Year 25 Time Unit, Month 12, Day 17
Location: The Blood Desert.
In that red desert, where the air carried nothing but ash and the scent of iron, Ozal still stood. He fought as if war were an ancient game he had grown weary of centuries ago. His features remained unchanged, untouched by fatigue, though those around him fell like dry leaves in the wind.
But this time, something was different—the humans were fewer. Their numbers were still considerable, yes, but no longer the torrents we had once seen. As if they were beginning to understand that what they faced was not something that could be conquered by sheer numbers.
Suddenly, Ozal turned.
His eyes—or what resembled eyes—locked onto us, fixing upon us as though we were tiny creatures observing him from behind a curtain of dust.
Then he spoke, in a tone laced with an arrogant sort of surprise:
"Oh… What are you doing there? Come closer."
We hesitated for a moment. Then we stepped forward, without knowing why we always obeyed him.
He smiled, but there was no warmth in his smile. It was the smile of someone who knew he could not be touched, no matter how close we got.
Then he said, raising a nonexistent eyebrow, puzzled like someone waking from an incomplete dream:
"Why did you leave in the middle of my story? That was strange."
He looked around—at the corpses, at the cracked earth—then back at us, as if none of it mattered, as if it were all just a backdrop for the tale he had yet to finish.
And then he spoke in a voice trembling with a strange blend of sorrow and contempt, each word peeling something rusted from within:
"You… like them… are no different."
His voice was frail, heavy with a sorrow that defied explanation, as if he spoke not to be heard but to confirm to himself what remained inside.
He fell silent for a moment, then looked up to the sky. The red desert sun hung overhead, burning everything without concern for shadows. Its glare danced upon his dark skin, yet he did not move. He drew a slow breath, as if inhaling dust, not air.
Then he turned his gaze—slowly, heavily, as if facing his past—toward the fallen humans before him. They were not true enemies. None of them ever were… They were just human.
He whispered, perhaps to himself, or to something ancient within that hadn't yet died:
"You want salvation… don't you?"
A short laugh escaped him. It wasn't mockery—it was something closer to broken pity.
"No… I won't allow it."
Then he stretched out his arms, as if to embrace the coming storm, and spoke with a voice devoid of mercy but filled with conviction:
"For this… is my nature. I am your enemy."
He paused. Raised his chin to the sky, then spoke his name slowly, as if bringing it back to life through sheer utterance:
"I am… Ozal Karn."
"And in the name of the family… I will not let you survive while I still draw breath."
Then something strange happened.
It was as if the earth beneath him exploded—not from any external force, but from an internal will that erupted all at once.
He surged forward.
He charged at the retreating humans, now stumbling, screaming without order. No sound rose above the pounding of his steps, as if the earth itself acknowledged his presence.
In his eyes, something had changed—flames without color. Cold as ice. Hot as rage.
He began to crush skulls as if they had never been human, but objects made to be broken. Ribs shattered. Limbs flew. Bodies crumpled in his hands like brittle clay.
His smile… was not joy. It was declaration. A proclamation of instinct's victory over mercy.
He laughed.
A hollow, deep laugh, as if rising from the bottom of a well with no end.
He laughed long… not because anything was funny, but because he alone understood the scale of the tragedy.
He laughed at their ignorance, his patience, the repetition of mistakes made since time immemorial.
He laughed… because he was alone.
He laughed, because no one returns from hell whole.
Then he spoke, staring at the mangled corpses—some headless, some senseless:
"Is it time again… to bring this hell back?"
His voice this time was neither loud nor soft, but more like a whisper exhaled from a heart that had burned too many times, until it became ash that could no longer scatter.
"This prison…"
Suddenly, without warning, the ground beneath him opened like a heavy eyelid, and from it emerged a book.
No, not a book—something that wore the guise of a book.
Its cover was as dark as the abyss, pulsing like a heart, with letters written in a color that resembled no color known:
"3,000,000,000 Corpses."
Ozal looked at the thing… slowly, as if the entirety of his past spilled onto his face in that instant.
"You've returned…"
"My curse… my torment…"
He spoke the words like a cursed prayer, or a confession to a ghost that never left.
Then he lifted his gaze to us. His eyes were still, yet behind them raged a storm beyond measure.
"As for you… the words I meant to say…"
He stopped.
As if he regretted beginning. Or perhaps remembered the ending was never his to give.
"They will remain unfinished."
"But don't worry…"
"You'll hear the rest of the tale from another creature… like me."
"Or perhaps… you won't."
He smiled. No, it wasn't a smile. It was a human farewell, distorted beyond recognition.
Then the book trembled.
It moved beneath him as if the earth shifted with it, and it opened—silently, without light, without mercy.
The pages did not turn.
They folded reality.
In a single moment—as if the world had been devoured in the blink of an eye—everything vanished.
The battlefield, the blood, the corpses, even the burning sun… all gone.
Nothing remained.
Except the darkness.
A deep, suffocating darkness…