Every impact shook the frozen ground under his boots. Zekai stood slow, eyes sweeping the tree line.
"...What now?"
Another tree came down somewhere behind him. Then another. Snow blew upward like smoke off a fire.
Something huge was moving out there. Not one thing. Many.
Overhead, crows scattered in loud, panicked bursts.
"...That's never a good sign."
The footsteps stopped. Total silence dropped over the clearing.
He turned in a slow circle. "...Where are you."
Nothing answered. Just snow, trees, mist.
"...Don't tell me this is hide-and-seek."
They kept appearing — two, then five, then eight, then twelve — until his jaw tightened on its own.
"...Seriously?"
Massive shapes stepped out of the treeline — ten meters at the shoulder, manes like black fur armor. Every crimson eye held the same flat confidence: something that had never once lost a hunt.
Alpha Wolfrezons.
Every single one of them locked onto him at once.
"...Those aren't... ordinary Wolfrezons."
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
ARCANA STATUS
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Alpha-class Wolfrezons detected.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
His eyes narrowed. "...Alpha-class."
His gaze drifted to the corpse still lying nearby — the one he'd already killed. Next to these, it looked almost small.
Then it hit him. "...That wasn't an adult."
"...It was the Alpha Pack's cub."
Silence.
He let out a breath. "...So you're telling me—"
"—I just killed somebody's cub?"
Twelve throats answered at once.
ROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAR!!
The sound rolled through the whole valley. Snow blew off every branch in a wave.
He rubbed the back of his neck. "...Yeah. Probably earned that one."
One wolf stepped forward. Then another. The pack spread out around the clearing, and before he'd finished tracking the movement, he was already surrounded.
He turned once, slow, taking it in. "...Nice formation."
"So this is how wolves actually hunt."
He shrugged off his coat and let it fall into the snow, leaving him in just the white shirt. He undid the top button, and the wind bit straight through the fabric.
"Null Drakular."
Black ash spiraled around his palm and solidified into white steel.
He rolled one shoulder and settled his grip on the hilt.
"...Come on, then."
"...Let's find out whose hunt this really is."
None of them moved. Instead, every jaw dropped open at once, blue light gathering deep in each throat.
"...Wait." He blinked. "All of you can do that?"
The glow built.
"Oh..." His smile disappeared. "...No."
Twelve beams fired at once.
BOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!
The forest disappeared under blue light.
"Oh, no—"
He drove one foot into the snow and twisted sideways. One beam grazed his cheek, heat searing across skin. Another detonated beneath him, and he used the blast wave itself to launch clear over the impact zone.
"I almost got roasted!"
The pine tree behind him vanished under a second barrage.
BOOM!!
Wood exploded outward in a thousand frozen splinters. He landed hard on another branch.
"...That was close."
The branch shook under him. Every wolf tracked upward at once, jaws already loading another volley.
"...Again?!"
The first pass missed.
The second didn't.
BOOM!!
A blue beam clipped his left side.
"Gh—!"
The blast threw him straight through a frost-laden pine.
CRAAASH!!
The trunk snapped clean in half. He rolled across frozen ground, coming to a stop with his shirt burned open and a deep scorch line carved across his ribs, blood already staining the snow beneath him.
Before he could even push himself back onto his feet, the Alphas were already on him — closing from above and every side at once, the whole ring collapsing inward in the same breath.
He didn't get the chance to escape. Claws opened him up everywhere at once, four, five, six strikes landing before his mind could catch up to the first one. Null Drakular hung useless in his grip. There was no window to swing it. The pack didn't let up for a single second, tearing into him like they'd already decided this was where it ended.
His eyes went wide.
Oh no. I underestimated them.
He was standing right at the edge of it now — the line past which nothing came back.
Then something hot flooded up behind his eyes, burning through the panic.
No. I don't lose again. Not here. Not to this.
In the gap between one claw and the next, his eyes found it — dozens of paths threading through the chaos, there and gone in the same instant, gaps in the white that closed as fast as they opened. He took the one that put a wall of Alpha bodies between himself and the rest of the pack, slipping out from certain death by a margin thinner than a blade of grass.
He came up breathing hard, chest heaving, voice flat and worn thin. "...That—" He pushed himself upright. "—actually hurt."
Pale blue light spread beneath the burn. The wound started closing.
"...Frost Heal." He flexed the arm. The pain stayed put. The wound just stopped slowing him down.
"Wasn't just a gift." A breath. "It was insurance."
He closed his restored hand into a fist.
It wasn't just healing. It was buying me another shot at this.
The Alphas turned back toward him, hunting for the kill they'd almost had.
He lifted his head, slow, and started walking forward one measured step at a time.
He swung Null Drakular through open air once — nothing behind it but momentum and the pressure alone tore a wave through the snow and freezing air, the whole clearing swirling in its wake.
"...You'll see who I really am." The words came out quiet. Quiet was worse.
The pack didn't wait around for him to finish the thought. They attacked as one.
He kicked off the shattered snow and vanished into the white before any of them could lock a beam onto him. For one heartbeat, only drifting snow marked where he'd been standing.
The wolves searched — not panicked, patient. Coordinated. Two came in from the front while a third swept his blind side. A fourth burst upward through the snow, directly beneath him mid-fall.
Four massive claws converged on the same point at once.
BOOOOM!!
The impact threw him backward hard.
"...Ghk!"
One claw raked across his back. Another caught his shoulder. A third missed his throat by inches. His body crashed clean through another tree, breath tearing out of him.
"...These... aren't acting like beasts."
"They're hunting like a trained military unit."
His own strike was already falling before the thought caught up — a flash of silver dropping above one of them.
SLASH!!
Null Drakular came down clean. The Wolfrezon's chest split open, and before the body even hit the ground he was already moving again — stepping across an incoming beam, using it as a launch point, twisting through the air into a horizontal cut.
SHHHHK!!
Another neck separated. Blood painted a wide crimson stripe across the white, the headless body staggering three steps before it crashed down and scattered the rest of the pack out of its path.
The survivors stopped. No blind charge this time. Just watching — crimson eyes flicking from the fallen corpses back to him, then spreading out into a wider ring.
"...They're—" He frowned. "—changing formation."
Three lunged together. He ducked under one claw, stepped clean over a second, kicked off the third mid-motion, and spun his whole body through the gap.
Null Drakular blurred into pure silver light.
SLASH!
BOOM!!
He wasn't fighting desperately anymore. Every dodge fed straight into the next counter, every step landed with purpose.
SLASH!
BOOM!!
Every swing ended something.
The sword no longer felt heavy. It felt like the part of him Null Reality had given back.
SLASH!
BOOM!!
One after another, massive bodies dropped into the snow. Within moments, half the pack already lay motionless around him.
Six left standing. None of them looked at the bodies scattered around their feet.
Their eyes kept drifting instead — toward the deepest part of the frozen forest. Like they were waiting for something stronger to finally show up.
For the first time, the formation cracked.
Fear surfaced in six pairs of crimson eyes at once.
"...Now you get it." He walked forward, slow, each footstep sinking deep into the snow behind him.
"I'm not prey."
One wolf roared, desperate, and charged. Another followed. Then the rest, all at once — no more patience, just raw panic dressed up as aggression.
He cut the lead wolf down before it closed half the distance. The charge broke apart around the body.
The survivors didn't press the attack again. They widened the ring instead, pacing through the snow, hunting for a gap that didn't exist.
Zekai's breath came ragged, chest heaving. Six left. He rolled his shoulders once and lifted the blade.
"...Who's next?"
✦ End of Chapter 56 — The One They Fear ✦