Ash rained from a sepia sky like malignant snow, carpeting the blasted ruins of what had once been Hedra’s eastern industrial district. Ten-storey husks, gutted by mana-wild firestorms, leaned against each other like drunkards in a bar fight. Far below, the cracked asphalt of main street writhed with crimson veins of living corruption—roots of the Beast King’s domain, pumping foul energy into the earth.

  Gerard sprinted across those veins, each stride leaving a small bloom of blue-white mana that fought back the rot for a heartbeat before it returned. Smoke stung his eyes; sweat and grime streaked the lines of his square jaw. Behind him, the combined strike force of humanity’s top forty Awakened pressed the attack in scattered teams, but here, at the spear-tip, only two men raced.

  Elias kept pace on Gerard’s right, crimson heat shimmering around his tall, broad-shouldered frame. Flames coiled like serpents up his spear shaft, flaring at every footfall. The brothers-in-arms had fought side by side since the Orphanage Massacre, five years after the world ended and mana erupted from nowhere. Twenty-five years of battle had etched stories in their scars and in the surety with which they moved together now—no need for words, every glance a paragraph.

  Until today.

  A roar thundered through the canyons of ruined skyscrapers. Windows still intact burst outward, glass tinkling to the ground. The Beast King swelled into view at the far end of the avenue: part horned gorilla, part obsidian porcupine, three storeys tall, muscles knotted like anchor cable. A crown of jagged antlers crackled with black lightning. In the pit of Gerard’s soul, something screamed a warning he couldn’t quite name.

  “Finally.” Elias grinned, spear point lowering. “Time to end this.”

  Gerard’s reply came through gritted teeth. “No glory runs. We follow the plan—bait, flank, decapitate.”

  Elias’s grin widened, but he nodded. Flames burst from under his boots; he vaulted onto a half-collapsed bus and leapt again, clanging onto an overhead sign gantry to gain height. Gerard stayed ground-level, tasking himself with drawing the monster’s focus.

  He inhaled—mana flooded the lattice of channels he had painstakingly forged in his body over three decades. Every inch of skin tingled; every muscle tightened. Soul Reinforcement — Overdrive, fifteen percent, he judged. That threshold wouldn’t tear tendons outright but would still grant him speeds to shame cheetahs and strength to turn concrete to powder. The price would come later: muscle fibers frayed, micro-ruptured organs, a fever that would lay him near death for days. He accepted the cost; humanity’s future was worth another scar.

  Gerard blurred forward, Star-Iron daggers flicking into his hands. He zig-zagged across the street, leaving after-images. The Beast King tracked him, six glowing eyes narrowing. A paw the size of a sedan slammed down, shattering asphalt. Debris exploded outward, a lethal hail—but Gerard was already sliding under the shock wave, carving two quick sigils in the air. Threads of mana tightened into shimmering wires that wrapped the monster’s wrist.

  “Elias, now!” Gerard barked.

  High above, Elias became a comet. “Blazing Lance—Sovereign’s Fall!” he roared. The spear elongated, superheated, a sun-bright javelin of fire and intent. He hurled it in a meteoric arc toward the nape of the Beast King’s neck—the single spot Gerard’s earlier scouting had identified as a vulnerability where chitin plates overlapped.

  The monster lurched, hindered by Gerard’s binding wires. It couldn’t dodge. Victory rose in Gerard’s chest like dawn.

  And then, impossibly, the binding wire snapped—not from strain, but sliced. A spear haft of scarlet flame whipped sideways, striking the wire at precisely the right angle. Gerard’s eyes followed the motion back to its origin—and his pulse froze.

  Elias.

  Locked eyes. A heartbeat that lasted years. In Elias’s pupils flickered a strange violet glow—mana, yes, but wrong, oily where mana should feel crystalline. Yet beneath that eldritch sheen, Gerard saw something heartbreakingly human: spite, resentment feral and ancient.

  “Elias?” His voice cracked, softer than the roaring battlefield deserved.

  Elias spoke, too quiet for others to hear amid the din. Yet the words carved themselves into Gerard’s mind as if etched by red-hot needles.

  “I—won’t—be—second—best.”

  The flaming spear reversed, its tip now targeting not the Beast King but Gerard’s chest. Power screamed along its length. Gerard’s over-reinforced muscles reacted on instinct—he twisted, trying to interpose a dagger—but Overdrive had already begun exacting its hidden toll. A micro-spasm, the barest glitch in movement, cost him four centimeters.

  The spear punched through his left lung, out the back of his shoulder.

  Time fragmented. Gerard staggered, coughing pink froth. Heat charred skin around the wound; the smell of his own burning flesh would have sickened him if shock hadn’t numbed everything. The Beast King bellowed triumph and raised both paws overhead, shadows coalescing into a hammer of darkness.

  Gerard dropped to one knee. Move. Reinforce. Dodge. Commands fired in his brain but his body answered with static. Overdrive was unspooling, mana tearing micro-lesions wider; Elias’s spear had skewered an artery, each heartbeat now a drain.

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  Through tunnel vision he saw Elias land lightly beside him, withdrawing the weapon with a wet hiss. The violet glow in Elias’s eyes flared, then receded into familiar amber. For the barest moment, confusion clouded his features—as though waking from a nightmare.

  “Gerard—what—no, I didn’t—” Elias’s voice wavered.

  The Beast King did not care. Its arm-sized claws descended.

  Gerard summoned the last scraps of mana, weaving them into a translucent cocoon around Elias. He felt rather than saw the impact: earth quaking, bones shaking, spatter of hot blood. Something ruptured inside him; the world tilted.

  When the dust settled, Gerard lay pinned under a slab of collapsed masonry, legs crushed. The Beast King, momentarily satisfied with the blow, turned to swat at other defenders rallying at the far end of the street. Its back was to Gerard, massive heart unguarded for two, maybe three seconds—an eternity for a fighter.

  He tried to rise; agony screamed him back. Dimly he registered Elias kneeling a meter away, eyes wide, hands trembling above the cauterized hole in Gerard’s chest.

  “G-Gerard…” Tears cut tracks through soot on Elias’s cheeks. “I—I don’t know what came over—I couldn’t stop—”

  A cough racked Gerard; copper flooded his tongue. Yet his gaze softened. Even with pain icing his veins, puzzle pieces clicked: the violet mana, the decades-long rivalry turned sour only recently, strange mood swings… External influence. Some entity, maybe the Beast King’s own aura or other manipulator, had twisted Elias’s envy into murderous impulse.

  Understanding brought no solace, but it eased the sharpest edge of betrayal. Gerard managed a raspy breath. “Not… your fault. But listen.”

  Elias leaned close, desperate.

  “Protect… them,” Gerard whispered, meaning humanity, meaning their friends still fighting. “Live… for both… of us.”

  Elias’s shoulders shook with ugly sobs. “I promise.” His spear—still wreathed in embers—trembled in his grasp.

  Somewhere distant, fresh explosions thundered as the second assault squad unleashed artillery mana. Gerard knew he would not see the battle’s end. Blood loss and Overdrive backlash were stealing his vision, blurring edges. Yet his soul remained incandescent, unwilling to fade.

  He closed his eyes—and opened inner sight. Threads of mana in the air danced: cerulean hope from healers, crimson fury from berserkers, sickly indigo corruption from the Beast King. Gerard reached for the cerulean, trying to patch his shredded organs. The mana slipped through spectral fingers; his core could no longer command it.

  But his soul blazed hotter. Whispering. Not yet. Purpose unfulfilled.

  The world hushed. Time’s tide receded. He felt weightless, detached from the crushed body beneath the concrete. Below him—no, around him—he sensed Elias springing back into battle, spear a crimson comet once more. He wished his brother success, redemption. He wished humanity victory.

  Then gravity inverted, or perhaps ceased. Gerard’s soul drifted upward, leaving the mortal coil like vapor rising from a cooling forge. He looked down to see his own body, small and broken, embraced by blue-uniformed medics who had arrived too late.

  So ends Gerard, learner of ten thousand arts, he mused with odd serenity. But maybe… the forge is not yet cold.

  A light appeared high above the toxic clouds—not the sun, which had long been obscured by corruption storms, but a pinprick of argent brilliance that grew, beckoned. It was not Heaven, he felt, nor any afterlife sung by pre-apocalypse poets. It was possibility. A gate hammered open by the raw tenacity of a soul refusing entropy.

  Curiosity, Gerard’s oldest companion, flared. One more lesson, then. He turned toward the light.

  Below, the Beast King shrieked as combined elemental cannons tore into its flank. Elias’s battle cry rose above the din, a paean of rage and penance. Gerard smiled sadly. He whispered a final benediction: “Win, brother.”

  And then the light swallowed him.

  There was no tunnel, no life-review montage, only frequency—a symphony of mana notes he had never heard yet somehow recognized. They layered into harmonic structures, equations of color. Gerard drifted through them, absorbing principles beyond language: Affinity can evolve. Soul can archive. Worlds are many, separated by frequency thresholds.

  He sensed a lattice forming around his essence—a System vast and ancient, greeting him like a librarian with an open ledger.

  Reincarnation Condition Met

  Vessel: Suitable

  Trait: Soul Archive (Complete Form) initialized

  Additional Affinity: Pending natal environment

  Memory Integrity: 87%. Accept? [Y/N]

  Gerard laughed, or the soul equivalent—crackling aurora in the void. Yes. And the ledger inked itself.

  Heat, then cold, then pressure. The sensation of being poured into clay. Somewhere, a heartbeat like a distant drum began—a heart not quite his yet. He curled inward, consciousness dimming, preparing for the long float of gestation.

  Just before sleep claimed him, a single thought rang clear:

  I’ll learn faster this time.

  Elias’s spear sank deep into the Beast King’s chest. Flames howled. In the monster’s dying bellow, no one heard the whisper that escaped Elias’s cracked lips:

  “Forgive me.”

  High overhead, the sepia clouds parted for a breath and a silver star streaked across, unseen by the soldiers below—Gerard’s soul on its way to worlds unknown.

  The first life had ended. The story had only begun.