Consciousness was a hammer blow of agony.
Grieremir—or the ghost of him—woke to a symphony of pain. It was not the sharp, clean finality of the explosion, but a deep, resonant thrum of misery that seemed to emanate from every cell. His body felt wrong. Small. Fragile. A puppet with shoddy strings.
He tried to open his eyes, but one was swollen shut, a crusted mess of blood and filth. The other pried open a sliver, revealing a world of oppressive darkness, broken only by a single, rusty grille high on a stone wall, allowing a sliver of torchlight to cut through the gloom.
The air was thick, choking. It stank of stale sweat, vomit, the coppery tang of old blood, and the damp rot of moldering straw. He was lying on a pile of filthy, damp rags that served as a bed, the cold of the stone floor seeping into his bones.
Where…?
The thought was a spark in a void. But before it could catch, a second wave hit him. Not of physical sensation, but of memory. A flood of images, sounds, and feelings that were not his own.
A woman with kind green eyes, her face gaunt, singing a soft, elven lullaby. A feeling of safety. Then, darkness. Chains. The sting of a whip.
A man with a cruel smile and cold eyes—Tarik Cave. The feeling of terror, so profound it was a physical taste in the mouth.
A roaring crowd. A circle of packed dirt and sawdust. The snarling face of a beast-man, all tusks and fury. The impact of a fist. The crack of a bone.
A name, whispered in the dark like a prayer: Yrauos. My name is Yrauos Ardynth.
The memories were a hurricane, tearing through the ordered mind of the master shinobi. He—Grieremir—was an island being eroded, his identity subsumed by the raw, primal experiences of this child. This slave.
He tried to sit up, and a white-hot fire lanced through his side. Broken ribs. He cataloged the injuries with a detached, professional calm that felt alien in this small, broken body. Concussion. Multiple contusions. Malnourishment. Severe dehydration.
This was the body of an eight-year-old elf boy. And it was a hairsbreadth from death.
He forced himself to breathe, to assess. This was a cell. A holding pen. The sounds from beyond the grille were the sounds of a thriving, brutal enterprise: distant roars, the clang of metal, the murmur of a crowd. An arena. The Crimson Pit.
The memories confirmed it. He was property. A combatant. His life was worth only the entertainment he could provide before his inevitable, bloody end.
A fresh, more terrifying assault began. It started as a heat in his chest, a flicker behind his ruined eye. Then it spread, a current of raw, untamed power that scorched his veins. His blood felt like it was boiling, his muscles twitching with spasms of contained lightning. He could feel the filth on the floor, the latent, minuscule life-force in the mold and rot, and a deep, instinctual part of him reached for it, pulling that energy into his broken body in a desperate, clumsy attempt to heal.
Verdant Carapace. The name surfaced from Yrauos's memories. His bloodline. His curse. The only reason he had survived this long.
But there was another. A deeper, more volatile power, sleeping fitfully in his core. A resonance of fire and lightning, of cataclysm and rebirth. It whispered promises of incineration, of turning this entire foul place to ash. Infernal Convergence.
The two powers warred within his frail vessel, a feedback loop of agony. The regenerative pull of the Carapace fought against the self-immolating potential of the Convergence. His body was the battlefield, and it was losing.
No.
The thought was a shard of ice, sharp and definitive. It was Grieremir's voice, cutting through the chaos.
This is unacceptable.
A shinobi must have control. Of his body. Of his mind. Of the environment. This boy had none. He was a leaf in a storm. But Grieremir was the rock the storm broke against.
He focused every ounce of his ninety years of mental discipline. He ignored the pain. He silenced the foreign memories. He pushed back against the raging bloodlines, not with force, but with a will of tempered steel. He visualized a dam, containing the torrent. A valve, regulating the flow.
Breathe in. Hold. Breathe out.
It was the most basic of exercises. But in this body, it was a Herculean task. He matched his breathing to the faint, sluggish rhythm of the boy's Mana Core—a Crude Core, stunted and weak. He began to circulate the chaotic Essenceflow, not as the wild currents they were, but as a single, manageable stream.
The pain did not vanish, but it receded from a scream to a manageable throb. The panic subsided. The two warring bloodlines, feeling the guiding intelligence, quieted to a low hum.
In the newfound silence of his mind, a single, clear objective crystallized.
Survive.
The heavy, iron-banded door to the cell screeched open. A hulking guard, a human with a face like battered leather, stood silhouetted in the torchlight.
"Get up, rat," the man grunted, his voice a gravelly threat. "You're on. The crowd's hungry, and Gorehorn needs a warm-up."
The guard didn't wait for a response. He strode in, his boot connecting with Yrauos's side—the side with the broken ribs.
A fresh explosion of pain. But this time, Grieremir was ready. He let the pain in, analyzed it, and used it to fuel the cold fire of his focus. He didn't cry out. He didn't whimper. The boy would have. The man would not.
He looked up at the guard with his one good eye, and the man, for a fleeting second, hesitated. It wasn't the look of a terrified child. It was the flat, empty gaze of a predator assessing its prey.
Then, the moment passed. The guard grabbed him by the arm, his grip like iron, and hauled him to his feet. The world swam, but Grieremir—Yrauos now—planted his feet. He was weak, but his stance was perfect. Centered.
He was dragged out of the cell and into the roaring, blood-stained heart of the Crimson Pit. The path to the arena sand was a tunnel of shadows, but at its end was a circle of blinding light and the thunderous sound of a crowd baying for blood.
The master shinobi was gone. The slave boy remained. But somewhere in the space between, a new entity was born. One with the experience of a legend and the desperate will of a child.
Yrauos Ardynth took his first, limping step into the light, his mind cold and clear, his body a weapon waiting to be sharpened.
The fight for his second chance had begun.