The warhammer rested on Council's hound's shoulder, not as a weapon, but as an extension of his own skeleton. There was no tension in that posture—only the crushing boredom of a predator who had already decided how the prey would die.
Gore-Stalker.
The classification didn't surface as an insult, but as data. Inhuman muscle mass. A frame built wide and tall, weight hanging low and rooted, like something bred for impact rather than reach. In the library of my mind, Kael slid into place with the ease of shelving a book. Creatures like this won through sheer mass. They lost through predictability.
The worn books Master Kahn brought me leafed through my mind.
Engagement protocols: never meet force with force. Anger's seat lies in the prefrontal cortex, rendering the subject strategically predictable once provoked.
Critical vulnerabilities: the knee joints, the orbital cavity, the hinge of the jaw.
For as long as I could remember, I had been a ghost haunting the margins of other men's wars, dissecting the old stories from the safety of a straw mattress. Now, I could feel the dock's details sharpened to a cruel clarity: the loose splinter on the plank, the metallic tang of drying blood.
I can fight.
The realization brought no relief—only hunger.
The mountain-like man noticed the change. His smile widened, crooked and lazy, as his gaze locked onto mine. He found no pleading there. No panic. Only focus—too sharp for a no longer crippled boy.
"...Interesting," He murmured, tilting his head. "Either you've finally snapped... or you're stupider than you look."
Words were useless variables. My brain had already discarded them. All that remained were vectors, angles, distance.
Unarmed.
My gaze slid to the dock floor. Cobblestones. Irregular. Granite. Hard enough to break bone, small enough to conceal intent.
The armored giant advanced without haste, every heavy step groaning against the wood. No guard. No caution. When I dipped down and curled my fingers around the cold, slime-slick stone, he laughed—a low, satisfied rumble, like a man watching a toddler brandish a spoon.
"Throwing pebbles now?" The laughter grew, shaking his chest plate. "Is that it?"
My senses screamed. The world fractured into usable fragments. The salt wind, the slight sway of his massive frame, the exact millisecond his weight transferred to his front leg.
Now.
The stone left my hand in a clean, violent arc. Physics took over. He flinched by millimeters. The granite didn't take the eye, but it grazed the orbital ridge. Skin exploded. A thick, dark ribbon of blood welled up instantly, blinding the left side of his vision. If the angle had been a hair's breadth different, the eyeball would have burst like overripe fruit.
Cold crept into the air. The grin vanished from his face.
His free hand rose to his face. Fingers came away stained with crimson. He stared at the wetness, not in pain, but in sheer, paralyzed disbelief. The air around him curdled.
"...You," the voice was a compressed hiss, "think you can handle me?"
The answer came as an eruption. He charged.
Amber stumbled back, terror cutting through her like a fever.
"Bad idea, boy!" the hound roared, the last trace of patience tearing loose.
The warhammer struck the planks with a thunderclap, splintering the wood. He let it fall and kept coming. He didn't need steel to break me.
"I don't need all of you intact. Just enough to scream." he bellowed, closing the distance.
The tactical blueprints of my mind met the visceral chaos of reality. The hound didn't just attack; he detonated. He lunged with a massive haymaker—a swing that carried the momentum of a falling titan. A move designed to pulverize, and reckless enough to leave his flank exposed for three-quarters of a second.
I didn't step; I flowed. My legs obeyed without hesitation, carrying me through a gap that would have been my grave. The air from his fist whistled past my ear. The wood of the dock shrieked as his knuckles found a support beam instead of my skull, sending splinters flying like shrapnel.
I didn't look back. I sprinted toward the heap of broken bodies where the Guild members lay.
The adrenaline was pumping in. I reached the first fallen man and my fingers closed around the hilt of a longsword.
No longer an invalid — a hero stepped out of every epic ever memorized.
The giant stood bare-handed, his warhammer abandoned at the harbor's edge.
Predatory triumph coiled tight in my chest.
Steel in hand.
Nothing left to him but a bruised ego.
Then, his gaze shifted.
The volcanic fury in his eyes vanished, replaced by a cold, sharp malice that I hadn't accounted for in my equations.
His lips pulled back in a jagged, yellowed grin.
Distance to the sword. Distance to him. Angle of approach. All aligned.
One variable remained unseen.
Amber.
She stood frozen near the harbor's edge, her knees still trembling from the drain of her Breath. She was exposed—small, unguarded—and I had left her directly in his path.
He didn't even glance at me as he pivoted. He surged toward her with a burst of speed that defied his mass.
"No!"
The word was a jagged tear in my throat. Logic collapsed. The "Engagement Protocols" vanished, replaced by a primitive, desperate terror. The distance was too great. Physics was an uncompromising judge, and the verdict was clear: I couldn't reach her before he did.
I ran anyway.
I poured every borrowed scrap of strength into my stride. My heart screamed, my vision tunneling until nothing existed but her frozen form and the oncoming armor.
I was two steps away when his shoulder dipped.
She was never the target.
The timing was.
He waited for the precise instant desperation stripped me of caution, then sent his elbow around in a brutal, horizontal arc without so much as a glance back.
Impact arrived before sight. A fist slammed into my torso like a battering ram. Air was ripped from my lungs. The world spun—timber, sky, water—all trading places as I was launched backward.
The sword slipped from my nerveless fingers, clattering uselessly against the wood.
But he didn't stop. A boot crushed my leg against the dock. Another blow descended, heavy and unrefined, cracking the wood inches from my skull.
Pain. Raw. Nameless.
He didn't just want to kill me; he wanted to erase the very idea that I could matter. Another blow descended, a heavy, unrefined strike. My vision flickered—a jagged strobe light of wood and red.
Across the deck, Amber blurred at the edge of my vision—hope collapsing in real time. Her cries dissolved into the harbor's roar, her wide eyes catching the moment I broke.
I tried to draw breath, but a boot crushed down on my chest. Air refused to come. The dock slipped away.
Mom.
Every coin she had counted, every hour she had traded for a smear of pork lard to feed my failing body... it wasn't just work. It was an investment in a future I was currently bleeding into the harbor.
Why?
The question tore through the fog of my fading mind. Why forge a life as a prison of useless flesh? Why did she have to wither so I could simply be?
The unfairness weighed on me like a second body, heavier than his armor. It burned through my veins, not poison, but fire.
Then, a sound vibration not in my ears, but in the deep of my mind. It didn't speak in words, but in echoes of intent.
The sound was cold, ancient, and hollow. It felt like the scrape of a blade against a whetstone.
I understand only the hunger behind it. The creature wasn't asking out of curiosity; It was a void waiting to be filled.
Something inside me snapped. Plans, protocols, contingencies—ashes. The giant filled my vision, malice carved into his face, and pain became a distant, irrelevant thing.
Pain had been my only currency. I had nothing left to pay.
A new sensation rose to take its place. It was a devouring, primal appetite. It wasn't my stomach that was empty—it was my soul. The hunger for the life Celeste had bought with her own.
My vision didn't just darken; it transformed.
Starlight flooded my vision, cold and absolute—the same white that coiled within the snake.
His boot still pinned me.
Something cracked in his gaze—surprise, bare and fleeting—followed by something worse. Urgency. Not mine. His.
A feral need to finish this before whatever was stirring could no longer be contained.
Time stretched thin, pulled taut to the point of tearing. Within that suspended instant was the burning coiling tight around my heart, and the sudden, violent realization:
I'm starving.