A BRIGHT FUTURE.

The smell of blood never goes away.

Bayón knew that all too well; it clings to your throat, it stays on your hands, even if you wash them until you tear the skin off.

The dead don’t go away either.

They follow him in dreams, in every silence, they call him traitor, murderer, monster, millions of voices demanding the same thing: “Your ambition condemned us.”

And the worst part isn’t hearing them.

The worst part is that, deep down, Bayón knows they’re right.

He never wanted to be a soldier—he was a musician.

A broken artist, an ordinary guy who ran away from home searching for freedom, only to end up a slave to war.

Forced into recruitment.

Used by radicals.

Turned into the spark of an empire that rose upon corpses.

And in the end, when fire consumed entire countries, the face burned into the memory of both the living and the dead was his.

Bayón, the damned.

Bayón, the man who couldn’t die.

But that would be his punishment.

When the time finally came to pay, he found no rest, no oblivion that awaits the fallen.

Hell didn’t begin with fire and brimstone, it began with the smell of burning flesh and a lightning bolt crashing down from the sky like an executioner.

First came the thunder in his ribs, then the blood in his mouth, and then the pavement exploding beneath his back.

The crowd ran, screaming, begging.

No one looked at him with hope; they looked at him like a corpse that simply refused to fall.

But Bayón stood up.

Slow, staggering, with bones creaking.

—“You don’t know when to stay down,” said Torgann, wrapped in lightning, before vanishing in a blue flash.

The fight that followed wasn’t a fair battle—it was an execution. Every electric strike ripped flesh, every discharge shook him as if trying to erase his very existence.

Bayón endured only because he knew a pain worse than this, even worse than regenerating bone after bone when he first arrived in this world.

He struck, missed, struck again, missed.

Until, by pure instinct, his fist reached the noble’s jaw—just a brush, but enough to ignite his rage.

—“Why the fuck won’t you fall?!” spat Torgann, furious, while the city crumbled around them.

Bayón, with half his face drenched in blood, smiled with red teeth.

—“Because someone has to stop you, bastard. You’re a crazy idiot—you’re destroying everything...”

They kept dragging each other through ruins, through shards of glass, through screams.

Not because he could win... but because he couldn’t accept that another life would be dragged down by his shit.

Until the moment came.

The instant when Torgann, overconfident, disappeared in a frontal lightning strike.

Bayón, knowing he was betting everything, raised his broken arm and swung it into the void.

The fist met the champion’s jaw.

CRACK.

Bayón’s own arm bone shattered like glass, electricity devoured him, pain burned him alive.

And yet, the blow connected.

The entire world erupted in a blue explosion.

Tiles flew, buildings shook, the city fell silent.

No one truly witnessed the fight.

No one, except a few civilians trapped in the chaos.

The world would never know the champion had fallen.

But that was the beginning.

The day when an ordinary man, cursed with a will of steel, stood against someone who believed himself a “god.”