The cloak was gone.
What remained in its place was a young man—or something wearing the shape of one. Pale as bleached bone, sickly in a way that wasn't incidental but fundamental, as though whatever process had given him this power had extracted the cost directly from his physical vitality.
Deep black hair hung lank against his forehead. Deep black eyes that absorbed light without returning any of it. Around five feet eight, thin in the way that made his frame look constructed from sharp angles rather than anything organic, every visible line suggesting a body that had been pushed past its natural limits so many times that recovery had stopped being complete.
He looked like a sick child who had been given power that no child's body was built to contain.
Leon didn't give him a single moment.
FWOOSH! SLASH! CRACK!
