Small, ragged cuts covered both his arms. Blistered burns spread dark across his left shoulder.
Frost Heal kept working through them — slow, aching work, closing what it could and leaving the rest to sit as a dull throb under his skin. Not fast enough to erase the damage piling up faster than it could repair.
"...Haa." He exhaled hard, chest heaving.
"So that's your ceiling." He looked at the beasts circling him and laughed, quiet, humorless.
"...Mine isn't."
His blood-slick fingers tightened around Null Drakular's hilt until the grip ached.
The humor drained out of him. No. I'm not losing anyone. Not one more."
Memory tore through him in a single flash. Aron. The people he'd watched die because he'd arrived a second too late, every single time.
His breathing steadied on its own. Everything around him slowed down to something he could actually read.
Every claw, every shift of muscle laid itself bare. He didn't look for the safe way through this time. He looked for the one that ended it.
Then he moved.
One Alpha broke formation first, lunging in ahead of the others. That single mistake tore the whole defensive wall apart.
He drew a slow breath through his nose. His pulse found a rhythm and held it.
The fear was still there. The pain was too. But neither controlled his body anymore.
"...I'm not running."
The rest didn't retreat. They dropped low instead, crimson eyes burning brighter than before. They'd watched their own die in front of them. Still, none of them ran.
They squared up to fight.
He watched them for a second. A faint smile crossed his face.
"...Good."
He dropped his stance, bringing the white blade level. "So you've still got some fight left in you."
Null Drakular hummed low against his palm, some current running through the steel.
His grip closed tighter.
"Come on, then."
"Let's finish this."
He vanished from their sight.
The clearing exploded into motion. Silver cut clean arcs between towering bodies, each step threading him through snapping jaws and sweeping claws. His blade struck only once against each target, precise and surgical, before he moved to the next.
Black blood scattered across the white. Pines snapped in half. Snow rose in sheets around the collisions.
One. Two. Three. Ten. Twelve.
The sword had stopped feeling like a weapon he was carrying.
It felt like a piece of his own arm.
The last Alpha took two staggering steps forward, the light dying out of its eyes, before its whole ten-meter frame gave out and collapsed.
Snow drifted back over the clearing, silent, as if nothing had happened at all.
From above, the trees crowded in around the clearing, black and bare. At the center of them, one figure stood alone in a field gone red. Twelve bodies. One cut apiece.
At the dead center of it all, Zekai stood alone.
He hadn't won by being stronger than twelve Alphas. He'd won because, somewhere in the middle of getting torn apart, he'd learned exactly how they hunted. The second he understood the pattern, the hunt had already flipped sides.
Null Drakular sank point-first into the snow, taking his weight. His breathing filled the quiet.
"Haa."
"Haa."
White breath curled off his lips like smoke.
Overhead, the crows circled the clearing but never crossed toward the northern treeline. Something out there hadn't moved through any of it — something that made twelve dead Alphas look small. Watching. Deciding.
He looked around at the corpses ringing him in. Every Wolfrezon. Down.
A real smile broke across his face this time.
The clearing sat dead silent. His own breath was the loudest thing left in the forest.
"...I—" He looked down at the immaculate steel in his hand.
A quiet, settled smile formed. "So this is what actually getting stronger feels like."
He closed his eyes. The crushing weight of helplessness in his chest — the one that had been sitting there since he'd crossed into this place — had finally gone lighter.
"If I keep growing like this—"
"Maybe—"
"I can actually save him."
Aron's smile surfaced clean in his mind.
His grip closed tighter around the hilt.
"No."
His eyes snapped open, burning.
"I will save him."
"Whatever's waiting for me out there in the dark."
He lifted the blade and let it rest against his shoulder, cold wind sliding across the steel.
A dangerous grin tugged at his mouth.
"Come on, then."
"I'm done running."
For the first time since any of this had started — since the fracture had first opened up under his feet — he felt strong enough to keep walking forward.
The hunter had survived.
For a few seconds he just stood there. Then his legs buckled.
"...Huh?"
His grip loosened on the hilt. He caught himself on one knee, breath turning ragged.
"...Feels like my stamina just hit zero."
His body had burned through everything it had — every dodge, every sprint, every swing draining reserves faster than he could track. Now the bill had come due.
Grrrrrrr...
He froze. Looked down at his own stomach.
"...Oh." It growled again.
Grrrrrrr...
"...I'm hungry."
He scanned the clearing. Snow. Trees. Dead wolves. Nothing else. No fruit, no berries, nothing that looked safe to put in his mouth.
His eyes drifted back to the nearest corpse.
He looked at it. Looked at his stomach. Back at the corpse.
"...No way."
Silence. His stomach growled a third time, louder.
He sighed. "...You're really making me do this."
—
A few minutes later, a small fire crackled beside the carcass. Exhaustion had narrowed his options down to exactly one.
He held a strip of roasted meat, turning it over. "...What if this thing's poisonous."
He hesitated.
Grrrrrrr.
"...Fine. If I die, it's your fault."
He bit into it. Chewed slow. His face gave nothing away. He swallowed.
Nothing happened. He waited a few more seconds. Still nothing.
"...My luck is really something."
Zzzzsup.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
[ ARCANA STATUS ]
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Wolfrezon Meat
Edibility: Compatible
Toxicity: None Detected
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
He stared at the notification. "...Would've been nice to know that before I bit into it."
The window vanished without another word.
He stared at the empty air a beat longer. "...Useless."
He took another bite. Then another, hunger burning through whatever hesitation had been left.
"Why does my luck always land me on stuff like this."
A few more bites in, he nodded slow. "...Not terrible." He looked down at what was left. "For survival food—"
"—this'll do."
He kept eating. First time since crossing the fracture that nothing was actively trying to kill him. No monsters. No strange voices in his skull.
Just him, a fire, and the thing that had tried to eat him twenty minutes ago, now doing the opposite job.
When he finished, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and stood, eyes drifting north.
The trees out there ran darker. Denser. Quieter in a way that felt deliberate.
"...Guess everyone out here has to hunt to eat."
A faint grin. "Not the only hunter in this forest, apparently."
His eyes stayed locked on that treeline.
"Guess I'll find out—"
"—exactly who's hunting who."
Somewhere past the northern woods, something far older opened its eyes.
Then a familiar sound cut through the quiet.
✦ End of Chapter 57 — The Hunt of Twelve ✦