The hammer rested on Kael's shoulder, not as a weapon, but as an extension of his own skeleton. There was no tension in that posture—only the crushing boredom of a predator who had already decided how the prey would die.
Gore-Stalker.
The classification didn't surface as an insult, but as data. Inhuman bone density. Low center of gravity. Attacks that were devastating, wide, and metabolically expensive. In the library of my mind, I slotted Kael into these parameters with the ease of shelving a book. Creatures like this won through sheer mass. They lost through predictability.
Dusty volumes from Master Kahn's library leafed through my mind.
Engagement protocols: never meet force with force. Anger's seat lies in the prefrontal cortex, rendering the subject strategically predictable once provoked. Critical vulnerabilities: the knee joints, the orbital cavity, the hinge of the jaw.
For fifteen years, I had been a ghost haunting the margins of other men's wars, dissecting the old stories from the safety of a straw mattress. Now, I could feel the dock's details sharpened to a cruel clarity: the loose splinter on the plank, the metallic tang of drying blood.
I can fight.
The realization brought no relief. It brought hunger.
Kael saw it. His smile widened, crooked and lazy, as his gaze locked onto mine. He found no pleading there. No panic. Only focus—too sharp for a crippled boy.
"...Interesting," Kael murmured, tilting his head. The movement cracked a vertebrae. "Either you've finally snapped... or you're stupider than you look."
Words were useless variables. My brain had already discarded them. All that remained were vectors, angles, distance.
Unarmed.
My gaze slid to the dock floor. Cobblestones. Irregular. Granite. Hard enough to break bone, small enough to conceal intent.
Eyes. Always the eyes.
Kael advanced without haste, every heavy step groaning against the wood. No guard. No caution. When I dipped down and curled my fingers around the cold, slime-slick stone, he laughed—a low, satisfied rumble, like a man watching a toddler brandish a spoon.
"Throwing pebbles now?" The laughter grew, shaking his chest plate. "Is that it?"
My senses screamed. The world fractured into usable fragments. The salt wind, the slight sway of Kael's bulk, the exact millisecond his weight transferred to his front leg.
Now.
The stone left my hand in a clean, violent arc. Physics took over. Kael flinched by millimeters. The granite didn't take the eye, but it grazed the orbital ridge. Skin exploded. A thick, dark ribbon of blood welled up instantly, blinding the left side of his vision. If the angle had been a hair's breadth different, the eyeball would have burst like overripe fruit.
The dock froze. Kael's smile died.
His free hand rose to his face. Fingers came away stained with crimson. He stared at the wetness, not in pain, but in sheer, paralyzed disbelief. The air around him curdled.
"...You," the voice was a compressed hiss, "think you can handle me?"
The answer came as an eruption. Kael charged.
Amber stumbled back, terror cutting through her like a fever.
"Bad idea, boy!" Kael roared, patience dissolving into bloodlust.
The warhammer hit the planks with a thunderclap, splintering the wood, but he didn't even use it. He didn't need steel to break me.
"You're only breathing because of the documents!" he bellowed, closing the distance. "I don't need all of you intact. Just enough to scream."
The tactical blueprints of my mind met the visceral chaos of reality. Kael didn't just attack; he detonated. He lunged with a massive, overhead haymaker—a swing that carried the momentum of a falling titan. A move designed to pulverize, but one that left the flank wide open for three-quarters of a second.
I didn't step; I flowed. My new legs coiled and snapped, propelling me through a gap that would have been my grave. The air from his fist whistled past my ear, a localized gale that smelled of iron and old rage. The wood of the dock shrieked as his knuckles found a support beam instead of my skull, sending splinters flying like shrapnel.
I didn't look back. I sprinted toward the heap of broken bodies where the Guild members lay.
The adrenaline was pumping in. I reached the first fallen man—Rurik—and my fingers closed around the hilt of a longsword.
I can do this. I can win.
The euphoria was a blinding light. I wasn't just a invalid anymore; I was the protagonist of every epic I had ever memorized. I looked at Kael, who stood unarmed, his hammer forgotten near the harbor's edge. I felt a surge of predatory triumph. I had the steel. He had nothing but his bruised ego.
Then, Kael's gaze shifted.
The volcanic fury in his eyes vanished, replaced by a cold, sharp malice that I hadn't accounted for in my equations. He didn't look at me. He looked past me.
His lips pulled back in a jagged, yellowed grin.
In my rush for the sword, I had calculated the distance to the weapon, the distance to Kael, and the trajectory of my own strike. I had ignored the most critical variable.
Amber.
She stood frozen near the harbor's edge, her knees still trembling from the drain of her Breath. She was a silhouette of vulnerability, and I had left her directly in Kael's path.
Kael didn't even glance at me as he pivoted. He surged toward her with a burst of speed that defied his mass.
"No!"
The word was a jagged tear in my throat. Logic collapsed. The "Engagement Protocols" vanished, replaced by a primitive, desperate terror. The distance was too great. Physics was an uncompromising judge, and the verdict was clear: I couldn't reach her before he did.
I ran anyway.
I threw every ounce of Amber's energy into my stride, my heart screaming, my vision narrowing until only the silhouette of her clothes and Kael's armor existed. I was a blurred streak of steel and panic.
I was two steps away when Kael's shoulder dipped.
He hadn't been aiming for her. He had been waiting for the exact moment my desperation made me reckless. He didn't even look back as his elbow swung around in a brutal, horizontal arc.
Impact arrived before sight. Kael's fist slammed into my torso like a battering ram. Air was ripped from my lungs. The world spun—timber, sky, water—all trading places as I was launched backward.
The sword slipped from my nerveless fingers, clattering uselessly against the wood.
But Kael didn't stop. A boot crushed my leg against the dock. Another blow descended, heavy and unrefined, cracking the wood inches from my skull. Big attacks. Wide. Reckless.
Pain. Raw. Nameless.
He didn't just want to kill me; he wanted to erase the very idea that I could matter. Another blow descended, a heavy, unrefined strike. My vision flickered—a jagged strobe light of wood and red.
Across the deck, Amber was a silhouette of collapsing hope. Her cries were muffled by the roar of the harbor, her eyes wide, glassy orbs reflecting my own destruction.
I tried to draw breath, but Kael's boot was a mountain upon my chest. As the oxygen failed, the dock faded.
Mom.
Every copper coin she had counted, every hour she had traded for a smear of pork lard to feed my failing body... it wasn't just work. It was an investment in a future I was currently bleeding into the harbor.
Why?
The question tore through the fog of my fading mind. Why the cage made of useless flesh? Why did she have to wither so I could simply be?
The injustice was a physical weight, heavier than Kael's armor. It was a poison that was filling my veins.
Then, a sound vibration not in my ears, but in the deep of my mind. It didn't speak in words, but in echoes of intent.
"...###...for?"
The voice was cold, ancient, and hollow. It felt like the scrape of a blade against a whetstone.
"...###?"
I didn't understand the sequence, only the hunger behind it. The creature wasn't asking out of curiosity; it was demanding a purpose. It was a void waiting to be filled.
Something inside me. The "Engagement Protocols" and "Tactical Blueprints" burned away. I looked up at the giant looming over me, his face a mask of restrained malice, and I realized I didn't care about the pain anymore.
Pain was a currency I had spent my entire life. I was bankrupt.
A new sensation rose to take its place. It was a devouring, primal appetite. It wasn't my stomach that was empty—it was my soul. The hunger for a reason. The hunger for the life Celeste had bought with her own.
My vision didn't just darken; it transformed.
My pupils constricted until they were nothing but pinpricks of freezing starlight, glowing with the exact, terrifying hue of the white snake.
Kael froze. His boot was still pressing down, but the man beneath it had changed. The air around the dock didn't just chill—it went stagnant, as if the world itself were holding its breath before a catastrophe.
The last thing I felt before the blackness claimed my conscious mind was the burning coiling tight around my heart, and the sudden, violent realization:
I'm starving.