Two Decades... Ti of the War
Leon had just stepped out of the huge teleportation portal Ethan created when he heard a low growl behind him. His heart beat wildly and loudly in his chest as he slowly turned around.
There, standing in front of him with its tongue dripping with saliva and its eyes screaming brutality and hunger, was a 6-ter-tall Dark Hound. Its crimson eyes literally stared into his very soul.
His mind broke at the re sight of the beast. Then ca its aura, unlike anything he had ever felt before. He had felt the Platinum-tier beast’s aura, but that had been from afar. This one was close to him. Too close. In front of him stood a Diamond-tier beast.
A Dark Hound, nonetheless.
The beast seed to have sensed the young boy’s fear because its lips curled back into what could only be described as a demonic grin. It moved forward, slow and deliberate, paws crunching through stone and debris as if they were re leaves. Leon stumbled back, breath shaking, legs refusing to obey his silent, desperate screams to run.
There was no one around. Everyone else had already escaped, whisked away by the teleportation arrays. He was the very last to leave the Labyrinth Grove. The universe truly chose the most twisted monts to balance karma.
Not like it was anyone’s fault. He had caused this. The corruption. The betrayal. The fall of hope that led to the monsters pouring through the cracks. If only he had kept his pride, his arrogance, his envy on a leash, none of this would have spilled into reality.
Regret was useless now. The beast towered over him, breath scorching his face with the foul stench of blood and rot. Leon’s trembling hands rushed into motion as he summoned his spirit beast.
A roar of chilling wind echoed out as a spectral wolf of pure ice manifested at his side. Tyrant. His partner. His pride. A majestic Arctic Wolf, its fur shimring like stars frozen in the dead of winter. Frost curled beneath its paws.
Tyrant didn’t hesitate. He leapt at the Dark Hound, fangs aid for the throat.
And that was when Leon discovered what true despair ant.
The hound caught Tyrant mid-air with a single swipe of its claw. Ice shattered. Blood sprayed. The wolf flew like a ragdoll, crashing into the ground so hard the earth cratered beneath him. A whine of agony escaped his spirit beast’s throat, one that pierced Leon’s chest far deeper than any blade ever could.
No. Tyrant.
Leon’s scream cracked the air as he thrust both palms out, mana surging wildly through his veins. He launched a torrent of freezing shards, an avalanche of ice that howled through the battlefield. The temperature plumted. Snow whirled. A storm answered his desperation.
The Dark Hound walked through the blizzard without so much as a scratch.
It vanished.
Reappeared right in front of him.
Leon didn’t even see its paw move. His ribs did. They snapped like brittle sticks as the beast slamd him into a boulder, his bones caving under the force. He tried to breathe, but pain stole the very concept of oxygen from him.
A claw pierced his thigh. Another ripped into his shoulder. Blood soaked the snow that had been conjured from his own magic. Tyrant howled again, crawling, broken but refusing to abandon his master. His icy fur was cracked, lting in patches, leaving streaks of red.
Run. Tyrant’s desperate voice echoed in Leon’s mind through their bond. Please.
The command that should have co from summoner to beast had reversed.
Leon didn’t run.
He couldn’t.
The Dark Hound closed its jaws around his left arm. There was a wet crunch, followed by a ripping sound that did not feel real until the white-hot agony struck. His scream tore through the air, louder than any spell he’d ever cast. He watched his own arm fall into the snow, a grotesque contrast of pale flesh and crimson staining white.
Tyrant lunged again, even with legs that could barely carry him. The beast swatted him away effortlessly. Leon’s eyes widened as he watched the wolf skidding, sliding, leaving a streak of ice and blood.
His heart shattered.
He reached for Tyrant with his remaining hand, tears freezing on his broken face. Vision blurring. Body numb. Not from cold. From death, circling closer.
The Dark Hound pinned him, claws digging into his chest, slowly, purposefully, as if savoring his suffering. Hot blood stead against the winter air.
Leon’s mind spiraled into darkness. Air left his lungs in ragged coughs. His strength, his pride, his reasons to live all slipped like sand dripping through cold fingers.
The last thing he saw was Tyrant crawling again, trying one more ti, still fighting when everything was lost.
Still believing in him.
Light vanished.
And Leon died screaming.
But that day did not end with death.
That was rely the start of the monster he would beco.
...
Death should have been the end. Leon’s consciousness should have dissolved into black nothing, the way every story promised. Yet sothing refused to allow that escape. His hatred, molten, relentless, clung to him like shackles and dragged his fading soul down into a deeper abyss than death itself.
There was no light, no warmth, no air. Only pain that felt carved into existence itself.
A voice slithered through the void. It didn’t speak in words, it spoke in emotion... in resentnt. It echoed every mont Leon had ever envied Ethan, every humiliation, every scream trapped in his throat. His fear twisted. His despair rotted. That festering hatred beca fuel.
His lifeblood, spilled across fractured ice, shimred with an unnatural glow. The snow beneath him boiled, as if rejecting the tragedy it hosted. Tyrant’s last whimpers were swallowed by a sudden pulse of malevolent energy that erupted from Leon’s corpse.
Bones cracked first, not breaking apart but reshaping. His spine arched upward as if pulled by invisible strings, and from his back burst two jagged wings. Not graceful angelic limbs, wings made of black ice, thorns of frozen death jutting outward like blades ant to carve worlds apart.
His veins glowed a dark cerulean blue, illuminating under his pale skin like rivers of winter lightning. His hair lengthened into a wild white cascade, frost dripping from each strand. His ears sharpened, features refining into an eerie, almost haunting beauty, the kind the old legends warned would lure mortals to doom.
Fae.
Not the playful sprites children imagined, but the ancient, twisted lineage born from winter’s oldest nightmares.
His heart did not beat with life. It pulsed with vengeance.
The Dark Hound noticed too late.
Leon’s eyes snapped open. Blazing with an unnatural icy brilliance.
The beast lunged, a blur of muscle and claws.
Leon did not flinch.
A single whisper escaped his lips, a newborn curse laced with power that did not belong to mortals.
"Freeze."
The world obeyed.
Ti slowed, the air crystallized around the beast, its furious snarl suspended mid-sound. Frost exploded across its fur like living chains, crawling from snout to tail. The hound’s crimson eyes widened as panic broke through its rage.
Leon rose to his feet, body nding in chilling perfection. He looked at his hand, skin like smooth porcelain, fingers ending in sharp, glacial talons. His expression was void of humanity, only a rciless calm.
He stepped forward. The beast shattered with a single touch.
Ice-dust and gore sprayed across the snow, glimring like a macabre snowfall.
Tyrant lay motionless nearby, chest barely rising. Leon stared at his spirit wolf, the only creature that had tried to shield him, even when all hope died. Sothing flickered in his chest, but it wasn’t compassion. It was possession.
He reached down. Dark ice slithered over Tyrant’s wounds, reforging flesh and bone, rging spirit and frost into sothing more feral, more obedient. Tyrant’s fur blackened and spiked with icy armor plating. Its once noble eyes glowed with corrupted loyalty.
A monster rewritten.
Leon stood taller, wings unfurling behind him like the herald of a frozen apocalypse. His voice scraped through the air, distorted and layered with spite.
"Ethan Smith..."
The na tasted like poison and purpose.
"...I will take everything from you."
The sky responded to his awakening. Clouds churned unnaturally, a storm spiraling under his will. Snowflakes sharpened into tiny blades, the wind howling a cold prophecy, the birth cry of a Dark Fairy who existed solely to destroy one man’s world piece by piece.
Leon did not walk away from death.
He arose from it to beco sothing darker.
His wings slowly unfurled as he took off to the skies.
...
He had been travelling for days, sotis flying, sotis on Tyrant’s back. But without food, things were very difficult for them. And the worst part was that despite his evolution and transformation, he had lost vital parts of his being. His torn hand hadn’t regenerated, and the beast’s venom seed to have affected him in more ways than just an evolution could change.
Beasts above the Gold-tier were truly in another league.
Currently, they were walking side by side in a pine forest. Snow covered the ground and the trees, and Leon loved it. He felt more than comfortable in this place. No beast had attacked them so far, courtesy of his spirit beast and his own aura.
But, without caution, he collapsed, face-first into the snow. And the rest was history.
He awoke in a lab of so sort, where an unknown woman was conducting experints on him. There, he was made into a cyborg; tech replaced his missing limbs and organs.
Leon had been made anew.
And, he blad Ethan for it.
Reviews
All reviews (0)