TORTURED ME, TO AWAKEN AS AN SSS DRAGON

Chapter 2

The claw was still inside him.

Dante could feel it, the thing's bone hooked through his chest and scraping against his spine, and the world was going sideways in slow, ugly lurches. Blood filled the back of his throat. He tried to breathe and got copper instead of air.

"Dante!" Lucia's voice was somewhere above him, cracked down the middle. "No, no, no, don't close your eyes. Look at me. Dante, look at me!"

He tried. He really did. But his vision was draining like water through a cracked glass and everything was turning into shapes without edges, sounds without sources. The sky above him was still torn open, still bleeding that wrong red, and somewhere in the distance more of them were coming. More teeth. More hunger.

So this is how it ends. On the side of a road, with nothing to show for any of it.

Then his blood stopped falling.

He felt it before he saw it. The warmth leaving his chest just stopped, like someone had pressed pause on his dying. The drops that had been running down his ribs and pooling on the asphalt lifted, one by one, pulling themselves free from gravity and hanging in the air around him like red glass ornaments. Spinning slowly. Catching light that had no source.

Something pressed against the inside of his skull. Not a voice. Bigger than a voice. Older than language. It filled the spaces between his thoughts like water filling a vessel, and the words it carried weren't heard but known.

[The Mother System has recognized the will of the vessel. Reawakening protocol initiated. Bloodline: Ancestral. Rank: Unmeasurable. Skill granted: Fallen Will.]

"What's happening to him?" Lucia stumbled back, her silver blade flickering in her grip. "What is that? Why is his blood doing that?"

Nobody answered her. There was nobody left to answer. The road was empty except for abandoned cars and the dark shapes still crawling down from the broken sky.

Dante's wounds began to close.

The sound was wrong. Wet and backward, like tearing fabric played in reverse. The hole in his chest pulled itself shut, bone grinding against bone as it fused, muscle threading itself back together in strands that glowed faint red before settling into flesh. His skin reformed over the wound as if it had never been there, smooth and unmarked, and his body rose from the ground in a single motion that didn't look like standing. It looked like something lifting him from the inside.

His eyes opened and they were gold. Not yellow. Not amber. Gold, like molten metal poured into human sockets, and they held no recognition. No fear. No pain.

"Dante?" Lucia whispered. Her voice was barely a sound. "Is that you?"

He looked down at his own chest, at the place where the claw had been, and tilted his head. The gesture was curious. Almost amused, the way a man might look at a scratch he got from a kitten.

Then he laughed.

It came out low and hollow, a sound that didn't belong in a human throat. It echoed against the empty cars and the broken sky and the silence where the wind used to be, and Lucia pressed her hand over her mouth because the thing laughing was wearing her brother's face but it wasn't him. Whatever was behind those gold eyes had lived long enough to find a fatal wound funny.

"Interesting," he said, and the word came out fractured, layered, like two voices stacked on top of each other. "This body is fragile. How has it survived this long?"

"Dante, please." Lucia's eyes were wet. "Talk to me. Tell me what's happening."

He didn't look at her. He turned toward the remaining Blightbearers, three of them, D-rank creatures with rot dripping from their jaws, and his expression settled into something that looked like amusement. Like a man watching ants try to climb a wall.

"You," he said to the largest one. His voice carried across the road with a weight that made the air vibrate. "You put your claw through this body. Through these ribs. Through this heart." He took a step forward. The creature lowered itself, muscles coiled, teeth bared. "Do you know what lives inside this blood? Do you have any idea what you woke up?"

The beast lunged.

A magic circle tore open beneath Dante's feet. Ancient symbols bled red light across the asphalt, spiraling outward in patterns that looked older than the language carved into them. The ground shook. The sky above the tear splintered further, cracks spreading like veins through glass, and from those cracks something fell. Not rain. Red. Thick and slow and deliberate, each drop hitting the earth with a sound like a judge bringing down a gavel.

"You're insects," Dante said quietly, watching the creatures scramble and screech as the red light expanded beneath them. "You crawled through a crack in the sky and thought you found prey. You found a grave."

He raised one hand, palm open. The symbols on the ground blazed white.

"Crimson Judgment."

Red light erupted from the earth in a column so bright it burned shadows into the road. It swallowed the first beast whole. No scream. No sound of tearing flesh or breaking bone. The creature simply wasn't there anymore, erased, removed from existence like a word wiped from a page. The second one tried to run. The light caught it mid-stride and it vanished. The third didn't even get to turn. Gone. All three of them, D-rank monsters that would have required entire guild deployments to contain, just gone. Smoke where bodies used to be. Nothing else.

Lucia crawled backward across the asphalt, her broken silver blade hanging from her grip like a toy. Her hands were shaking so badly she could barely hold it. She had been called the most gifted Awakened in six years. She had made elite recruiters fight over her. And now she was watching her talentless brother, the failure, the dead stone, unmake creatures she couldn't have beaten with a full squad behind her.

He was something else now. Something that made her feel like a child holding a stick in front of a god.

"Dante." Her voice broke on his name.

He turned to her. Those gold eyes found hers and held them, and there was nothing behind them. No warmth. No recognition. No trace of the brother who let her talk his ear off in the car, who smiled only for her, who walked through hallways full of cruelty every day and never once let it touch the way he loved her.

Then the gold flickered.

It dimmed, stuttered like a candle in a sudden draft, and the light behind his eyes went out. His body went slack, every muscle releasing at once, and he dropped to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut. His face hit the asphalt and he didn't flinch because there was nothing left inside him to flinch.

[Skill: Fallen Will has ended. Duration exceeded. The vessel's body has entered a state of half-death. This skill cannot be activated again for 90 days.]

Lucia scrambled to him on her knees, pulling his head into her lap, pressing her fingers to his neck for a pulse she could barely find. His skin was cold. His breathing was so shallow it was almost nothing, each inhale a thin whisper that might have been the last.

The god had worn a human shell, and the shell was screaming silently as consciousness folded into black.