In the dark plumbing of young Rockie's mind, voices rose like a chorus of small, hungry storms.
"He's a curse."
A different voice answered with steely conviction. "He alone is responsible for the death of his family."
Another, blunt and brutal, cut in. "Something like him should just pass away."
A distant, bored voice supplied the final cruelty. "What does somebody like him bring to this world? He's nothing but a useless runt."
Rockie jerked upright in a cold sweat. He'd dozed on the bench outside the couple's house; the night still clung to him like damp cloth. The umbrella he'd been holding remained over his shoulder. For a moment he simply sat there, breathing hard, the voices thinning to the edges of his hearing.
He pushed himself to his feet, folded the umbrella and set it aside, then moved along the path with slow, awkward steps.
Why must I be such an anomaly? Nothing bad ever happens to me; only the ones around me, he thought, and a single stinging tear tracked down his cheek.
The only person who's managed to stick with me is... Mr. Hadet, he told himself, wiping the moisture away with the heel of his hand.
He wondered why. The thought hadn't finished when Mr. Hadet's silhouette fell into step beside him, soundless as a shadow.
"Alone once again—But what weight has solitude to one born of it?" Mr. Hadet's voice was a low, wind-brushed thing.
Rockie answered before he realized he would. "I'm never truly alone, Mr. Hadet. I always have you."
Mr. Hadet gave him a look that held years. "I walk with them all—Yet my steps make silence bloom; Alone, though I'm there."
"You're not much of a people person, are you, Mr. Hadet?" Rockie asked, half teasing, half searching.
"I cherish all life—Years teach the heart quiet joys; beauty hides in small," Mr. Hadet said, each phrase measured.
"I've never seen you talk to anyone except me before." Rockie watched the older man's face.
"I speak once in life—Soft words fall like evening rain; some thirst for harsh storms," Mr. Hadet replied, and his mouth turned in a faint, knowing smile.
Ahead, a new tableau snapped into focus: a small girl—bright orange hair tumbling free, freckles scattered across her nose, a missing tooth flashing when she tried to smile—surrounded by three older men who loomed like bad weather.
"A new soul drifts near—Yet fate whispers, only you can guide them my way," Mr. Hadet murmured.
Rockie's face smoothed into something like intent. He moved forward, unblinking, as if some other part of him had already decided what to do.
One of the men leered. "You're a little gorgeous thing, aren't ya?" he said.
"You have pretty hair," another added, the words slick with bad intent.
They noticed Rockie before they could turn away.
"Who the—" one man started.
Rockie closed the distance faster than the eye could follow. His fist struck the first man square in the chest; in a single, terrible instant the man crumpled, lifeless, like a puppet whose strings had been cut.
"WHAT THE HELLLLL!?" the second man screamed, voice tearing.
Mr. Hadet's voice went soft but cold. "When life fades by you, think of me in that still breath—I'll bloom through your hands."
Fear flickered across the remaining men's faces. One lurched back; the other tried to put space between himself and Rockie.
"You're the cursed child!" the third man spat, and Rockie lunged. His punch hit the man's stomach with brutal finality—flesh tore and whatever it was inside burst through the back in a grotesque, awful display. The man fell and did not rise.
Mr. Hadet watched, composed and almost reverent. "What a gift you bear—Many wield, yet few ensure; Your strike ends all doubt."
The last man turned and fled. The path grew quiet, save for the girl's small, frightened breathing.
Rockie turned to her. "Are you okay?" he asked, voice raw with something like concern.
She stared at him, horror stripping the colors from her face.
"You're—" she stammered, stumbling backward.
Rockie frowned, confusion creasing his features.
"You're a monster!!!" the girl screamed, and then she ran.
"I—I don't understand. I saved her," Rockie muttered, bewilderment and hurt braided together.
Mr. Hadet's reply was cool and patient. "Not all lives need hands—To save, one must sometimes still; Mercy wears silence."
"But those guys— they were going to do something to her," Rockie protested.
"You will come to know—Saving all is not your role; hope must do the rest," Mr. Hadet said, as if reciting a lesson that could not be argued with.
"But Mr. Hadet, that situation... it was hopeless, even for her. If I didn't step in she would have—" Rockie's voice trembled, the unfinished sentence like an open wound.
Mr. Hadet's answer was the same calm insistence. "Watch, and let fate steer—Kindness fades like morning mist; ends heed not goodwill."
"W-Whatever, Mr. Hadet," Rockie said, and fell into step behind him.
They walked a few more minutes along the path until Mr. Hadet came to a stop before a small, weathered shed. He paused, then turned to Rockie.
"Stay and keep the rain—Something stirs beyond those doors; I'll return in breath." Mr. Hadet's voice had the hush of ritual.
Rockie nodded. Mr. Hadet slipped into the shed.
Moments later a figure burst from the shed—one of the men who had fled earlier. His appearance was a frantic slate: his shirt and hands were smeared with blood, his breathing ragged and panicked.
"What—" Rockie began, but the escaped man's presence was a question that could not be finished.
Then Mr. Hadet stepped out of the shed holding the girl's hand as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened.
"Oh, you're touching her, Mr. Hadet," Rockie blurted, half in accusation, half in astonishment.
"She sought me too soon—will resists the hand of fate; Still, I must lead her." Mr. Hadet's voice was steady, compassionate in its way.
"What happened in there, Mr. Hadet?" Rockie asked.
"Life unraveled there—A thread of sorrow and chance, Woven to be torn." Mr. Hadet's words folded the scene into something solemn and inevitable.
Then, in the sudden snap of a waking moment, Rockie came back to the present. He was no longer on the path or standing under rain; his head lay on the cold bar counter in the dim room, and the dream's residue clung to him like fog.
Auguste folded his arms and studied Sage with a skeptical half-smile. "Sage, how can you be so certain your compass is pointing true?"
Sage didn't flinch. He answered with that same quiet confidence, as if the world's riddles were little things he could sort by feel. "I have a knack for these kinds of things."
Auguste shrugged, amusement flickering across his face. "I'll bite — you've convinced me for now."
The exchange died on their tongues when the tower's front door exploded inward with a thunderous crash. Dust billowed like a gray wave, choking the entry hall. Both men turned toward the upheaval, squinting against the grit.
"What happened?!" Auguste barked, flapping his hand in front of his face to clear the haze. Out of the smoke, something cold and brutal met him—the muzzle of a sawed-off shotgun pressed inches from his face.
"Oh my—" was all Auguste managed before the world detonated.
The shotgun roared. Bone and blood and powder filled the air in a grotesque bloom. Auguste's head ruptured; the rest of his body slumped uselessly to the floor, his life leaving him in a single, awful instant.
When the dust settled, a new figure stood in the doorway: a man swathed in a black cloak and hood, his face obscured beneath a gilded plague-doctor mask. Both of his arms were clearly prosthetic—sleek, black metal limbs that flicked and hummed with an almost mechanical grace. A tiny knife sat in a sheath at his hip, a mundane detail against the rest of his unnatural silhouette.
Sage's reflexes were immediate. He drew his revolver and trained the barrel on the intruder's masked head. Fingers tightened on the trigger—then an elbow struck his ribs with the force of an anvil. The gun fell from his grasp and clattered on the floor as Sage doubled over, gasping, clutching his midsection.
"Dammit—" he cursed through the pain.
The plague doctor raised a palm. From it sprang a crackling bolt of orange energy that slammed into Sage like a meteor. The blast detonated against him, throwing him backward across the room until he slammed into the wall in a shower of plaster.
Rockie hauled himself upright, shaking the impact from his skull, and turned to face the intruder.
"Who the hell are you?!" he demanded.
The figure's voice was muffled and oddly ceremonious behind that beak of metal. "I am the savior of the world, here to cure the Hadean Tier of a plague."
Rockie frowned. "What are you talking about?"
The man's tone hardened, unruffled. "This plague is a plague that's ridden this world with nothing but chaos and destruction since the beginning of time."
Rockie blinked, baffled. "I still have no clue about what you're going on about."
The masked man's finger rose, pointing straight at him. "I'm here to get rid of a Fault."
Rockie's eyes narrowed. "Shoot, how'd you know?"
"That doesn't matter." The shotgun folded into itself with a soft mechanical whisper. The small knife at the plague doctor's hip slid free and, with a grotesque stretch, unfurled into a colossal greatsword—an obscene slab of sharpened metal that dwarfed the masked man, thirty times his height, a brutal wedge of steel attached to a hilt.
"What does matter is that you're as good as dead." The plague doctor lunged, the massive blade moving with the precision and speed of a surgeon's scalpel. Despite its size, the weapon sliced through the air as if it were nothing more than a kitchen knife.
Rockie moved on instinct, weaving through every sweep. Each blow that should have cleaved him into chunks merely whooshed past—until a downward arc caught the blade in the ground when Rockie sidestepped, embedding the edge with a deafening thunk. Through the plague doctor's mask, pale blue light bled from the eye slits.
What kind of Fault are you? the plague doctor thought, eyes narrowing behind the mask. Rockie stanced himself, winding his arm back to strike.
"I understand you now!" the plague doctor declared. He hauled the sword up and met Rockie's punch with the hilt. The clash sent Rockie sliding across the floor for several meters; the masked man's eye slits flared a brighter blue.
The nature of this Fault's ability is a sickening one, the plague doctor observed inwardly. Through his glowing lenses he perceived what others could not: a dark, shadowy barrier clinging to Rockie like a second skin. The plague doctor watched, as if downloading the knowledge into his head, and his vision grew more feverish with each blink.
An ability that makes it so anybody with the intent to kill him will have a guaranteed death instead. So how exactly am I supposed to kill something that can't be killed by normal means? Does he even know that he has this ability, because this isn't his gimmick…
Rockie spat words through clenched teeth. "Are you just going to stand there?"
With a metallic ripple the greatsword shrank, thinning and lengthening until it became a rapier—elegant, wicked, absurdly incongruous with the scene it had been part of.
"Plus Demon: Demon Feet." A red aura crawled over the plague doctor's boots, and he lunged forward with inhuman speed, rapier poised to strike. Rockie ducked the thrust, but the masked man shifted his momentum with machine-like grace and ended up standing perilously close.
"Plus Demon: Demon Leg!" The plague doctor's leg flared with the same crimson energy, and a kick snapped out like a piston. Rockie managed to parry the blow, but the force was monstrous—enough to send him flying over the bar counter and skidding across the floor.
I have to fight this one with no intent to kill. Is this even possible? Rockie's body trembled with the calculation, an ugly thought lodged in the back of his gut. Behind him, something creaked and shifted.
He turned and saw, with a cold, impossible clarity, the beheaded corpse of Auguste rising from the rubble. Where flesh had been there was nothing—no blood, no ragged wound. The place where his head once belonged looked as if someone had smoothed stone into it. Auguste's fingers brushed that faceless gap, and the missing head re-knit itself into being, like a statue glued back together.
"Brave of you to think there's life behind these eyes," Auguste intoned, voice flat but alive.
The plague doctor snarled a sound of disbelief. "What!?"
Auguste's hands found the floor and, with practiced command, he shaped the very ground itself. Two massive stone hands erupted from the earth and lunged at the plague doctor, clamping around him like a pair of iron vise-jaws.
"What is this!?" the masked man screamed.
"Alchemy," Auguste answered simply.
The stone hands hauled the plague doctor from the tower and hurled him down the mountainside until he vanished into the distance, a dark speck against the cliff. Rockie pushed himself to his feet, rubbing the back of his head, the world still spinning.
"Shoot, what was that?" he asked, voice raw.
Auguste—alive, whole, as blunt as ever—smirked. "Looks like someone's got your name written on a bullet."
Rockie's voice cut through the ringing silence, impatient and half-frustrated. "I know that, but why? How does he know that I'm a—" He didn't finish the sentence; the thought hung in the air like a blade.
Auguste finished it for him, a single clipped syllable. "Fault?"
Rockie blinked. "You figured that out too?"
"Easy guess," Auguste murmured, folding his arms as if the answer were the dullest of puzzles.
Sage pushed himself up, one hand pressed to his jaw where pain still flared. He let out a ragged sound. "Ugh—what happened?"
"Tch. Nothing, really," Rockie said, dismissing it with a short, tight breath.
Auguste's expression folded into something like concern despite his calm. "Are you certain it's nothing? He showed up with blood on his hand—do you think he'll just walk away from that?"
Rockie chewed the inside of his cheek. "I doubt he will. He lost his intention to kill me halfway through fighting me."
"And how do you know that?" Sage asked, surprise and curiosity threaded through the question.
Rockie shrugged, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. "It's just a part of my nature."
Sage pressed his palm to his temple, eyes narrowing. "What exactly is your nature?"
Rockie smiled—small, almost weary, but oddly calm. "I'm the Fault of Death."
Both Sage and Auguste went still; their eyes widened as if the words had knocked the air from the room.
"Th—That's—" Auguste stammered, his voice cracking in a way Rockie had never heard from him before.
Rockie tried to defuse the moment with a quick, rueful laugh. "I know, that sounds metal as hell. It isn't as cool as you think. I don't know how, but I think he caught onto my Fault gimmick, and since he knows what I can do now, he probably won't come back."
"He better not come back," Sage said, tone flat and hard.
Rockie's shoulders hunched with a trace of lingering worry. "I'm still worried though... somebody like him just walking around casually doing things like this—"
Auguste waved a hand, unwilling to let fear grow teeth. "Well, as you've seen, he's got no teeth against us—so what's there to fuss about?"
Rockie's gaze went somewhere distant, to a worry that had nothing to do with themselves. "It isn't really about us. I have a friend—he's also a Fault, though he hasn't figured it out like me yet. Shade, stay safe." His voice carried the weight of genuine fear and the fragile hope that the name might somehow be kept from harm.