The Solaza Eagle, crowned in gold, tore through the bloated thunderheads, trailing a wake of sleet as it plummeted toward the iron-clad city of Solace. It dived into the bowels of a shadowed alley. Upon landing, its wings unfurled not into feathers, but into a hundred jagged streaks of emerald light—shimmering like silk ribbons shredded by a gale. As the light swirled and settled, the raptor vanished. In its place stood an old man, his beard and hair a stark, wintry silver.
The elder jerked his deep cowl lower, masking his features in shadow. Tucking his hands into his voluminous sleeves, he exhaled a plume of white mist that hung heavy in the freezing air. With a slight, rhythmic sway to his gait, he stepped out of the gloom and drifted toward the roar of the distant crowd.
The sky hung low and oppressive. Swirling snow bit at the skin, carrying the brine of the Storm Sea from a hundred miles away. This was the Year of Frost; the winter threatened to seep deep into the very marrow of one's bones.
Yet, in the heart of Solace's Iron Square, a fire was raging—not of wood, but of human hatred.
"Hang the beast!" "Burn the whelp!" "Put his head on a pike!" "Back to hell with the Fallen!"
At the epicenter of this storm stood a young captive. His veins ran with the purplish-red blood of the Lycan. His name was Neo.
The evidence overflowed from wicker crates, backed by the testimony of four witnesses. An inquisitor, his mustache trimmed to a razor's edge and clad in a stiff charcoal-wool uniform, stood behind a brass megaphone. His voice hammered against the eardrums of the crowd:
"Neo, slave-gladiator of House Memoris, charged with the supreme sin—Treason!"
"Ingrate! Traitor!" the official roared. "The rebellious soul finds no mercy!"
In the world of Aemera, this was the iron law, a decree traced back to the primordial betrayal of the Morningstar against the Divine. For the accused, there were no acquittals. Looking at the scene now, Neo didn't have a ghost of a chance.
A woman bolted from the crowd, a blur of grief and rage. She slammed through the gendarme's line and lunged at Neo. As the guards scrambled to restrain her, she lashed out—clawing, kicking, and shrieking with a raw, lung-bursting agony: "You devil! Give me back my son! Give him back!"
Fresh welts rose on Neo's face and chest where her nails had raked his skin, yet his gaze remained as still as a frozen lake. He remembered the charge read moments ago: The brutal murder of a fourteen-year-old boy. This woman was the boy's only kin—the "star witness."
The absurdity of it was cold: on the night of the murder, Neo had been seventy miles away at the Thures Estate.
There was no fire in Neo's sky-blue eyes—no resentment, no fury. They acted only as a mirror, reflecting the woman's own twisted, hysterical visage back at her. He didn't hate this perjurer; she was a mere pawn, pushed to the front of the board. His mind was elsewhere, tracing the unseen threads to the hand moving the pieces. Who hated him this much? Who wanted him not just dead, but desecrated?
That unnerving, crystalline stare pricked at the woman's conscience. Shame flickered in her eyes, followed by a surge of panicked humiliation. As the guards finally hauled her back, she spat a glob of thick phlegm directly into Neo's face.
On the high wooden dais to the north, Viscount Erdrit maintained his perennial mask—a face as cold and unyielding as the iron of the city itself. Only those who knew him intimately could catch the predatory glint in his eyes. He was savoring this. The trial was a triumph; the grieving mother's outburst was the perfect, bloody bow on a well-wrapped gift.
Well done, Will. Exquisite, Erdrit mused. He cared nothing for the blood of a Lycan or the tears of a mother. Innocence and guilt were secondary to "compliance." This trial was a political anchor, securing his seat of power. To stay on the throne, what was one more corpse?
But some still felt the weight of it. Will, the Viscount's favored steward—a man who commanded respect even from barons—stood apart. Despite his status, he was still a servant, forbidden from standing beside his master in public.
Perhaps his heart hadn't fully hardened yet. Will let out a soft, almost imperceptible sigh, leaning toward the young noblewoman beside him. "To be honest, I always enjoyed his performances in the arena. A pity..."
The lady, however, wore her boredom like a heavy cloak. To her, the stifling political theater and the droning accusations were far less interesting than the horizon. Her eyes drifted toward the dark clouds, tracking a strange, hulking shape emerging from the mist—an airship. A bizarre, fascinating contraption that had only appeared a year ago, looking utterly out of place, yet undeniably alluring.
"Wait... since when do airships lay eggs?" Lady Bertha muttered, her brow furrowing.
"Pardon me, Lady Bertha?" Will asked, confused. But a heartbeat later, the realization struck him like a petrification curse. His jaw dropped, his entire frame freezing as a cocktail of disbelief and sheer terror flooded his eyes.
The airship was laying eggs. Or more accurately, it was deploying War-Pods.
War-Pods. The mortal enemy of all life, the spawn of the abyss—the signature airborne assault craft of the Demon Legions.
From this distance, they looked like overgrown castor beans, bloated and emerald-green, their husks armored with wickedly sharp obsidian spikes. Each weighed well over seven hundred pounds. When dropped from the stratosphere, they hit with the kinetic fury of a Titan's warhammer, turning solid earth into craters of dust.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
Doom unspooled its bloody prologue amidst a thunder that rattled the very ribs of the city.
In an instant, the Iron Square became a chaotic symphony of explosions, sirens, and the primal screams of the dying. Shadows huddled together in terror; others bolted like headless flies, trampling one another in a desperate, futile bid for escape. Dignity was ground into the dirt; the apocalypse had arrived, unannounced and unmerciful.
At that moment, Neo was being hauled toward the guillotine by two hulking gendarmes. Because his "crimes" were so heinous, he had been denied the relative mercy of the noose. As the mob had bayed, his head was to be lopped off and impaled upon a pike for ten days—a grisly testament to the price of treason.
Neo had no intention of dying like a pig at the slaughter. Even putting the false charges aside, he was not the type to offer his neck to the blade.
His original plan had been to wait until the final second—the very moment the blade was released—to use his last hidden ace to break free. But a single War-Pod shattered that plan.
CRASH!
The wooden stairs leading to the execution platform were pulverized. splinters, jagged stones, and slush erupted into the air. A flying shard whistled past Neo's cheek, carving a thin red line across his skin.
The impact was sudden, yet Neo didn't so much as flinch. It wasn't some innate gift or a slow reflex; it was a hardened discipline forged through years of gritting his teeth through pain.
The two gendarmes guarding him possessed no such iron will. The Pod had slammed down less than three meters away. Both men instinctively threw their arms up to shield their faces—and in doing so, they missed the ominous sight of the green husk webbing with cracks, leaking a sinister, deep-crimson glow.
Like the iron-cased bombs crafted by the Gnomes of Dedandris, the War-Pod didn't just land. It detonated. The armored shell became a storm of shrapnel, shredding everything in its path.
The shockwave from the detonation hit like an invisible fortress wall, hurling Neo and the two gendarmes backward.
But Neo was a creature of the arena, and his reflexes were honed to a razor's edge. In the micro-second before the impact, he executed two life-saving maneuvers.
he pivoted. Using the bulk of one gendarme as a meat-shield, he shifted his center of mass just enough to evade the lethal core of the blast. A jagged shard of the pod's casing whistled past, grazing his thigh and drawing a thin line of crimson, but to a man who had survived the pits, it was a mere scratch.
he yielded. Instead of resisting the blast, he leaned into the kinetic energy, throwing himself into a controlled roll. He traded a bone-shattering impact for a tactical tumble, neutralizing the worst of the concussive force.
Clang! Rattle! Clang!
Neo hit the cobblestones hard, rolling several times. The iron chains linking his shackles hissed and sparked against the black stone tiles. He sprang up in a fluid motion, staying low to the ground in a predator's crouch before lunging toward cover. His movements were so seamless it was as if he and the demon who dropped the pod had rehearsed this carnage—swift, lethal, and without a stutter.
"Axes out!" Neo bellowed as he scrambled, a desperate warning to the dazed guards.
Today was a political stage-play, and the gendarmes were dressed for the part in full "Bulwark-I" regulation plate. The shrapnel from a War-Pod was ferocious, but it shouldn't have been enough to breach heavy enchanted steel. Unless their luck was utterly rotten, they should have survived.
But a fleeting backward glance made Neo's heart sink. Their incompetence was staggering.
One guard was too slow to rise and made a choice Neo considered suicidal: he drew his longsword, attempting to parry the massive silhouette looming from the smoke. Neo's warning might as well have been a whisper in a hurricane.
The other guard was even more pathetic—he tried to play dead. He didn't realize that denizens of the Abyss scent life-force like sharks scent blood; such a trick was a death sentence.
The results were as inevitable as they were gruesome. The first guard's sword was ignored entirely as a massive, flaming chain-axe cleaved through air and bone, lopping his head clean off. The second was impaled by the white-hot spike at the axe's pommel, pinned to the earth like a specimen in a jar.
This was a Black Butcher, the common tongue's name for an Obsidian Sentinel. They were the shock troopers of the Infernal Legions—brutes of immense strength, boundless cruelty, and a terrifying degree of tactical intellect. Unless one was a Paladin of the Light or a Temple Warrior, even a Tier-5 fighter would find themselves outclassed in a one-on-one duel against these smoldering stone giants.
Months ago, Neo had witnessed ten Tier-3 warriors swarm a single Tier-5 master. The slaughter had been absolute. Though two survived, they were carried out of the arena on their shields. Neo himself had spent two months bedridden; the other man never fought again. That day, the terrifying reality of a Tier-5's power had been seared into Neo's mind.
Now, facing a Black Butcher, Neo had only one thought: Run.
The Butcher didn't care about the difference between a gendarme's plate and a prisoner's rags. If it breathed, it was prey.
Neo's gamble for a chaotic escape was collapsing into a death trap.
Thwack! Thwack! Thwack!
Bolts hissed through the air, striking the obsidian floor with the force of thunderclaps. These weren't ordinary arrows; they were Wolf-Fang Bolts fired from Gale-Crossbows—the pride of Solace, second only to its iron mines. To wield such a double-stringed, triple-fire weapon required a marksman of at least Tier-3 proficiency.
Against a single archer, Neo's agility might have bought him a chance. But now, five snipers had him dead in their sights, weaving a lethal net of steel. Across the scorched, open expanse of the Iron Square, there was nowhere to hide.
Dammit, Neo cursed under his breath. He couldn't fathom why, in the heart of a demonic invasion, these men were so obsessed with a single convict. A dozen bolts chased his heels, forcing him into a series of frantic dives and rolls until he was driven back toward the wreckage of the execution platform. It was the only cover left standing amidst the ruins.
As he fought to steady his breath, he counted a single blessing: the Black Butcher had been lured away by the shrill screams of the noblewomen on the northern dais. But then, a high-pitched whistle sliced through the air—a sound that made the hair on his neck stand up.
"Another pod?" Neo didn't wait to look. He sucked in a lungful of frozen air and bolted.
Even while dodging the snipers, he had mapped their positions in his mind. He gritted his teeth, a feral determination taking hold. This time, I'm getting out of this square or dying in the attempt.
BOOM!
The entire execution stage detonated, splintered into a million jagged shards. The hundred-pound guillotine blade whistled barely twenty centimeters above Neo's head, hurtling another ten meters before slamming into the obsidian tiles in a spray of sparks. Had he not been forced to crawl on all fours by his shackles, that blade would have sheared him in half.
Seven years of carnage in the arena had forged Neo's will into cold iron; he didn't panic. But when he took a reflexive glance back at the blast site, his composure finally shattered.
Roaring flames—blacker than the abyss—licked at the ruins, turning solid stone to ash in seconds. At the center of the inferno, three monstrous dragon heads snarled from the shoulders of a Cerberus-Beast. Atop the creature sat a woman clad in the Dark-Gold Plate of a Fallen Divinity. Her eyes glowed with a toxic, emerald malevolence, and a faint, mocking smile played on her lips as she stared directly at him.
Neo's heart plummeted. It wasn't just the sheer power she radiated—it was the history she wore. In the Age of the Fallen, such beings might have been common foot soldiers; but now, ten thousand years later, creatures of this caliber were found only in the dusty epics of the Radiant Church or forbidden demonological scrolls. They were the dark reflection of the Church's Apostles—beings of legend.
Neo knew, with a bone-deep certainty, that to her, crushing his life would be no more difficult than stepping on an insect.
"Heh..." she purred, her voice a velvet blade. "A descendant of the slave-hounds."
The Demoness's voice wasn't loud, yet it pierced the soul like needles dipped in liquid ice.
Her words were spoken in Archaic Infernal, a tongue of ancient curses that carried its own malignant weight. The sound instantly ignited the dormant Demonic Brand buried deep within Neo's bloodline. A searing heat surged up his spine, setting his blood to a boil. His very life felt as if it were being slow-roasted over an abyssal pyre. A low, guttural snarl tore from his throat—a primal craving for slaughter, an unquenchable thirst to rend flesh and drink deep from the warmth of a fresh kill.
Bloodlust… No! Neo roared internally, his jaw locking so tight the bone creaked. He knew that if he didn't suppress this tide now, his consciousness would be devoured, leaving behind nothing but a mindless beast. The blood of the Gloom-Lycan did not flow to be driven by others, and he was no one's loyal hound.
Facial bones buckled and reshaped beneath his skin. Fangs tore through gums. Claws slid from his fingertips like unsheathed daggers, and silver-gray fur erupted across his hide. He met the demonic surge with a forced metamorphosis, completing the racial shift in mid-stride.
SNAP!
The black-iron shackles groaned under the pressure of his swelling muscle and bone, finally shattering into useless scrap.
"Come, little pup," the Demoness purred, her lips curling into a venomous arc.
But before the words fully left her mouth, her brow twitched. "What?"
There was no chaotic, blood-red aura surrounding Neo's lupine form. Instead, the tips of his silver fur shimmered with a pale, lunar-blue light. His eyes were not the crimson of madness, but the frost-blue of a permafrost lake in the Great North—cold, clear, and unyielding.
"How curious," she mused. With a flick of her wrist, she manifested a spectral skull wreathed in toxic green soul-fire. It shrieked as it hurtled toward Neo. He twisted in mid-air, but the homing curse was too swift. The skull collided with his chest, erupting into a pillar of vile emerald flames. The stone floor hissed and corroded where the light touched it, leaving behind a charred, smoking crater.
Neo collapsed, his body going limp and silent.
Yet a heartbeat later, he snapped back to his feet, lunging toward the edge of the square with a desperate, staggering speed.
"Impossible..." A flicker of genuine surprise crossed the Demoness's eyes. Few below the rank of a Radiant Church Bishop could shrug off a Soul-Blight Curse, especially a Lycan whose blood should have been a conductor for her malice. This was an anomaly.
Whiz! Whiz! Whiz!
Three arrows of pure Holy Light tore through the air, their sanctified energy searing even from a distance.
"Hmph!" The Demoness scoffed, conjuring three bolts of Abyssal Shadow in response. Black and white collided in mid-air, detonating into a dazzling shower of starlight and soot.
The Cerberus-Beast let out a bone-shaking howl, its massive frame convulsing so violently that the Demoness was nearly thrown from her perch. Hidden within the fading trail of the Holy Arrows were two "Shadow Fangs"—deadly projectiles infused with a lethal dual-cast of Radiant Ignition and Holy Detonation.
What had seemed like ordinary streaks of sanctified light suddenly erupted into a swirling halo of black and crimson. The explosion tore through the barrier of black flames shimmering around the Demoness. With a flick of her wrist, she deflected one arrow with a burst of raw energy, but the second moved like a phantom. It curved around her defenses and buried itself deep into the side of the beast's central neck.
BOOM!
A crater the size of a dinner plate burst open. Molten, lava-like blood sprayed into the air, congealing into dark crimson orbs before they even hit the ground.
A snarl of genuine fury twisted the Demoness's features. She had been nicked—an insult she wouldn't soon forget. Her eyes, now venomous hooks, swept toward the source of the arrows, yet she still found herself unwilling to let her "little pup" slip away.
She traced a sigil in the air with lightning speed. Two streaks of violet-black necrotic energy slammed into the corpses of the two fallen gendarmes. The bodies began to twitch and contort in a sickening dance of resurrection. With guttural, beast-like rasps tearing from their throats, the undead thralls dropped to all fours and lunged after Neo like rabid hounds.
"****Fuck of the Light..." she sneered, shattering another volley of incoming arrows with a casual flick of her fingers. With her other hand, she channeled a beam of malevolent light into the gaping wound on the Cerberus's neck. Flesh knitted together like writhing vines, the injury sealing shut in a matter of seconds.
Meanwhile, high atop the spire of the Radiant Academy in the square's northwest corner, two figures wreathed in golden radiance shattered a stained-glass window and leaped into the air. They were decoys, meant to draw the Demoness's ire while the high-ranking nobles fled from the eastern dais. Their mission was a success, but only through a twist of fate: Neo, surviving a curse that should have liquidated his soul, had inadvertently tanked the lethal attention meant for them.
The Demoness watched the two streaks of gold retreat, a void-like darkness pooling in her gaze. Her Hex-Sight was a birthright of the hunt; no prey marked by those eyes had ever escaped the cull.
"Killing you too quickly..." she whispered, her fingers stroking the Cerberus's coarse mane, "...would take all the fun out of it, wouldn't it?"