CHAPTER 123

  A NEW TOY—MONOCEROS

  Hans lay sprawled across a snow-blanketed ridge, limbs slack, face tilted toward the gray sky.

  Frost had crept up his cloak, threading crystals along his lashes. Breath rose in slow, measured plumes, the only proof he was still clinging to life. Two days of stillness. Two days of feeding on nothing but Photons.

  That had calmed him, maintaining his metabolism.

  A shadow passed overhead.

  “Oh, for My’s sake,” a voice cut through the cold, sharp and inverted. “Till when you’ll keep sulking. I’m a crazy god, you know. Does this look wise to you?”

  Aadya’s face hung upside down in his vision, hair drifting like a curtain of black ink in the breeze.

  Hans didn’t stir. His voice, when it came, was sandpaper dragged over stone. “I’m pissed. Leave it at that.”

  “I’d leave it if you weren’t being dramatic in front of a literal god.” She straightened, then snapped her fingers.

  Hans felt his weight vanish—then realised he was soaring far above the ridge.

  “Oh no—wait! I don’t have my wind pendant—”

  Gravity returned with interest. He plummeted.

  “Agh—goddamn—load Elven Codex!”

  The shift hit mid-fall. His from flickered, limbs elongating, hair bleaching to gold. Inches from the impact, the lightCloak shimmered around him, catching his descent like a ghostly hand. He landed softly. Gracefully.

  Infuriatingly.

  He turned to face her, scowling. “You ever consider that someone ought to smack you upside the head?”

  “Frequently,” she said, brushing snow off her shoulder. “Unfortunately, no one daring enough ever lived long.”

  She mused, continuing. “Where did your resolve of not using —being Theodred go. There was a saying in my mother land— if you want to die, throw yourself in water, you’ll see yourself struggling to breathe, struggling to live.”

  She tossed him something. Cold metal smacked his chest.

  Reina’s sword which he renamed— Kindness. It was named that just to mock others that he had killed them with Kindness. But it literally became the word itself.

  He hadn’t even noticed he’d left it behind.

  “I’m not exactly a swordsman,” she declared conjuring a blade made of prismatic mana, light refracting like oil across its surface. “if you don’t want to die, you better unsheathe that thing.

  “No—”

  Power cracked the air between them. His body seized. Fingers moved without permission. The sword sang free of its scabbard, and a burst of aura tore through his spine like wildfire.

  Hans staggered.

  “Why can’t you just let me be?”

  He surged forward, aura flaring, shoving her with everything he had.

  She slid back a pace. Not more. But enough.

  “You think this is about letting you be?” Her voice was low now, colder than the snow. “This is your power. Yours. No matter who gave it, no matter what it cost—you either wield it or waste it.”

  It wasn’t that he couldn’t, he just didn’t want to. The power reminded him why he could change into an elf, Reina’s, her biological mother’s blood was flowing in his veins. Aadya just made it so he could separate them.

  Hans turned his face away. “The person I hated my whole life turned out to be my mother. I don’t think you understand what that does to a person.”

  Aadya blinked. Slowly. “Don’t talk to me like your pain is unique. You’re not special, Hans. Everyone’s life is a tailored kind of hell. Mine too—Yours is just louder today.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Your father. Your mother. Arat. Delimira. Chris. Even your grandparents. Everyone has demons. Everyone’s drowning. Difference is—your choice to swim through it.”

  “My mistake was thinking you are stronger” She jabbed a finger at him. “Stronger than any— I thought you’d just suck it up and be done with it. But you ran away the instant.”

  He pushed her finger back. “I don’t know what you think of me, but I’m not the guy you are searching in me. I don’t show it, doesn’t mean that I don’t get hurt.”

  Sighing, she proposed. “You want a distraction? Dijkstra challenged you, everyone thinks he is planning to kill you there. Prove them wrong. Go beat some sense into him.”

  He laughed, bitter and raw. “He’ll crush me. He’s far stronger by leagues.”

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  “You’ve a spirit. The strongest light skills, six of them. And even a sword that doubles the aura—he is just a warlord.” she pointed.

  “Just—just a warlord. Lady are you hearing yourself?” Hans looked at her in disbelief. He turned hiding his eyes. “And I don’t want to use the spirit.”

  “Lying aren’t we? Did something happened that I don’t know?”

  “Nothing.” Hans denied clenching, the horrendous scene of spirit world flashed in his memory.

  So, she can’t gaze in the happenings of spirit world. She don’t know I was kicked out without getting one.

  “There is no direct way for you to beat Dijkstra. Frankly you aren’t at that stage yet. You have to be smart about it.” Aadya explained.

  “Sixty-two,” Hans said. “Grade sixty-two with an aura pool that dries up if I sneeze too hard. He dodges everything and has enough reserves to outlast a siege.”

  He paused,

  “And why is my grade is not increasing faster as it has been?”

  That troubled Hans since stepping in spirit world. His mastery over Armis was not progressing as fast he hoped either.

  “You rose because your body was made to hold that much aura, you were just refilling it.” She answered. “From now its the normal journey.”

  “So no shortcuts—ah, I have to face a warlord in my grade sixties. Man, I’m a masochist. This is not a challenge, its a suicide.”

  .

  .

  .

  It had been a month since he started living with the self-proclaimed goddess and accepted himself. Training to calm. A month was long enough to notice patterns. She didn’t eat, but demanded feasts. Didn’t sleep, but complained of boredom. She was a child crowned with divinity, and he was her reluctant keeper.

  He regretted leaving Clandor now—abandoning the last three skills.

  But time didn’t wait.

  Soon, Indu would blaze with banners and blood. The Knight Convention was coming—not annual, but summoned when the Knight Association needed to cull, promote, and correct the imbalance of strength.

  A battlefield dressed as a celebration.

  Hans stirred stew over a fire that Aadya didn’t need but insisted upon.

  “You want to come to Indu?” he asked, stirring lazily. “For the convention. I’ll show you around.”

  She snorted. “You’ll show me around? I’ve roamed these lands for seventeen cycles.”

  “Just.. don’t want to be alone, right now.” he said. Then added, quieter, “And I can’t show up to Deli and Chris like this.” He gestured to himself—currently shaped in the form of Theodred.

  “So am I the second option?”

  “Be grateful you’re an option.”

  A long pause. Then, “Fine. I’ll do the fragile you some favour, but I won’t linger.”

  “Good enough,” he said, standing. “We’ll need to pick up a few things first.”

  INGRESS

  A pillar of light cleaved through the mountains and deposited them in a clearing thick with green and shadow. Hans’s dungeon—Mystic Glades..

  They landed in silence.

  Scorch marks marred the trees. Aura scars split stone. Signs of recent trespass.

  Hans frowned. “They’re still raiding my place?”

  Aadya walked forward, unconcerned. “Hmm.. its my first time here— you made quite the place.”

  She moved as though she owned it.

  Hans knelt, one hand pressed to the earth. The mana in the glade stirred, old and familiar.

  Oh, I missed this.

  The land responded, It began as a low vibration, subtle as breath. Then the forest shifted.

  Branches creaked. The trees themselves parted like courtiers at the arrival of a king. From the deepest part of the glades, where the roots drank magic and the stones pulsed with magic, something massive stirred.

  Then—thunder.

  No. Footsteps.

  A shape moved between the trees. Then another. Then many.

  Hans stood slowly, squinting into the shadowed canopy as the underbrush exploded outward.

  They came like puppies.

  Titanic, and utterly undignified puppies.

  The first to crash into the clearing was a Crocotian—easily sixty feet from snout to tail. Its body was a cathedral of stone slabs and moss, jointed with living roots, its eyes glowing faintly with the green-gold gleam of a day seed. It let out a low, warbling bellow like an old bell struck underwater, and nudged Hans in the chest with a snout larger than his entire body.

  Hans grunted, nearly knocked flat. “So you grew again.”

  The nine-headed hydra wasn't far behind. It burst through the tree-line in a blur of tangled necks and curiosity, each head pushing past the others to get a better look. They hissed in chorus—though not menacingly. If anything, it sounded like excitement. One head bumped the Crocotian’s flank in irritation, while another nosed Hans’s shoulder like a feline demanding affection.

  Then a tremor came—deep and measured, like a titan’s heartbeat echoing through the veil of trees, it emerged.

  A mountain that walked.

  It moved with the authority of a creature that could only be avoided, not stopped. Each step sank into the earth like a divine hammer, leaving cratered impressions behind.

  “…That one’s new. I only left will—my intent. Vanir must’ve completed it. A mono horned Aramadino”

  The golem was unlike Hans’s other creations. Taller than most keep towers, broader than siege engines, it carried not just mass but had presence. Its body was built from a fusion of blackened stone, polished to a glassy sheen, and living wood braided tight like tendons. Its joints hissed with compressed air and soft, rune-guided magic, releasing a faint halo of steam with every motion.

  And Moss clung to its underbelly in trailing curtains.

  Vanir, you went beyond this time.

  Hans took in the view of Behemoth. Its face was a sculpted monolith of intent, devoid of the animalistic softness of a real beast. No eyes—just twin lines of amber light carved deep into the head like slitted runes. Its singular horn rose in a long, spiralled arc, black at the base and transitioning to a glass-like crystal at the tip—clear, and humming with volatile aura.

  And then there was its breath—slow, controlled, emerging in thick gusts of white steam from vents hidden behind armoured plating. It sounded not like panting, but measured exhalation. Like it was thinking.

  Hans stared. “You’ll be called MONOCEROS.”

  The golem tilted its massive head, then—curiously—lowered its horn. Not toward Hans.

  Toward Aadya.

  “What?” Hans looked puzzled, muttered. “I was the one who made you—you big bone head.”

  “I like this one! I’ll take it,” Aadya declared with a grin.

  “Wait! What?” Hans denied, or tired to, but Aadya wasn’t expecting any answers or explanations.

  “Yes, yes, take it. Everything is yours,” he sighed, then a humanoid golem appeared, carrying his hidden belongings. He quickly reattached his waist belt, the knapbinder, and stowed away every golem in his 12 slots. He was all set for the war.

  “Let’s go to Indu,” he declared, putting on his wind pendant. Finally, he felt like all his power had returned and it was time for the world to know that Hans Parv was back.