Hayjin's lungs were burning. It wasn't the familiar sting of London smog, but an icy fire that seemed to expand with every breath, clawing at his windpipe. Behind him, the roar of the forest wasn't made of birds or wind, but of the rhythmic, heavy trampling of his pursuers.
"Run. Don't look back. Just run," he repeated to himself, as his bare feet sank into luminescent moss that sprayed azure spores with every step.
The forest of Alius was a psychedelic nightmare. Trees with silver bark twisted toward a sky that knew no familiar stars, and gnarled roots emerged from the ground like the fingers of buried giants. Hayjin jumped over a root as tall as he was with an ease that left him horrified. His body—that of a small child—shouldn't have possessed such strength. Yet, every time he pushed off his legs, he felt an electric shock start from the Mark on his neck and branch down his spine, making his muscles as taut as violin strings.
"Get him! Don't let him reach the edge of the valley!" Cross's command echoed from afar, muffled by the density of the vegetation, but the shadows following him were close. Too close.
"Why? Why me?" Hayjin thought, dodging a low branch with feline reflexes. "What the hell does my family have to do with this nightmare? I had an exam... I had Sarah... Sarah was waiting for me..." The image of her face, blurred by the London rain, pierced his mind. That memory was the only thing stopping him from collapsing to the ground and letting himself be captured. He didn't want to be the "tool" of Cross and the Cult.
Behind him, the cult members began to mutter.
"He's too fast," one said, his voice thick with superstitious dread. "No child can move like that. The Mark must be fueling him."
Suddenly, the sound of breaking branches behind him ceased. The silence that followed was a thousand times more terrifying than the shouting. Hayjin didn't stop, but he felt the air grow heavy, charged with a static electricity that made the hair on his arms stand up.
A shadow detached itself from the canopy of trees above him. Without a sound, the hooded figure who had killed him—the Assassin—landed silently a few meters away. The hood was still pulled down, a void of absolute darkness where a face should be. There was no strain in his breathing, no hesitation.
The Assassin lunged.
It was a movement Hayjin's human eyes couldn't follow. In an instant, the man was upon him, a gloved hand reaching out to seize his shoulder.
The Mark on the back of Hayjin's neck exploded.
In that millisecond, time seemed to slow down. Hayjin felt the heat of the Mark expand like a shockwave. Without even thinking, his muscles reacted on their own: he dropped to his knees, sliding sideways with impossible agility, and with a thrust of his hips, he leaped toward a nearby trunk, using it to give himself a diagonal kick-off that propelled him several meters away.
The Assassin remained motionless for a moment, his hand still stretched into the void. He said nothing, emitted no groan of surprise, but Hayjin sensed a kind of cold evaluation emanating from the figure.
Hayjin landed poorly but scrambled up immediately. That was when he felt the cold.
A liquid warmth began to soak his right flank, drenching his hemp tunic. He brought his hand to his waist, and when he pulled it back, his fingers were covered in a dark red, almost black under the forest's blue light.
"He hit me..." he realized with horror. The Assassin had been so fast that Hayjin hadn't even noticed the contact. A deep gash tore through his side, a silent warning: you will not escape.
His vision began to sway. The pain arrived a second later, a wave of fire that caught his breath. "I have to... I have to find help. I can't die again. Not here. Not like this."
He ran again, but this time he staggered. Blood left a dark trail on the luminescent moss. He hid behind a cluster of giant ferns, holding his breath as he heard the pursuers approaching.
"He's wounded. Follow the trail!"
The damp heat trickling down Hayjin's side was the only thing keeping him conscious. Every time his foot hit the ground, a jolt of agony shot from the wound up to the Mark, which responded by pulsing with a rhythmic violet light, almost like a beacon in the fog.
"How long have I been running? An hour. Maybe two. How much time has passed?"
His thoughts were fragmented, shards of glass wounding his mind. He couldn't fathom how his child's legs could keep moving. He had run for miles, climbing steep slopes and sliding into muddy gullies. A child's body should have given out after ten minutes, but he felt a foreign force, a sort of dark "fuel" burning in his veins, forcing his muscles to strain beyond their natural limit.
Behind him, several hundred meters back, the Cult members danced through the trees like crazed fireflies, leaping from branch to branch at speeds imperceptible to the human eye.
"He can't go far! He's losing too much blood!"
One of the members was terrified. He had seen dozens of initiations, but none had ever shown such resistance. In his mind, the figure of Hayjin was becoming a dark legend. "If we don't catch him, Cross will kill us all. But if we do catch him... what will that thing do to us when it grows up?"
Hayjin tripped over a root and fell face-first. The taste of churned earth and moss filled his mouth. He lay still for an instant, feeling his heartbeat thudding against the forest floor.
"Enough. Just leave me here," he thought, tears blurring his vision. "Sarah... sorry. You said not to disappear, and I ended up in another world being hunted by madmen."
The image of Sarah laughing while they ate that stale bagel appeared before his eyes. It was so vivid that for a second, he almost smelled the London traffic. That wasn't just a memory; it was his anchor. If he died there, that memory would die with him. No one would ever know again that a boy named Hayjin had existed.
He stood up, pressing his small hand over the wound in his side. Blood welled between his fingers, warm and slick. He used a strip of his tunic to throttle the cut, tightening it until he saw stars dancing before his eyes from the pain.
In the circular hall of the cave, silence reigned once more, but it was no longer the solemn silence of waiting. It was a silence heavy with failure, thick as stagnant smoke. Cross sat on a throne of raw stone, hands interlaced under his chin, staring at the void where Hayjin had stood before.
Asmita stood beside him. She couldn't keep still. Her long, pale fingers kept stroking the edge of the hemp tunic Hayjin had lost during the initial struggle, a torn piece of cloth she gripped as if it were a sacred relic.
"They lost him…" she hissed, and her voice was no longer the reassuring one she had used. It was a metallic, grating sound.
Cross didn't move. His calm was irritating, almost inhuman. "He is no ordinary child, Asmita. You know that well. The Mark doesn't just scar the body; it rewrites the very structure of the host. What we saw in the cave was just a reflection of his will to survive. It is a positive sign."
"A positive sign?" Asmita spun around, her red eyes glowing with a mad light. She stepped toward Cross, looming over him. "He is the Bearer. The seed we have cultivated for centuries through the blood of his lineage. If he dies in that forest because of a hemorrhage or a wild beast, all our work will vanish. I felt his heart, Cross. It beat against my palm like a war drum. He is mine. The Cult cannot afford to lose him."
Cross looked up, meeting the girl's gaze. "Nothing is lost in the design of the Mark. I have sent the Assassin. If there is a hope of recovering him or marking him further, he will find it."
Meanwhile, Hayjin resumed his run. The hours began to blur. The forest of Alius seemed to shift around him: the trees grew taller, the shadows longer. He felt invisible creatures moving in the bushes, bird calls that sounded like human laughter.
The Assassin, the figure who had killed him, was always there. He didn't run, he didn't shout. He appeared and vanished among the shadows, a patient predator waiting for the prey to run out of blood. Every so often, Hayjin saw the reflection of his blade among the leaves, a flash of silver reminding him how close the end was.
"Why doesn't he finish me?" Hayjin wondered, leaping over a stream of water. "He's studying me. He wants to see how much the Mark can endure. I'm a rat in a maze."
It was nearly dawn—or whatever the rising light was in that world—when Hayjin saw a change in the vegetation. The trees thinned out, making room for an orderly clearing. The smell of the wild was replaced by the reassuring scent of burning wood.
His vision was now a narrow tunnel. He saw only patches of color.
Green... brown... gray... light.
Hayjin grit his teeth until he tasted blood. He stood up, forcing his legs to move. He burst out of the thick thicket and found himself in a more open glade where the grass was shorter and the scent of resin was replaced by something incredibly domestic: wood smoke.
Not far away, nestled between the slopes of the hills, was a small cabin of stone and wood. A robust man with a grizzled beard and powerful arms was splitting logs with a heavy axe. A woman, wearing a clean apron and with her hair tied up, stood in the doorway holding a clay bowl.
"What shall we have for dinner, love?" the woman asked, her voice calm and harmonious, carrying a taste of normalcy.
"Whatever we have, darling. The roots are good this year," the man replied, relaxing with her in that seemingly bright and luminous afternoon.
"Help..." he tried to shout, but only a hoarse croak came from his throat.
Then, he gathered every ounce of energy a body could have and...
"HELP!" Hayjin screamed. His childish voice was a desperate scratch in the silence of the clearing. "PLEASE!"
The man froze for a moment. He looked around, frowning. "Did you hear that, darling?"
"Yes... it sounded like a child."
Hayjin stumbled into the open, running toward them, but the Cult members had already burst from the forest behind him. There were five of them, besides the Assassin who remained in the shadows of the trees.
A Cult member reached out to grab Hayjin, but the boy, in a final burst of pure adrenaline, performed an unpredictable move: he jumped, planting a kick straight onto the pursuer's bone mask and using him as a human springboard to propel himself forward.
He fell, rolling right at Silas's feet.
Blood flowed heavily from his side, staining the manicured grass in front of the house. Hayjin looked up, his eyes glassy with pain and terror.
"Help me..." he whispered, grabbing the hem of the man's trousers. "Please... don't let them take me."
The man looked down at the child. His face, initially confused, changed instantly when his eyes fell upon the Mark glowing on Hayjin's neck. His pupils contracted. It wasn't fear he felt, but an ancient, profound recognition.
He knelt, taking Hayjin into his arms with a delicacy surprising for someone of his stature.
"Stay calm, it's alright," the man said, and his voice was now like the rumble of distant thunder. "Everything will be fine. No one will touch you here."
He turned to his wife, who had rushed to the doorway, her face pale. "Elara! Take him inside. Now. Use the red root ointment and bandage the wound. Hurry!"
The woman took Hayjin from her husband's arms. She was warm and smelled of bread and lavender. She carried him into the house, laying him on a solid wooden table as Hayjin felt his consciousness slip away.
Outside, the Cult members had reached the clearing.
The Assassin, however, unlike his companions, remained motionless at the edge of the forest. He understood. He had seen. He knew that this man was no simple human.
Rhaegalur straightened up, crossing his arms. "Leave. Immediately. If you take another step on this land, there will be nothing left of you to bury."
The cultists, blinded by fanaticism, did not listen. Four of them lunged forward with inhuman speed, blades drawn.
Silas didn't even move. He simply raised a hand and snapped his fingers.
There was no long incantation, no magic words. Only an explosion of blood-red flames that erupted from nowhere, engulfing the first two cultists. In an instant, not even ashes remained; they were literally atomized by the heat.
The other two stopped, paralyzed by terror, but it was too late. The man moved his wrist sideways and a scythe-shaped wave of fire swept over them, reducing them to black dust before they could even scream.
The Assassin stared at the man for a long moment. Then, without a word, he turned and vanished into the thick of the brush. He knew he could not win that battle.
His eyes, hidden by the hood, met the man's. For the first time, the Assassin did not take a step forward. He knew who that man was. He knew that no member of the Cult, not even Cross, could win against that primordial power. Without a sound, he dissolved into the shadows and disappeared.
Inside the cabin, Hayjin heard the muffled cries of the men outside, but the sound reached him dulled, as if he were underwater. He felt the warm hands of the man's wife pressing on his side, smelled the pungent scent of the healing herbs she was trying to apply, but his mind was drifting back.
He saw Sarah. They were in the library. She was laughing and handing him a note.
"You'll make it, Hayjin. You're stronger than you think."
"Sarah…" he murmured with his last breath.
Rhaegalur re-entered the house, his massive presence seeming to fill the room. "How is he?" he asked, his voice now soft and worried.
"He's losing too much blood... I don't know if..."
Inside the house, the woman continued pressing bandages onto Hayjin's side, but the blood wouldn't stop coming. "It's deep! I can't stop it!"
The man tried to help his wife, the air around him still vibrating with heat. He approached the table, looking at the boy's pale face.
Hayjin opened his eyes for one last, fleeting moment. His mind, clouded by pain, returned to London. He saw Sarah smiling at him, the city lights, the gray rain.
"Sorry, Sarah... I don't think I'll be coming to class tomorrow..."
Then, darkness enveloped him completely.
Meanwhile, in the cave, Cross and Asmita remained silent for several minutes, until a sudden shiver ran through the air of the cavern. A dull vibration, like underground thunder, shook the rock walls. Cross closed his eyes, tilting his head as if listening to a distant melody.
"It is over," Cross murmured.
"What?"
"Our assassin has returned safe and sound. But the five who accompanied him... they no longer exist. They have been erased from the tapestry of this world."
Asmita gasped, bringing a hand to her throat with an intrigued and astonished look. "Erased? By whom? By a beast?"
"No," Cross replied, and for the first time a shadow of genuine unease passed over his stern face. "It was by the one who was once known as the 'Dragon God.' Our assassin recognized his signature. Primordial red flames. The boy is under his protection now."
Asmita began to tremble, not with fear, but with a repressed rage that threatened to explode. "Then we must go there. Now! Mobilize the entire cult, burn that valley, and take back what belongs to us! Rhaegalur is just an old remnant of an era we have already defeated!"
"Silence!" Cross's command boomed through the hall like a cannon shot. He rose slowly, his figure seeming to grow taller and more menacing. "We are not ready to face Rhaegalur. Not yet. A direct attack would only lead to the destruction of half our ranks, and the boy would die in the crossfire."
He walked toward the large pool of black water at the back of the hall, observing the ripples on the surface.
"We will leave him there, for now..." he said finally, in a tone that allowed no argument.
Asmita's eyes widened. "Leave him there? In the hands of a man who hates everything we represent? Rhaegalur will train him, Cross! He'll teach him to fight us! He'll give him a will of his own, a moral compass... he'll make him unusable as a tool!"
"Or," Cross countered, turning halfway, "he will make him perfect. Think, Asmita. Right now Hayjin is a broken vessel. He is confused, he hates us, he hates himself, he hates this world. If we took him now, we would have to break his mind to control him, risking damage to the power of the Mark."
He paused, a cruel smile illuminating his face.
"Let Rhaegalur heal him. Let him raise him, teach him to use his body, give him a reason to live. Let Hayjin build a life in this world, grow fond of that land, learn to love again. And then... when the fruit is ripe, when the Mark has absorbed enough life force and technique... then we will return."
Asmita stared at Cross, and slowly her expression of rage transformed into a sick understanding. "You want Rhaegalur to forge the weapon that we will then use."
"Exactly. We want Hayjin to have something to lose. The despair of a man who has everything is far more powerful than the fear of a child who has nothing. When the time comes, we will return for him. And then it won't be a frightened child following us, but a complete Bearer who will have no choice but to embrace his destiny to save what he loves."
Asmita stroked the scrap of Hayjin's cloth again, pressing it to her lips. "I will live for that day. To see Rhaegalur fall and the boy return to my arms... it will be my only prayer."
"For now, let him live his illusion of freedom," Cross concluded, sitting back down into the darkness. "Alius's time is long, and we have all eternity to wait for our tool to be ready."