The dust moved first.
Not in a rush.
Not in collapse.
It slid away in slow, unwilling waves, peeling back from the street as if something unseen had passed through and taken the noise with it.
Rian's ears rang.
He pushed himself upright, hands shaking as they found broken concrete for support. Pain flared—then settled—his body reminding him all at once that it was still human.
The street came into focus piece by piece.
Crushed buildings.
Scorched asphalt.
A long, perfectly straight burn line carved through stone and steel alike.
And where the ruin should have been thickest
And where the ruin should have been thickest—
The tall creature stood.
Or what remained of it.
Its massive frame was locked in place, one knee sunk into shattered asphalt, arms hanging loose as if whatever strength had held it together had simply let go. At the center of its chest—
A hole.
Perfectly round.
Perfectly clean.
Straight through.
Rian could see daylight on the other side.
The edges weren't torn or burned. They looked emptied, as if something essential had been removed rather than destroyed.
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then the creature began to come apart.
Not collapsing.
Not falling.
Its surface broke into dark particles, lifting gently from its body like ash rising from a dead fire. The chunks didn't crumble—they unwound, peeling away layer by layer, drifting upward and outward in silence.
An arm dissolved at the elbow.
The torso hollowed further.
The head fractured into drifting motes before it could even hit the ground.
There was no roar.
No final resistance.
Just quiet erasure.
The particles thinned as they rose, breaking down into finer and finer dust until even that faded, leaving nothing behind but scorched ground and the empty space where something enormous had stood seconds ago.
Rian didn't move.
The street felt wider without it.
Too wide.
He exhaled slowly, only then realizing he'd been holding his breath—waiting for something that never came.
The tall creature was gone.
The dust settled further.
Bit by bit, the haze thinned, peeling away from the street until the air stopped tasting like ash and heat.
That was when Rian saw him.
The boy stood where the creature had been driven back from—feet planted unevenly, knees locked more out of habit than strength. One arm was still raised toward the sky, fist clenched, frozen in the aftermath of a strike that had already ended.
His eyes were closed.
Not in peace.
In exhaustion.
Blood drifted from him in slow, dark threads. From his shoulder. His side. Along his forearm. It soaked into torn fabric, dotted the ground beneath him, ran in thin lines that followed the cracks in the street.
He wasn't moving.
Not swaying. Not breathing hard. Just… standing.
Rian's chest tightened.
It was hard to believe someone could survive that beating.
Harder still to believe they had won.
The street around him looked like a battlefield carved by something inhuman—crushed stone, collapsed walls, gouges ripped through asphalt—yet at the center of it all stood one boy, broken and upright through sheer refusal to fall.
Rian took a step forward before he realized it.
"Hey—" His voice came out rough. "You… you can drop your arm now."
The boy didn't respond.
For a terrifying second, Rian wondered if he was already too late.
The raised fist trembled—just barely.
And then, slowly, gravity began to remember him.
The boy's eyes opened.
Slow.
Unfocused.
They were already wrong.
Black filled them completely, swallowing the whites without mercy, veins of deep red light etched through the darkness like fractures in glass. The glow pulsed faintly—not new, not rising—just there, steady and cold.
His raised hand trembled, still angled toward the sky as if the punch hadn't finished yet. Blood drifted from his body in lazy arcs—shoulder, ribs, scalp—dark droplets hanging in the dust-choked air before falling softly against ruined stone.
It was hard to believe someone could survive that beating.
Harder to believe he'd won.
Then—
A roar.
Distant.
Warped.
Heavy enough to crawl through the ground and settle in Rian's bones.
Far away, beyond collapsed blocks and skeletal towers, the sky flickered.
Blue.
Then orange.
Sparks tore through the darkness in violent bursts, brief and furious, like lightning being shredded mid-strike. The flashes reflected in the boy's black-and-red eyes, the crimson veins flaring brighter for a heartbeat—as if reacting, not changing.
The roar came again.
Sharper.
Angrier.
Still fighting.
The boy's gaze shifted first, tracking the sound without turning his head. A faint tremor ran through his body as the raised hand finally lowered, fingers uncurling slowly, reluctantly.
His eyes remain dark and red
Watching.
Measuring.
Waiting.
The street held its breath.
This wasn't the end.
It was only the pause before the next impact.
The boy moved.
He didn't climb out of the crater.
He leapt.
A single motion—legs coiling, body snapping upward—clearing broken stone and twisted rebar as if gravity had loosened its grip on him. He landed hard on the street's edge, boots skidding, knees buckling for half a breath before he forced himself upright.
The roar came again.
Closer this time.
Blue and orange sparks flared somewhere beyond the ruins, tearing briefly through the haze like wounds in the dark.
The boy turned toward it.
And began walking.
Each step was uneven, delayed by fractions of a second, like his body was receiving commands too late. Blood continued to trail behind him, dripping from his arm, his side, his scalp—marking his path across the shattered street.
Then—
His eyes flickered.
The black receded first.
The red veins dimmed, cracking, collapsing inward like dying embers.
Color returned.
White.
Brown.
Human.
The moment they did—
He staggered.
A violent shudder ripped through his frame as he dropped to one knee. His hand clawed at the ground, fingers scraping uselessly against grit and glass.
He retched.
Blood poured from his mouth in a thick, choking spill, splattering across the street. Another convulsion followed—and this time, it came from his head.
Thin streams of blood leaked from the corners of his eyes, tracing crooked lines down his cheeks as his vision failed him all at once.
Rian shouted for him.
The boy didn't hear it.
His body swayed, tried to rise—
—and failed.
He collapsed forward, hitting the ground hard, limbs slack, breath shallow but still there. The sparks in the distance flared once more, the roar echoing faintly through the ruins—
—but the boy didn't move.
He was back to human again.
And whatever price it demanded—
It had begun to collect.
Not sitting—more like collapsing where the ground looked least likely to give way beneath him. A slab of broken concrete at his back. Twisted rebar jutting out like ribs around him. The city, or what was left of it, breathed in slow creaks and settling groans.
For the first time since it all began—
Nothing was immediately trying to kill him.
His hands shook as the adrenaline finally bled out. He clasped them together, knuckles white, just to stop the tremor. Dust coated his skin, his clothes, his throat. Every breath tasted like smoke and iron.
He stared ahead, unfocused.
Today had started like no other.
A shift at the convenience store. Fluorescent lights. The hum of refrigerators. Complaints about prices. His boss letting him off early
Dead now.
The thought hit him late. Too late. Not with pain—just a hollow drop in his chest.
The store was gone.
The street was gone.
The place he stood in every day without thinking had opened into a hole in the world.
Monsters had crawled out of it.
Things that shouldn't exist. Things that broke buildings like toys and screamed like they meant it.
And then—
A kid.
Not a soldier.
Not some armored responder.
Just a random boy who had appeared in the middle of hell and fought a towering creature like the rules didn't apply to him.
Rian let out a quiet, broken laugh.
"What the hell…" he murmured.
None of it fit. None of it lined up with how reality was supposed to work. He'd watched someone be crushed into the street, beaten into the ground again and again—
—and stand back up.
He rubbed his face with both hands, dragging fingers through dust and dried blood. When he lowered them, the ruins were still there. The crater. The scorch marks. The impossible straight line burned through everything.
It hadn't been a dream.
Rian's gaze drifted back to where the boy lay unconscious nearby, breathing shallow but alive. Small. Human. Too normal for what he'd done.
A random kid shows up.
Fights a monster.
Defeats it.
Rian leaned his head back against the
concrete, eyes closing for a moment.
His life hadn't just gone wrong today.
It had gone off script.
And whatever had broken through the ground
Elsewhere.
Far from the ruined street where dust still drifted and silence pretended to exist—
The ground buckled.
Not shattered—buckled, like something vast had decided the street no longer deserved to be flat.
It ran on four limbs.
Low. Heavy. Relentless.
Each step struck like a piledriver, claws biting into asphalt, stone folding beneath its weight. The segmented body flowed forward in brutal coordination, plates locking and unlocking in sequence, spine ridges glowing faintly as force traveled cleanly from rear limbs to front.
A charge.
Not wild.
Not blind.
Committed.
Flames met it head-on.
A wall of yellow fire roared across the street, thick and violent, heat rolling hard enough to warp metal and peel paint from buildings. The blast swallowed its head, its shoulders, its entire forward mass—
—and broke.
Fire split around it instead of stopping it.
The creature didn't slow.
Plating blackened. Outer layers scorched and cracked, glowing at the seams before sloughing off in burning fragments. Beneath them, deeper segments held—dense, interlocked, built to endure.
Blue followed.
Sharper.
Hotter.
Focused.
Lances of condensed flame struck its flank, smaller but far more intense, punching against joints and seams with surgical precision. One hit tore a chunk free, sending molten fragments spinning through the air.
The creature snarled.
Not in pain.
In irritation.
Its stride shortened for half a step—then corrected. Muscles compressed. Weight shifted forward. The next impact came harder, claws carving deeper trenches as it powered through the barrage.
Another yellow blast hit.
Then another.
Buildings burned.
The street screamed.
The air itself shimmered under the heat.
Still—it charged.
Fire crawled across its scales, clinging, chewing, but never slowing it enough. Smoke streamed from its back in violent sheets as it lowered its head further, horned plating angling forward like a living battering ram.
Distance vanished.
The source of the flames grew closer.
Closer.
The creature's eyes locked.
Its spine flared.
And the charge reached its final phase.
Whatever stood ahead—
Was about to be tested.
A figure stepped through the flames.
Not pushing them aside. Not shielding himself.
They simply parted.
Fire licked at his clothes, curled around his shoulders, slid past his skin without leaving a mark. Smoke washed over him and thinned, as if the heat itself refused to stay.
White hair hung loose and untouched by ash. White strands caught the light where the fire broke around him. Blue eyes—flat, unbothered—tracked the incoming mass without urgency.
The charge did not slow.
The ground shattered under the creature's weight, cracks racing ahead of it as its horned plating angled down for impact.
The figure raised one hand.
Palm open.
The air bent.
Something invisible folded inward around him—space tightening, sound dulling, the flames stuttering mid-crawl as if caught in indecision.
A handle appeared in his grasp.
Not summoned.
Assembled.
Metal took shape where imagination ended, lines sharpening, weight settling. A blade followed—long, precise, finished before the creature crossed the last stretch of distance.
He took one step forward.
Not to meet the charge.
To intercept it.
Then—
The blade moved.
Not fast.
Correct.
Then—
He spoke.
Soft. Uninterested.
"Falseborn Domain."
The air hesitated.
Flames crawling across the street faltered, their shapes thinning, edges blurring as if someone had tugged them backward by an invisible thread. Heat dimmed. Smoke folded inward instead of rising.
The blade in his hand vibrated once.
"Recall."
The flames vanished.
Not extinguished.
Gone.
For half a heartbeat, the street felt hollow—like something important had just stepped out of it.
Then the fire came back.
Hard.
It didn't bloom or spread. It arrived.
Orange and blue slammed into the charging mass from angles that didn't exist a moment ago, heat snapping into place all at once, pressure following like a delayed echo. Asphalt blackened instantly. The air screamed.
The blade followed.
Its weight changed.
Not heavier— final.
The cut landed.
No arc. No flourish.
Just a line drawn where the creature had committed itself fully to motion.
For a fraction of a second, nothing happened.
Then the world remembered to react.
The creature hadn't reached him yet—
Then the air split.
No flash.
No sound.
Just a pressure drop so sudden it made the dust hesitate.
A heartbeat passed.
Then the creature screamed.
Two lines tore open across its front legs, perfectly placed, slicing through plating and sinew as if the space itself had been measured and corrected. The charge faltered mid-stride, hooves striking wrong, weight shifting where support no longer existed.
Momentum betrayed it.
The direction changed.
Its body veered violently, balance snapping as both front limbs failed at once. The spine flared in reflex, muscles roaring, but the damage was already done.
The charge collapsed sideways.
Steel met concrete.
The creature crashed into a nearby building, the impact shuddering through the street as walls buckled and windows detonated outward in a storm of glass and dust.
Silence followed.
Not because the fight was over—
But because something had just decided where the creature was allowed to stand.
The creature twitched.
Its ruined front legs pressed against the ground, plates grinding as it tried to rise. Purple light bled through the fractures, veins of energy crawling beneath broken armor. The glow intensified, pulsing in slow, deliberate waves.
Healing.
Bone knitting.
Flesh remembering its shape.
The creature dragged itself higher—
Then it heard it.
A voice.
Close. Calm.
"Expand."
The glow stuttered.
Before the creature could place its weight—
"Recall."
The sky answered.
Blue fire fell.
Not drifting.
Not spreading.
It rained—dense, focused, impossibly fast.
Impact after impact after impact.
The street vanished beneath the barrage, explosions overlapping into a continuous roar as blue flames hammered the creature from above. Its body slammed back into the ruins, fire wrapping around its frame, chewing through stone and steel alike.
The creature roared.
A sound torn raw by pain and fury.
As the fire thinned, its back began to glow.
Pink.
Brighter than before.
Regeneration surged, light flooding outward from its spine, plates re-forming, damage crawling backward under the glow.
It started to rise again.
Then—
"Expand."
The glow hesitated.
"Recall."
The world fell on it again.
Another rain.
Another detonation.
Another roar swallowed by flame.
Again.
And again.
Each time it tried to stand—
Each time the light answered—
Each time the words came first.
Not shouted.
Not strained.
Measured.
Like a correction being applied.