"I'm fine. I mean, as fine as someone in chains would be. At least I don't need to share space with that creature anymore."
Zaridan's voice filled the Temple while I approached — deep, drawn out, with the lazy cadence of someone who was in no hurry for absolutely anything. He never was. In all the months I came down there, not once did Zaridan demonstrate urgency. It was as though time, for him, were a suggestion he had politely declined.
The long hair wasn't tied up in a bun like the other times. It fell loose over the enormous shoulders, dark, straight, contrasting with the muscular body covered in tattoos that climbed up the neck and reached the face in lines I could never decipher — because they moved. They always moved. Serpentining slowly beneath the grayish skin like snakes searching for something they never found, but that also never gave up searching. I had already stopped trying to understand what they were. Whether it was a more powerful variation of the mark, whether it was part of him, whether it was something else the Oasis didn't know how to classify. Just as it didn't know how to classify anything about that creature.
The eyes remained covered by the bandana — reddish, faded by time, what remained of something that had been white at some moment of his existence. Even so, the face directed itself at me with surgical precision while he spoke. Zaridan didn't need eyes to see. I had already understood that in the first exchanges: whatever existed behind that blindfold saw more than my eyes ever could.
He was calmer than usual. The rage and hatred I felt radiating from him in the first months — that animal hostility that made the air vibrate and my hands sweat before I got within ten meters — had diminished. Not gone away. Diminished. Like a bonfire someone covered with ashes: the ember was still there, red and patient, waiting for the right moment to remind everyone it had never gone out.
It was strange that after so long he still accepted to talk and even train with me. Stranger still that I sometimes felt something resembling expectation when I descended there.
"We're all chained to something. Sometimes it's easier when it's visible." I said while finally entering the Temple, my steps echoing on the dark stone floor. "But today I wanted fewer words, more action."
Zaridan let out a low sound that could have been a laugh or a grunt — with him, the line between the two was too thin to matter.
✦ ✦ ✦
My eyes climbed up the body of that enormous creature as I approached: the bull legs, thick and curved, ending in hooves that marked the stone floor; the torso human but too broad, as though someone had taken a man's body and stretched it to fit a frame that wasn't made for our species; the pointed ears folded back, so tall that even though they seemed elfin no one in their right mind would make that connection. The grayish skin shone with a faint luminosity I could never determine was sweat, reflection, or something coming from within.
He had human characteristics — that was undeniable. But he also had characteristics of everything else. Traits of races I knew mixed with traits of races I had never seen, combined in a form that wasn't grotesque but was definitely unclassifiable. Clearly masculine. Clearly unique. And clearly something that shouldn't exist in any catalogue of the Oasis — and that, for reasons I would probably never be able to explain, had been summoned by me.
"What are we betting today, human?"
Zaridan stepped back to give space while I entered the center of the construction. The thick chain accompanied him, swinging from side to side as though it were made of paper — links that would weigh enough to pin any other creature to the floor, dragged by him with the disregard of someone carrying a collar they've already forgotten they wear. It was then that I saw the two glaives forming in his arms — being born from nothing, as always, blades so long and heavy they almost touched his back. Any other creature would carry those weapons with visible effort. Zaridan held them with the ease of someone who had forgotten they were heavy.
It wasn't the first time I came there. In truth, I had almost lost count of how many times that Temple had been the stage of my humiliation.
✦ ✦ ✦
It all began months ago, when Zaridan obeyed my order for the first time — watching over Broxes.
The six-armed Orghaal seemed strangely frightened and above all confused by what he had seen, but even so Zaridan didn't kill him. He could have killed him. No one would have stopped him. But he chose not to. And it was with that that I finally realized the chain between the two of us wasn't made only of hatred. There was something more. Something that wasn't respect, wasn't loyalty, and wasn't fear. It was merely the mutual recognition that the two of us were trapped in the same world, in the same circumstances, and that maybe — maybe — talking was less unbearable than silence.
The conversations became training.
The training became routine.
And the routine became the most dangerous thing I did every day.
Zaridan was strong.
No — that sentence doesn't work. Strong was Dioscuros. Strong was Arachne growing to twelve meters with the cannon loaded. Strong were the adjectives I used for creatures that operated within the limits of what I could understand.
Zaridan didn't operate within any limit.
He was the most powerful creature I had ever fought against, by a margin I found impossible to reach — at least not at the level I was at. Each exchange with him was a lesson disguised as defeat. Each time my body hit the stone floor of that Temple, I learned something no conventional training would give me: the difference between being fast and being fast enough, between having strength and having the right strength at the right moment, between knowing how to fight and understanding what fighting really was.
Five hundred and seventy-six exchanges.
Five hundred and seventy-six defeats.
Several per day, over months. Some lasted seconds — I advanced, read wrong, and woke on the floor without knowing which blow had put me there. Others lasted minutes, and in those I felt the progress: a dodge I wouldn't have managed before, a counterattack that passed close enough to make his tattoos move faster, a pattern reading that for an instant — just one instant — made me believe that maybe next time I would manage.
Next time never came.
Morgana and Livina were entirely against it from the start. And I understood. From the outside, what I was doing was insanity: subjecting myself every day to training with a Mythic creature that could kill me with a single real blow, on a bet that it would choose not to. Morgana's logic was as always — calculated, precise, implacable: "If he kills you once, my Lord, there is no second attempt." Livina's concern was more direct: "He's stronger than all of us combined. What's the plan if he decides he doesn't want to play anymore?"
The plan was to have no plan.
It was to trust — and I hated that word — that what I felt in those exchanges was real. Because I felt it. In each defeat, in each blow that brought me down, in each second I spent sprawled on the floor staring at the Temple ceiling: Zaridan never underestimated me. Never. It was the rarest thing I had ever found in the Oasis — a creature that treated me as a threat from the very first exchange, even when I clearly wasn't. He went all out. Each blow was genuine. Each movement was that of someone who took seriously what was in front of him.
And there were the times when I knew — knew with the certainty of someone who has observed someone long enough to read what isn't said — that he decelerated. Not out of pity. Not out of gentleness. But in the same way a sword master adjusts his rhythm against a student who is almost understanding a movement: slow enough for him to see, fast enough for him not to notice it was on purpose.
Zaridan would never admit he was teaching me.
And I would never admit I knew.
Those were the silent terms of our unspoken agreement. And it worked.
✦ ✦ ✦
After months consuming nectar stones instead of investing in the base — a trade that cost dearly and that, on paper, was the wrong decision — my body was finally different. Stronger, faster, with a resistance I hadn't had before. Of course, in practice, that only meant I could now see Zaridan's movements. Not necessarily stop them. Not necessarily return them. But see them — and at the level he operated, seeing was already a feat most creatures of the Oasis would never achieve.
Every fight I had fought in my life had shown me one thing with brutal clarity: I was weak.
Even knowing that the battle against the Burmans proved I had evolved, I could still have died countless times that day. Every victory I conquered had a dose of luck mixed with strategy — and worse, a dose of the enemy's arrogance that I was already tired of using as a crutch. I beat Dioscuros because he underestimated me. I survived Leda because she lost her head. Every enemy I defeated fell because of a mistake of theirs, not because of an entirely earned merit of mine.
With two races wanting my head, being strong stopped being a desire.
It became an obligation.
My kingdom was strong. I knew that. But I also knew that, in my absence, I needed someone capable of protecting everything dear to me. Someone on the front line. Not behind it.
Morgana was brilliant — the sharpest strategic mind I knew and an elite marksman who solved problems at distances most people couldn't even see. But she was exactly that: a mind. A piece that operated from the top of the board, moving other pieces. She wasn't the type who descended to the field and became a reference for soldiers who needed to see someone fighting at their side.
Livina was a warrior, yes — but of a different kind. She fought using her summons, coordinating forces in a way I was still learning to admire. Only, she would hardly have the time or inclination to understand the terrain, seek the vanguard, fight hand to hand alongside my soldiers while shouting orders that made an entire army move as one thing.
What I needed was a general.
A field commander. Someone capable of being on the front line and being the reference on the battlefield — the point soldiers look at when they don't know what to do, and that, just by being there, makes the difference between an army that loses and an army that wins.
Most races had a hero exclusively for that function. The great kingdoms had legendary generals who inspired entire legions by the simple presence on the field. The Burmans I faced didn't have one only because their summons were probably mediocre — a stroke of luck I couldn't count on repeating.
I had the solution chained in my Temple.
And to get it, I needed to enter his game.
✦ ✦ ✦
I breathed deep.
And said the sentence I had been rehearsing for weeks.
"I want to bet your freedom."
The entire Temple seemed to contract.
Zaridan's slouching composure — that posture of someone who didn't care about anything enough to change position — broke. It was subtle. A stiffening of the shoulders. A change in the tilt of the head. The tattoos on his face accelerated for a second, the lines twisting faster as though responding to something his mind felt before processing.
Freedom.
The only word that made that Mythic creature react.
I knew that, however much he seemed not to care about the training — however much our daily exchanges had something that resembled routine and that, from afar, someone would confuse with normality — it wasn't enough. Zaridan was chained. Not only by physical chains. But by the pact. By the system. By the rule that made him my summoned hero and that, as long as I lived, didn't allow him to simply leave.
He was a prisoner. And prisoners, however well treated they may be, never forget the door is locked.
"OHOHOHO."
The laugh came out deep and full, echoing off the Temple walls like thunder trapped in a room too small.
"That is a very interesting wager…" His arms crossed over his chest, the glaives shrinking but still gripped in his hands like natural extensions of his body. The head tilted to the side — the gesture I already knew, Zaridan's way of evaluating whether what he heard deserved investment. "But what do you get in return?"
There it was.
Zaridan's game.
If there was one thing I had learned in those months of training and conversation, it was that Zaridan wasn't a creature of strength — he was a creature of word. Agreements carried weight for him. Wagers had meaning. He liked negotiations where both sides placed something real on the table, and loved — genuinely loved — those in which he gained what he wanted most.
Giving freedom to a summoned hero was something very few Lords did. And when they did, it was almost always out of pity — a hero too weak, a failed summon, someone who wasn't worth the maintenance cost but who, over time, had won enough sympathy to earn a dignified farewell. It was rare. It was sentimental. It was the kind of gesture that cost nothing because what was lost had no value.
With Zaridan, it was the opposite.
Freeing him meant giving up the most powerful creature in my kingdom. It meant losing my only chance at having what I needed most. It wasn't a gesture of pity — it was the most expensive bet I had ever made in my life.
And it was exactly for that reason that Zaridan paid attention.
Because he knew I wasn't an idiot. And whoever bets something valuable without being an idiot is because they expect to win something worth even more.
"Be my General." My voice came out firmer than I expected. "Command my troops. Be, in my absence, the commander of the best kingdom that exists in the Oasis."
Silence.
The kind of silence that has texture — dense, charged, alive. Zaridan's tattoos stopped moving. All of them. At once. As though even the lines on his skin were holding their breath to hear what he would say.
His head returned to center.
His mouth opened.
And what came out was the question I knew was coming — the question that separated the deal from the conversation.
"Boy…" His voice dropped half a tone. "I'm not going to go easy on you just because we've been talking all these days. You understand this?"
His grayish skin began to bristle. Every hair, every pore, reacting to something coming from within — a contained excitement I already knew from our exchanges, but that I had never seen at that intensity. Zaridan liked what he was hearing. He genuinely liked it. And the reason was simple: for the first time in all those months, the wager had real weight.
I could lose him forever.
He could win the only thing that mattered.
"After nearly five hundred and seventy-six exchanges, we're at five hundred and seventy-six to zero." I said, and if there was fear in my voice, I pushed it to a place deep enough so it wouldn't tremble. "I think it's time I gave everything I have. And for that I need an incentive." I let the pause last half a second longer than comfortable. "What do you say? Are you afraid?"
Zaridan's smile ceased the same way it had begun — all at once, like a door closing.
And he took a combat stance.
✦ ✦ ✦
If there was one thing I admired about Zaridan — one, above all others — it was that he wasn't arrogant. His words sounded that way, sometimes. The tone, the laugh, the way he called "boy" someone who was technically his Lord. But it was a façade. Performance. Because in each of the five hundred and seventy-six exchanges we had, Zaridan went all out.
That was why I trusted him.
Not because he was gentle. Not because he was loyal. But because he was intelligent enough to know what I was worth — and honest enough to act accordingly.
"All right." Zaridan's voice filled the Temple with a gravity I had never heard before — and I had heard a lot of that voice. "Let's do the following. Knock me down, and I will be your General." The glaives extended over his forearms, growing as never before, slow, heavy, the metal elongating centimeter by centimeter while the air groaned around the blades — as though the weapons themselves knew that this time was different. "But know that I will go all out. Like every other time."His head tilted in my direction — and even through the blindfold, I felt the gaze. "Prepare yourself."
My heart accelerated.
I was nervous. More than in any battle, more than against Dioscuros, more than in any moment of the Purge. Because in those situations I was fighting to survive — and surviving is instinct, is reaction, is the body doing what the body does when it doesn't want to die. Here it was different. Here I was fighting for a choice. And if I lost, the consequence wasn't my death — it was something that, in a way, hurt more. It was losing the creature I had spent months learning to respect.
The mark began to cover my body.
It climbed up my arms, closed over the torso, descended down my legs — the armor fitting with the familiarity of something that was already part of me. And in my hands, responding to what I asked, two long glaives formed. Long, heavy blades that almost touched my back — replicas of his, forged by the same mark that covered me, born from months of observation and imitation and defeat.
"So you're going to use the weapon I taught you…" Zaridan said. And for the first time, I heard something in his voice that wasn't there before. It wasn't surprise. It wasn't amusement. It was something else — something that, if I didn't know him, I would call pride. "Good."
After months training with him, I had learned to use the glaives like no other weapon. Sword, spear, crossbow — I knew how to wield them all, but wasn't proficient in any. The glaives were different. They were a weapon I could only learn by watching a master use them — and I had watched, five hundred and seventy-six times, the greatest master that existed. Each defeat was a lesson he never admitted he was giving. Each blow that brought me down carried, beneath the force, the instruction of how it should have been blocked.
If I had any chance of knocking Zaridan down, the only weapon that would let me do it was his.
I gripped the glaives.
He gripped his.
The Temple grew small.
Not physically — the walls didn't move, the ceiling didn't descend. But the space between the two of us filled with a pressure that made everything shrink. His presence and mine, for the first time, occupying the same air with real intention. It wasn't training. It wasn't routine. It was the most important wager of my life against the strongest creature I knew, and if I lost, he would leave forever, and I would never find another like him.
I breathed.
He waited.
This time I would go all out. And for that I needed to activate something I had never used against him — my secret. Something I had only managed to do once in my life, against Dioscuros, and that had cost me months just to understand how I did it. Months of trying, of failure, of entire nights concentrating everything I had on a power that seemed to have a will of its own and that only responded when it decided I deserved it.
I closed my eyes for half a second.
And called.
[ Blood Trail activated ]
The world changed.
I felt my blood accelerate as though every vein had doubled in diameter — a hot, violent current coursing through my entire body, pushing everything forward, faster, sharper, more present. The Temple around me decelerated. Not like that time against the Burmans — not time stopping, not the world becoming a statue — but enough. Enough for each detail to become sharper, for each movement to gain contour, for the space between one instant and the next to open just enough for me to fit inside it.
In front of me, Zaridan didn't move.
But I saw the change in him. The minimal tilt of the head. The tattoos accelerating on his face. The posture that, for the first time in five hundred and seventy-six exchanges, adjusted half a degree — like a predator that has just noticed the prey in front of it might no longer be prey.
He was feeling it.
And still, he waited. He gave me the time. He gave me the chance to show everything before advancing.
I was grateful.
Blood Trail alone wouldn't be enough. Not against him. Not against a Mythic creature that operated on a scale I still couldn't reach.
I needed more.
[ Affinity with Magic activated ]
The magic exploded inside me like a dam breaking. I felt every fiber of my body vibrate at a frequency I barely recognized — and with it, blood magic responded, igniting on the skin with an intensity that made the Temple's shadows retreat. I rode the wave. I channeled everything I had. And I summoned.
Zaetar materialized at my side.
The Temple shuddered. The creature's presence filled the remaining space — and now the Temple that before seemed too large for a conversation seemed too small for what was about to happen.
"OHHH."
Zaridan let the sound out slowly, savoring. His head turned toward Zaetar, then back to me — and for the first time I saw something on his face that resembled genuine surprise. Not fear. Zaridan didn't have fear. But the recognition that the boy he had been knocking down for months had kept cards he didn't know existed.
"So you had a secret hidden away…" His glaives seemed to tremble with excitement — the gesture I knew, the one that preceded the advance. "That was how you killed them."The corner of his mouth opened in a smile. "Very well. Come with everything."
I wasn't going to last long in that form. Blood Trail was already charging the body. Affinity with Magic burned from inside like fire running down a fuse too short — maximizing all my abilities, but devouring all my mana at a speed I felt being extracted as if through a straw. Each second there was one less second I would have.
It was all or nothing.
I advanced.