When Alucard touched the journal, the world shifted.
The scent of parchment and dust vanished. The air turned to iron, heavy and hot like the breath of a dying god.
He blinked — and stood in a scarred wasteland beneath a sun that bled through the clouds.
Mountains were broken into ribs of stone, rivers had boiled into scars of glass, and the horizon was nothing but corpses and banners fluttering in wind that no longer carried life.
At the center of that endless graveyard stood a man.
He was tall — not impossibly so, but enough that his shadow fell like a storm. His hair was dark brown, clinging to his temples in the sweat of war. His eyes burned green — not bright, but deep, like a forest fire viewed from afar. His bare chest was carved in old wounds and sigils that glowed faintly beneath the grime.
He stood upon a mound of corpses, alone, yet facing an army that stretched into eternity.
And he was laughing.
"C'mon, you war-bastards!" his voice thundered across the plain, half laughter, half challenge.
"You want a piece of me? Then have all of my pieces!"
Then, with madness that only heroes and monsters shared, he leapt.
The earth shook where he landed.
And from his body — from his back, from his sides, from beneath the flesh of his arms — sprouted limbs. Dozens at first. Then hundreds. Each arm was different — one plated in iron, one scaled, one skeletal, one burning with golden light, another dripping with ichor that hissed where it fell.
The army roared and charged.
The brown-haired man met them like a storm given flesh.
His limbs struck with the sound of worlds breaking. One sweep tore through fifty men; another arm reached and crushed a chariot whole; a third plucked an arrow mid-flight and flung it back faster than thought.
Each movement was brutal poetry.
The battlefield itself became his weapon.
He punched his fist into the ground, splitting it open like an egg, sending lines of magma slicing through ranks of enemies. He tore boulders from the crust and hurled them like seeds.
Every time he struck, the earth remembered.
The army tried everything.
Some unleashed flame and storm. Others sang chants of annihilation. But the man's laughter drowned them all.
He grew wings of ash and gold, sweeping down through a hurricane of arrows, and with each beat of those wings, hundreds died.
When the last enemy fell — when the final scream faded into silence — he stood amid the carnage, a god of wrath beneath a burning sky.
Then the vision twisted, and the battlefield dissolved like smoke.
Then I heard his voice — deep, rough, almost… tired beneath the bravado.
"Ugh, I don't know how this works. Damn it, Envy, did you have to make your sorcery so complicated?"
There was a pause, the sound of a chair scraping, a grunt.
"Anyway, apparently I'm supposed to document my actions and my past. Booooooring. So screw that — I'm recording my battles instead."
He chuckled. "So in this one, I defended against an army of five thousand Transcended. Yeah, five thousand. They tried to weaken me with their fancy Aspect tricks, but it didn't work. I tore through them all. Grabbed one, then a couple hundred more, smashed them together like wet clay. One thought he could sneak up on me — didn't go so well once I sprouted wings and broke his spine."
He paused again, muttering, "Yeah, and because Envy's on my ass about it, I'm supposed to note this happened twenty years ago. Is that fine, you creepy bastard?"
The vision cracked.
And Alucard was thrown into another scene.
This time, the world was an endless ocean — a mirror of black water stretching under the dying light of dawn.
And in that sea stood the abomination.
It was titanic.
Its head rose above the clouds. Its body was a continent of flesh and nightmare, writhing with teeth and tendrils and eyes that wept molten gold.
And above it — a single figure, flying on twelve wings made out of hands.
It was the same man.
But now his wings shone with terrible glory: His wings were made out of hands and flesh, and each one was unique and more horrifying than the last.
He soared, a speck of defiance against an infinite beast.
The creature roared — a sound that split the ocean. The waves rose high as mountains, swallowing the horizon.
The man answered with silence and violence.
He descended, and their clash birthed an apocalypse.
The sea burned.
The sky shattered.
For ten days and ten nights, man and monster devoured each other's light. Each blow shook creation itself.
The beast opened its maw and unleashed a storm of blood and fire — but the man met it with a thousand arms, tearing through the inferno, his body alight with scars that glowed like runes of defiance.
He screamed — not in pain, but in triumph — and unleashed his full might.
An infinite number of limbs erupted from him, stretching to the heavens and the abyss alike. The sky vanished beneath their number. The ocean became red.
And the creature — that vast god of the deep — screamed one last time as its body was torn apart, piece by piece, until nothing remained but drifting fragments and a sea of blood.
When the silence fell, even the wind seemed afraid to breathe.
He sighed. "Yeah, that one was fun. Though getting lectured by Envy afterward sucked. Especially when he brought his creepy friend along. Still — worth it, right?"
Another voice tried to answer, faint and muffled, like it came from beneath water.
"Please," the man said, chuckling. "We both know the Storm God didn't mind."
His tone said otherwise.
And then the world tore apart.
Alucard gasped as he was thrown back into his own body, back into the library. His heart was pounding, his veins burning like molten iron.
The journal sat in his hands — quiet, unassuming, ancient.
But his mind was still full of the man's laughter, the slaughter, the storm of arms and wings.
He looked down at the cover, tracing the sigil burned into it — the same one that had been carved into the walls of Dracula's castle.
It pulsed faintly beneath his touch, like a living heart.
"…Who the hell were you sinner of wrath?" he whispered.
The library didn't answer — but somewhere deep beneath the earth, something shifted.