The Price of Defiance

The leader’s order was sharp and immediate.

“Take him.”

Two soldiers lunged, throwing weighted nets.

Vials of green liquid were tied to the ropes, designed to shatter on impact and release their toxic payload.

“Alchemical traps. They came prepared.”

Aki didn’t retreat. He advanced.

The first net flew past his ear, snagging on a tree branch.

He ducked under the second, the vials smashing against a boulder behind him with a hiss of corrosive, green smoke that ate into the stone.

“He’s fast!” a soldier yelled, his voice tight with surprise.

Aki was already moving, closing the distance. The Grey katana in his hand dissolved into mist.

“His weapon is gone!”

“No, look!”

His hand reformed, not into the elegant sweep of a katana, but into the brutal, heavy head of a battle-axe.

It was a crude, vicious-looking weapon, designed not for finesse, but for shattering shields and breaking bodies.

He was upon the nearest soldier now, a large man with a heavy shield and a look of grim determination.

“For the King!” the soldier roared, bracing for the impact.

Aki didn’t meet the shield. He planted his foot and pivoted, the heavy axe swinging in a low, vicious arc that was impossible to block.

It slammed into the soldier’s head, just below the shield’s protection.

There was a wet crunch of armor being torn open and bone being shattered.

The man’s roar turned into a choked gurgle. His eyes went wide with shock as he looked down at the axe head buried in his torso. He collapsed, his shield clattering beside him.

“One down.”

The other soldiers froze, their professional training failing them in the face of such brutal, instant death.

“He… he split him in half!” one stammered, his face pale.

Aki stood over the corpse, his face spattered with the warm spray of blood. A slow, chilling smile touched his lips.

“You wanted a monster,” he said, his voice a low growl that was more terrifying than any shout.

“I’ll give you a monster.”

While his men faltered, the leader of the squad remained unnervingly calm, his eyes narrowed as he analyzed his foe.

“Hold your positions, you fools!” he barked, his voice cutting through their panic like a whip.

“His strength is just as the Doctor’s report predicted. Do not engage him head-on! Use the toxins!”

He stepped forward, pulling two wicked-looking daggers from his belt.

A faint, shadowy mist seemed to seep from his hands, clinging to the blades and turning them a sickly shade of purple.

He was a poison mage.

“Impressive,” the leader said with a predatory smile, completely ignoring the mangled corpse of his fallen man.

“But the Doctor knows all about you, ‘Esmos’.”

He closed the distance between Aki, his movements fluid and confident.

“A pathetic child playing with a power you can’t possibly comprehend.”

He gestured to the forest around them, to the world at large.

“You are a threat to the King’s peace. You are just a relic clinging to a dead world. This will be your—”

He never finished his speech.

Aki didn’t charge. He didn’t throw his axe. He simply stomped his foot. Hard.

The earth buckled slightly, sending a shower of dirt and dead leaves into the air, momentarily blurring the leader’s vision.

In that split second of blindness, Aki moved.

He wasn’t there, Then he was.

The leader’s eyes widened in shock as Aki appeared directly in front of him, the battle-axe already a Grey blur in mid-swing.

There was a wet, slicing sound.

The leader’s head, his mouth still open as if to finish the word “end,” tumbled from his shoulders and rolled to a stop in the dirt.

For a horrifying moment, his body remained standing before it collapsed in a heap.

The soldiers stared in stunned, absolute silence. Their commander, their poison mage, was dead before he had even finished his threat.

The spell of terror was broken by a single, panicked shout.

“The Captain is dead!”

“What do we do?!”

Aki did not give them time to regroup.

He lunged forward into their broken ranks, his axe a whirlwind of brutal, efficient death. He cleaved through one soldier’s upraised sword and the arm that held it.

He spun, the flat of the axe smashing into another’s face, sending him flying.

He was a force of nature, an unstoppable killer. And that made him predictable.

This was the trap.

The leader had been a decoy. His death was a calculated sacrifice.

As Aki brought his axe down on a cowering soldier, another lunged from his blind spot. This soldier’s sword glowed with the same sickly purple poison as the leader’s daggers.

Aki sensed the attack at the last second. He tried to turn, to bring his axe around.

He was too late.

The poisoned blade sliced deep across his calf.

A searing pain, followed by a dreadful, spreading numbness, shot up his leg.

He roared in fury and spun, his axe decapitating the soldier who had struck him in a single, fluid motion, but the damage was done.

He stumbled, his leg refusing to obey his commands.

The world began to swim before his eyes.

The remaining soldiers, now led by a grim-faced second-in-command, saw their chance.

Their fear was replaced by triumphant greed.

“He’s poisoned!” the new leader shouted, a vicious snarl on his face.

“The Captain’s plan worked! Subdue him!”

“We got you now, you fucking monster!” another mocked, advancing cautiously.

“Remember, the Doctor wants him alive!” the leader commanded. “This bastard is going to make us all rich!”

Aki gritted his teeth, fighting against the blackness creeping at the edges of his vision.

The paralytic agent was working fast. His powerful body, which could heal from any physical wound, had no defense against this alchemical venom.

He collapsed to one knee.

Shika, who had been hiding in the undergrowth, rushed to his side.

She nudged his face, letting out a series of distressed squeaks.

“Get… back, Shika,” Aki grunted, his words slurred.

As the soldiers advanced, forming a circle around him, Shika turned to face them.

A ferocious snarl, shockingly deep for such a small creature, ripped from her throat.

As she snarled, her small white paws tensed.

For a split second, her claws elongated into razor-sharp black talons that tore furrows in the dirt before retracting just as quickly.

One of the soldiers flinched back. “What the hell is that thing? Did you see its claws?”

“Ignore the pest!” the leader ordered. “Get the target!”

Aki felt a presence in his mind, a voice filled with a child’s innocent worry.

“What has happened to you?”

His mind was too clouded to process the shock of it fully.

“Shika…? Is that you?”,Aki was confused.

“Yes!” the voice replied, desperate.

“Poison… paralysis… I’m weak to those.” he managed to think, his body slumping further, his axe dissolving into mist.

Shika looked from the advancing soldiers back to her fallen companion.

Her telepathic voice asked a terrified question.

“You won’t… die, right? Aki..”

The soldiers were almost upon him. He could feel their hands grabbing at his arms, rough and cruel, trying to pin him down.

Despair, cold and absolute, began to wash over him.

He had failed. After all this, he was going to be captured.

Taken back to that scientist. Rika and Mia… lost to him forever.

As Shika watched them restrain her master, a primal rage erupted from her tiny body.

Her telepathic voice was the last thing Aki heard before his world went white with fury.

Shika said furiously “Stop this , you fools”, Her transformation was not a thing of magic, but of raw, physical horror.

Her small body convulsed.

The sound of stretching muscles and popping joints echoed in the sudden silence.

White fur darkened to a shadowy Grey.

Her limbs elongated, her hands swelling into massive paws tipped with scythe-like claws. Her jaw unhinged, her teeth growing into a forest of vicious fangs.

In seconds, the cute mascot had become a terrifying, six-foot-tall mythical beast, a monster of pure predatory instinct.

The soldiers stared, their triumphant smirks replaced by sheer, abject terror.

“What is that?!” one screamed.

“It’s a Myth Beast!” another shrieked, his voice cracking.

“Run! Without a mage, we don’t stand a chance!”

“It was too late.”

While the beast tore through the panicked soldiers in a whirlwind of blood and claws, Aki lay on the forest floor, his consciousness adrift.

The poison was pulling him under, into a cold, endless dark.

But in that darkness, he saw a light.

A memory. A vision.

Mia and Rika, smiling at him, their voices a warm, gentle whisper in his soul.

“You have to be strong, Aki.’

“Don’t give up, Oni-chan.”

The vision was a fire in his veins, a power far greater than the poison.

He felt his own healing abilities, spurred by this surge of will, begin to fight back, burning the toxin away.

As the last soldier’s scream faded into a wet gurgle, Aki, his body still trembling, forced himself to his feet.

“I…” he whispered to the memory of their smiles, his voice a raw promise.

“I will be strong.”

When the fight was over, only one soldier remained, paralyzed by fear, having dropped his sword and fallen to his knees in a puddle of his comrade’s blood.

Shika, her fur matted with gore, shrank back to her normal, fluffy form and hopped onto Aki’s shoulder, nuzzling his cheek.

“Thank you for saving me, Aki,” she said in his mind.

Aki, now fully recovered, walked toward the last soldier.

His hand morphed into a curved, cruel-looking sword that he placed against the man’s throat.

“Where is the Doctor?” he asked, his voice deadly calm.

The soldier trembled violently. “H-He’s in the Aqua mire Laboratory! An island base!”

“An island?”

“Yes!… In the middle of the Aqua mire sea!.”

“Why was the kingdom’s hunters hunting me…“, Aki asked violently.

" The Ayla Kingdom has announced a huge bounty on your head! Six thousand keto! Everyone is looking for you!”, soldier trembled in fear.

Aki’s eyes widened slightly at the sum, but his focus narrowed again.

“How do I get there?”

“From the main town on the Aqua mire coast,” the soldier stammered.

“You need a ship to get to the island. If you can get a ship, you can get to the Doctor!”

Aki absorbed the information in silence. Then, without another word, he slit the soldier’s throat. He and Shika now stood alone in a field of carnage.

He felt it a second later—a sense of being watched. He looked up into the trees.

“We are being watched, Shika.”

Shika let out a low growl.

A single black raven, its eyes glinting with an unnatural intelligence, cawed loudly and took flight, soaring into the night sky.

“News… News… News…” its cry echoed back, a sound that was not a sound a normal bird would make.

“We must hurry,” Aki said, turning toward the direction of the coast.

“We need to wash this blood off first,” Shika’s voice added in his mind, a surprisingly practical thought.

Far away, the raven flew over the vast, moonlit expanse of the Aqua mire sea.

It landed silently on the stone balcony of a high-tech laboratory. Below it, a man with a smug face watched a series of screens displaying data and maps.

He had a cruel, self-satisfied laugh etched permanently on his face.

The raven opened its beak, and a dry, raspy voice emerged.

“I have news…”

The smug-faced scientist turned from his screens, a wicked smile spreading across his lips as he looked at the raven.

The hunt was getting interesting