The earth was a canvas of ash and ochre, a desolate graveyard stretching to a bruised, silent horizon. In this deserted land, a lone figure walked. He was not stumbling or searching, but moving with a terrible, inevitable stride, a silhouette of grim purpose against the broken landscape. This was a man forged by loss and armed with a power that whispered of ultimate victory, yet tasted of bitter emptiness.
A tremor shook the dead ground. With a sound that was less a natural cry and more a mechanical grinding, a Lesser Kaiju a hunched, chitinous beast, all jagged teeth and toxic steam roared a challenge. It was a low-caste predator, an opportunistic scavenger of ruined cities, now sensing a meal. Its multi-faceted eyes, clouded with primal hunger, locked onto the unknown man and prepared to attack.
The man didn't pause. He didn't even shift his gaze from the horizon. He simply stretched forth his hand, a gesture of utter, casual dismissal. The Kaiju's roar choked in its throat. Its massive, armored body didn't explode or burst; it simply and horrifyingly crumbled to dust. The dense carapace, the sinew, the bone all decomposed in an instant, a flurry of black motes carried away on the desolate wind.
"I need more power," the man stated, his voice a flat monotone that held the resonance of countless battles and endless sacrifice. It wasn't a request; it was a cold, absolute declaration.
He stopped by the ruins of a broken wall, where a young boy knelt amid the rubble. The boy was young, his armor scratched, his face streaked with soot and tears. He was alive, which, in this world, was often a greater curse than death.
"You... thus can't be..." the boy managed, his voice trembling as he recognized the figure of impossible power.
The man looked down, his eyes like chips of glacier ice. "You. You disgust me," he said, his contempt sharp enough to draw blood.
He didn't need to ask what had happened. The smoldering crater, the dead silence where a town once stood, the boy's unspent energy it spoke volumes. The man's words were a brutal incision. "If you were truly a Kaiju Hunter, you would have protected the lives you loved. You should have become stronger than anyone. But you are weak. You are defined by your failures."
The boy flinched as if struck.
The man's gaze softened infinitesimally, the pain in his expression quickly masked by the steel of his conviction. "You, who are weak, still have something to protect. Hope, memory, remorse those are things worth fighting for. But me? I have the power to defeat a Kaiju Lord, to shatter mountains, to scour this blight from the Earth, but I don't have anything to protect anymore." His words were the heaviest burden in the world.
He pointed a finger at the kneeling boy. "But you... you are different. You can still do what I can't do. You can use your power for something other than revenge, something other than a lonely crusade."
The boy looked up, his eyes finally clearing, a desperate fire kindling in their depth. "Then give me. Give me the power too! I will not fail again!"
"Finally, you said the words."
A new voice, not the man's, resonated across the ruins a chorus of voices, layered and echoing. A shimmering, spectral light pulsed around the scene, and from the fractured stones, another man showed up. But he wasn't alone. Shadows, indistinct yet resolute, gathered behind him. They were the ghosts of past hunters, of those who had fallen fighting the endless war against the Kaiju.
The newcomer was cloaked and wore the scars of a hundred wars on his ghostly visage. "The world will give you the power to do what we could not do. We have been waiting for this moment."
"Then take it. Take our power and do what we could not do. We shall all give you our power," they all said, their voices a mournful, determined tide.
The boy blinked, utterly overwhelmed. "Huh?"
"Do you understand just how remorseful we are?" the chorus of ghosts demanded, their shared regret a palpable force. "We failed. And now that failure can be transformed into your strength."
The light intensified, coalescing around the kneeling boy. He screamed as the ghosts lunged forward, not to harm, but to merge.
"Aaahhh! It hurt! It hurt!"
"Now wake up and kill all Kaiju on the face of the Earth!" the ghosts commanded, their final will imprinted on his soul.
The pain peaked, an unbearable conflagration of energy and memory.
"Aaahhh!"
The ethereal man's voice, the original one who walked the desolate land, was the last clear sound. "From this moment on, we from the future and you from the past will all become one. Our power will all become one. Our destiny is one. Our goal is one."
Another voice, stern and grave, added a final caution. "But power always come with a price. We hope you understand."
A final, gut-wrenching scream tore from the boy's throat a new sound of transformation, of agony and acceptance.
"Aaaahhhh!"
The young boy got up from where he was sitting down. He was no longer a boy; his frame was taut with new, terrible power. His eyes, now burning with the integrated will of the dead, looked at the world with a horrifying certainty.
"I'll make sure to shatter all the Kaiju!" the young boy screamed out, his voice now layered with the echoes of his predecessors.
The Dragon Lord's Arrival
A new presence manifested, a shift in the air that was colder and heavier than the ash-laden wind. It was the scent of ancient, malevolent power.
"How much will you suffer?" a deep, resonant voice sneered from above.
The boy, consumed by his new mandate, turned toward the source a massive figure descending from the cracked sky.
"Ah! Ah!" a new, high-pitched, surprisingly cheerful voice broke the tension. A young girl, barely sixteen, skipped out from behind a jagged pillar, her clothes immaculate despite the dust. "Well, I am stronger than I look. You too are strong too," the girl said, looking from the towering figure to the transformed boy with unsettling calm.
The massive figure ignored the girl, his attention fixed on the boy's impossible aura. He was reptilian, scaled in obsidian, with horns that scraped the sky.
"By any chance, are you a Kaiju God or whatever?" the young girl asked the beast innocently.
The creature's sneer became a monstrous grimace, radiating pure, lethal offense. "How dare you call that name and compare it to a lowlife like me?!" The ground buckled beneath its terrible rage.
"Die, you inferior human!" the Kaiju man roared.
A terrible, hellish energy gathered around him. Flame burst, a brilliant, hungry yellow and black fire that spread throughout his body, enveloping the surrounding area in a heat that vaporized the moisture from the air. The massive flames turned the ash-field into a blinding inferno.
He stood fully revealed, a titan of destruction, and spoke his name with a terrible pride: "My name is Grym, one of the Seat of the Black Blood Kaiju."
Grym looked down upon the shattered city, the transformed boy, and the strangely unconcerned girl, his voice now a pronouncement of doom.
"You can call me a Dragon Lord. That's what you humans called us, right?" Grym's eye, a vertical slit of molten gold, fixed on the boy. "By the decree of the Black Blood Kaiju, this city and kingdom will be destroyed. And you, little hunter, will be the first to fall."
The boy stood his ground, the ghosts within him stirring. The confrontation was set. The new, unified hunter against the ancient, arrogant destruction. But the question remained: who was the young girl, and how did she fit into this desolate landscape of power and death?