# Chapter 4: A Hunter in Dead Skies
The northern border of the Clover Kingdom had always been considered harsh, but majestic in its own way. Rocky mountains met ancient forests here, and the air was so saturated with mana that at dusk, a faint, ghostly luminescence would sometimes flare above the treetops. But today, nature had gone still. The birds had fallen silent. The animals had burrowed deep into their dens. And the sky itself had taken on a strange, murky violet hue.
A squad from the Golden Dawn — the elite of the elite — moved along a mountain trail. Six riders on magical mounts, their white-and-gold mantles rippling in the wind, glowing with an air of absolute purity. Each of them was a noble. Each carried an enormous reserve of mana and a grimoire stocked with devastating spells.
"Commander — do you feel that?" A young knight named Sir Alis reined in his phantom horse. His hand drifted instinctively to his grimoire. "The air… it's gone heavy. Like someone dropped a sack of stones across my shoulders."
The squad commander — a tall man with cold eyes — narrowed his gaze. His Light Magic normally let him see for miles, but now his vision was clouding over.
"This is no natural phenomenon," he said, his voice flat. "And it isn't magic. The mana in this area is behaving as if something is… *frightening* it. It's trembling and dispersing."
Then the sky split open above them.
It wasn't thunder — it was the sound of matter being torn. Straight down from the dense clouds, wreathed in crimson flame, a black shape fell like a stone. The speed was so monstrous that the air around the falling object ignited from the friction.
"Earth Magic: Titan's Bastion!" one of the knights shouted, snapping his grimoire open in an instant.
A ten-meter wall of reinforced granite surged up in front of the squad, saturated with mana for hardness. Any mid-tier spell would have shattered itself against that monolith. The shadow didn't even slow down.
*CRASH.*
The black silhouette punched through the granite wall the way a red-hot knife passes through butter. Stone fragments weighing hundreds of kilograms flew in every direction, crushing magical horses and their riders. When the dust settled, a creature that had no business existing in this world was standing in the center of a scorched crater.
Tall, clad in black leather, with enormous black wings spread behind him. An undying flame raged at the back of his head, and his face was hidden behind a solid mask. King — *Wildfire*, First Commander of Kaido — straightened slowly. His presence — his Haki — pressed down on the knights like a physical vice.
"So this is it," King said. His voice was hollow, emptied of any emotion. "The energy of this world. Brittle. Unreliable. You call it *magic*, but all I see are crutches for those whose will is too weak to stand on its own."
"How dare you—!" The Golden Dawn commander thrust his hand forward, his grimoire rattling through its pages in a frenzy. "Light Magic: Spears of Divine Justice!"
Dozens of blinding rays erupted from his fingers and streaked toward King at a speed the eye couldn't track. Each beam could punch through a palm-width sheet of steel. King didn't move. He simply stood there with his arms crossed.
The beams struck his body. There was a sharp crack, sparks of light scattered in every direction — and not a single scratch appeared on King's black skin. His Armament Haki, combined with the natural durability of a Lunarian, made him an absolute fortress.
"Light," King said, raising one hand slowly. "Light has no weight. Which means it cannot wound someone who carries the gravity of hell within themselves."
He took one step forward. The earth cracked beneath his boot.
"Wind Magic: Blade of the Heavenly Storm!" Two more knights combined their power, generating a massive vortex of razor-sharp air currents.
King walked straight through it. The wind tore at his cloak, but the moment the currents touched his skin they dissipated helplessly. King reached out and seized one of the knights by the face. There was a crunch — the man's magic shield popped like a soap bubble.
"Let him go!" The commander threw himself into the attack, manifesting a sword of light in his hand.
King tilted his head slightly.
"Too slow."
A single short sweep of his wing sent the commander flying dozens of meters. The man slammed into a cliff face and left a deep imprint in the rock. The knight King held by the face let out a shriek — the flame at the back of the Lunarian's head suddenly surged, and King's hand blazed white-hot. A second later, the scream stopped. The knight's body simply became ash and drifted to the ground.
"You're a monster!" whispered Alis, the last survivor, watching his comrades die without landing so much as a scratch on their attacker. "Magic… magic is supposed to *protect* us… why isn't it working?!"
"Because magic is a lie." King drew his jagged sword. The blade was coated in coal-black Haki, and it radiated vibrations that bent the space around it. "You rely on formulas and words. But in a real battle, all that matters is the density of your soul."
King swung the sword. It was not a spell. It was a pure physical cut, amplified by Will.
The air in front of him simply exploded. A massive arc of black flame tore through the forest, shearing centuries-old trees down like dry grass. The cliff face that had the commander embedded in it cracked clean in two. A moment later, silence — the kind that fills a tomb — settled over the clearing. Of the Golden Dawn's elite squad, nothing remained but scorched scraps of white-and-gold mantles.
King walked slowly toward the commander's trampled grimoire. The book, severed from its owner, was crumbling to dust — but King managed to lift what was left of it.
*Clover's magic… so vivid. So utterly useless.*
He looked north, where the demon's skull rose above the mountains, now wrapped entirely in Kaido's Flame Clouds.
*Lord Kaido will be disappointed. There are no warriors here. There is only livestock that has convinced itself it's divine.*
King spread his wings. He had another area to survey — a territory where the mana ran at its thickest. His Observation Haki had caught a strange echo to the south. There was something there… heavy. Something that reminded him of Wano's own steel.
"Let's see," he murmured, and with a powerful beat of his wings, he shot into the sky and vanished into the clouds.
---
At that same moment, ten miles from the site of the slaughter, Yuno — leading a separate scouting party — came to a sharp halt. Sylph, his wind spirit, suddenly burst from his shoulder and began to tremble, pressing herself against his cheek.
"Yuno!" she squeaked. "I… I can't feel the mana to the north! It's just *gone!* There's nothing up there but emptiness and cold!"
Yuno tightened his grip on his grimoire. His golden eyes darkened with strain. He could feel it — distant, but undeniable. A pressure that had nothing to do with magic. It was physical. It turned the stomach and triggered something ancient and primal: the urge to run.
*Something has come into our world. Something against which our wind is nothing but a draft.*
"All units!" Yuno shouted, wheeling his horse around. "Full combat readiness! We move north!"
He didn't yet know he was riding straight into the Dragon's jaws — or that the magic he was so proud of was about to become his curse.