The leader of Kora's guards finished speaking, her smile a thin, cruel slash in the severe lines of her face. The silence that followed was heavier than the dust in the ruined library, thick with the promise of violence. Six against three. The odds were bad, but not impossible. For a single, suspended moment, the only sound was the frantic thumping of Retour's own heart against his ribs, a frantic drum counting down the last seconds of peace.
Then everything happened at once.
Dean moved first. He didn't roar. He didn't announce his intent. He simply exploded from his guarded stance, his body a blur of worn leather and scarred plate. He closed the distance to the nearest guard in two long strides, his fist, encased in its gauntlet, smashing into the man's helmet with a sickening crunch of metal and bone. The guard crumpled without a sound. Dean had already pivoted, his cudgel sweeping low to buckle the knees of a second soldier. It was brutal, efficient, and bought them a precious second.
"Retour, the exit!" Dean barked, his voice a gravelly command that cut through the sudden chaos.
But the exit was blocked. The remaining four guards fanned out with disciplined precision, their swords gleaming dully in the murky light. Their leader, the sharp-featured woman, kept her eyes locked on Retour, ignoring Dean entirely. Her orders had been clear. The book. The heir.
Ile hadn't moved from his position near the pedestal. His analytical gaze darted across the scene, calculating trajectories and probabilities. "The structural integrity of the shelves to your left is compromised," he stated, his voice unnervingly calm amidst the clash of steel as Dean parried a thrust from a third guard. "A controlled collapse could impede their advance."
Retour's hand went to the hilt of his own sword, but his fingers trembled. It wasn't fear. It was the thing inside him, the mist, writhing in response to the surge of adrenaline and panic. He could feel it scratching at the back of his eyes, a hot pressure building in his sinuses. The visions from the Codex—his father's sacrifice, the terrible power—flashed behind his eyelids. The crown is not worth this.
The sharp-featured leader saw his hesitation. She lunged, not at Retour, but at the Codex itself. Her gloved hand shot out to snatch the open book from its pedestal.
A jolt of pure, undiluted rage, white-hot and blinding, tore through Retour. That book was his. His history. His curse. His father's final legacy. It was not for some Usurper's lackey to defile.
No.
The thought was a silent scream.
The world erupted in crimson.
It didn't seep from his pores this time. It detonated. A shockwave of palpable, red energy blasted outwards from his body, silent and utterly devastating. It wasn't a cloud; it was a tidal wave of raw, malevolent force.
The effect was instantaneous.
The leader, her fingers inches from the Codex, was thrown backwards as if hit by a battering ram. She slammed into a toppled bookshelf fifteen feet away, the impact a sickening crack of wood and armor. She did not get up.
The other guards froze in mid-action, their forms caught in the roiling, blood-colored haze. Their screams were cut off before they could even form, swallowed by the suffocating silence of the mist. It didn't just kill them. It unmade them. Their armor didn't dent; it flaked away into rust particles that hung in the air like metallic dust. Their skin desiccated in a heartbeat, shrinking tight to bone before the bones themselves greyed and crumbled into powder. Within three seconds, where four trained soldiers had stood, there were only four vaguely human-shaped clouds of ash settling gently onto the marble floor.
The mist did not discriminate. It licked out towards Dean, who had been grappling with a guard. The guard simply dissolved in his arms, leaving Dean clutching at empty air, his eyes wide with a horror that was beyond comprehension. The red tendrils brushed against Dean's vambrace. The metal instantly frosted over with a thick, reddish rust, and the leather strap beneath it petrified, turning brittle and black.
It reached Ile, who stood his ground, his scientific fascination warring with a primal fear. The mist coiled around his outstretched hand, and the scroll he had been holding disintegrated into a fine, grey powder that sifted through his fingers.
Then it was over.
The red wave collapsed back into Retour, sucking back into his skin with a sound like a final, ragged breath. The silence returned, deeper and more profound than before.
Retour stood panting, his entire body trembling. The headache was no longer a throb; it was a white-hot brand searing into the core of his brain. Nausea twisted his stomach, and his knees buckled. He caught himself on the stone pedestal, his vision swimming in and out of focus. The cost was immense, a hollowing out of his very soul.
Dean was staring at the rust on his vambrace, then at the piles of ash, his face pale. He looked at Retour not with reverence, but with a dawning, terrible awe. This was not the prince he had sworn to protect. This was the curse made flesh.
Ile, however, was already moving, inspecting the ash residue on his fingers. "Complete molecular disintegration," he murmured, his voice hushed not with fear, but with a kind of terrifying reverence. "The energy output is... incalculable. And the targeting parameters... it recognized us. It chose not to consume us, only what we held." He looked at Retour, his eyes alight. "You didn't just unleash it. You commanded it."
Retour could barely hear him over the roaring in his own head. He felt filthy, violated, monstrous. He had seen the look in Dean's eyes. He had felt the sheer, annihilating nothingness of the mist's power. This was what his father had sealed away. This was the price.
He looked at the Red Codex, still lying open on the pedestal, its crimson eye seeming to mock him. It had shown him the truth, and the truth had used him as its weapon.
From the shadows near the shattered main entrance, a figure stirred. The sharp-featured leader, broken and bleeding, pushed herself up on one elbow. One of her arms was bent at a grotesque angle, and a gash on her forehead bled freely into her eye. But she was alive. She had been on the periphery of the blast. She had seen everything.
Her cold eyes, filled with a new kind of terror, locked onto Retour. She didn't speak. She didn't need to. The message in her gaze was clear, and it would be far more dangerous than any sword.
She knew. She had seen the heir. And she had seen the living weapon he contained.
With a pained gasp, she dragged herself into the deeper darkness of the library ruins, the sound of her ragged escape a final, chilling footnote to the massacre.
Retour slid to the floor, his back against the pedestal, the weight of what he had done—and what he was—crushing him. The Blood Mist had awoken. And the world would never be the same.