TIMESKIP
Time passed.
April 3rd, Year 59.
Exactly four years since the tragedy.
The night was clear—too clear. The full moon hung in the sky like an open, cold eye, a silent witness to things destined to repeat themselves. Its light bathed the hills and the deserted roads, stretching the shadows longer, more alive than they should have been.
Outside the city, where the path dissolves into the forest, a masked man stood.
Motionless.
As if carved from darkness and moon-silver.
In his hand, an old axe, its blade dulled by time, yet still hungry. There was no threat in his stance—only certainty.
Beneath the hood, the mask was cracked.
Through the fracture, the true eye of the stag could be seen—deep, inhuman, faintly glowing in the moonlight. It did not blink. It did not tremble. It stared forward, as if counting the heartbeat of the world itself.
The wind stirred the leaves. The forest sighed.
Somewhere, far away, a bell tolled once.
The man tightened his grip on the axe handle.
"It is time."
The words were barely a whisper, yet the night heard them. The moon received them. And something ancient, buried beneath years of silence, stirred once more.
Toru took his first step forward.
The news arrived late—fragmented, contradictory—but it was enough to sow panic. Additional guards were dispatched to the city, some coming directly from the capital: armed men, frightened men, sent more to calm the king's fear than to uncover the truth. Rushum was investigated, cleansed, sealed in silence. Nothing was found that could fully explain what had happened—only erased traces, hastily rebuilt walls, and eyes that avoided questions.
The king was restless. That storm had not been an ordinary one. He had felt it even from afar, like pressure in his chest, like a warning. He knew something in the order of the world had fractured, but without proof, without a clear name, time was allowed to bury everything.
And time did what it does best.
Years passed. Rushum was repopulated. The council was replaced. The temples were reopened, and the stories became whispers. Children born after that night grew up never knowing what had truly happened. Only the elders still flinched when the wind blew too hard or when the sky darkened suddenly without reason.
But history never forgets completely.
In the chronicles, written in pale ink, nearly erased, that night was given a name—one spoken rarely, and never aloud:
"The Massacre Hidden in the Night."
And somewhere, beyond borders, beyond known roads and human laws, Toru continued to walk forward—
not as a child,
not as a man,
but as a consequence.
After a short whistle from Toru, the night air vibrated.
From the darkness descended the messenger eagle, its wings slicing through moonlight. Toru tied an old, crumpled letter to its leg, stained with dried blood, the paper reeking of time and guilt. Without another gesture, the bird ascended and vanished toward the capital.
In Rugum, the king—now fifty-five years old—received the message at dawn, under a suffocating sky. He read it in silence. The date struck harder than the words: April 3rd, Year 55. Four years.
The memory stabbed him sharply: The Massacre Hidden in the Night.
And yet, the questions remained. Too many. Too heavy.
Desperate, he summoned the Royal Guard. He demanded the elite warriors and their commander, Yutaka—one of the strongest men in the capital. Yutaka entered the hall carrying his long, ancient sword, a blade infused with the divine energy of the Serpent God, former protector deity of Trosa. A presence that enforced silence.
"Rushum must be checked. Immediately," the king said in a low voice.
"I understand," Yutaka replied. No questions.
The troops departed before the sun climbed the sky. Along the route, the commander divided them into two groups. One was tasked with preparing the new altar for the sacrifice scheduled a year later. The other, under Yutaka's direct command, marched toward Rushum.
When they arrived, silence was the first sign that something was deeply wrong.
It was no longer just the central building drenched in blood.
It was the entire city.
Streets, houses, temples—everything was coated in red traces, congealed by time. Everywhere, abandoned corpses, scattered chaotically, as if life had been torn away in a single motion. No voices. No breath. Rushum was a city without life, hollowed from within.
It was worse than four years ago.
After hours of silent investigation, Yutaka entered the central building. There, in the darkness, he found them. All the city's children. Huddled together, confused, frightened, wide-eyed—unaware of what had happened, unaware of where everyone else had gone.
What an image…
heavy… broken…
an empty city, yet the children left behind…
This is not a massacre.
It is a message.
Yutaka felt his hand tighten around the sword's hilt. He immediately ordered additional troops to escort the children safely to the capital. Not one was to be left behind.
He tried to summon a messenger eagle.
He whistled.
Nothing.
He whistled again.
Silence.
No eagle answered. The sky felt empty.
Yutaka looked up at the heavy clouds and understood, a cold shiver running down his spine:
Something was rotten.
Something was moving in the shadows.
And it was not over.
The next morning brought another unsettling discovery: all the horses were gone.
Stables open. Ropes intact. No signs of struggle. No signs of escape. For animals trained not to panic even in battle, their disappearance was impossible to explain.
Yutaka felt a knot tighten in his stomach.
He decided to personally inspect the altar preparations.
When he arrived… he understood.
Again.
Everything was corpses and blood.
The altar, the tents, the tools, the ritual banners—all drenched in that filthy red, dried in places, fresh in others. Crushed bodies underfoot, grotesquely still forms in a place meant for sacrifice. There had been no battle. There had been a passage.
Then the sky changed.
Morning was abruptly swallowed by black clouds. Lightning split the air, thunder striking the earth like a sentence. The wind rose violently, tearing canvas, hurling dust and dried blood into the air.
And then—
Screams.
Blood burst forth again.
Screams.
Blood.
The wind howled through trees, through armor, through souls, and it seemed to speak clearly, deliberately, inevitably:
"You will pay."
One by one, the guards began to fall, cut down without seeing what struck them. Without time to raise their weapons. The ground seemed to shatter beneath their bodies, blood flowing in red torrents, mixing with the rain.
The sound reached Yutaka's ears.
No—it was above him.
No—it was beneath him.
No—it was around him.
It was everywhere.
The commander spun, the Serpent God's sword vibrating in his hand, divine energy thrumming as if the blade itself sensed the threat. He tried to locate the presence. Nothing. Only lightning. Only wind. Only that repeating whisper that seemed to come from the world itself, not the air.
Not a man.
Not a being.
A punishment.
Yutaka shouted orders, but his voice was swallowed by thunder. He stepped forward, then another, desperate, spinning, searching for a shape, a shadow—anything.
And for the first time in his life,
one of the strongest men of Rugum
felt
pure fear.
Because the storm was not crashing down upon them.
The storm was hunting them.
Amid the chaos, with wind screaming and blood spilled everywhere, a silhouette appeared before Yutaka. A hooded man, the stag's eye gleaming in the moonlight, axe raised. In a fraction of a second, the blade was at the commander's throat.
"So it's you…" Yutaka murmured, his voice trembling between recognition and dread.
With a swift dodge, he broke away from Toru and, in a precise reflex, struck him with a solid punch, sending him crashing into the council's central building. Toru rose slowly, staring at the blood staining the floor, whispering with fury:
"You will pay! You do not deserve mercy! This is your fault!"
The fight erupted.
Toru attacked with lightning-fast strikes, swift as the wind, every movement filled with obsession and rage. Yutaka, sturdier and more disciplined, dodged—one evasion after another, blow after blow—but every motion drained him, consumed him bit by bit.
Toru's axe found flesh: a cut on the cheek, another on the knee, one on the arm. Yutaka dropped to one knee. It was time to draw his weapon. His long sword, infused with the Serpent God's venom, glimmered faintly in the lightning.
Toru pressed on, relentless, precise. Yutaka dodged, then began to counterattack. Toru was struck by the commander's blade, and without realizing it, the poison had already begun its work. In a swift motion, Yutaka seized Toru by the throat with one hand.
"I am not like the ordinary guards, monster!" Yutaka shouted.
"You are the monsters here. You are guilty, and you will die!" Toru replied, his voice thick with fury.
Toru's eyes closed. The poison surged stronger.
He remembered his childhood—the grandmother devoured by the Stag King, the blood, the corpses, the terror.
He opened his eyes.
"YOU ARE GUILTY!" he screamed.
From his left palm, a stag's antler erupted, manifesting from his fury, and in a fraction of a second, it pierced Yutaka's throat. The commander collapsed, managing only to whisper:
"A second form…?"
Toru staggered free, trembling, only now noticing Yutaka's sword, still dripping with the Serpent God's venom. He collapsed beside the body that had once been the symbol of order and discipline.
The image was familiar—yet terrifying.
Four years ago, it had been Toru and the Stag God, fallen side by side.
Now, it was Toru and the king's commander, Yutaka, lying together in blood, surrounded by corpses—witnesses to guilt and punishment repeated, a symbol of a cycle that had not yet ended.After several hours, the devastating storm began to fade, like a wounded beast retreating into the dark. Thunder turned into distant echoes, and the once-lashing rain thinned into a heavy curtain of droplets. Through the burdened clouds, the sun dared to slip through with pale light, revealing the true face of the disaster.
The royal troops—sent to call for reinforcements and escort the children to the capital, Rugum—returned to the devastated city. What they found froze the blood in their veins. Collapsed buildings, streets torn apart by power gone out of control, scorched marks burned into stone—clear signs of a confrontation that had far surpassed human limits.
The guards stood motionless when they spotted their commander, Yutaka, lying on the cobblestones, glassy eyes fixed on the sky. Beside him lay the body of a young man—or rather, a boy of about seventeen—his clothes shredded, his chest rising only faintly.
One was dead.
The other was alive.
Unfortunately for them, the one who lived was Toru.
The residual aura still faintly pulsing around him made the soldiers instinctively step back. Even unconscious, the boy radiated an unsettling presence, as if the energy of his ring refused to be fully subdued. The poison from Yutaka's weapon had taken effect, paralyzing his body and plunging him into forced sleep—but it had not extinguished his power.
Without hesitation, the captain of the guard ordered the application of anti-energy enchanted shackles, marked with witchcraft symbols. The cold manacles, engraved with ancient runes, snapped shut around Toru's wrists, and the air trembled slightly as his bond with the ring was suppressed. The magic withdrew abruptly, like a flame smothered beneath ash.
Yutaka's lifeless body was lifted with respect and covered. Toru, however, was shown no mercy. He was bound, loaded into an armored carriage, and guarded on all sides. The order was clear: he was to be delivered alive to the capital.