The night over Lunareth was quiet. Only the distant hum of mana-filled wind brushed through the leaves. The moon hung low, pale and steady, its light falling across Aetherion Haven. Inside, everyone was asleep—everyone except Shadow.
He stood alone outside the base, gazing into the mist-draped trees. His gauntlets pulsed faintly on his hands, a dim light tracing across their surface like a heartbeat. Something had been stirring inside them for days now. A pull. A quiet voice beneath the metal that whispered—not in words, but in feeling.
Shadow closed his eyes. "You've been restless too, huh?" he murmured. The gauntlets gave a faint pulse in reply.
He took a slow breath and let his mana flow freely, syncing it with the weapon. The forest around him dimmed, the air thickened, and the world tilted sideways.
When he opened his eyes again, the forest was gone.
He stood in the middle of an abandoned town—silent, colorless, lifeless. The sky above was cracked like broken glass, bleeding faint light through gray clouds. The cobblestone ground was fractured, and in the distance, a bell rang once before fading into silence.
Shadow flexed his hand. His gauntlets were still there, but their glow had vanished. When he tried to summon any of his transformations—nothing. The weapon was cold, dead. He reached inward for mana resonance, for Ego response—but the link was cut.
"What…?"
Only two basic daggers remained on his belt—plain steel, unremarkable. His instincts flared a moment later. A killing intent swept across the street like a wave.
He moved just in time. A blade whistled past his neck, barely grazing him. He spun and saw his opponent step into view.
It was a man in black armor, faceless beneath a cracked helmet. In his hands was a weapon that felt alive—its core pulsing with the same eerie light his gauntlets once had.
Shadow tightened his grip on the daggers. His heart pounded, not from fear, but from the sheer wrongness of the air around him.
The man raised his sword in silence. The trial had begun.
They clashed. The sound of metal echoed through the empty town. Shadow moved on instinct—dodging, weaving, striking back when he saw an opening. But every hit felt heavier, sharper. His opponent fought with a calm, deliberate rhythm, as if he had done this countless times before.
After a few exchanges, Shadow's arms trembled. His daggers clashed against the black blade—and snapped in half.
He staggered back, breathing hard. Only basic Assassin skills work here. His mind raced. If I can't rely on Ego, then it's back to the basics.
He rolled under another swing, kicked the man's leg, and dashed into an alley. Dust fell from the roofs as he grabbed a rusted spear leaning against a wall. It was old, but balanced. He spun it once, testing the weight.
When the black knight appeared at the alley's mouth, Shadow lunged. Their weapons met, and as the clash resounded, a flash tore through Shadow's mind.
A memory that wasn't his.
A child's laughter. A workshop. A small hand clutching a metal core that pulsed with warmth. Then, fire—screams—darkness.
Shadow gasped as he stumbled back, gripping his head. The vision vanished as quickly as it came. "What was that…?"
The knight said nothing. His blade flared, and they fought again.
Each clash brought another fragment. A woman's cry. A dying man's last words. The forging of something alive.
By the fifth exchange, Shadow realized it—the memories belonged to people who had died in experiments. Their souls were trapped inside the weapons.
"Then you're…" Shadow muttered under his breath. "You're one of them."
The knight stopped for a brief moment, the glow in his weapon flickering.
That was all the confirmation he needed.
The fight resumed, fiercer this time. Shadow pushed his limits, every movement guided by instinct and will. His body ached, his breathing ragged, but his resolve didn't falter. He wasn't fighting to win—he was fighting to understand.
As the final clash came, both weapons shattered.
The shockwave threw him backward. He hit the ground hard, vision blurring. The knight staggered too, the black armor cracking open to reveal… emptiness. A hollow echo of a man who once was.
Shadow stood slowly, reaching out. "Rest now. You've fought enough."
The figure paused. For a moment, faint light flickered where its heart should have been. Then, it nodded—and dissolved into dust.
The air shimmered. The cracked sky healed.
A warm glow surrounded Shadow as he felt the pulse of life return to his gauntlets. The familiar resonance surged back, stronger than ever, but this time… different.
He felt emotions. Grief, anger, hope—all intertwining with his own.
The Ego's voice whispered faintly in his mind for the first time. You understand now.
He opened his eyes to find himself back in Lunareth Forest, the morning light creeping through the canopy. His gauntlets glowed faint blue, alive once more.
Shadow exhaled slowly, a small, genuine smile crossing his face. For the first time in years, he felt something real.
He could feel again.
The town dissolved around him like a bad dream. The empty street, the shattered bell, the gray sky — all of it folded away in a hot breath of light. Behind Shadow, a furnace rose from the earth, enormous and impossible, its mouth a ring of molten stars. Heat that could melt mountains pressed against the back of his neck though he stood a dozen paces away. He could feel the world thinning, the border between his body and something older and hungrier tearing open.
His hands were steady. The gauntlets at his wrists hummed, but they answered faintly now, as if asking permission. Shadow did not hesitate. He pulled himself toward the open maw of that forge and listened.
Memory hit like a hammer blow the moment he touched the first scrap. A child's laugh, bright and tiny; the smell of oil and iron; a small workshop where someone patiently taught hammer strikes and quenches. Then the flash of a different night; metal screams as machinery chewed through bone and ward, the sharp scent of burnt cloth, a man screaming words that became metal. Each scrap he lifted from the wrecked stalls and ruined smithies carried with it a thousand voices, lives shaped and broken by heat and hands.
He scoured the town as if possessed. Swords blackened by ash, broken polearms, buckles shrieking with lingering temper, a warped bell clapper whose iron remembered a hundred hands. He found a child's toy wrench wedged beneath a beam, a thin strip of copper with a name scratched into it. He gathered everything—took the spear from the alley, hammered off flaking bronze from a rusted shield, pried out ingots that had cooled in uncertain shapes. The pile at his feet grew into a mound of history.
Each strike rang the same. Each ringing opened his skull to more fragments. He struck a length of steel and saw a man placing his hand on a newborn blade and whispering a promise. He hammered an axle and relived a woman's last laugh in a lab hallway. He filed a jagged edge and was plunged into the cold of an operating room where someone—someone he had never met—closed their eyes and offered their last breath to metal.
It was unbearable and necessary. Pain was not only physical: it tunneled through him, a chorus of lives wanting to be understood, to be named. Voices collided in his head, sometimes tender, sometimes raw, sometimes begging. The forge answered each strike by throwing white light into his vision as if to cleanse him and then opening the wound again. It was hell and baptism at once.
Hours or lifetimes passed. He worked without counting. The gauntlets at his wrist gave no comfort beyond the dull fit of worn leather and cold metal. Sweat scoured eyes and soot streaked cheeks, but Shadow kept driving the hammer until the pieces yielded and bent exactly where he needed them to.
When he folded two halves together and quenched them in the cooling stream that had appeared like a vein beside the forge, there came a sound that was not wind. It was a voice, low at first and then bright as a spark.
You hurt, it said, curious and immediate.
Shadow's hand stilled on the hammer. He had expected an echo, a whisper, the gauntlets speaking from some old language of metal. He had not expected a presence that laughed like a child. He set the hammer down and listened, breathing hard.
If you are made of metal and memory, then you are not only weapon, the voice continued. You can be shelter. You can be laughter. You can be home.
He bent and shaped the last clasp, pinning two coils together. Hot steam rose from the seam, and with the last strike the gauntlet's surface shimmered. The old silhouette remained, but where black metal had been there now ran a ribbon of warm bronze etched with tiny filigree that caught the light like a living vein. The fingers were sleeker, articulation tighter; along the forearm an inlay showed a small, simple pattern that looked like a smiling sun.
It breathed. For the first time since the trials began, the pain in his head loosened. Memories still came like a tide, but instead of stabbing, they folded in. Faces swam up and looked at him with gratitude rather than accusation. A child's hand, soot-smudged, closed around his pinky and squeezed.
You are called, the voice asked gently, waiting.
He gave it the name he had felt in his chest for nights but had not said aloud. He spoke it like blessing and like promise.
Shadowfang had been the name before. Now he called the new pieces something warmer, something that fit that spark of laughter.
Erebos—no, Solfang, he whispered. The name tasted right, resonant with the mana that hummed through the repaired seams.
A sound like a laugh echoed beneath the metal. Hello, Master, it said. I am awake now.
The gauntlets flexed against his skin and for the first time the metal responded to more than commands. It reached out like a friendly hand, nudging his palm as if to test the warmth.
Shadow sank to his knees, the hammer sliding from his grip, and felt something inside him shift. The flood of memories slowed and began to make a strange sort of order. The voices that had been screaming became a chorus, and within it a single steady tone: a thank you.
Then the world cracked open in a different way. Text, not written in any book but burning bright in his mind, unfolded as if a screen of light had been hung in the air.
Congratulations on forging your Ego.
Job updated: Ego Forger has ascended. New job: Soulwright.
Class evolution: Assassin has evolved. Eclipse Reaver
Breakthrough achieved: Level 20.
Level increased: 25.
The words hovered and then folded into memory, the letters cooling like embers. Shadow's breath trembled. He tested his fingers. The gauntlets hummed, chatty and alive.
Well then, Master, Solfang said, voice bubbling with childish pride. What do we do first? Do we make tea? Or train? Or tell jokes?
He found himself laughing despite the hammer burns and the echoes and the rawness. The laughter was small but true.
We train, he said. We get stronger. We keep them safe.
Solfang hummed like a little engine. I like that. I want to learn things. Tell me names. Tell me stories. Shadow looked up at the cracked sky of that strange town, which had already begun to stitch itself smooth around the edges, and the impossible forge cooled into a faint glow, retreating into a pocket that would be there whenever he returned.
When he opened his eyes the forest air was damp and cool. Morning light cut through the mist. The taste of molten metals was gone from his mouth. At his wrists Solfang flexed, fitting like a second skin and brighter than the old, and somewhere beneath the world an old tree sighed as if relief came in the shape of a breath.
He rose, shoulders raw and heart oddly lighter. The change in him would not be marked only by a number. It was the small things now: the way his voice felt when he spoke with the team, the softness that threaded his hands when he tended a wound, the care that transformed his forging into something more than tools.
Solfang chattered as he left the clearing, already asking about tomorrow's training. Shadow answered, and for the first time since he could remember, he answered with his real name in his head as well as his alias. The gauntlets squeezed his wrists like an eager friend.
They walked back toward the camp together, and Lunareth watched them go.