His birth mother from his previous world.
The woman who had given him life and then taken it away with her own hands.
She wore a gown of pale blue silk that whispered with each step, her hair arranged in elaborate curls that frad a face he had tried so hard to forget. She was older now, lines of age touching the corners of her eyes, but still beautiful in that cold, porcelain way he rembered.
And beside her, his hand resting protectively on her arm, was Lukas.
The young man who had fought Jorghan in the street.
The one Jamie had called out to with such desperate concern.
Standing beside her now, Jorghan could see the similarities he had been too distracted to notice before—the shape of the eyes, the line of the jaw, and the way they both carried themselves with that sa aristocratic bearing.
Realization dawned like a sun rising over a battlefield, illuminating truths Jorghan had never considered, never imagined.
Lukas wasn’t just his cousin.
He was his half-brother. His mother’s son from the life she had built after murdering her firstborn child.
[CRITICAL ALERT]
[Bloodborne Rage: 96%]
[Carnage Requiem: 97%]
His mind replayed the mories without his permission, as vivid and terrible as the day they were made.
The family’s mansion, his mother sitting by his side as he was dying.
His mother’s face, beautiful and impassive. Her voice, so calm and asured, explaining why he had to die.
"You were a mistake," she had said.
"An inconvenience."
The poison they had forced down his throat.
The burning in his veins as it took effect.
The way his mother had watched him convulse and die, her expression never changing, as if she were observing sothing mildly interesting but ultimately unimportant.
And then darkness.
And then... rebirth.
Into the Sol’vur clan.
Into a new family that had loved him, accepted him, and made him whole again.
A family that was massacred while he was powerless to stop it.
And now both of them were here.
Both the people responsible for his deaths—plural—standing on that platform like they had every right to breathe, to live, to smile.
His blood didn’t just burn.
It ignited.
Seeing all of them together at one place laughing sent a full-on rage into his mind. He no longer suppressed his rage.
[BLOODBORNE RAGE: 100%]
[CARNAGE REQUIEM: FULLY CHARGED]
Jorghan stared at them with a gaze that held nothing human in it anymore.
His eyes blazed with a crimson light, the pupils elongating into slits like those of a predator. The red tattoo on his neck started to spread towards his chest and his arms. It was pulsating as if it were alive.
As he stood there, as the couple on the platform moved to take their positions at the centre with their parents on either side—Jamie and his mother on one side, Hawkin and his wife on the other—the priest opened an ancient to and began to read in the old language of the empire.
The words ant nothing to Jorghan.
Nothing existed except the fury burning through his veins, the ancestral bloodline awakening in response to his absolute rage, and the system screaming warnings that he couldn’t hear past the roaring in his ears.
He moved.
The ground beneath Jorghan’s feet didn’t just crack.
It exploded.
Stone and earth erupted outward as he launched himself into the air with such force that the shockwave knocked people off their feet in a ten-ter radius. Debris rained down on the screaming crowd.
Ti seed to slow as Jorghan sailed through the air, a crimson cot trailing power.
He could see every detail with crystalline clarity—the shock on people’s faces, the guards reaching for weapons too slowly, and the way the priest’s eyes widened in terror.
He landed on the platform with the force of a teor strike.
The impact was deadly.
The wooden platform, reinforced with both physical supports and magical wards, shattered like glass. The shockwave radiated outward in concentric circles, throwing everyone on the platform off their feet. Nobles who had been standing were hurled backwards, tumbling across the ground. The ceremonial objects went flying.
Dust and splinters filled the air. The crowd’s excited chatter transford instantly into screams of panic and confusion.
By the ti the dust began to settle, by the ti the nobles were picking themselves up and trying to understand what had just happened, Jorghan was already moving.
He walked through the chaos with single-minded purpose, his boots crunching on broken wood. His gaze was locked on one person and one person only.
Her.
His mother, from his previous life.
The woman who had murdered him with poison and cold calculation. She was on the ground, her elaborate dress torn, her carefully arranged hair disheveled. And as Jorghan approached, she looked up at him with eyes that widened and terror in them.
The killing intent rolling off Jorghan was a physical presence, a pressure that made the air itself feel thick and suffocating.
Normal people in the crowd simply collapsed, their minds unable to process the sheer malevolence radiating from him.
Others staggered, falling to their knees, vomiting from the intensity of it.
[CARNAGE REQUIEM: ACTIVE]
Lukas moved.
He stepped between Jorghan and his mother, his face a mask of determination despite the obvious fear in his eyes.
Energy crackled around his hands, the sa power he had displayed in their previous fight.
"Stay back!" he shouted, his voice cracking slightly.
"I don’t know who you are or what you want, but you won’t touch her!"
Jorghan’s crimson gaze shifted to the boy—his half-brother—and sothing like cruel amusent flickered across his face.
Behind them, Hawkin had risen to his feet.
His warrior’s instincts were screaming at him, recognizing the threat level of the intruder.
But there was sothing else in his expression—confusion, recognition struggling to surface through years of separation and change.
"You," Hawkin said slowly, his voice carrying across the chaos.
He was staring at Jorghan with an intensity that suggested pieces were falling into place. "Your face... those eyes... that tattoo..."
His own eyes widened as impossible realization dawned. "It can’t be. The Sol’vur marking. But that would an—"
The chaos around them intensified.
Guards were mobilizing now, pouring onto the platform from all sides.
They ford ranks, weapons drawn, so already channeling magic, and other soldiers pointed their guns at him.
There were a lot of them, all trained warriors, all focused on the single intruder who had just destroyed their carefully planned ceremony.
In the crowd, people were scattering, running in all directions. Parents grabbed their children and fled. Vendors abandoned their stalls. The festival atmosphere had transford into complete pandemonium in a matter of seconds.
Jamie Moorne stood frozen, his face pale with shock. Not knowing what’s happening. He could see the young man standing before his wife and his son. But he wasn’t aware of the true identity of the man whom he killed.
But Jorghan heard none of it.
Saw none of it.
His entire being was focused on the woman cowering behind Lukas, on the target of a fury that had been building for two lifetis.
Scarlett, still in her wedding dress, had been thrown to the side by the initial impact.
She lay there among the debris, her compulsion-addled mind struggling to process what was happening.
But as Jorghan’s power continued to build, sothing in that overwhelming pressure seed to crack through the magical influence holding her mind prisoner.
Her eyes flickered, consciousness returning in fragnts.
Caden Harrington, Hawkin’s son, the man who had shot Jorghan, was shouting orders to the guards while backing away from the crimson-lit figure at the platform’s center. His aristocratic confidence had evaporated, replaced by raw survival instinct.
And Jorghan stood at the epicenter of it all, a force of nature wearing human skin, the last survivor of the Sol’vur clan finally face-to-face with the people who had destroyed his lives.
The red dot in his consciousness spun so fast it beca a blur, and sowhere in the depths of his fragnted awareness, a voice that might have been his own or might have been sothing far more ancient whispered a single word:
Vengeance.
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