The king of Nothing

Ethan D Valor is the first son of Duke Arataka Falhar of the kingdom of Ekador. From birth, Arataka had only one purpose for him. Arataka was many things — a duke, a royal court strategist, an extreme genius — but above all, an evil bastard obsessed with strength, breakthrough and control. He believed the next step in human evolution was the integration of spirit beast genes into a human body, and his own son was his first test subject. The experiments started before Ethan was old enough to understand what his name was. Gene after gene, modification and mixes, injected and monitored and recorded. Arataka wanted a living weapon, not a son. Those experiments left permanent changes in Ethan's body, extreme pain and fatigue that never fully went away. Ethan's stepmother, the Duchess, saw what her husband was building and tried to stop it the only way she could. She couldn't take Ethan away from him, neither could she expose Arataka. So she helped the boy escape to the one place his father's hands couldn't reach him — the front lines of the Great Battle of Ekador, the ongoing war between the kingdom and the spirit beasts pouring out of the spirit realm. Ethan was just twelve years old. The Duchess's older brother, veteran commander Lord Ronan, took him in and trained him. For five years Ethan learned how to use his Aura, hand to hand combat, survival, and everything else that kept him alive. He was not an awakner yet. His soul core wasn't unlocked. What he had was his Aura, the training of a soldier, and whatever his father had put inside him. At seventeen, during an ambush deep in spirit beast territory, Lord Ronan took wounds that couldn't be treated in the field and died slowly over two days. Before he went, he pressed his spear into Ethan's hands. Typhoon — a high-class weapon built for lightning soul core awakners. In the hands of a non-awakner it didn't just fail to work. It attacked him, pushing the current through his own arms every time he used it. Yet he fought with it anyway. He took command of what was left of the battalion and drove the last horde to its end. Only four people survived that battle including Ethan. The Great Battle of Ekador ended. He was listed in the army's records as a soldier, never a hero. He had failed to protect again. Yet he stayed in the army — that was the only life he knew. Two years later, on New Year's Eve, a letter came from the Duchess asking him to enroll in the Dragonshire Academy of Excellence, the top institution on the continent of Devriah, full of awakners, nobles, and people who had never seen a real battlefield. He didn't want to go. He had no interest in academic rankings or awakner hierarchies. But the Duchess had pulled him out of his father's hands when he was twelve, and her brother had given him everything he knew before giving his own life to protect him. He owed her. And so he enrolled — for her. He is nineteen now. Carrying his dead master's teachings and his dead mother's name — D Valor, a name he took after refusing the title of duke, choosing the title of a commoner. There are things Ethan has not yet looked at directly. His mother's death. What his father actually completed before the Duchess intervened. What the genes inside him are still doing. And the feeling of something ancient. He is walking toward Dragonshire Academy with all of it still unanswered. The academy doesn't know what Ethan is bringing. Neither does Ethan.