Chapter four * Collateral damage *
***600 Years Ago*
_The page history burned._
A scene omitted from the annals of history. The secret only few people witnessed, and deliberately not added into the history books.
Wind howled beyond the Central Continent's walls, carrying ash and the copper stink of old blood. Maslow Griffin planted his boots in cracked earth and stared at the thing calling itself Kirin.
His heart beat like a war drum. _Last defense._ The words echoed in his skull. If he fell here, humanity fell with him. He knew the weight of his own power - he'd split mountains, burned skies clean. Cities were nothing to him.
Yet this… humoid turtle… made his palms sweat.
Kirin stood small, humanoid, delicate. Shell patterned like cracked jade. But her eyes held oceans. And when she spoke human words with a smile too soft for a beast, the air grew heavy.
Maslow locked his knees. Warriors died standing. He would too.
"I can sense it," Kirin said. Her voice was silk dragged over a blade. "Your battle intent. Desperate. Hopeless. And yet you smile." She tilted her head, shell catching pale light. "Amusing."
A shiver ran down Maslow's spine despite himself. He didn't flinch. He tasted iron on his tongue. Fear. He let it sit there.
"You cannot win," Kirin continued, smile never reaching those ancient eyes. "But we don't want your extinction."
He wanted to roar until his lungs tore.
_You killed billions. You dragged us through centuries of suffering and ash. And now you stand there and claim extinction wasn't your intent? Do our deaths mean nothing?! Does our pain mean nothing to you?!_
But the words died in his throat.
He knew it before he spoke. Knew it in his bones.
To these exotic things that ruled at the top of the food chain, his outrage was nothing. His death were statistics. His suffering was background noise. His grief. All of it was less than dust under their claws.
The words felt wrong. Too gentle. Maslow's throat was sandpaper. "Then what?"
"Endure Grik for one hour." She lifted a clawed hand, pointing to the shadow beside her. The humoid tiger. "We take half the world. You lose, we take all of it."
Grik. The name hit like a drumbeat. The humanoid tiger didn't speak. He didn't need to. Black sludge oozed from his fur, thick as tar, cold as a grave. Each drop hissed when it hit the ground, eating stone. The air turned dense, hard to breathe, like the sky itself was drowning.
Maslow's lungs burned. "Why would I believe you?"
Kirin's smile sharpened into something cruel. "Because you have no choice." She paused. Then, softer, almost pitying: "You're all collateral damage, Maslow. Nothing more."
Grik's head snapped toward her. Shock flashed in beast-gold eyes. Kirin had spoken too much. Even he doesn't know what she meant by that.
_Collateral damage._ The words detonated in Maslow's chest. A century of war. Billions of screams. Children burned in white fire. All of it… a footnote. He felt reluctant to accept what she said as the truth, but she does not have any reason to lie to him.
Blood rose in his throat. He swallowed it. Pain carved lines into his face, but he stepped forward anyway. "I accept. One condition: five years. No beasts cross the border. Time for my people to move."
Kirin laughed - a sound like breaking ice. "One and a half hours. Survive that, and your five years are yours."
Grik moved without sound. One moment he stood beside Kirin. The next, Grik hung in the sky, a tiger-shaped scar in reality.
His aura rolled out in waves - vile, putrid, thick with blood and old death.
His eyes burned red. Not rage. just pure malevolence.
Black sludge exploded outward, a storm of corruption. It clung to Maslow's skin, cold and acidic, trying to rot his qi. The pressure alone made his bones creak. The world groaned under Grik's weight, like the planet was old and tired and ready to break.
Golden light erupted from Maslow's chest. Sun-hot. Defiant. Qi poured into his palm, shaping a claw of pure light. He met Grik's fist mid-air.
*BOOM.*
Shockwaves ripped the clouds apart. Maslow was hurled back, skidding across shattered earth, leaving a trench of pulverized rock. His arm screamed in agony. The sludge was already eating his golden qi, hissing and spitting like water on fire.
Grik blinked once. Surprise. Then rage.
He came again. No words. No warning. Just a meteor of black death screaming through the sky.
Maslow caught the fist with his bleeding palm. The sludge crawled up his arm, burning. He was thrown back again, teeth cracking from the impact.
He tasted blood. He tasted failure. He tasted resolve.
Golden light surged, brighter this time, angrier. This time Maslow moved first.
---
*[Back to Present]*
Arin jerked awake in the ruined room. Dust filled his mouth. His head throbbed like it had been split open and stitched back wrong.
Memory was a broken mirror. History, reduced to summaries. He only knew the ending: Maslow's fight bought humanity time. Then history continues.
After the sky stopped bleeding, survivors crawled to three continents. Veraks, Golden, Kedas. Cold stone cities built on bones. The Central Continent became a wall. A wound that never closed.
Beyond it lay the White Continent. No Man's Land. The air there tasted of metal and rot. Radiation from the Eyeball still twisted the land. Grass grew in spirals. Rivers ran black. And things lived there now - aberrations that survived the mutation, twisted into shapes that shouldn't exist.
Further still: Silver, Vishtall, Red. Beast continents. Red Continent sat at the center, a wound of red soil and black skies. Rumor said demons walked there. Demons at Maslow's level. If true, humanity should be ash. That is what humans thought, but the legend rank and above knows more.
But peace held. For more than a century. Beast cores were found inside skulls - glowing stones that hummed with power. The strongest man cracked their secret. Beast taming was born. For those with soul traits, it patched humanity's weakness.
Arin clenched his fist. The summarized history in his mind felt too clean. Too small. Like reading about a war from a child's textbook.
Respect sank into his bones, cold and absolute, for the man who never bent. Maslow Griffin - the one who stood tall while the world collapsed, who took the weight of all humanity on his back and didn't break when his spine should've shattered.
Then something in him snapped.
Rage flooded his veins, black and boiling. Killing intent poured from him in waves, aimed straight at the beasts below like sharpened spears. His teeth bared without permission.
The ruby clutched in his palm pulsed once. Dim light bled through his fingers,without his notice answering the hate he didn't know he carried.
But minutes later, the fire died.
It drained out of him like blood from an open wound.
A cold weight settled in his chest. If someone as strong and terrifying as Maslow Griffin couldn't save humanity… then what was a nameless, powerless boy like him supposed to do?
The thought tasted like ash. Bitter. Useless.
He let out a dry, cracked laugh that echoed off the stone walls. The sound felt hollow in his own ears. "Forget saving the world," he muttered, voice rough with hunger. "I'll rot and die a dog's death in some gutter before the sky even cracks. Let the tall men worry about holding up the heavens."
_If the heavens come crashing down, the tallest will hold it._
He exhaled. A long, slow sigh that stirred dust on the cold stone floor. The courtyard smelled of old ozone and dead light from the stones. Arin dragged his gaze down, sifting through the few tattered memory fragments of Pangu's history that old Arin had left behind.
It all ended too fast. Pages torn out. Cities falling in a single line. The final war described like a footnote.
Rushed. Sloppy. Like the world itself got tired and stopped writing.