I woke up in a small house to the sound of a barking dog. I stepped out, and the sun blinded my eyes. Covering the rays with my arm, my eyes slowly adjusted to spot Kasumi in a small garden, watering the plants. Suddenly, she turned to me and I saw a solemn smile on her face as she walked up to me. But I could neither hear her footsteps or feel her warmth.

“This is a dream, isn’t it?” I whispered, and everything twisted into black nothingness. I floated across a black void. Why was I still alive? Even though I had truly died, again.

I wondered what I had done to deserve such a fate.

First my family had been taken. Then I watched as the cruel world twisted itself around it, showing me reality in the harshest ways possible. Forced to watch as I could nothing for I was absolutely powerless.

So I sold myself for power. The strength to change my fate, the strength to change the world. For years I fought for the sake of others, at the sake of my own humanity. A selfless notion born from selfish cowardice, I became a murderer. Sometimes in order to save lives you had to take them. And I believed in this with absolute confidence, after seeing all the things that humans were capable of.

And in the end I lost sight of what it meant to be human.

People called me a war hero. If only they could see the piles of bodies I left behind. How many children I had orphaned. By putting one man to the sword, I spared ten more. Fear was the way I changed things. The strongest and most powerful impulse of the human spirit after all, was fear.

The fear of death.

Something I had forgotten. As time passed my senses dulled. I didn’t train as hard and I didn’t strive to become more powerful. I would become as powerful as the world required me to be, and no more than that. People like me had no place during peacetime. And during peace there was no need for strength. So I told myself that I would bury my blade, and watch over this kingdom. To draw upon my sword if absolutely necessary, but otherwise never.

So it pained me when I woke up every night, remembering all the things I saw during war. All the blood and death, and I missed it. I missed fighting, because I no longer had a cause to serve.

Until Kasumi reached me. She was strange. Mischievous. Playful.

Broken.

Just like me.

Sometimes she greeted me with a wide smile, and sometimes she looked like she was in pain. I had never had someone treat me normally before. Someone that saw me and didn’t think about me as a soldier, but as a person.

Little by little, I learned bits and pieces about her.

I wish I could have known more.

And eventually I fell in love.

Something that I was never able to confess to her.

But history was cursed to repeat.

Asura was right. I was doomed to do this forever.

I had failed to protect her. I watched her die, because I was powerless.

I hadn’t changed since that night that I had killed my sister. I was incapable of doing anything. I could do nothing for the only person I cared for.

Because I thought that the world no longer needed me. I was victorious. My cause had won, and now there was peace.

And so I had allowed victory to defeat me. Make me weaker. Wear me down.

Once more, I desired power again.

And my mission became to watch those that had wronged me die the most excruciating deaths possible. To slowly break every bone in their body, to tear their flesh from bones, to drain them off blood and pour salt into their wounds until their lungs burned from the inside.

I would give up anything, not to live another life but to avenge my old one.

Anything.

Everything.

As long, as I could have revenge.

And so the Abyss heard me. But I didn’t know that it was the Abyss back then. I could feel myself falling into a part of the chasm that was older than the parts I had been to.

“How much are you willing to give up for power?”

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I heard his voice at the back of my head. I couldn’t tell whether he was still there, but I heard him then. A reminder of my commitment to strength, because the only way to find justice in this world was to be powerful.

The only language that the world understood was violence.

I felt a surge of adrenaline and strength. I struggled, squirming where I was.

I refused to be trapped here.

Not by death. Not by Asura. And not, by fate.

Black matter tore through my skin, my arms and up my shoulders. All I could see was the blood being torn out of my veins but I couldn’t care less. None of this was real. And it didn’t mean anything if I couldn’t force myself back into the real world.

I was angry. Fueled with rage that I didn’t even know that I had.

I wanted to burn the world. I wanted to watch it turn into soot, and if I were to become lord of the ashes then so be it. I wouldn’t stop until everything in this world went into the ground, I wouldn’t stop until every kingdom turned into ruin. Every civilization unto extinction.

Until life became a scarcity, until the forests themselves collapsed and the ground shattered. Until the mountains whittled down into rocks, and the oceans dry out.

Because no life deserved to flourish in this world.

Deep down I had always known that within me was a great capacity for evil.

I had always fought against it.

But no more.

“You aren’t ready.”

It was Asura’s voice.

I didn’t care.

If the gods decided that I was to die, then I will disobey fate by living. I will break the cycle, even if I had to squirm like a centipede. Crawl like a cockroach. I will disobey the makers of this world and the fate they had chosen for me. And I will crush the heavens, and tear the lords from their thrones.

Sometimes the world doesn’t need another hero. Sometimes it just needs a monster.

I dived into the memories of the dark world that was the Abyss, and saw fragments of the past. How a star had fallen from the sky, crashing into where the city of Visereal would come to be. How the mana veins in the ground shook and turned black as the star died.

I saw how Asura fought armies of humans, slaughtering thousands upon thousands as he treaded alone across the land. How humans waged war against the demons, only to fall everytime, until the fated battle where all four heroes assembled.

I saw how Asura became imprisoned, trapped in the source of his own powers, the Abyss. How he was buried by humans, encased in a tomb of enchanted limestone, and even in his imprisonment, a part of the Abyss was open. Every hundred years, a small crack in the Abyss forced open, bleeding a single drop into the waking world. The pool that I had fallen into had been fused with the dark energy of the Abyss, the same pool that had given me my false immortality.

With furious intent I tore my way through the Abyss, And as I felt myself tearing back into life, I saw Asura. He was standing there, just watching. He was visibly shaken.

“I never would have imagined,” he spoke softly. “Even after traveling across the entirety of Elysium and the edges of the world, that the one thing I would come to fear would be a single human and his fury.”

My body twisted and turned into an amalgamation of torn sinew and flesh, and I could feel myself leaving death.

I had been banished from death. Forbidden from dying. The strings of fate had unlatched from my shoulders, and now I was free.

I finally emerged in the waking world. I felt myself re-appear, magic knitting my flesh and bones together. I bled into the world, tearing the walls between realms apart through sheer anger.

And I created myself in the waking world. I couldn’t see, but I could feel my hand dig into the dirt once more. I could feel the heat from the flames, and I could feel the coldness of the earth beneath my fingernails. Slowly, fingers grew into an arm and I could feel a hand once more. I kept going, until I grew a chest, and then a head. It took long, but I could see once more. Everything was black. The forest, the ground, my skin. I crawled across the dirt with a single arm, dragging myself along towards what remained of Kasumi. I tried to stand up on my stumps, raising my arm. It felt like the insides of my new body was tearing itself apart as I moved, but I didn’t care.

Her body had turned black from the flames, beyond recognition. But I could recognize her. I wouldn’t mistake her for anything else in the world. I held her remains in my arms, and for a moment I thought I saw her mouth move. But it was simply her body crumbling away and faded away into the night sky, just like mine had.

I stood there for a bit, watching as the rest of her body followed the wind. Her ashes flew with the wind, spreading across the distant lands where I would never see her again.

And it was empty inside once more. Even with everything I had done, all the sacrifices I had made, all the losses I had suffered, the world took from me once again.

And her death gave birth to a new monster.

My body began to grow faster and faster, creating a replica of my past self. Only now I was infected with the Abyss. My flesh turned into the color of the void, dark mana spiraling out of control. My veins burst open as magic burnt me from the inside out.

The boundaries between the waking world and the Abyss faded, and just for a moment, the darkness invaded. It rippled across the aether, and across the world the most powerful creatures could feel a change in the ecosystem.

Something had awoken, and torn apart the gates that led to the realm of the powerful and mighty. Something that had been erased from the annals of history.

As the world became aware of my ensuing return, everything human inside of me was left behind, and the only thing that remained was one thing.

A rage like no other.

Even as the abyss consumed me, and I gave in to the dark edges of the world, my rage remained. An anger so great that it rivaled the death of a thousand suns, the birth of a calamity.

My blood boiled and evaporated, releasing black smoke across the air. Eyes grew on the side of my face, traveling across the body until I could see all around me. My mind became blank as my vision focused only on the footprints I had to follow. The scent of blood and fire that they left behind. The sensation of their feet across the distance they had travelled. The feel of the Abyss as it rushed through my veins.

There was only silence as the ground twisted around me, mana terraforming the forest as the monster flew across the air, leaving behind a trial of rot and corruption as it chased after its prey.

Cursed with the disease that was life.

To seek revenge against the world.