The cave was a literal microcosm of hell. The air was thick with the coppery smell of blood and the sickening, ozone-like smell of Void energy, which made it hard to breathe. Garrick was a wall of golden Aura across the room, a lone mountain trying to keep back a wave of writhing shadow beasts that the Huntsman had called up. His movements were getting slower, and the poison was clearly taking its toll. Rolan was down by the door, and the stone under his leg was getting darker. It was hard to hear his groans.
And Leo... Leo was slumped against a crumbling pillar, aware but barely. The first trap set by the Huntsman had crippled him, making it impossible for him to even lift his blades. The weight of it all, the lives of everyone I had brought into this suffocating darkness, fell squarely, crushingly, on my shoulders.
I was an Artisan. A good one, perhaps the best my age had ever produced, thanks to the dragon's gift. My opponent was a Master, a specialist killer steeped in the forbidden arts of the Void. The chasm between us was not a gap to be bridged by cleverness; it was an ocean threatening to drown me.
The Huntsman moved with a liquid, predatory grace, his dark blade a whisper of death in the gloom, leaving faint trails of purple corruption in the air. He didn't come at me with the overwhelming force of Damian or the perfect, grounded form of Cassius. He fought like a spider, weaving a complex web of feints, parries, and lightning-fast strikes, each one aimed with a surgeon's precision at the minuscule, fractional weaknesses in my defense he seemed to perceive instantly.
I met his storm, my mind desperately clinging to the cold point of absolute focus in the heart of the Two-Heart Cadence. My Rhythmic Sense was a sphere of crackling awareness, screaming warnings a split second before each attack landed, a vital buffer against his terrifying speed. My ancestral sword, what little remained of it after the earlier clash, felt clumsy and inadequate, but I used the shard, channeling disruptive infusion 'taps' through the broken steel, parrying, deflecting, doing anything to simply survive the next heartbeat.
He was toying with me. I could feel the cold, detached curiosity in his movements, the almost academic way he tested my guard, mapped my reactions. He wasn't fighting me; he was dissecting me. He'd feint high, forcing my guard up, then his blade would flicker low, scoring another shallow, stinging cut along my ribs. He'd press forward, a blur of steel forcing me back, then vanish into a burst of unnatural shadow-step, only to reappear at my flank.
'Too fast,' the thought was a frantic drumbeat against the steady cadence I fought to maintain. My breath burned in my lungs. My Mana reserves, already strained from the earlier chase and the constant effort of maintaining the Sense, were draining like water through a sieve. 'His control is absolute. My infusions… they barely slow him. Like throwing pebbles against a fortress wall.' Each parry sent a jarring shock up my arm, fatigue a heavy poison seeping into my muscles.
He saw his opening, created by my own failing stamina. I pivoted, a fraction too slow, to deflect a low, sweeping strike aimed at my already injured leg. In that half-second of committed motion, his attack vector changed with impossible speed. His blade spiraled upward, a black serpent striking from below. It bypassed my guard entirely.
I felt a sharp, searing cold as the tip of his sword bit deep into the steel of my remaining gauntlet – the one protecting my sword hand. It didn't just strike it; the Void-laced energy pulsed, and I felt the metal unmake itself beneath the blow. The rune-etched Ashworth steel, a masterwork, cracked, groaned, and then shattered into useless fragments that clattered against the stone floor.
My hand, now bare, burned with residual Void energy. Before I could recoil, his blade flashed again, a fluid, contemptuous backhand. I tried to parry with the broken hilt of my sword, a pathetic, desperate gesture. He was too fast. A sound like a snapping tree branch echoed in the cavern as my ancestral blade, the symbol of my acceptance, was severed completely at the crossguard. The useless hilt fell from my numb fingers.
Disarmed. Broken.
The Huntsman flowed forward, his blade a black line drawn against the purple gloom, aimed directly at my heart. No weapon. No defense. No time. Pure instinct screamed. I threw myself backward, a desperate, clumsy roll across the slick, blood-stained stone. The blade missed my heart but found my gut, slicing through my leather tunic, tearing deep into muscle and flesh.
Pain exploded, white-hot and absolute, stealing my breath. It wasn't the clean pain of steel. It was a cold, devouring agony, the Void energy actively consuming my life force, snarling against my draconic healing like acid on raw flesh. My cadence shattered into a thousand discordant shards. My Rhythmic Sense dissolved into a screaming static of pure, overwhelming pain. I collapsed onto my back, the cold stone a shocking contrast to the fire in my gut, the world dissolving into a grey, swimming haze.
I heard Seraphina scream my name, a sound of pure, soul-shattering terror that somehow cut through the roaring in my ears. I tried to push myself up, my muscles spasming uselessly. I was dying. The cold was spreading from the wound, a numbness creeping into my limbs.
Through the blur, I saw the Huntsman stand over me, his masked face an unreadable cipher, his dark blade raised for the final, contemptuous blow. And in that moment of absolute, impending annihilation, my human thoughts, my carefully constructed plans, my knowledge from another world – it all burned away like chaff, leaving only a single, desperate, and utterly pathetic realization.
'I was a fool.' The thought was a ragged whisper in the roaring darkness. 'Too hasty. Too confident. Arrogant.' I saw Seraphina's terrified face, Rolan's still form, Garrick fighting desperately against shadows, Leo bleeding out against the pillar. 'My knowledge… it made me think I was untouchable. I walked into this city, this war, thinking I was the protagonist...' Tears mingled with the sweat and blood on my face. 'I'm not the hero. I'm just a boy playing with power I don't understand, and I've led everyone I care about to their graves.' My vision began to tunnel, the edges fading to black. This was the end. My second, final death.
And then… something else surfaced. Deeper than thought, older than memory. A roar of pure, primal indignation from the core of my being. It was not Lancelot. It was not the office worker. It was the ancient, slumbering will of the dragon, a creature of absolute supremacy, outraged at the sheer audacity of being cornered, wounded, killed, by an insignificant insect. And it refused.
The Manifestation Barrier, the invisible wall between Artisan and Expert, didn't just crack. It vaporized in an explosion of raw, untamed power. The Dragon Heart, sensing mortal annihilation, seized absolute control, overriding my failing human consciousness.
Pain, a thousand times more intense than the Huntsman's blade, ripped through me. It was the agony of creation, of flesh and bone being forcibly re-forged by a will not my own. A guttural, inhuman sound tore from my throat as black, iridescent scales erupted violently from my skin, not patchy this time, but a near-complete, interlocking coat of living armor that flowed across my torso, arms, and neck like molten obsidian, sealing the bleeding wound in my gut with a searing hiss of cauterized flesh.
My hands spasmed uncontrollably, fingers elongating, nails thickening, sharpening into shimmering, razor-sharp talons of raw, crackling Mana. Dragon Claws. My senses exploded, the dim cavern becoming a terrifying, vibrant tapestry of Aetheric signatures – Garrick's fading gold, Rolan's weak flicker, Seraphina's terrified green, Leo's guttering grey – and the Huntsman's cold, sharp spike of purple. The air itself tasted of fear, blood, and the electric tang of ozone.
I had smashed through the wall. I possessed the power of an Expert. But the 'I' who held it was no longer entirely human.
The Huntsman's killing blow descended. It met my newly formed draconic scales with a deafening shriek of protesting metal on something far harder. The blade, laced with Void energy that had shattered Ashworth steel, skittered off the nigh-impenetrable armor, leaving only a shallow, smoking scratch.
I rose from the floor, not as a wounded man, but as a predator reborn. The world looked… different. Sharper. Slower. The Huntsman, this Master-level killer who had been an insurmountable mountain seconds before, now seemed… frail. His movements, once impossibly fast, now looked jerky, predictable. Insignificant.
'This thing,' a cold, ancient thought resonated through my mind, eclipsing my own fear, 'this insect… it dares to impede me?' The sheer arrogance of the thought was terrifying, exhilarating.
He struck again, his perfect technique now laced with a flicker of shock, of disbelief, unable to comprehend the sudden reversal. I didn't parry. I didn't dodge. I let his blade scrape harmlessly against my scales – a gnat biting granite – and moved inside his guard, my own movements no longer the fluid dance of my Path, but a series of brutally direct, predatory lunges driven by pure, efficient rage.
My clawed hand shot out, not guided by technique, but by an instinct that screamed destroy. The Huntsman, for the first time, was forced onto the defensive, his own blade a desperate blur as he tried to parry the five shimmering points of death aimed at his throat. The sheer, raw force of my strike sent him stumbling back, his professional calm finally shattered, replaced by the wide-eyed shock of prey realizing the gazelle it was hunting had sprouted teeth of fire and obsidian.
I stalked forward, the two-heart cadence gone, replaced by a single, deafening, roaring beat – THUMP-THUMP-THUMP – that was the only sound in the universe, drowning out everything else. I could distantly feel Seraphina's terror, Leo's pained shock, Garrick's struggle, but they were peripheral, irrelevant data points. The only thing that mattered was the utter, absolute offense of this lesser creature's continued existence before me.
'Why does it still draw breath?' the dragon roared in my soul, a cold, alien fury utterly devoid of human anger. 'Why must I exert effort to unmake this gnat?'
Fueled by this chilling, supreme arrogance, I ignored a desperate slash from the Huntsman that glanced harmlessly off the scales on my shoulder and lunged again, my clawed hand scything through his hasty guard. The sound was a wet, sickening tear of fabric, leather, corrupted Aura, and the flesh beneath. My claws ripped through his defenses and tore four deep, parallel gouges down his shoulder and chest, shredding steel mesh and muscle alike.
He screamed, a raw, human sound of pure agony and shock, and stumbled back again, clutching the grievous wound, his dark blood pouring between his fingers, steaming slightly as it met the cold stone.
"Lancelot!" Seraphina cried out from behind me, her voice a fragile thread of terror and a wild, desperate hope. She thought I had turned the tide. She thought her wounded, bleeding lord had found the strength to fight back. She thought the hero had risen.
I opened my mouth, perhaps to reply, perhaps to roar in triumph, but the sound that ripped from my throat was not my own. It was a deep, guttural, and utterly out of control roar of pure, possessive, inhuman fury, a sound that promised not victory, but annihilation. It echoed through the cavern, silencing the distant sounds of Garrick's battle, freezing the very air.