When, in just a few days, the rulers of a kingdom that had prospered for years fell at the hands of a fire devil with a human face, hope rested on the shoulders of the strongest.

  But that was too much to ask of a single man.

  “I already knew the damned truth... but what else was I supposed to do?”

  He is not a hero. He can’t be called a knight. And with every step he takes, he drifts further from being human.

  “Who was I supposed to listen to?”

  Everyone expected him to save them.

  But who will save him?

  Who will give something back to the one who lost everything?

  Who will show the path to the one who guided so many?

  The answer is simple: no one.

  “If I had kept fighting... would anything have changed?”

  Even if he truly were immortal, as his nickname suggests, immortality is not the same as invincibility.

  Nor is it necessarily tied to having a soul with inhumanly unshakable emotions.

  “If I didn’t keep believing in them... then what else was I supposed to believe in?”

  Can we blame a hero who failed in his role to protect the weak?

  “Honestly, keeping myself alive... was a mistake. I haven't done a single damn thing right.”

  Does the suffering of the weak automatically invalidate the suffering of the strong?

  “But it doesn’t matter anymore. Everything that could be lost… is already gone.”

  Is he... not human, just because he is the strongest?

  “There’s no reason to keep resisting. I am a killer, not a hero”

  The world lost a hero who never chose to sacrifice himself for others.

  One who had to rise from the dust time and time again—only to always end up in the same place.

  Summit of the Absolute Zero Mountain

  Present Day

  On a morning unusually colder than the rest, Eirwen wakes up realizing her emotions remained unstable even after she lost consciousness.

  As a result, a violent ice storm is ravaging the castle.

  Having spent hours under constant gusts of wind, more aggressive than usual, with shards of ice flying at high speeds in what no longer seems like a snowstorm but rather a tornado, some windows have cracked and various walls have begun to collapse—slowly but steadily—as the old castle shakes violently.

  Eirwen, still unable to control her powers at will, desperately searches for a way to calm them down to avoid further damage to her only home.

  Knowing that books are usually her “escape from reality,” she struggles to free herself from the rubble and crawls toward the library in hopes of soothing herself through reading.

  In the process, she comes across the book "Founders of Civilizations", which tells the stories of the most powerful and significant kingdoms in the entire history of the continent of Ar.

  There, looking for information about her family, she is faced with the fact that almost all the pages about the Kingdom of Oberon have been torn out.

  However, she gradually finds calm as she immerses herself in the pages that remain intact.

  In the remaining intact pages where Oberon is mentioned, the book recounts how, just forty years ago, this kingdom was spreading civilization and modernity across the underdeveloped settlements of Ar.

  It gained followers throughout the continent and was praised by those who would later become its allies, largely due to the lack of cruelty in Oberon’s ruler, Kayron.

  As Kayron’s supporters grew across Ar, what would become one of the most powerful kingdoms in history began to take shape.

  Kayron managed to win over producers and exporters of all kinds of resources, which he used to enrich his people—rapidly turning Oberon into a powerhouse in raw material production and export.

  He also built an army strong enough to defend it.

  Kayron was an incredibly charismatic man.

  Despite his strength and the readiness of his warriors, he always preferred to win over other nations by forging mutually beneficial relationships or persuading them that they would need him as an ally.

  He was a pacifist—an honorable man born into a noble family who blindly pursued the dream of a world without borders.

  But in the end, he would be destroyed by his greatest enemy.

  After all, Oberon was only one side of the coin.

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  On the other side stood the Kingdom of Tora, that enemy who came out of nowhere and would eventually erase Oberon from the map—becoming the most direct indirect cause of Eirwen’s current situation.

  “Now that I think about it…”

  Eirwen looks at the book more intently than usual and feels as if she had never read it completely, which leads her to try to piece together the history even without the missing pages.

  “How could a kingdom with Oberon’s level of influence fall so quickly to a single enemy?”

  The Kingdom of Tora.

  A kingdom that, after a recent coup d’état, had begun to adopt a colonialist and supremacist stance—aiming to conquer all of Ar and make it part of its own empire.

  Its new ruler, Tora Zahar, is a pyromaniac with no sense of morality and not a trace of mercy—more than an army of soldiers, he commands a legion of hitmen who wipe out every sign of life to achieve their objectives.

  By taking control of Ar’s entire underworld and creating a “criminal association” later named Tartarus, he began sowing discord among Oberon’s allies, aiming to orchestrate Kayron’s downfall.

  Thus, from the shadows, Zahar began massacring village after village—taking the survivors as slaves and impaling the dead bodies on stakes that would later be driven into Oberon’s walls as a form of provocation.

  These provocations, along with the persecution of Oberon’s allies, eventually stirred in Kayron the rage that led him to declare war on Tora.

  However, due to Tora’s dirty strategies, it was difficult for a kingdom governed by honor and morality like Oberon to respond effectively.

  “Here it cuts off again…”

  Completely absorbed in the story, Eirwen has forgotten the reason she began reading in the first place.

  “So… Tora won because they struck from the shadows using dirty tricks?”

  Even though the outlook is grim—and she already knows how Oberon’s story ends—Eirwen notices one last scrap of page that remains untouched.

  —“The Immortal Puma”? Seems like Oberon had some powerful warriors, —Eirwen whispers to herself.

  It is told that, in one of the decisive battles nineteen years ago, a man singlehandedly defended a village from Tora’s assassins, saving a total of 533 villagers and holding Tora’s minions at bay for three days, until he collapsed unconscious.

  Between scattered fragments, it is said that he was the right hand of the Admiral of the Oberon Army and the youngest soldier ever to join the military—also the youngest to be promoted to the rank of Vice Admiral.

  During the war, when the Admiral realized Oberon had no chance of winning against Tora’s deceitful tactics, he allowed his right hand to fulfill the final request of his fallen comrade: to protect his homeland.

  So, abandoning the front lines that were already lost, he bid farewell to his superior and marched toward his destiny.

  It is said that he fought using nothing but his own body, and that his rage and resilience were so immense that even poison failed to bring him down. In the end, he collapsed unconscious from sheer exhaustion, blood loss, and the countless wounds he suffered during those three days.

  Amazingly, he survived. And after the war, Zahar exploited his sense of justice—forcing him to trade several years of service in exchange for the lives of the enslaved survivors from the very village he had fought so hard to protect.

  A promise that, for obvious reasons...

  “This is the last thing left undestroyed… What could have happened to that ‘Puma’?”

  In the rest of the book’s historical accounts, there are no further references to either Tora or Oberon. What little there is about Tora comes only from Oberon’s chapter, as Tora has no chapter of its own.

  “I wonder if any of them are still alive… It feels like they were all wiped out.”

  Thanks to this book, Eirwen now believes she may have just learned the identity of her possible father: The King Kayron. However, she also considers the possibility that, due to his position and feats, the Puma might be related to her in some way—even if not by blood.

  Still, despite having read every book in the library, she has never been able to discover what truly became of her family, where they might be now, or even confirm exactly who they were. This has also left her not even knowing her own last name.

  “I wish at least one of them would come looking for me.”

  Lying on the floor as she read, Eirwen slowly stands—though staggering weakly—and begins to wander the castle aimlessly.

  There is no more food left, but the body of a grown woman like hers needs nutrients—nutrients she has lacked for most of her life.

  Additionally, the constant use of her essentia, even if unintentional, and the wounds caused by the falling debris that nearly crushed her, are taking a heavy toll. She begins to feel increasingly faint.

  With dizziness growing stronger, her muscles weakening, and her energy slowly draining, Eirwen walks back to the first room in the castle she remembers ever being in.

  —“Frost, Flake, Blizzard...” —she murmurs weakly, sorrow in her voice.

  On the ground lie three doll-like figures resembling small golems, seemingly made of ice. Although their names are still engraved on their chests, they no longer respond to her call.

  Staggering slowly toward one of them and nearly sobbing, she begins to eat the ice in a desperate attempt to ease her hunger.

  “I hope you can forgive me.”

  Eirwen had resisted eating her only three friends, but she knows that, if they were still alive, they would want her to survive. So she decides to make one last effort to ease her hunger, even if only with frozen water and dirt.

  “I did everything I could to live, so I hope that when I can’t go on any longer, you’ll welcome me in the afterlife.”

  Her only hope would be another arcane creature like Luke, but there won’t be a second Luke.

  Even dragons avoid climbing to the top of the mountain. And it doesn’t matter if creatures like Yetis have fur thick enough to withstand the cold—when massive ice shards spin trapped in a blizzard as fast as an F5 tornado, we’re talking about nearly indestructible blades and giant chunks of ice spinning at 500 km/h, ready to shred to pieces anything in their path.

  But Eirwen has little control over herself—certainly not enough to contain the threat her own power poses. And as her condition worsens, the effects of her magic will only grow more dangerous with her… while the darkness lurking outside the castle keeps her from setting a single foot beyond its walls.

  “In stories, princesses usually get a happy ending.”

  “Where’s mine?”