Percival returned home that night with his head low and his thoughts heavy. The streets of Salvaya were silent, the kind of silence that pressed against your ears, but his mind refused to rest. His expression was tight, jaw locked, steps slow and deliberate. Every motion felt weighted, as though the air itself resisted him.
He couldn't stop replaying his brother's face the betrayal, the arrogance, the quiet violation of everything their world was built upon. For hours, he walked with that thought like a shard lodged in his chest, wondering if he should tell their father what had happened. Whether it was justice… or revenge.
He stopped at a corner.
A raspy voice broke through the fog in his mind.
"Hey, boy. Come here a second."
An old man sat beneath a dying streetlight, the bulb flickering weakly over his hunched form. His hands trembled as he raised a tin cup.
"Got a few bucks to spare, why don't you?"
Percival's eyes narrowed. The instinct was to ignore him just another beggar lost to time. But something inside him shifted.
A strange, buried recognition tugged at the back of his skull.
For a moment, the world tilted.
He was thirteen again. Standing in this very street. Facing a man who looked exactly the same fragile, ancient, yet carrying a strange weight in his words.
"Ah… I remember you," Percival muttered.
The old man's lips curved into a thin smile. "It seems the contract worked."
Percival took a step closer, his shadow stretching across the cracked pavement.
"Is what you told me back then even true?"
"Of course," the old man said. His eyes gleamed faintly in the lamplight. "You never did kill the dragon that rests atop that mountain, did you?"
Percival exhaled through his nose, half a scoff, half a sigh. He turned to leave.
"Now where are you going?" the old man called out, voice hopeful maybe expecting a coin, maybe something more.
Percival tossed him one anyway, the metal clinking on stone.
"If your offer still stands," he said without turning back, "then I'm off to slay the black dragon."
The old man's grin widened, revealing a mouthful of crooked teeth.
"Don't get cocky, brat."
The journey to the Black Mountains of Saldova was long. Cold. Relentless.
Snow fell in sheets, smothering the world in silence. Percival's breath came in visible clouds, his cloak stiff with frost, his fingers numb around the hilt of his odachi. He walked for days through frozen wastelands where even beasts dared not tread.
When he finally reached the summit, the storm had grown into a living thing wind howling like the dead.
There, on the peak, a shadow stirred.
The black dragon rested upon its throne of bone and stone, scales glistening faintly beneath the lightning. When one violet eye cracked open, it was like a portal to another age.
Its voice rolled out like thunder.
"What the fuck…" The dragon's tone was lazy, irritated, ancient. "I had decided that if I woke to a beautiful girl, I'd make her my pet. And if it was a man…" The corners of its mouth curled into something cruel. "I'd pluck his eyes out and have them for breakfast."
It yawned, a sound that shook the mountain.
Percival didn't move. Didn't blink.
He smiled in the face of death.
"How many years has it been? Thirty? Forty? …Ah, who cares," the dragon muttered, rising slowly. Its body was vast, serpentine, muscles rippling under obsidian scales. The movement alone cracked the cliff beneath its weight.
"Now then… let us begin."
A wave of nightmare energy exploded from the creature's body. The shockwave sent Percival flying back, tumbling through snow and rock.
Mid-air, his instincts took over. Shadows burst from his fingertips, coiling into a rope of darkness that latched onto the cliffside. He yanked himself upward, boots grinding against the stone.
When he stood again, his breath was ragged but steady. His hand tightened around the odachi. The blade's edge drank in the light.
He looked up at the beast and spoke quietly almost reverently.
"Listen here, dragon. Your power doesn't intimidate me. You should've sharpened your skills before facing me. For I am the rightful heir to death and you will become nothing but a stepping stone in my ascension."
His crimson eyes glowed.
He dashed forward.
The dragon roared, and their collision split the world.
The mountain screamed beneath them. Each strike cracked stone and sent avalanches rolling for miles. Waves of corrupted energy tore through the land, killing everything they touched trees, beasts, even the rivers turned black.
But Percival didn't stop.
He fought through blood and frost, shadow tendrils lashing against scale, steel cutting through fire. Each blow felt like it could shatter him, but each time he fell, he rose again. The dragon's claws sliced through armor and flesh. His ribs cracked. His lungs burned.
Still, he kept moving.
They fought for three days and three nights, neither yielding, neither showing mercy.
On the first day, he learned the rhythm of its rage.
On the second, he learned the weight of its breath.
On the third, he learned what it meant to defy death itself.
Blood stained the snow.
Percival's shadow flickered with each heartbeat. His body was breaking bones splintered, vision fading. Yet in those moments, he felt something awaken inside him: not divinity, not power, but will.
"Huff… Huff…" He spat blood, eyes locked on the beast. "Had enough yet, eh, dragon?"
"Not in a million years!" the dragon roared, wings splitting the clouds.
The storm answered.
They clashed again, until both could barely stand.
The final night came beneath a full moon that painted the battlefield silver. The dragon drew in a deep breath, summoning the essence of death itself. The air grew heavy, still, suffocating.
But then… death hesitated.
Its power stilled in the air, like a held breath.
It bowed.
And in that pause, Percival moved.
He leapt, a streak of black and red against the white snow, and drove his odachi deep into the dragon's chest. The beast roared, thrashing but he didn't stop. He tore into it with his bare hands, ripping through flesh and scale until the mountain shook with its death cry.
When silence returned, only Percival remained.
He collapsed beside the corpse, body mangled, blood freezing in the cold. His vision dimmed.
Between life and death, he hovered caught in that narrow space where neither side would claim him.
He slept for days.
When he finally stirred, it was to the quiet crackle of wind over ice. His body was broken. His thoughts were distant.
He stared up at the sky and tried to breathe.
Slowly, he began weaving his energy through his shattered form, mending what little he could. His voice came out hoarse, barely a whisper.
"I asked myself how I'm still alive…"
He paused.
A faint, humorless smile ghosted over his lips.
"But all I could think is…"
"Sheer luck