The snow hadn't even finished swallowing his scream when the world forced another one out of him.
Sharp teeth.
Blood pouring down.
Bones cracking.
There was no pause.
No breath.
No mercy.
Only one thought broke through the haze inside the young man's head—
a single, trembling whisper forcing itself through the terror drowning him:
"I have to get up."
Kairo screamed.
Not the kind of scream someone makes when they stub their toe or cut their hand.
But the kind torn from a living body while it's being eaten alive.
A wolf's jaws clamped deeper into his side—ripping, shaking, tearing.
Another's teeth dug into the muscle of his shoulder.
His nerves should've been lighting up like fire.
But instead—
Nothing.
No pain.
No heat.
No cold.
Just sound.
Just the crunch of his own bones in someone else's mouth.
Just the wet, horrible grind of his own flesh being pulled apart.
His hand slipped through the snow, slick with his blood.
His fingers clawed at the ground.
His lungs heaved in broken, uneven spasms—
And somehow, impossibly, he rose.
His fist cracked across the skull of the wolf latched onto him.
A punch not of technique, but of a dying body refusing to stay down.
The beast yelped—
a wet, choked sound—
and flew sideways across the snow.
Another lunged.
Kairo twisted—
one arm missing—
blood spraying out in a violent arc as he kicked upward with every ounce of strength left in his shaking body.
His foot smashed into the creature's jaw—
dislocating it with a sickening crunch.
One growl.
One whimper.
One wolf limping backward with hesitation for the first time.
Kairo staggered.
Breathing hard.
Vision shaking.
World tilting.
Heartbeat fading in and out like someone flicking a switch behind his ribs.
He looked down.
His missing arm.
Blood pulsed from the wound, each heartbeat spraying crimson across the snow.
He felt his knees buckle.
He tasted metal in his mouth.
He saw stars in the corners of his vision.
An inner thought crawled through him—
quiet, distant, almost peaceful:
Life…
it really is so fragile.
He thought of his father.
Not the warm memories.
Not the laughter.
Not the advice.
The last time he saw him.
Cold.
Still.
Wrapped in white.
Eyes closed forever.
Kairo's vision blurred.
His breath hitched.
His shoulders trembled.
The wolves circled again—
slow, patient, hungry.
He reached down and grabbed his katana—
or what was left of it.
The blade had dulled.
Edges chipped.
Metal oxidized from the snow.
Rust mixed with dark, dried blood—
his blood—
painting it in ugly streaks.
Kairo stared at it.
At the shaking of his own remaining hand.
At the flickering of his breath in the frozen air.
At the way his vision pulsed in and out like a dying lantern.
Inner thoughts whispered into the hollow inside him:
Why…
why does it hurt…
yet I feel nothing?
He touched his chest.
No pain.
No warmth.
Just the thump of his heart—
feral, desperate, refusing to stop.
He exhaled, fog pouring from his lips.
"What… is this?"
The young man with silver hair stood in the snow—
blood covering his body,
dying his hair a darker red,
dripping down his chin in thick strings.
He felt none of it.
Not the cold.
Not the blood.
Not the teeth still embedded in his waist.
Nothing.
Just adrenaline.
Just raw, human spirit.
Just the violent refusal to die.
He inhaled.
Shaking.
Shivering.
Barely holding onto consciousness.
And the only thing left in him
was the most human thing of all:
Survival.
And then—
Something broke.
Not the wolves.
Not the snow.
Not the sky.
The story broke.
A sentence cut through the blood and frost like a blade forced into the wrong world:
In a world full of magic — ruled by gods and whispered legends — follow Kairo, a young man burdened by the mark of the Abynt, said to bring misfortune wherever he walks.
Driven by faith and desperation, he journeys to find Elveryine, the Divine Dragon, hoping to lift his curse and redeem his bloodline.
A single paragraph,
a single breath,
the story describing itself—
mocking him
while he fought to remain alive inside it.
Kairo Mercer got up.
He refused to die.
The man going through the impossible
decided—
I want to live.
The wolves trembled.
Kairo didn't notice.
He was staring at nothing—
or something only he could see.
His body swayed, blood dripping in slow trails down his legs, but he lifted his head just slightly…
"…hey…"
The word left his mouth as a broken whisper, soft and breathless.
"…I'm sorry."
Not shouted.
Not desperate.
Just… tired.
Tired in a way no seventeen-year-old should ever sound.
His knees buckled.
He knelt slowly into the snow, the frost swallowing his legs as his body sagged forward.
He stretched out his remaining hand.
To anyone watching, he was reaching for empty air.
But what Kairo saw—
what he truly saw—
was himself.
A child.
Seven years old.
Small.
Cold.
Alone.
Tired.
Scared.
Standing in the snow in front of him.
The same messy silver hair.
The same fragile eyes.
The same shaking shoulders.
The same abandoned expression he carried the day his father died.
Little Kairo didn't speak.
Blood dripped from Kairo's chin onto the snow.
The wolves backed away even further, confused and terrified by a moment they instinctively knew wasn't meant for beasts.
Kairo's breath fogged the air in a slow, fragile cloud.
"I'm sorry…"
he whispered again, voice cracking.
He reached out further—
his fingers inches from the child only he could see.
The snow fell around them like white ash.
His child self didn't step closer.
He didn't step away.
He just watched.
A mirror of innocence he lost long ago.
A reminder of every moment he failed to protect the person he used to be.
Kairo's vision shook.
The cold finally pierced through the numbness.
The fear finally caught up to him.
And the apology finally escaped his chest like a confession he'd held since the day his world first broke:
The wolves watched in silence.
For the first time, they weren't hunting a boy.
They were witnessing a soul fracture in real-time.
Kairo didn't wait for the child to answer.
There was no answer.
There was only an apology that slipped out of him like breath in winter.
"…I'm sorry."
He stood.
Slowly.
As if death itself were lifting him by the spine.
His remaining hand swept down, fingers closing around the battered katana's hilt.
The blade trembled—not because of the wind, but because the air feared what it touched.
The wolves didn't growl.
They couldn't.
Their throats locked.
Their bodies stiffened.
Jaws hung open, dripping saliva onto snow that hissed as if the blood soaking into it was hotter than flame.
They stared at him—
eyes wide, round, animal, unable to comprehend the wrongness in front of them.
A boy who should be dead.
A body torn apart.
A soul half-gone.
A heart beating only out of spite.
The wolves blinked.
And in that blink—
one of them died.
Or rather—
became two.
Perfectly split down the center.
As if the world had simply decided symmetry was beautiful again.
The beast's upper body slid sideways first.
Then the lower half collapsed.
And the snow drank its blood like a thirsty god.
The other wolves didn't understand.
They didn't know when he moved.
They didn't know if he moved at all.
They didn't know how something so broken could act with such precision.
They only knew—
oh.
oh.
Something had cut them.
Red paint sprayed across Kairo's face as the two clean halves hit the ground with a soft thud.
It soaked into his hair, streaking the blood already dripping there like ink spilled onto white parchment.
Two dead.
Three left.
Kairo didn't celebrate.
Didn't breathe any louder.
Didn't even blink.
His eyes were empty.
Hollow.
Dead.
Abynt.
His blade tilted slightly in his numb grip, the edge catching the moonlight—
and even the light recoiled, bending away as if refusing to touch what that steel had become.
The wolves' legs shook beneath them.
Their instincts screamed to run.
Their bodies begged them to flee.
But they couldn't move.
Not while those dead eyes stared through them.
Kairo exhaled once.
The katana whistled through the air.
The wolves flinched—
too late.
He continued walking.
Slowly.
Boots crunching the floor
in a rhythm too calm for someone who should've bled out minutes ago.
CRUNCH.
CRUNCH.
CRUNCH.
Each step felt like a memory being dragged back into the present.
Fragments of childhood.
Echoes of hands that once guided him.
"Listen up well, Kairo."
His father's voice.
Clear.
Warm.
Firm.
"This is how you protect yourself from a wolf."
Little Kairo, trembling in the snow, clutching a too-large wooden blade.
"You wait for them to leap…
and then—"
BANG.
His father's blade pierced the lung of a charging wolf, fast and clean.
The beast collapsed at his feet.
Kairo flinched, his small hands shaking.
"T-that's… scary, Dad…"
His father only laughed, ruffling his hair.
"That's why you learn, son.
So you don't end up on the ground."
The memory faded—
—and the present crashed back in.
Kairo's breath broke in the cold air.
He had broken his father's rules.
He hadn't waited for them to leap.
He hadn't countered with perfect timing.
He hadn't used technique.
He had simply—
cut them in half.
Instinct.
Desperation.
Abynt.
Nothing more.
His right sleeve hung empty.
Blood dripped from the stump in slow, heavy drops.
The remaining wolves watched him.
Then—
one whimpered.
Another stepped back.
A third broke entirely, bolting into the snowstorm with a strangled, terrified cry.
The rest followed.
Fleeing from a prey
that had become something else.
And then—
Silence.
A silence so absolute it felt wrong.
Kairo stood there, alone.
The snow fell softly around him, gentle and weightless.
The wind died.
The world waited.
He couldn't hear the wolves anymore.
He couldn't hear the trees shifting.
He couldn't hear his own heartbeat.
It was like the world itself had stopped breathing.
Just him.
Just a boy in an eternal snowland.
Wielding a bloody, rusted katana.
Body torn into shreds.
Skin pale and frozen.
Hair matted with red.
Arm missing.
Bones showing through torn flesh.
Standing.
Existing.
A corpse that hadn't realised it was supposed to fall.
A dead man
too stubborn for death.
A silhouette in red snow.
A myth being born.
A quiet omen of the Abynt.
Kairo didn't move.
He couldn't.
He just stood there, staring into the empty world—
a dead man lingering
because life wouldn't let him go.
He thought of the pink-haired girl
wearing that awkward little crown
on the cliff.
That quiet moment.
That strange warmth.
That softness that didn't belong in this world.
His chest tightened—
not from pain,
but from something he couldn't name.
He lifted his head toward the sky.
The clouds were thick, swollen,
hiding the sun entirely.
They looked heavy enough to fall,
to crush the frozen land beneath them.
It was cold.
So cold.
The kind of cold that claws through skin
and buries itself into bone.
Yet his body—
shredded, bleeding, dying—
felt warm.
Too warm.
The warmth of a fever.
The warmth of blood spilling too fast.
The warmth of a body shutting down.
His vision blurred,
edges fading in and out
as if the world couldn't decide whether to keep him or let him go.
And yet—
A faint, fragile breath left him.
"I feel…"
His voice cracked, thin as paper.
"…so alive."
The storm heard him.
Snow lifted at his feet,
spinning upward in a slow, spiraling dance.
Wind curled around his legs,
pulling red into white,
blending the blood on the ground into the snowfall.
Scarlet Heaven.
A storm of red-tinged flakes
swirling around a dying boy
who refused to fall.
Crimson painted the air.
White swallowed the earth.
Snow carried streaks of red
like strokes on a winter canvas.
He stood in the center of it—
warm and freezing,
alive and dying,
present and fading.
A silhouette flickering between life and death.
The storm howled.
The sky churned.
The world held its breath.
And Kairo stood under Scarlet Heaven,
a dead man
too stubborn
for death.