The streets were quieter now, the distant lanterns of Thornridge’s knights swinging like errant fireflies in the darkness. Lucavion paid them no mind. Even as a group of knights rounded a distant corner, their gazes landing on him briefly, none dared stop him.
Still, as he approached the city gates, their presence grew thicker. The knights’ hushed voices carried in the cold air, their armor glinting beneath the pale moonlight.
“Who… who is that?” one muttered, a trace of unease in his tone as Lucavion and Aether passed the outer walls.
Another knight shouted, his voice ringing clear in the stillness. “You there! Stop!”
Lucavion didn’t stop. He didn’t even look back. Aether’s pace quickened to a measured canter, her form cutting through the shadows like an extension of the night itself.
More shouts followed, confused and angry, echoing across the stone walls. “Stop him!”
“Who was that?”
“Don’t let him—!”
But Lucavion was already gone.
The wind tore at his cloak as Aether’s hooves carried them beyond the gates and into the wild, open night. The shouts faded behind him, swallowed by the endless stretch of darkness. Thornridge shrank into the distance, its lights flickering like a dying ember on the horizon.
Lucavion’s dark eyes remained fixed ahead, the faint glow of Aether’s eyes casting streaks of light against the moonlit ground.
Leaving is easy when you’re already a ghost.
He let the silence settle around him, his smirk lingering faintly as the wind whispered past. The blood staining his coat would wash away soon enough, but the memory of tonight—the carnage, the silence, the greed flickering in Zirkel’s eyes—would linger like the last embers of a dying fire.
He ran a gloved hand through Aether’s mane, her steady rhythm calming as they vanished into the night.
“Onward,” he murmured softly, his voice lost to the wind.
The world stretched out before him, vast and waiting. And for now, that was enough.
*******
FOOSH! FOOSH!
Inside a forest, the river flowed with an unhurried rhythm, its surface broken only by ripples where Lucavion’s pale skin met the water. Moonlight cascaded down in ribbons of silver, casting his fair body aglow, the scars etched into him a testament to battles of the past. The marks stretched across his arms, his shoulders, his chest—each one with a story buried beneath, unseen but never forgotten.
For all their quiet, rivers have a way of washing things away—blood, dirt, memories that claw too sharply at the mind.
Lucavion cupped his hands beneath the flowing current, watching the crimson streaks melt away as the water carried them off into the unknown. The silence around him was vast and all-encompassing, broken only by the occasional murmur of the river or the soft rustle of branches overhead. His clothes—washed and wrung out with precise care—hung limply from the low branches of nearby trees, their dark fabric fluttering faintly in the breeze.
“Finally, the blood is gone…” he muttered, his voice so quiet it barely brushed the air. His tone was absent, but there was something distant in it—less about the blood itself and more about what it represented. It always stains deeper than the flesh.
Lucavion sank further into the water, letting it swallow him up to his collarbones. He closed his eyes, feeling the weight of the river press against him like a quiet anchor, as if the world were trying—if only for a moment—to hold him still.
Interesting, he thought suddenly, stretching his arms out beneath the surface. There was a buzz thrumming faintly under his skin, a vigor that hadn’t been there before. Strength sang through his veins, sharp and potent, almost tangible enough to taste.
“Hmm…” He tilted his head back, the moonlight streaking across his features as a slow smirk tugged at the corner of his lips. “The harvest is indeed quite much.”
His fingers curled loosely, feeling the tingle of energy that lingered there—a pulse, faint yet steady, like an ember cradled beneath ash. The death mana absorbed from tonight’s little spectacle… It’s potent. Far more than it should be.
The carnage he’d left behind—the Elders of the Crimson Serpent Sect, the sect leader Vaelric—it hadn’t been for sport. Each of their deaths had been important to him. With each blow, each last breath drawn from their lips, the death mana had flooded into him, flowing as naturally as water into a vessel.
‘Now,’ he reflected inwardly, ‘it’s on the verge of breaking through.’
The [Flame of Equinox]—his second core, a fire born of opposites—shimmered at the edge of its evolution. A breakthrough into the 4-star tier was no small thing, yet the familiar hum of progress reminded him of what came before.
‘Just like with the [Devourer of Stars].’ That core, his first, had shattered its boundaries in a similar way, swelling to 4-star status after a hunt not unlike this one. His mind drifted back to the power that had surged through him then, the exhilaration of breaking through limitations that others dared not approach.
Lucavion submerged himself entirely for a brief moment, letting the icy water consume him. In the darkness, his thoughts whispered like faint echoes, drifting back to the faces—twisted, desperate, enraged—of those he’d killed tonight. All of them fell so easily. The strong exist to be tested, and when they fail… Well, they are no longer strong.
Breaking the surface again with a deep inhale, Lucavion smoothed his wet hair back, the droplets tracing slow paths down his face and neck. He exhaled, letting the chill settle into him as his sharp gaze lifted toward the moon.
“Killing enemies at the peak of 4-star… no, even those who were near their limit…” He trailed off, his voice low but edged with satisfaction. “They had no idea what they were offering me.”
Lucavion’s gaze lingered on the moon, the pale glow a mirror of his thoughts—cold, unwavering, yet not entirely devoid of light. He ran a hand down his face, wiping the water that clung stubbornly to his skin, the weight of the night pressing faintly against his shoulders.
Killing for the sake of power alone… that’s never been my way.
No, tonight’s slaughter had not been indiscriminate. The Elders of the Crimson Serpent Sect, their so-called leader Vaelric—each death had been weighed, measured, and deemed inevitable. A simple truth, but truth nonetheless.
“They earned their fate,” Lucavion murmured, his voice low, as if sharing a secret with the river itself.
The disciples, however, had not all met his blade. Many had been left behind, trembling in the shadows or fleeing into the night. He had allowed them to live, their lives not worth the price of his time or his blade. Their hands had been stained, yes, but not enough. Not yet.
“Karma,” he thought, smirking faintly as he recalled the faint hum of Vitaliara’s voice in his mind, her presence ever so vibrant again, like a flame reignited after too long in the dark.
Not so long ago, she had been as much a shadow as the ghosts that haunted him—weak, waning, her strength barely enough to sustain her. But with her recovery came the return of her powers, abilities as natural to her as breathing. One of which, as Lucavion now relied upon, was the ability to judge.
“Karma,” he whispered aloud this time, savoring the weight of the word on his tongue. The concept was far more delicate than the blunt force of justice, more nuanced than morality’s fickle scales. To most, life and death were binary—black and white, good and evil. But Vitaliara’s gaze pierced through the haze of moral ambiguity. She could see how much a person had stained themselves in death’s ink, how tightly they clung to the blood they’d spilled.
Her words came back to him from earlier that night, a faint echo in the recesses of his mind:
[Lucavion. Their karma is heavy.]
The Elders, the leader Vaelric—they had not been petty tyrants or simple misers. They were creatures steeped in death, their souls tethered to the lives they’d crushed underfoot. To Vitaliara, Guardian of Life, such men appeared as twisted masses of decay, their aura thick with the lifeblood they’d stolen.
[Those who drink deeply of death eventually drown in it,] she had once told him, her soft voice carrying the weight of centuries.
Lucavion had taken her judgment for what it was: undeniable. He trusted her instincts as he trusted his blade, and so when the time came, he delivered the sentence she’d revealed without hesitation.
“Those disciples,” he muttered, eyes narrowing faintly. “Their hands are dirty, but not drenched. There’s still time for them to crawl away from the edge, to choose something different.”
That was the difference—choice. Lucavion knew better than anyone that the path to redemption, if one wanted to call it that, was a razor’s edge. A single misstep, one decision too far, and a person could slip beyond saving. That was what the Elders had done. That was what Vaelric had done.
“They had their chances,” he said quietly, brushing his fingers across the water’s surface. The ripples warped the reflection of the moon, fracturing its pale glow into something almost unrecognizable. “And they threw them away.”
The death mana thrummed through his body—wild, seething, alive. It wrapped around his advancing core, coaxing it forward, feeding its flames until the equilibrium between life and death burned brighter than ever.
‘It’s close now,’ he mused, a faint gleam in his dark eyes as he focused inward. That final shackle is thin—just a little more.