The Anomaly's Path

The tavern had become a slaughterhouse. Inside, the air was a thick soup of smoke, splintered wood, and the metallic stench of demonic mana.

Ren ducked under another swing from Grog.

He felt the wind of the massive fist brush against his hair, and knew that if that punch had landed, his head would have been nothing but a wet stain on the broken floorboards. He rolled to the side, came up with his sword raised, and put three feet of distance between himself and the demon.

His arms were shaking. His lungs were burning.

He had landed at least seven clean strikes on Grog since the fight began, shallow cuts on his arms and chest and legs, but the demon did not seem to notice.

He just kept coming, his massive body absorbing damage that should have dropped any normal man.

We both have same rank, Ren thought, watching Grog turn around slowly. But that bastard physical body is much times stronger than me.

Grog was not fast or clever. He did not feint or parry. He just swung. But every swing carried the force of a falling tree. It was the kind of power that didn’t need precision because it could afford to miss.

It only needed to hit once.

Ren had been fighting for his life against men like this before. Men who had never needed to learn how to fight because their bodies were weapons all on their own. The trick was not to block or parry but to never be there when the fist came down.

He sidestepped as Grog lunged again, felt the demon’s shoulder brush against his own, and brought his sword around in a tight arc aimed at the back of Grog’s knee. The blade bit deep, and black blood sprayed across the floor.

Grog stumbled, caught himself on a broken table, and turned with a roar that shook the remaining glass in the windows.

"Stop your petty tricks, bastard!" Grog growled, his voice thick with pain and fury.

Ren did not answer. He was already moving.

Across the room, Elena was a storm.

Her twin swords moved in a rhythm that she had perfected over years of training, a dance of steel and shadow that left no opening for her enemies to exploit.

Two shadow figures came at her from opposite sides, their blades aimed at her throat and her stomach, and she did not retreat. She stepped forward instead, into the space between their strikes, and brought her left sword up to catch one blade while her right sword carved a line across the other’s chest.

The first shadow figure stumbled back, clutching his throat. The second fell to his knees, black blood pouring from the wound Elena had opened.

She did not watch them fall. She was already turning toward Dorian, who was fighting back to back with one of the younger knights against three more shadow figures.

"Dorian!" she shouted. "Switch!"

Dorian did not question her. He planted his foot and spun, his heavy claymore sweeping in a wide arc that forced the shadow figures to scatter. Elena stepped into the space he had created, her swords flashing, and cut down one of the figures before he could recover.

The remaining two hesitated. Their eyes darted between Elena and Dorian, and for the first time since the fight began, Ren saw something like fear in their hollow faces.

They were losing.

Silla noticed it too.

Her wild eyes swept across the room, taking in the bodies of her fallen comrades, the wounded demons clutching their bleeding arms, the knights still standing despite the punishment they had taken. Her lips peeled back from her sharp teeth, and she let out a sound that was half laugh and half snarl.

"You think you have won?" she spat, parrying a strike from Dorian and dancing back out of reach. "You think killing us will change anything?"

Instead of answering, Dorian just kept swinging.

Silla was faster than Grog. Her blade was thin and curved, and she wielded it like an extension of her own arm, every movement fluid and unpredictable.

But she was also reckless. She took risks that a smarter fighter would never take, gambling that her speed would save her from the consequences.

Dorian’s claymore caught her across the shoulder, and she screamed.

"You—"

She did not finish the word. Elena was there, her twin swords driving Silla back, forcing her to retreat toward the corner where the wall would soon trap her.

"Keep pressing!" Ren shouted. "Do not let her breathe!"

The young knight on the floor was not moving.

Ren saw him out of the corner of his eye, lying in a pool of blood, his sword still clutched in his hand. He did not know if the man was alive or dead. He did not have time to check. Grog was coming again, his massive fists raised, his face twisted with rage.

He waited until Grog committed to a massive overhead swing. As the demon’s guard dropped, Ren moved—not away, but toward him.

He slid under Grog’s arm, felt the demon’s elbow graze his back, and drove his sword up into the soft flesh beneath Grog’s ribs. The blade sank deep, and Grog roared, a sound of pure agony that echoed off the walls and drowned out every other noise in the room.

Ren twisted the blade and pulled it free.

Grog fell to his knees.

It took another ten minutes to subdue the remaining demons.

The shadow figures were killed or captured. He was too tired to do anything but stay upright. Dorian and Elena finally pinned Silla against the wall, blades at her throat.

Dorian and Elena stood over Silla, who was pinned against the wall with a blade at her throat and another at her stomach. Her wild eyes were still wild, but there was no laughter in them now.

Only hatred.

"You should have killed us," she hissed.

"We need you alive," Dorian said. "For now."

Grog was on his knees, his massive hands bound behind his back with rope that looked too thin to hold him. But he was not struggling. He was just staring at the floor, blood dripping from the wound in his side, his breathing slow and heavy.

Ren looked around the room. Five knights were still standing. Two were on the ground, wounded but alive.

One was dead.

He wiped the blood from his sword onto his coat and turned toward the back door.

"Ren! Where are you going?" Elena called out.

"Leo," he said, his voice raspy. "He went after the traitor. He hasn’t come back."

Ren broke into a sprint, his heart hammering. He ran through the rain, his boots splashing in the deep mud of the alley. The silence coming from the darkness was louder than the fight had been.

"Leo! Please, kid... don’t do something you can’t come back from," he whispered.

The rain was still falling when he stepped out into the alley.

The alley was dark and narrow, lined with overflowing trash bins and walls stained with years of grime. The rain had turned the ground to mud, and Ren’s boots sank with every step he took. He called out Leo’s name, but there was no answer.

Just the steady drumming of water and the distant rumble of thunder.

He walked deeper into the alley and he saw it.

Blood.

He turned the corner and stopped.

Leo was standing at the end of the alley with his back to Ren. His clothes were soaked through, clinging to his body like a second skin.

His sword was in his hand, the blade dark with rain and darker with something that rain could not wash away. His shoulders were slumped, and his head was bowed, and he looked like a man who had been standing in that spot for a very long time.

At his feet, a body lay in the mud. Ren’s stomach turned.

"Leo," he called out.

Leo did not move.

"Leo."

Slowly, Leo began to turn.

His face was pale, drained of color, and his eyes were hollow. There was no anger in his gaze. No satisfaction. No triumph. Just exhaustion. Just the flat, dead stare of a man who had done what he had to do and found no peace in it.

The rain fell between them.

"...It is done," Leo said. His voice was quiet, barely louder than the rain. "She will not hurt anyone else."

Ren opened his mouth to speak, but the words died in his throat. What was there to say? "Good job" felt like an insult. "I’m sorry" felt too small.

Leo turned back to the body. He stood there for a moment, looking down at Marta’s face, and then he walked past Ren without another word.

Ren watched him go.

The rain kept falling, washing the blood into the gutters, indifferent to the fact that the boy who had left the village was gone forever.

_

The water had gone cold a long time ago.

I sat in the wooden tub with my knees pulled up to my chest and my arms wrapped around them, staring at the cracks in the ceiling.

The bathhouse was small and rundown, tucked away at the edge of Duskfall where no one came unless they had nowhere else to go. The walls were stained with moisture, and the floorboards creaked under the weight of nothing at all.

Three days had passed since the Incident.

We had captured Silla and Grog. Ren and the other knights had dragged them back to our hideout in Duskfall, bound them with ropes and chains and whatever else they could find, and thrown them into the basement. They sat in the dark with their hollow eyes. I had not looked at them once.

Seraphina arrived on the second day. She took one look at me, said nothing, and walked past to interrogate the prisoners herself. Cassian followed close behind. His golden-blue eyes were soft with pity. I hated it. I didn’t need the world to feel sorry for me.

"Leave them," I had told them. "I will handle them myself."

Seraphina hadn’t argued. She just nodded and left me to my silence. But I wasn’t ready to handle them. I wasn’t ready to handle anything.

I killed Marta.

The thought circled my mind like a vulture waiting for something to die. I had killed her. I had raised my sword and brought it down and watched her body crumple into the mud. I had stood over her as the rain washed her blood into the gutter.

I thought I would feel something. Relief, maybe. Justice. Closure. The kind of satisfaction that came from ending a monster’s life.

But I felt nothing.

Her words kept coming back to me.

You are also killing me to survive. You are also taking a life to protect the ones you love. The only difference between us is that I kill the weak, and you kill the guilty.

Was she right? Was I any different from her?

She killed to live. I killed to protect.

But in the end, we both had blood on our hands. We both had bodies in our wake.

I remembered the old man’s voice from the prison, the first person I ever killed. He had looked at me with that same twisted understanding.

He told me we were all just killers trying to survive in a world made of lies. He said the world would judge him, but it would call me a hero, even though we were doing the exact same thing: clawing for one more breath.

"In the end, all of us are doing this just to... survive."

He was right. Marta was right.

We were all just trying to survive. Marta was trying to survive. The old man was trying to survive. The demons were trying to survive. Even the children in the orphanage, the ones who never made it out, they were just trying to survive.

In this world, right and wrong were just stories people told themselves to sleep at night. Underneath the fairy tales, everyone was just trying to survive.

The only difference was the choices we made along the way.

Some people called it fate or perhaps destiny?

I thought about Roran.

He had told me once that a sword was just a tool. It could kill or protect or destroy or defend, depending on the person who held it. The sword did not choose. The sword did not judge. The sword simply was.

"Find your purpose," he had said. "Find your path. Hold onto it and never let go."

My uncle Theron had said something similar, back in Frosthollow.

"A sword doesn’t only kill. It depends on the person. You decide whether you want to kill or protect or take revenge. Find your purpose. Find your path."

I had been searching for that path ever since I woke up in this life. I thought my purpose was simple: protect the ones I cared about.

But Marta was someone I cared about. And I had killed her myself.

So what did that make my purpose?

What did that make my path?

Was my purpose about killing? Or was it about surviving? Or protecting? Or revenge?

...Maybe it was about all of them.

I was a selfish person. Seraphina was right about that.

Humans were born greedy. We wanted things. We wanted to live. We wanted to protect the people we loved. We wanted to hurt the people who hurt us. We wanted to be strong. We wanted to be safe. We wanted so many things that we could not have, and we were willing to do terrible things to get them.

I wanted to protect Mia. I wanted to save the children. I wanted to kill Kael. I wanted to burn Morana to ash. I wanted to find Voss and tear his laboratory apart with my bare hands.

I wanted to... survive.

I wanted it all. I was a selfish, greedy man, and I was willing to kill to keep what was mine.

So where did that leave me?

I didn’t know, but I could feel something shifting inside me. The pieces were coming together. The rage, the grief, the guilt, the determination, they were all mixing together into something new. Something that was not quite anger and not quite resolve.

I was close to understanding. Close to finding a sword art that wasn’t just a technique, but a reflection of who I was. Something that represented the man who wanted everything.

The old man had said I would regret my choices. Seraphina had said every day was a choice between being better or being worse.

I did not know if I was better. I did not know if I was worse.

I just knew I could not stop.

My thoughts also drifted toward Marta’s power, Gardener’s Touch.

That power kept nagging me from the start, and I was right. When Mia told me about that being, the Forgotten One she called it.

I hadn’t thought about it back then because things were happening too fast, but when I tried to find out about it, I didn’t find anything. There was no name of his, and it was as if he never existed. I never found anyone who even knew about that name.

Then how did Mia know? Did only some people know about it? Or was it just being passed down as a fairy tale story?

Was Marta connected to that being?

Did her power come from the same source? I did not know. I could not find any records. It was as if the Forgotten One had never existed at all, except in fragments of stories that did not fit together.

I had asked Seraphina about it once. She had given me a strange look and told me to be careful. "Do not say things like that in front of the wrong people," she had said. "The church will call you a heretic. They will execute you before you can take another breath."

So I stopped asking.

But the questions remained. Who was the Forgotten One? Why was their name erased?

And why did I feel like I would cross paths with them someday?

I did not have the answers. I did not know if I ever would.

I stopped the train of my thoughts and stood up from the tub. The water dripped from my skin, cold and clean, and I reached for the towel that hung on the back of the door. I dried myself slowly, methodically, trying not to think about anything at all.

My clothes were folded on a broken chair in the corner. My sword leaned against the wall beside them.

I dressed. I strapped Tempest to my hip. The door creaked as I pushed it open.

The rain had stopped. The sky was grey and heavy, but the water had finally stopped falling. The streets of Duskfall were muddy and quiet, and the morning air was cold against my face.

I had prisoners to break. I had a doctor to hunt. I had a future to carve out of the wreckage of my past.

I didn’t know where this path was taking me, and I didn’t know if I would ever be the same person again.

But I was going to walk it anyway.