"Your left side is entirely open."
The words were spoken with a calm, maddening indifference, accompanied by a sudden, jarring impact that sent Khalel sprawling into the dark, jagged soil.
"I was setting up a counter," Khalel spat, coughing as he pushed himself up from the dirt. He tasted copper and ash.
"You were setting up your own funeral," Darius Blaine replied. The Immortal didn't even look winded. He stood with his hands loosely at his sides, his stance devoid of the rigid, magical forms common to Villoria. It was raw, ugly, and ruthlessly efficient. "Against a King's Guard, that hesitation costs your head. Again."
"Let the boy breathe, immortal," a voice purred from the shadows of their makeshift encampment.
Anastasia Grimm stepped into the dim, violet light of the seals above. The Witch of the Black Forest was entirely out of place in the grim prison of Rakasha, wearing an impossibly clean, dark coat and a smirk that suggested she knew the punchline to a joke the universe hadn't finished telling.
"He doesn't need to breathe. He needs to survive," Darius stated flatly.
"Bathing him in his own blood won't speed up the process," she countered, tossing an apple—grown from the blighted earth through sheer, unnatural willpower—toward the boy. "You're relying too much on the phantom weight, Khalel. You fight like you're still holding a sword."
Khalel caught the apple, his knuckles white. "I was holding forty-one of them, Anastasia. It's hard to forget."
"Bite the throat!" a thunderous voice echoed from above. Dejambo dropped from the cavernous ceiling, a hulking mass of scarred muscle and unbridled savagery. The Beast of Carnage tore into what looked like the femur of a basilisk. "You humans overcomplicate murder. Forget the swords. Forget the fancy footwork. When the human king William Stormbourne comes for you, do you think he'll care about your stance? Rip his sternum out! Feast on his pride!"
"We are trying to raise a liberator, Dejambo, not a feral dog," Lucian De'Viel's voice sliced through the cavern, cool and sterile. The Alchemist of End didn't look up from his workbench, where vials of glowing, volatile liquids bubbled. "Though Anastasia is correct. From a biomechanical standpoint, Khalel's muscle memory is actively working against him. His soul is compensating for the mass of forty-one divine class signatures that are currently locked away in the treasuries of the thirteen kingdoms."
Khalel walked over to the fire, the argument washing over him like a familiar tide. He dropped onto a stone bench, staring up at the sky. It wasn't a sky at all, but a dome of fractured amethyst, interlaced with one thousand, four hundred and ninety-nine glowing, ethereal chains. The seals of Rakasha Island.
"It's been eleven years," Khalel muttered. "You'd think the phantom pain would stop by now."
Lucian finally turned, the lenses of his glasses catching the firelight. "It will stop when you take them back. Not a moment sooner."
"I don't just want them back," Khalel said, his voice dropping to a dangerous, low register. "I want the people who took them to rot."
Darius sat across from him, resting his elbows on his knees. "Revenge is a sloppy motivator, kid. It makes you predictable."
"Did it make me predictable when I leveled forty-five percent of the continent?" Khalel snapped back.
Silence fell over the cavern. Even Dejambo stopped chewing. The memory of the thirteen days of ash hung heavy in the air.
"You were six years old, Khalel," Anastasia said softly, dropping her teasing tone. She knelt beside him. "You were a child. A child who had just watched his mother get slaughtered by his own father's hounds. What you did wasn't a tactical maneuver. It was a tantrum of divine proportions."
"I killed a million people, Anastasia."
"And William Stormbourne has likely killed ten times that in his so-called holy crusades," Dejambo grunted, surprisingly gentle for a beast. "He acts so smug with his nine soul weapons and five divine classes. Sylvia Heartbreaker has drowned entire provinces in blood just to test out one of her thirteen toys. Do not carry the guilt of a world that forced your hand."
Khalel looked at his hands. They were scarred, rough, and entirely empty. In a world where every peasant, merchant, and noble manifested a soul weapon—a dagger of light, a shield of iron, a bow of wind—his hands were bare. The absolute pinnacle of Fantasia's history, the only person to ever draw forty-one divine class weapons from the ether, reduced to fighting with his fists.
"Lilia," Darius said, the name sounding strange coming from the Immortal. "Your mother. She didn't care about the weapons, did she?"
"No," Khalel whispered. The memory was fragmented, buried under years of rage and isolation on Rakasha. "She just wanted me to be safe. When the Grand Cathedral lit up... when the sky broke open and the forty-one appeared... everyone was terrified. But she just smiled at me. She was so proud. Right before Augustus Van Garret's guards kicked the doors in."
"Augustus," Lucian mused, returning to his vials. "A coward of a man, terrified of a bastard son eclipsing his precious lineage. He ordered them to take you by any means necessary. A fatal miscalculation on his part."
"And so, they called us," Anastasia smiled, a sharp, dangerous thing. "The thirteen kingdoms, the monarchs, the demons. They couldn't stop you. The Demon Queen with her four divine weapons, the Human King with his five... they were nothing against a grieving child holding forty-one. So they sought out the anomalies."
"The criminals," Darius continued. "The transmigrators."
"We don't have soul weapons, kid," Dejambo laughed, a deep, rumbling sound that shook the cavern. "We aren't from Villoria. We came from Earth. A place where humans had to invent their own fangs."
"And it took all four of us to put you to sleep," Lucian added, holding up a vial of deep, swirling black liquid. "We beat you, not with divine swords, but with the applied sciences, raw endurance, and the tactics of a world far more creative with its violence."
Khalel looked up at the dome of Rakasha again. "And then they betrayed you."
"Naturally," Anastasia shrugged. "They took your weapons, stripped you of your soul, and then realized they were absolutely terrified of the four monsters who managed to take you down. So, they locked us all in here. Together. The only place in Villoria where no one escapes."
"Until you turn eighteen," Darius corrected, stepping back into the center of the clearing and raising his fists.
Khalel sighed, the heavy emotional weight receding, replaced by the familiar, comforting discipline of his makeshift family.
"We have one year left," Darius said. "One year to teach you everything Earth knows about survival. One year before the seals weaken just enough for a localized alchemy breach."
"We aren't just going to break out," Lucian corrected meticulously. "We are going to dismantle the foundation of Villoria."
"And to do that," Darius commanded, "you need to stop leaving your left side open. On your feet, kid."
"I'm tired of the physical drills," Khalel groaned, though he pushed himself up anyway. "I need to understand how to bypass the warding on their armories. If I find William Stormbourne, punching him isn't going to shatter a divine shield."
"Which is why you spend your afternoons with me," Anastasia said, pulling a worn, leather-bound notebook from her coat. "Tomorrow, we resume your lessons on Earth thermodynamics. Villorian magic relies on the soul to generate fire. It's inefficient. I will teach you how to strip the oxygen from the air around his shield until his own lungs collapse before his magic does."
Khalel blinked. "You're terrifying, you know that?"
"It's why they call me the Witch, darling. Magic is just physics that hasn't found its manners yet."
"And after that," Lucian interjected, "we will review the chemical composition of void-powder. If you cannot summon a weapon, we will ensure you can manufacture an explosive yield capable of mirroring one."
Dejambo snorted. "Cowardly tricks. All of it. The boy needs to learn the scent of fear. He needs to know how to track the King's Guard by the sweat on their armor. Tomorrow night, we hunt the blind-crawlers in the lower tunnels. You use only your teeth and a sharpened bone, Khalel."
"I am not biting a blind-crawler, Dejambo."
"Then you will go hungry, and the crawlers will bite you!"
Khalel couldn't help but let a small, exhausted smile break through his bruised face. They were monsters. The worst criminals in the history of Fantasia. They had been hired to kill him, or at least subdue him so the monarchs could steal his birthright. Instead, they had become his wardens, his teachers, and the only family he had left.
Darius watched the boy smile. The Immortal rarely showed emotion, but a subtle softening around his eyes betrayed his stoicism. "You have the blood of a noble, the trauma of a tragedy, and the upbringing of four Earth-born criminals. When we finally shatter those seals, Villoria won't even know what to classify you as."
"I don't want a classification," Khalel said, his smile fading back into a mask of pure, hardened resolve. He raised his fists, settling into the alien, Earth-style boxing stance Darius had drilled into him. He kept his left arm tucked tight, guarding his ribs, his center of gravity low, no longer pretending to hold a ghost of a blade. "I just want my weapons. And I want the keys to your chains."
"Good," Darius stepped forward, throwing a sudden, blindingly fast jab. "Then prove it. Block this one."
Khalel didn't block. He slipped beneath the strike, twisting his hips, and drove his fist upward toward the Immortal's jaw.
The loud crack of the impact echoed through the cavern.
Darius didn't flinch, though his head snapped back slightly. He reached up, wiping a small drop of blood from his lip, and smiled. It was a terrifying, genuine thing.
"Better," Darius said. "Now, do it a thousand more times."
And under the violet glow of a thousand chains, the bastard son with no weapons went back to work.