
No army.
No allies.
Just one being.
White flames coiled around its body but they did not burn outward like normal fire. They bent inward, folding into themselves, compressing, condensing.
As though consuming reality instead of air.
A low laugh rolled across the battlefield.
"HAHAHAHA…"
The sound was layered too deep, too vast, too heavy for a single throat.
"You are too late," the figure said.
Its voice was calm.
Ancient.
Final.
"I have already ignited it."
The old man's eyes widened.
"You would doom the world… just to defy us?"
The figure tilted its head slightly.
"Doom?"
A pulse of white rippled through the air. The corpses on the ground disintegrated into ash without flame.
"No," it replied softly.
"Reset."
The light expanded.
The sky shattered completely.
And everything was swallowed in white.
Felix jerked awake.
His lungs dragged in air as if he had been drowning.
The darkness of the small wooden house pressed against him from all sides. For a moment, he couldn't move. His heart pounded violently, each beat echoing in his ears.
The dream again.
No…
It didn't feel like a dream.
It felt like a memory.
Cold sweat soaked through his thin blanket and into the straw mattress beneath him. His shirt clung uncomfortably to his skin.
Beside him, two soft breaths rose and fell in steady rhythm.
His mother.
His younger sister.
Sleeping close together under a patched quilt.
"Felix?" his mother murmured weakly, her eyes still closed. "Was it that dream again?"
He wiped his forehead quickly, steadying his voice.
"…Yeah. It's nothing."
She shifted slightly but didn't press further.
She never did.
Felix turned his head toward the cracked clock hanging crookedly on the wall.
4:00 a.m.
The numbers were faded. The ticking uneven.
He pushed himself up slowly, careful not to wake his sister. She stirred faintly, clutching the blanket tighter.
For a brief second, guilt flickered through him.
She was only six.
She shouldn't be living like this.
None of them should.
Felix stepped quietly over the wooden floorboards. They creaked beneath his weight though he hardly weighed enough to justify the sound.
Eight years old.
Too thin.
His ribs were faintly visible beneath his shirt. Dark circles hung beneath his eyes like bruises carved by exhaustion. His hands were rough from work small, but already hardened.
He paused near the door.
For just a moment
He felt warmth in his palms.
Not heat from outside.
From within.
He looked down.
A faint spark.
White.
Gone instantly.
Felix frowned.
"…Again."
It only happened after the dream.
He didn't tell his mother.
She already worried enough.
Outside, the air was cold and damp.
The demon district was quiet at this hour. Narrow streets of worn stone stretched in crooked lines between aging wooden houses. Smoke rose faintly from a few chimneys early workers like him.
Demons.
Not the horned monsters humans imagined in their stories.
Just people.
People who worked.
People who struggled.
People who survived.
Felix's gaze hardened slightly.
People who were blamed.
Leaning against the side of the house was the Trek.
His father's most prized possession.
A dwarven mana-cycle.
It resembled a bicycle, but thicker in frame, reinforced with rune-carved metal. Beneath it, locked into a compartment near the rear wheel, rested a small cylindrical mana battery.
A faint blue glow pulsed inside it.
Mana batteries were a necessity for those born without internal mana common among the lower districts. Without them, transportation, tools, even heating systems were impossible.
Felix ran his fingers across the handlebar.
The leather grip was worn smooth.
His father's hands had once held it every day.
Before
His jaw tightened.
Before the accusation.
Before the trial.
Before the execution.
Guard soldier to the demon baron.
Accused of treason.
Accused of aiding in the kidnapping of the baron's daughter.
Evidence presented.
Witnesses sworn.
Sentence delivered.
Too clean.
Too fast.
Felix had watched from the crowd.
He still remembered his father's eyes.
Not fearful.
Not ashamed.
Angry.
At something unseen.
Felix mounted the Trek.
The mana battery hummed faintly as it activated.
But as he pressed the pedal
The blue glow flickered.
For a split second
It turned white.
Then returned to normal.
Felix froze.
"…What?"
He looked down at the battery casing.
No cracks.
No damage.
He shook his head and began pedaling.
The cycle rolled smoothly through the empty streets.
Bundles of newspapers were stacked in a cloth sack tied behind him. He delivered them door to door tossing them with careful aim so they wouldn't tear.
Work before sunrise.
Coins by noon.
Enough for bread.
Sometimes.
As he moved through the district, the dream lingered in his thoughts.
The old man's words echoed.
We should have erased you…
Erased who?
And why did it feel like
Like he had been the one standing in white flame?
Felix gripped the handlebar tighter.
"I'm not a monster," he muttered under his breath.
He was just a kid trying to protect his family.
That was all.
High above the clouds, beyond mortal sight
Something shifted.
A presence stirred in ancient slumber.
Far away, atop a mountain hidden by eternal storms, a colossal eye slowly opened.
Gold.
Ancient.
Watching.
The air trembled faintly.
"Impossible…"
The whisper carried across the peaks like distant thunder.
"A fragment…?"
Below, in the quiet demon district, an eight-year-old boy pedaled through empty streets.
Unaware—
That something older than kingdoms had begun to notice him.