The heavy thud of the door cut off the outside world. A cold, thick shadow settled into the room, masking the quiet transition taking place within the darkness. The softness of the past was gone, buried beneath an unyielding determination. What remained was the architect, the Shadow, driven to restructure the Bastion without hesitation or grief.
Kilometers deep beneath those burning ruins, hidden behind walls of solid, resonance free stone, lay a silence as absolute as a tomb.
Silarias rested on a rough stone elevation. His hydrostatic form had shriveled into a pale, exhausted shell. The black, flaming fur hung dull and matted with dried void blood. The fleshy tentacles and glowing poison needles had vanished, retracted fully from the sheer exhaustion of the fight. At the center of his chest, where a vacuum vortex had recently drawn in the void sword, a deep, pulsating scar gleamed viscous and black.
His consciousness snapped back with the suddenness of a whip crack. His eardrums, though ringing heavily, caught deep, vibrating bass voices cutting through the inner fog. One voice carried an ancient warmth from the distant past. The other sounded rough, unfamiliar, and laced with an unpredictable edge.
A loud, triumphant laugh tore through the dark space.
"Look who crawled out of the abyss! Nephew, come on, show those lion jaws! You obviously don’t recognize me at all. Makes sense, considering they buried your entire bloodline alive in the mud!"
Silarias forced a heavy, rattling groan from his chest. Every muscle fiber felt flooded with heavy lead, yet sheer willpower forced his upper body upward. His blurry gaze shifted toward the corner of the room. Sitting upon a massive throne roughly carved from black steel was Forge Master Ijji. His colossal hand held a chalice overflowing with a burning, blue flaming liquid.
"Long time no see, Young Forge Breaker!" Ijji grinned wildly, his eyes reflecting intense combat spirit. "Do you still recognize me, or did consuming all that void energy turn your brain to liquid? Hahaha!"
Ijji slammed the flat side of his massive, glossy blade perpendicularly onto the stone floor.
The room vanished briefly behind a blinding, gold white flash that erased every shadow on the walls. The seismic shockwave slammed into Silarias like a physical blow. The sudden brightness triggered a vivid memory of the Everlasting Forge in full operation. Sparks rained down in his mind while intense heat made the air tremble, showing Ijji wielding titanic hammers to shape impossible metals.
Silarias coughed, tasting boiling tar and thick blood, though his lips twitched into a faint, weak smile.
"As if I would ever forget you, old lunatic. Hahaha! But wait. What did that guy just say? Nephew?!"
The atmosphere in the room shifted instantly. Within a single fraction of a second, the temperature plunged to absolute zero. Silarias’ breath condensed into heavy ice crystals that hovered like diamond dust. The figure standing in the farthest corner did not walk forward. He moved through a rapid succession of pitch black afterimages, slicing through space at an unnatural speed.
Without a sound, he appeared directly in front of Silarias’ face. The heat radiating from his glowing, red flaming eyes was felt immediately.
"Look at yourself, sixteen year old snot nosed brat," the man spoke. His voice sounded like grinding granite, carrying a sharp edge of mockery over a firm, demanding tone. "Are you seriously lying there crying on the floor right now? Is this what is left of the great promise? A half dead pile of misery that cannot even keep its own back straight? You are sixteen, kid. You are supposed to conquer worlds, not collapse in the dust like a common mortal! But you are still alive. That is something."
Silarias widened his eyes. The sheer atmospheric pressure radiating from the man felt like a heavy weight crushing his chest.
"Who... who the hell are you?" Silarias managed to ask, his voice raspy.
"You, my own blood, are no Nobody!" The man placed a heavy, glowing hand on Silarias’ shoulder with a firm, solid weight. "You are acting like a terrified teenager right now, but remember what lives in your cells! You are the rightful heir to a legacy that made the heavens tremble to their foundations! You know nothing about your mother, do you? A beast human, yes, but our specific bloodline? We descend from an ancient race that once ruled both worlds with an absolute, unyielding hand! I am your cousin, Silarias. In this cursed cycle, and in every subsequent life we drag out of the ashes! So pick up those sixteen year old bones of yours and listen!"
Faustus straightened his frame, his presence expanding as a dark aura swirled around him. His voice resonated through the vibrating stone walls like a storm.
"Everyone calls our kind by overly complex names. Hellspawn Hydra Beast Humans? What a dusty, bureaucratic title! Who came up with that term? A frightened historian in an ivory tower? No, nephew. If the world trembles for what we are, then let us give them a name that sounds like the end of their civilization. We are the Void Hydra. Short, powerful, and it tells them exactly what they need to know. We have too much power to count, and we consume their reality raw!"
Faustus executed a dramatic bow, sweeping his arm as if addressing a grand arena rather than a hidden underground chamber. His intense expression softened into a wide, theatric grin. The heavy pressure around him shifted instantly into an unpredictable, eccentric energy.
"Your father... your father was no mortal, Silarias!" Faustus moved around the stone elevation with light, calculated steps, throwing Silarias an encouraging wink. "He was a legend, a force of nature! A god among monsters! But he saw the prophecy resting on your young shoulders. He knew which hunters stood on the horizon. To give you a chance, to hide you from the forces that want to eradicate our race entirely, he gave up his own kingdom and brought you to the Ward! He sacrificed everything so that you could lie here today crying like a stubborn sixteen year old! I am not here to tear you down, kid. I am here to guide you."
He clapped his hands together with a sharp, echoing sound.
The revelation hit Silarias hard. Deep within his mind, Juro’s past words returned with startling clarity. Images of Juro inhaling from a pipe rushed forward, the thick gray smoke shaping into battlefields while those raw words echoed back. A man gave his life so that you could breathe. That is how we found you, left behind in the Ward.
The realization fell into place with absolute weight. Understanding that his survival had been bought through the ultimate sacrifice of a father he had never known broke through his restraint. Bitter tears tracked furrows through the dried black blood on his face. Silarias trembled, his broad shoulders shaking under the heavy realization.
Faustus paused, looking down at the tears. His expression hardened slightly, though a spark of quiet approval glinted in his glowing eyes. He clapped Silarias firmly on the shoulder.
"And now, my young audience, now that the tears are flowing and the metal is hot, I will show you how a true master handles the void. I am not going to break you, nephew. I am going to show you what can be achieved when you master these traits."
What followed was a fluid, rapidly escalating display of absolute control. Faustus moved not like a standard combatant, but with an eerie, unpredictable momentum that defied normal physical limits.
With a light, springing step, Faustus glided forward. His pitch black fur pulsed and liquefied. Instead of forming basic armor, he manipulated the void energy into a shifting, elastic substance. He moved across the space without resistance. Whenever his foot touched the ground, the stone beneath dissolved into a swirling pool of shadow, launching him forward instantly.
"Look at the flexibility, Silarias! Reality is rigid, but our blood must be fluid! Form it!"
Before Silarias could track the motion, Faustus spun in mid air. As he turned, fleshy tentacles burst from his sting manes. They did not simply shoot outward. They split into hundreds of thin, whipping strands that twirled around him like pulsating shadow ribbons, guided with absolute precision. Simultaneously, nine swelling manifestations of pitch black fire rose from his aura along the floor. They flowed rhythmically like liquid arms of energy, their hollow centers opening wide as the surrounding walls hummed from the force. It was a grotesque, living demonstration of energy control.
"Your traits are not static features, they are your tools! Do you need extra limbs to tear through the heavens? Forge them!"
With a deliberate hand gesture, Faustus halted in mid air, resting on the passive pressure of his own aura. He held back the hundreds of glowing poison needles from his mane, allowing them to spin in a tight, humming circle around his hovering form like dark planetary rings. With a grin, he brought his fingers together. The needles merged with a sharp hiss into a polished, lethal shape, forming a large floating scythe of concentrated void poison that shifted with the minor movements of his pinky finger.
"Creativity, nephew! Why rely only on your fists when you can make the void itself wield death?!"
Faustus landed back on the ground with a quick bow directly in front of Silarias’ trembling frame. The broad grin remained, though his eyes softened as he extended a hand. Then, he stepped back and snapped his fingers.
The lighthearted display vanished instantly into an overwhelming, suffocating presence. The air in the chamber felt as dense as liquid fire. Gravity multiplied rapidly, pinning Silarias’ body heavily against the stone floor purely from the passive force radiating from Faustus. The massive surrounding walls cracked, the rock melting and running down like thick liquid under the intense vapor.
"Do you see this?! This is the Void Forged Tyranny!" Faustus called out over the grinding sound of the shifting space, his eyes wide as he looked down at his nephew. "It is a spectacle to us, and a nightmare to the rest of the world! This is the raw curse and the true strength of our blood! So get up, young hydra! Show me those jaws and prove that you are worthy of the name Void Hydra!"
The immense pressure lifted just as suddenly as Faustus withdrew his aura completely. The heat dissipated, returning silence to the room. Faustus adjusted his attire, looking down with a calm, steady expression.
"Well? Any questions, nephew?"
Silarias remained on his knees, his chest rising and falling heavily. The tears on his cheeks had dried from the sudden heat, but his mind remained chaotic. The truth about his father, the connection to Juro, and the sheer skill of the man standing before him overwhelmed his senses. He forced his shaking arms to hold his weight and looked up, driven by a deep need for answers.
"My... my father..." Silarias rasped out, his voice cracking. He swallowed past the growing darkness creeping into the edges of his vision. "If he... if he sacrificed everything... why was I never told? And Juro... how did he know him? What is the next move of those hunters... and how can I..."
Silarias tried to finish the sentence, needing to understand, but the physical strain and the lingering impact of the oppressive aura proved too great. His voice faded into a faint whisper.
His arms gave out completely. With a heavy breath, Silarias collapsed forward, his strength fully spent, lying motionless upon the stone floor.