Chapter 14: 14 Aura

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14: Aura 14: Aura Gralash threw himself between the two, desperately trying to stop the creature, using all his legendary strength.

The phoenix unleashed a green fireball, striking him squarely in the chest.

Gralash flew backward, crashing into the rubble, and for the first time in centuries, he didn’t immediately get up.

A wave of pure destruction rippled through the room.

Walls collapsed, the ceiling cracked.

The giant phoenix stood majestically in the center of the chaos, its green eyes fixed on Misael’s motionless body, its jaws wide open for the final attack.

No one could stop it.

No one.

“Enough.” A voice, cold and imperturbable, rang out in the devastated room.

And the Beast froze.

The fire in the phoenix’s eyes flickered for a moment.

At the threshold of the room, amidst the smoke and rubble, stood Kairan.

“Go away!” Gralash commanded, struggling to his feet, his chest smoking: “I don’t want you to die!” Misael, lying on the ground, convinced until that moment that he was his brother’s equal, found the strength to shout: “Kairan, go away!

He’ll break you!

He’s too strong for you!” “Strong?” A single word escaped Kairan’s lips.

He advanced with a slow, measured pace, his hands behind his back.

In his eyes there was no fear, no worry, only an absolute calm, almost disinterested, like someone entering a room to blow out a bothersome candle.

His blue gaze fell on the Beast, and the creature, a primordial colossus that had made the God of War tremble, took a step back.

Kairan sensed what he was feeling.

He sensed it before he even understood it: that small creature that had come from nowhere was not prey.

It was something his ancestral mind instinctively recognized, something every fiber of his being screamed at him to flee.

But it was too late: Kairan had barely lifted a finger when a gravitational wave hit the phoenix with catastrophic force.

The air distorted, hissing, the ground cracked under the immense pressure, sinking into a crater.

The beast collapsed to the ground, as if crushed by an invisible mountain.

Bones shattered with sharp cracks, claws desperately dug into the stone, searching for a nonexistent handhold, while a roar of terror echoed through the room.

From the floor, Misael watched the scene with wide eyes, unable to articulate a movement or a word.

Gralash, on his knees, wasn’t even breathing: he simply stared at Kairan as she advanced toward the Beast, overcome by its power.

He moved slowly, emotionless.

Coming to the creature, he bent down and grasped the phoenix’s colossal head with one hand.

From the palm gripping the creature’s skull, a blinding flash erupted, immediately opening into a portal.

It opened just inches from the Beast’s flesh, like a hungry mouth, and from that portal emerged a gigantic sword, golden and shining, which pierced the phoenix’s skull from one side to the other.

The Beast’s head exploded in a cascade of blood and green fire.

An absolute silence fell over the room.

Kairan slowly rose.

He shook his robes with the absentminded gesture of someone dusting himself, then turned to his brother, still lying on the ground, and looked him indifferently in the eyes.

“Too weak,” he said.

Those two words, spoken with cold contempt, more than any blow Misael had ever received from Gralash, broke something inside him that would never heal.

There is a story told in the Abyss, whispered.

The story of how an eight-year-old boy earned the title of justice, along with the terror it brought.

It began with a request.

One of the kingdom’s prisons, dug deep into the bowels of Umbrafluctus, had held the Abyss’s worst criminals for centuries: child rapists, village devourers, demons who had committed such atrocities that even their own kind had locked them away in darkness so they would never have to look at them again.

There were more than a hundred thousand of them, and for generations, no emperor had known what to do with them.

Keeping them alive was costly, while freeing them was unthinkable.

Executing them would have required an army, and a bloodbath no one wanted on their conscience.

Kairan, at eight years old, asked to take charge of them, but Lilith refused.

Zaroth, who already feared his son, said nothing.

One night, without asking anyone’s permission, Kairan descended alone into the prisons of Umbrafluctus.

The jailers let him pass.

How could they stop him?

When the little prince passed through the iron gates, the golden aura he emanated made the locks rattle on their hinges.

The cells opened onto a circular abyss, circle upon circle descending into darkness, and from each cell, hungry eyes watched him.

A hundred thousand prisoners, a hundred thousand monsters.

And at the center of that infernal multitude, a child.

They began to laugh.

“They’ve sent a puppy!” shouted one.

“Fresh meat!” shouted another.

When Kairan, with a wave of his hand, blew all the locks open at once, the laughter turned into a roar of triumph.

A hundred thousand demons poured out of their cells, a sea of claws, fangs, and hunger, convinced they had been freed by an unconscious child.

They were wrong.

Kairan hadn’t freed them, he had opened the arena.

A colossus with arms twice his body hurled itself at him, but stopped him in midair.

Gravity pinned him down, crushing him, folding him in on itself until he was no bigger than a fist.

The demon fell to the ground like a stone.

The others hesitated for a moment, but then hunger overcame fear, and they all charged at once.

Kairan barely moved.

He stood in the center of the arena, his blue eyes scanning the tide of enemies with the calm of someone reading a book.

One by one, the prisoners died, some crushed by gravity, others impaled by the swords that flowed from its golden portals, blades dancing in the air like a swarm of silver.

Others simply stopped, stared into those eyes, and fell to their knees, unable to continue.

But it wasn’t the power that made that night legendary.

It was what Kairan said.

As the hundred thousand died around him, the child spoke, his voice low, calm, and implacable.

“You burned a Vanhai village while they slept,” he said to one, and that one fell.

“You sold your own children,” he said to another, and that one fell, too.

“You.

You have done things I will not speak, because they are not even worth speaking aloud,” he declared to a third.

He knew every crime, every name, every unpunished guilt.

He had studied them, in the months preceding, in the Library of Silence, and one by one, he reminded her of them, as justice fell upon them.

When the gray dawn of the Abyss filtered into the prisons of Umbrafluctus, a hundred thousand cells were empty.

In the center of the arena, an eight-year-old boy stood, unscathed, his eyes dry.

He felt neither joy nor remorse.

For him, it hadn’t been a massacre.

It had been a consequence.

When he surfaced and news spread throughout the realm, the demons didn’t know whether to revere him or fear him.

They called him justice.

They called him monster.

They called him child god.

Kairan didn’t care about any of those names.

He returned to the Library, opened a new book, and continued reading as if nothing had happened.

From that night onward, no one in the Abyss spoke Kairan’s name without lowering their voices.

When, months later, Kaldreth asked him if he would kill everyone at forty, the question wasn’t rhetorical.

It was the question the entire kingdom was asking.