There are people born to kill, and there are people born to survive.
Aiden Kaslana was neither.
From the moment he could remember, his life was shaped by cold eyes and colder blades. His family, the Kaslana Clan, was known for their silent killings — a house where emotions were weaknesses and failure meant pain. They spoke little, trained constantly, and lived only to perfect the art of death.
Aiden didn't fit.
While his brothers and sisters learned how to end life without hesitation, he found himself wondering *why* life had to be taken at all. When they honed their poisons, he practiced sword forms beneath the moonlight, not to kill, but to find balance. When they sought perfection in obedience, he sought perfection in motion.
He hesitated once during a mission. That hesitation became his sentence.
The beatings that followed were meant to erase his compassion, to carve a killer out of a child who refused to be one. But pain did something different to him — it taught him how to endure. It showed him that growth did not come from cruelty or control, but from persistence. He learned to breathe through agony, to move even when broken.
And in that quiet defiance, something awoke within him.
He began to love the struggle itself. The grind, the repetition, the process of failing, learning, and rising stronger than before. While his family glorified results, Aiden found beauty in the *journey*. Every cut, every scar, every sleepless night of training was proof of progress.
By the time he was eight, he had endured enough. One night, under a moon pale as frost, he escaped.
He ran until his lungs burned and his feet bled, deep into a forest so vast it swallowed him whole. There, for the first time, the silence wasn't suffocating — it was peaceful. The trees didn't judge him. The cold didn't mock him. The beasts didn't care if he was a failure; they only cared if he was strong enough to survive.
Years passed.
Aiden hunted, trained, and endured storms and solitude alike. He faced creatures that could tear through trees and men alike. He lost often — but every defeat was another lesson carved into his bones. He began to understand movement, rhythm, the weight of his sword, and the subtle pulse of life around him.
He grew to love it — the sensation of progress, of inching closer to mastery. He didn't crave victory. He craved improvement.
At sixteen, his blade no longer trembled. The monsters that once forced him to flee now fell with a single, precise strike. The frost of the forest had crept into his veins, making him calm even in chaos.
But beneath that calm, his heart still burned.
He wasn't chasing vengeance, nor seeking redemption. What he sought was understanding — of strength, of himself, of the strange energy that stirred within his body like a quiet flame in the cold.
When he met Kite a year later, everything changed.
Aiden saw in Kite the same steadiness he had fought to build — but Kite wielded a strange power, one that flowed like wind and struck like lightning. Nen. The invisible force that shaped the world in ways Aiden had only sensed before.
The moment he saw it, curiosity consumed him. He studied every movement, every flicker of aura, until he began to imitate it unconsciously. In three days, he learned to open his aura nodes. In another three, he grasped the basics of Ten, Zetsu, and Ren.
Kite was astonished. "You learned this just by watching me?"
Aiden only smiled faintly. "I failed enough times to figure it out."
It was then that his nature revealed itself — **Specialist**.
His Nen, strange and fluid, could adapt and evolve. From it, he birthed his first ability: **Tailless**, a ghostlike spirit with a single red eye that mirrored the loneliness inside him. Together, they shaped **Frostburn**, an aura that burned through freezing, blurring the line between ice and flame — between restraint and fury.
Before they parted ways, Kite told him of the Hunters — explorers of truth and freedom. That word, *freedom*, stayed with Aiden.
He decided he would take the Hunter Exam. Not to prove his worth to anyone, but to see how far he could go.
Because for Aiden Kaslana, the real reward wasn't the title.
It was the struggle.
The pain.
The never-ending pursuit of growth.
As he set his eyes on the horizon, his reflection shimmered in the edge of his blade — white hair, blue eyes, and a faint frost curling from his breath.
He smiled. Not the smile of a victor, but of a man who finally understood his path.
Strength wasn't about winning.
It was about *becoming.*