Rave's eyes fluttered open, blurry and raw. The world around him felt unreal — like he was caught between dreaming and waking. The fight, the blood, the cold certainty of death… it still echoed in his bones. His breathing was shallow, heart pounding like a war drum that had lost its rhythm.
He blinked slowly. His vision sharpened, but the confusion did not fade.
'Where was I?'
The question loomed heavy, but deeper ones pressed harder.
'Why is my core sealed?'
'...What even am I?...'
The silence around him gave no answers. He tried to speak aloud, but his throat was dry, voice nothing more than a cracked breath. So he stopped thinking, stopped asking, because none of it made sense anymore.
Instead, he focused on the feeling of the soft grass beneath him, each blade brushing against his skin like a whisper from a life that didn't belong to him. The sunlight above, warm on his face, felt almost cruel in its normalcy. His body, however, was far from normal. Every inch ached. His limbs pulsed with soreness, and his bones felt hollow from fatigue.
He sat up slowly, dizziness washing over him like a wave.
Where the mutant wolf once lay, torn apart in a battle too fierce for a boy like him to have survived, there was now only a single object — glowing faintly on the ground. A crystal.
A soul shard.
It shimmered with ethereal light, delicate and deadly. This wasn't just a piece of a beast's essence — it was currency, power, and knowledge, all compressed into a core fragment of cursed will. This one, being from a Grade 6 mutant, was rare. Priceless. Dangerous.
He reached out and touched it.
A surge of faint energy traced up his arm, like static clinging to his veins, before settling. His body shivered, but didn't accept it. Not yet.
Then his gaze drifted further… to what remained of Wil.
Or rather, what didn't.
A shattered skull. Pieces of bone and blood darkened the earth nearby. Rave's throat clenched as he looked away.
"I'm sorry, Wil... I needed to survive…"
But the truth carved deeper than that.
Rave didn't kill him.
Wil had done it himself. In the final moments, Rave had watched in silent horror as the man he'd called teacher turned the blade on his own neck. A clean, practiced motion. Not of desperation, but decision. One last act of control in a world that had taken everything else from him.
Why had he done it?
Guilt?
Shame?
A way to say sorry to Rave?
To give Rave one final chance?
Rave didn't know. He had asked himself a thousand times, but the answers never came. Only pain.
And yet... he was thankful. Wil had given him life — twice now. Once by saving him, and again by sacrificing himself.
Still, the weight of that moment would never leave him.
Trying to shake it, Rave lifted his left wrist and activated the cracked interface on his bracelet. The screen glitched once, then stabilized, revealing the strange data that now defined his existence:
| Name: Rave ??? |
Class: ??? (Unlocks when Rave breaks 250 seals)
Titles:
• Lost Son of Crimson City
• Bearer of the Cursed Heart
Curse Signature:
"Everyone He Loves Will Die"
Status: Dormant
Affinity:
• Light (Primary)
• ???
Unique Trait:
• "He Who Walks Between"(locked and may dissappear according to Rave's choices)
[Core Seal Integrity: 99.8%]
He stared at the screen for a long time.
"What does any of this mean?" he muttered under his breath.
The words meant little to him. Cryptic fragments from a story he didn't remember writing. The titles felt like riddles, each more chilling than the last. The cursed heart. The son of a forgotten city. And that last one…
'He Who Walks Between.'
"Between what?"
"Life and death? Light and dark? Something worse?"
The seal on his core… what laid behind it? Why was so much of him locked away, hidden from even his own eyes?
But even amid confusion, a sharp thought pierced his haze:
'I need to go back.'
Not to the battlefield. Not to the wild.
To the kingdom.
To Crimson City.
His main goal was to end the Absolute Authority, but now he doesn't know what to do. Still he decided to go back, to the place where he got exciled from.
Rave gritted his teeth and stood up, pain crackling down his spine. He looked to the horizon. Somewhere out there, past cursed forests and forgotten ruins, was the city that once abandoned him and the key to everything he didn't understand.
He took a single step forward.
And the wind shifted.
--