The chill of the forest air seemed to deepen, an unnerving counterpoint to the growing internal fire Wolf fought to bank.
He stood still.
Wolf's posture was a study in lethal stillness.
Wolf slides the wakizashi free with a wet, whispering sound—small, precise, humming in his gloved hand. The saber stays low, resting near his hip like a sleeping thing; the short blade lives in quick, nervous circles before him, a metronome of intent. The circles are small, intimate—an animal testing its space.
He slows the ether feeding his heart. Not enough to stop it—only to throttle back the flow, to ration the pulse that keeps his chest from emptying out. His heartbeat stutters, arrhythmic now, a slow percussion under muscle and bone.
The wounds on his heart, previously held closed by a sheer force of will and ether, now wept sluggishly.
His brow beaded with a cold sweat that wasn't from exertion, but from the brutal physiological tax he was imposing on himself. The pain, a dull, pervasive ache, was a constant, unwanted companion.
Doing this weakens him, yes.
I can only hope that when the Red Tide reaches maximum intensity and grants me regeneration, it would be enough to heal the wound at my heart... well, I don't even think I will be able to kill a hundred right—
The metallic whine of air being cleaved by steel shattered his thoughts!
A spear, its point crude but sharp, flashed from the gloom.
Wolf's breath hitched—a sharp, almost silent intake of air. His eyes, momentarily blind, darted to the sound.
Wolf meets it without flinch. He didn't move his feet. Instead, the small, circling wakizashi snapped out.
The wakizashi takes the blow by kissing the force and sliding it, hip-rotation siphoning kinetic energy into a clean arc. The spearhead arcs and bites into the packed dirt; a bright feather of wood chips bursts like a small sigh.
He keeps his upper body still, shoulders anchored, only hips turning—economy of motion.
The wakizashi's arc is a promise more than a strike.
Footsteps converge, all directions at once. He lets the other senses paint him a map: the scrape of metal left, a grunt to the right, the wet slide of a spearshaft behind.
He chooses defiance over evasion. He stood still and trusts the body he has trained into a weapon.
He shifted his weight subtly: knees slightly unlocked, weight settling back onto his rear heel like a coiled spring. His swords transformed their posture: the saber came up from the low guard, and the wakizashi came down from its circular dance. They crossed in front of his chest, forming a perfect cross-guard shape.
His sight returns as a slow flood and he watches the incoming attack—an overhead sword meant to split him clean in two. Wolf held the cross-guard for a split second longer, a terrifying stillness in the face of maximum velocity.
"Hah!" the enemy roared, their eyes wide with aggressive confidence.
At this moment of maximal force he doesn't meet the blow with equal power.
Wolf draws the saber's curve into the enemy's strike, connects blade to blade, and uses a micro-rotation of his core. The enemy's energy funnels through the contact point and is redirected—like guiding a river to pour out sideways. The blade's arc eats through the intended line and spits the opponent's momentum across the field.
The enemy gasped, the sudden loss of resistance throwing them off balance. The enemy tries to wrench the weapon back. Fingers close on the haft; joints tense.
In that split second, Wolf's wakizashi flicks out—two fingers, a ghost tap—and the enemy's wrist snaps in its mechanics, a tiny, surgical twist that unthreads balance. The gasp that follows is small, human.
The man's grip loosens.
He stumbles.
Wolf doesn't hesitate. The dual-sword motion is a single, flowing language in his hands: saber arcs from low to high in a bottom-to-top crescent that forces the opponent's knee into compromise; the wakizashi, used as a conductor, tracks the hand that clings to the haft, pushing and guiding it into a place where it cannot brace. The knee buckles as intended; the blade kisses the joint.
Sh-tunk! The sound was sickeningly soft.
The man's leg collapses into uselessness. He crumples with a soft, animal sound.
No time to watch! No time to even breathe deep!
Two more enemies surged from his periphery—one from the left, one slightly behind him to the right.
Wolf became a blur of controlled torsion. He changed direction instantly by a rapid contraction and relaxation of his core muscles—a barely perceptible ripple across his abdomen. The saber snapped out, its curve meeting the thrust of a short-sword coming from his left.
He didn't block; he hooked and slid the enemy's weapon, simultaneously rotating his entire body.
The body rotation converted the incoming attack force into shearing force, channeling it directly toward the tip of the enemy's own short-sword, sending it harmlessly skittering away.
As the saber deflected the enemy's weapon, his wakizashi flashed, not at the head or chest, but into the nearest open space: the opponent's hip joint. The enemy buckled, a strangled cry escaping their lips.
The enemy from behind was already there, a large, crude axe arcing toward his neck.
The sheer speed of Wolf's core rotation barely allowed him to complete the previous move, but the rotation itself was the defense.
As the turn completed, the wakizashi was released from its grip for a microsecond. The blade's hilt and guard slammed back into the heel of his palm with a jarring impact, transforming the weapon into a Torque Hammer attack. He slammed the heel of the hilt into the enemy's ribs.
A sharp Crack! echoed in the small space, and the second enemy gasped, stumbling back, clutching their side with a look of stunned disbelief and agony.
Wolf caught the wakizashi with a sickening wetness in the wound at his heart. He felt the sluggish, irregular thump of his heart and knew he had to keep moving, keep fighting with this devastating, minimal energy style, because if he stopped—he will die.
The sun throws white across steel, and for a breath he sees his own reflected edge—smeared, unclean.
He tastes copper in the back of his throat and smiles, a small, private thing.
He is cold-blooded, he is efficient. He is aware of the wound that will not close until the end.
A man lunges with a spear too tall to use in close quarters.
Wolf catches the shaft with the curve of the saber, uses the haft as a lever and as the man overreaches he releases the wakizashi as a torque hammer into the ribs—the short blade's butt slamming the side like a mallet. The man doubles and slides away.
Another shield thuds into his saber and he redirects the motion, a half-turn, a flick of hips, and the wakizashi threads the seam beneath the armpit.
The man gasps, lets go.
Wolf steps through the space like a current and the wakizashi's point becomes a lever to the wrist—torque applied, elbow unseats, the arm folds.
He is ballet and butchery in the same breath.
The world narrows to steel and breath.
Wolf's eyes snap to the new sword that has stepped into the ring of violence, the arming blade glinting with cold intent.
He tastes the metal in the air—iron tang and fear—and maps the new threat before him: one in front, one to the right, one coming up from behind.
Everything telescopes; his body answers on instinct.
He rotates—twice—fluid but faster than thought, a blur of hips and shoulders. The double-rotation costs time, precious heartbeats stolen by the wound that thumps like a disagreeable drum in his chest. The front opponent makes a tiny, impossible motion: he loosens his grip for a hair, an almost theatrical release of the hilt, and for a split second the wakizashi's edge slides past its intended mark!
Wolf feels the miss like a skipped note; his diaphragm freezes for an instant, the world contracting to a single cold point.
A breath later he recognizes the man: Hyung-woo.
A laugh slips out—half-mockery, half-ice.
"So it's you," Wolf breathes.
"They don't listen—do they? Afraid they are."
The jibe rides the blood-slick air; the words are bait as much as barbs. He pieces his guesses together quietly—tucks them under his ribs like spare blades—aware they are only educated guesses, not certainties. Still, they make a shape in his mind.
Hyung-woo gives him none of his temper.
He moves like a coiled cord that has been cut and taught himself to scream quietly under the skin. Rage folds into everything he does; Wolf can feel it like static against the back of his teeth.
Hyung-woo does not answer with talk—only motion.
Hyung-woo knows how fragile Wolf is. He knows the wound is not a wound that time will fix. He knows how a man lives on the edge of his own life and that every movement risks slipping off.
He uses that knowledge like cold calculation: thrust low with the arming sword, aim for Wolf's legs—the pillars that will collapse a man faster than anything.
Wolf's muscles prepare to sink, to drop the center of gravity and defend the lower line.
But he does not!
He has learned what lowers his chance of coming back from the edge. Crouch, and the ether that steadies his heart might falter; lower, and the knife of air that gives him breadth might find its gain. He makes the call that is simultaneously desperate and precise.
Instead of defending the leg thrust, Wolf answers by exchanging: not parry, not retreat, but trade.
"Your sword for my leg, my sword for your arm!"
The saber in his right hand drives at Hyung-woo's arm in the same breath the adversary's blade begins its low arc.
Hyung-woo reads the movement, feels the intent as if it were a physical thing.
He abandons the planned leg cut, dragging the arming sword up in an oberhau—not to cut Wolf but to brutalize the meeting point: the weak tip of Wolf's saber!
He throws the weight of his body into the chop; gravity and mass become a hammer.
The charts of momentum shift.
Impact!
Saber bites ground. The tip plunges into dirt. The sound is a cracked iron note. Wolf feels the countershock travel up his right arm—tremor, knife-of-pain—muscles screaming.
For a breath his weapon is pinned, immobile, the ground eating the edge he had trusted.
Hyung-woo's blade is heavy, well placed, a physical argument that disarms a plan.
For a second the world tilts toward defeat.
Wolf tastes the sting—metal in his teeth, a thin panic like smoke.
But he is not without recourse. The wakizashi is in his off-hand for a reason.
While the saber is caught—stuck, an anchor in the dirt—Wolf steps forward. Pain lances up his limb; the wound in his chest replies in a hot, thin flare.
He ignores the flare because the body does what the mind decides.
Without ceremony, without the arc that trained technique demands, the wakizashi drives upward—short, brutal, a needle to the soft of Hyung-woo's stomach. It is a close-in betrayal of fencing orthodoxy: instead of parrying, he stabs. The blade finds flesh.
Hyung-woo feels a clean point through skin, the hot pinch. The man does not block it—not with his sword, not with his strength.
Hyung-woo uses the opening Wolf gives him—frees one hand and shoves. A man's shove with banners of rage is a physical sermon: heavy, brass, resolute.
He slams into Wolf's right shoulder, the blow doing what it needs: it twists Wolf's body in the exact way that breaks a fragile way of ether control!
The pressure on Wolf's chest that had been barely holding the wound's bleeding in check snaps inside him!
A shriek leaves Wolf—raw, half animal. Black blood blooms at his chest, dark and viscous against his shirt like a bad omen. Pain detonates along the ribs, every nerve a bell. For a breath his legs fold; for an instant he is a man leaning over an abyss.
Hyung-woo does not wait to watch the fall.
He retreats—breathing hard, posture a blade of exhaustion and resolve. He presses fingers to the cut in his own stomach, a shallow, precise wound from Wolf's short blade. It will sting, but it is not fatal.
He crouches slightly, looks at Wolf as if cataloguing the moment and finishes with a voice like sharpened bone
"This is the end for you. I won't let you live beyond this day."
The red fog that had once drowned around Wolf begins to thin, like blood mist drying beneath a silent sun.
The Red Tide—that grotesque breath of rage and vitality—finally burns out.
Ether threads unravel from the air, fading into wisps of dull crimson that cling to the ground before vanishing completely. The field that had felt alive moments ago now turns eerily hollow.
The sudden clarity stings their eyes. Without the fog, the world looks raw, flayed—bodies scattered like discarded puppets, weapons half-buried in mud, the air sticky with iron.
And in the middle of it all stands Wolf.
His outline trembles in the cold light—no longer a phantom inside the red haze, but a man stripped of every mask. His breathing is jagged, wet. Blood drips from his fingers in a thin rhythm, tapping the earth like a broken metronome. His saber hangs loosely at his side, the blade cracked, the wakizashi's edge trembling with each faint movement of his wrist.
He tries once—twice—to send ether through his veins, forcing it toward his heart. His jaw tightens, shoulders tensing as if trying to command a dying engine to run again.
Not enough.
The ether sparks faintly across his chest, veins lighting with a faint red glow—thump... thump... a sluggish rhythm crawling toward life.
But the sound of it is uneven. His heart skips, stalls, stutters.
The ether flickers again, falters.
This is it.
Around him, the survivors finally begin to move. Step by step.
Weapons are raised, hesitantly at first—some hands shaking, some eyes wide in disbelief. The terror that had frozen them when the fog was still thick begins to fade, replaced by something else: the cautious cruelty of people who believe they've survived the storm.
"He's—he's not healing," one mutters, clutching his spear tighter.
"Look at him," another breathes, voice trembling. "He's done."
Well, look at them. He watched the circle tighten, their movements cautious, yet driven by the scent of a kill. Hyung-woo stood at the fore, a granite expression of righteous fatigue.
A victory for the future, is that it?
A genuine, weary smile almost cracked his blood-smeared lips. The idea was almost funny.
Losing to a trick of fate, someone from a time when the world had supposedly learned to be better, a time when skills were sharper...
It wasn't the loss to this man that stung, but the final, undeniable proof that his way—were ineffective against him.
I don't regret it.
The thought was a strange, serene anchor in the whirling chaos of his pain.
he had lived without a single apology, without a single retreat. Every life he'd taken, every wound he'd suffered, was a mark of that fierce, unyielding existence.
He had burned bright.
Hyung-woo, standing slightly ahead of the others, doesn't answer. His left hand still clutches the wound on his side; blood seeps between his fingers, but his eyes—sharp, burning—never leave Wolf. His chest rises and falls with slow, deliberate breaths, steadying himself for the inevitable.
Klion approaches from the flank, his sword dragging faintly through the dirt. "Form up," he growls. "Don't give him another opening. Surround him. Finish this clean."
Their footsteps form a circle around the dying man. The air grows taut again, drawn like a bowstring.
Wolf stands unmoving. Only his head lifts slightly—his eyes half-lidded, blood dripping from his chin. He breathes through his teeth, every inhale a rasp, every exhale a hiss.
Then—he laughs.
It starts as a small breath, a faint tremor in his throat, then grows louder, rougher. His shoulders shake; his cracked lips stretch into a grin smeared with black blood.
"...Haha..."
The sound warps—turns into something jagged, something feral.
"Ha...ha...hahaha!"
The laugh bursts out, splitting the air. It's hoarse, manic, but alive. It carries through the field like a broken bell ringing through fog. The circle tightens unconsciously; even now, even half-dead, his laughter makes them flinch.
Klion's hand twitches on his sword hilt.
"What the hell is he laughing at?"
Wolf spits blood into the dirt, smearing it with his boot. His grin widens—crooked, defiant.
"You finally see it, huh?" he rasps, lifting his head enough for them to meet his eyes. The pupils are still faintly glowing crimson, like embers refusing to die.
"No tricks."
"Just me."
The mockery was easy. It was the last, best weapon he had left. They thought they had survived the monster. But the monster had simply run out of fuel.
The outcome was the same.
Hyung-woo's expression doesn't change. He steps forward, pointing his arming sword at Wolf's chest. His jaw tightens, voice low and steady.
"You've already lost. Your time's up, Wolf."
My time is up. And what a spectacular waste of time it was.
Wolf's grin widens further, and for a heartbeat his eyes almost seem—calm.
There's exhaustion there, but something else buried beneath it—a quiet defiance, a strange serenity that doesn't belong on a man standing on the brink of death.
"Maybe," he murmurs. "Maybe it is."
He tilts his head back, staring at the dim sky as a breeze passes through the ruined field, stirring the smell of blood and ash.
He felt a sudden, final surge of feeling—not rage, but a defiant, wild joy. It was the feeling of knowing the cost, paying the price, and having absolutely no regrets.
He breathes once, the air rattling in his lungs, and then he laughs again—louder this time, wild and unrestrained.
"Hahaha!"
It echoes, rolling across the corpses and the broken weapons, bouncing against the trees that border the field.
It doesn't sound like the laughter of a man who's dying.
It was the laugh of a man who had drained the cup of life to the very bottom, even as the last drop of his own vitality was spilling out onto the dirt. It echoed the sound of the broken metronome in his chest, wild and discordant. It was his final, non-negotiable farewell.
Come on, let finish this.
Come on, give me some rest would you?