If you were a normal person and you saw me this way, you would think that I was a monster or a freak. You wouldn't be wrong to think that way, but in my world, many normal humans think that way—especially those who don't have any abilities or don't have magic. But in this world, I'm not the only person with abilities and powers like this. I was born human, but I was also born a werewolf.
With my wolf state, I was born what they call a low-class level werewolf. Many think that being a low-class werewolf means you are too weak or should just give up on chasing power growth. But that's not in my blood. I've seen many werewolves, dragons, vampires, shadow creatures, witches, mages, beasts, and dwarves. Even a weak human can become stronger, so why would I just stop because I'm a low-class wolf? I don't think so. My name is Nikolas Salvatore. I come from a family who has many like me, and no, we are not the only wolf family; there are others, different in their own way. But with me, many don't call me Salvatore. They just call me Nikolas, because they feel like the last name doesn't suit me for being the only lower-class wolf from my family.
The sun was a relentless weight on the back of Nikolas's neck. At ten years old, he was smaller than the other boys his age, his frame wiry and thin, lacking the "Noble Bulk" that his older brothers already possessed. Even the air in the training grounds felt heavier here, thick with the scent of dry grass and the distant, ozone-tinged metallic smell of the high-class mages practicing at the main estate.
He was standing in the center of a collapsed stone courtyard on the edge of the Salvatore Estate. This was the Neutral Zone—a place where the weeds grew through the cracks of forgotten history and the "High-Class" guards rarely bothered to look. Here, the ruins of an old watchtower provided the only shade, a jagged finger of stone pointing toward a sky that felt far too vast for a boy who felt so small.
"Again, Niko! You're leaning too far right!"
Leo's voice was a steady anchor in the heat. Leo was twelve, the oldest of their group and the undisputed heart of their squad. He wasn't a Salvatore; he was from a minor family that served the borderlands, but he had a natural gravity that made the other six of them follow him anywhere. While the Salvatore elders spoke of power as a birthright, Leo spoke of it as something you wrestled from the earth with your bare hands.
Nikolas wiped the sweat from his eyes, his palm stinging from the rough bark of his training stick. "I'm trying, Leo. It's like my legs won't keep up with my head."
"That's because you're thinking like a human," Leo said.
Nikolas paused, the heavy stick lowering slightly. Even though they were humans, they were not regular humans. They were the kind who carried the potential for the Shift—the ability to become something that ordinary people only saw in their nightmares. "But we are humans," Nikolas muttered, wondering what Leo meant by that.
Leo couldn't help but laugh after hearing the response. "Of course we are," he responded, stepping forward. He moved with a grace that Nikolas envied—a fluidity that suggested his wolf was already pacing just beneath his skin, ready to leap out. "But we are not regular humans. Regular humans see a wall and stop. We see a wall and wonder how hard we have to hit it to make it move."
He reached out, adjusting Nikolas's stance with a firm, brotherly hand. He kicked Nikolas's right heel out an inch, centering his weight. "The world calls us 'Low-Class' because we don't change as fast as the Dragons or the Noble Wolves. They think if you can't shatter a boulder by the time you're eight, you're a waste of space. But speed isn't just about muscles, Niko. It's about heart."
Leo flashed a bright, confident grin—the kind of grin that made Nikolas believe, just for a second, that being a runt didn't matter.
"We're going to be Knights, remember?" Leo whispered, his voice dropping so the others wouldn't hear.
A few yards away, Kael, a pale boy with the sharp, aristocratic features of a vampire, was practicing his footwork in silence. Jax was sitting on a fallen pillar, tinkering with a rusted gears-and-springs mechanism he'd scavenged from the estate's trash heaps. Elena was practicing her balance on a narrow beam of stone, her focus absolute.
"All seven of us," Leo continued, his eyes locking onto Nikolas's with a fierce intensity. "We'll show the Salvatores what a real pack looks like. We won't be their 'lower class.' We'll be the ones they have to look up to."
Nikolas nodded, a spark of hope catching in his chest like a small flame in a drafty room. He gripped the stick again, his knuckles turning white. He didn't have the "Noble Shift" yet. He didn't have the glowing eyes or the terrifying aura that his brothers flaunted during the family dinners. All he had was a sore back, a name he wasn't allowed to use, and a friend who believed he was more than a disappointment.
"Alright," Nikolas breathed, resetting his stance. "Again."
He swung. This time, the stick whistled through the air with a new kind of intent. He wasn't swinging at a phantom enemy; he was swinging at the invisible weight of his own last name. He imagined his father's smirk, the way his brothers looked through him as if he were made of glass, and he channeled that heat into his arms.
Thwack.
The stick struck a practice post with a satisfying crack. It wasn't enough to break the wood, but it was enough to make his hands sting with a vibrant, living pain.
"Better," Leo said, crossing his arms. "Now, do it a hundred more times. If you want to be a Salvatore, you train until you collapse. If you want to be Nikolas, you train until the ground collapses instead."
The afternoon wore on, the shadows of the ruins stretching like long, dark fingers across the courtyard. They laughed between drills, shared a single canteen of lukewarm water, and talked about the Grand Tournament as if it were a certainty rather than a dream. To the rest of the world, they were seven "runts" playing in the dirt.
To Nikolas, they were the only world that mattered.
"Hey, Jax!" Leo called out, wiping his brow. "Stop playing with those toys and show Niko that new step you learned. If we're going to hunt the deep forest one day, we all need to be faster than the shadows."
Jax looked up, his eyes bright behind a smudge of grease. "It's not a toy, it's a stabilizer," he grumbled, though he stood up anyway.
They gathered around, a small circle of diverse bloodlines—wolf, vampire, mage-kin—all discarded by the "High-Class" world for not being perfect enough. In the center of the Neutral Zone, under a sun that was finally beginning to dip toward the horizon, Nikolas Salvatore felt something he rarely felt at the main manor.
He felt powerful.
Jax stood up, wiping his grease-stained hands on his tunics. He was a year older than Nikolas, his family line technically Mages, but he lacked the "Pure Flow" required to cast the high-level spells the Academy demanded. Instead, he saw magic as a series of gears and conduits.
"The trick isn't just moving your feet, Niko," Jax said, stepping into the center of the dusty circle. "It's about the pulse. Even a 'Low-Class' heart has a rhythm. If you sync your breathing to the moment your heel touches the dirt, you don't just run. You glide."
Jax demonstrated, his movement a blur of efficiency rather than raw power. He didn't have the explosive aura of a Noble Wolf, but he moved with a mechanical precision that made him difficult to track.
Kael, the vampire, watched from the shadows of a crumbling archway. "He's right. My father says the 'High-Class' rely too much on their blood. They think the blood does the work for them. We... we have to work for the blood."
Nikolas watched them, his heart swelling. This was their secret. While his brothers were being pampered with mana-stones and high-protein diets at the Salvatore Manor, Nikolas was here, learning the "Scrap Magic" of the streets. He was learning how to survive when you didn't have a God-Tier bloodline to carry you.
"Hey, where's Sora?" Elena asked, looking around. She was the only girl in their group today, a sharp-eyed youth with the faint markings of a forest-kin on her neck.
"She's by the old well," Leo pointed toward the far end of the ruins. "Practicing her 'Scent-Lock.' She says she can smell a Shadow Demon from a mile away."
They all laughed, though a small shiver went down Nikolas's spine. The "Shadows" were the bedtime stories their parents told to keep them from wandering too far into the Deep Forest. To a Salvatore, a Shadow Demon was a target for a hunt. To a "Low-Class" wolf, it was a death sentence.
"Let's head over there," Leo suggested, picking up his own practice blade—a rusted iron length that had seen better decades. "We've got an hour of light left. I want everyone to run the 'Vanguard Formation.' If we're going to be a pack, we move as one."
As they walked through the tall, golden grass of the Neutral Zone, Nikolas felt the weight of the Salvatore name lifting. Here, he wasn't the disappointment. He wasn't the "Human" wolf. He was just Niko.
"You okay, Niko?" Leo asked, dropping back to walk beside him. He noticed the way Nikolas was favoring his right side, his ribs still aching from a fall earlier in the day.
"I'm fine, Leo. Just... thinking about the Recruitment," Nikolas admitted. "What if they don't see what you see? What if they just see a kid who can't shift?"
Leo stopped walking and put a heavy hand on Nikolas's shoulder. The sun was setting behind him, casting a long, heroic shadow across the ruins.
"Then they're blind," Leo said firmly. "The Academy looks for power, sure. But the Knights? The true Knights look for the soul. And you've got more soul than all your brothers combined. Don't let the last name define you, Salvatore. Let the man define the name."
Nikolas looked up at his friend, the older boy who had become more of a brother than his own flesh and blood. He felt a lump in his throat and nodded, unable to find the words.
"Now, come on!" Leo shouted, breaking into a run. "Last one to the well has to carry the water skins back to the estate!"
"Hey! No fair!" Nikolas yelled, his legs churning as he chased after the golden-haired boy.
They ran through the ruins, their laughter echoing off the ancient stones. For a moment, the world was simple. There were no ranks, no classes, and no expectations. There was just the wind in their hair and the promise of a future they would build together.
As Nikolas ran, he didn't see the flicker of a dark, oily mist rising from the cracks in the old well. He didn't feel the sudden drop in temperature or the way the birds in the trees had gone deathly silent.
He only saw Leo's back, the silhouette of a leader he would follow to the ends of the earth.
"Wait for me!" Nikolas cried out, his small boots kicking up clouds of dust as he pushed his "Low-Class" body to its absolute limit, a wide, genuine smile breaking across his face.
The sun finally dipped below the horizon, bathing the Neutral Zone in a deep, crimson light.