The rain poured in fine, silvery threads—each droplet shimmering briefly before being swallowed by the smoke-laden gloom that hung over the broken ruins of the Salvation Temple courtyard. Beneath this mourning sky, a creature crouched like a grotesque statue come to life.
Felix.
Or what remained of him.
Seeing the boy's new form—towering, sinewed, hunched on all fours with eyes like twin coals carved from an ancient inferno—Xiang Zainan was, for a rare moment, still.
So this is what the crow birthed, he thought. 'a full metamorphosis into A werewolf?'
To be honest, It had been an impulsive experiment, letting the boy devour one of his mutated crows.
Xiang Zainan had assumed it would trigger a wild mutation in the dormant Aetherborne Strain festering inside Felix, but he had not anticipated this outcome. A beast clothed in sinew and snarling breath—a monster that made the concept of a "werewolf" feel hollow in comparison.
I expected instability, an unguided transformation, perhaps even a rapid cellular decay resulting in death. But this…' He tilted his ghostly head as if trying to inspect an insect pinned to glass.
'This is much better... way better than anything I could have ever expected! If I can control this exact strand that made him into this and isolate it, my strength would not just come from myself anymore. No longer would I have to worry about fighting with my own power!'
From across the courtyard, Aesteros narrowed his eyes at the snarling creature. He regarded it not with awe or fear, but with a disgust so deep it curled his lip. The flames behind his pupils intensified.
"So," he said, his voice sharp with divine scorn, "you are a demonic spirit who casts forbidden curse magic upon your followers. Turning people into beasts… is that how your power spreads?"
Xiang Zainan didn't answer. He hovered in silence, ethereal and unblinking.
"Disgusting," Aesteros spat.
The word echoed in Xiang Zainan's mind, but he did not dwell on the priest's revulsion. He was already deep in thought.
'Curse magic… Is that what they call this here? On Earth, the concept of lycanthropy was one of mythology—triggered by the full moon, repelled by silver. But there's no lunar dependency here, and the mechanism is biological, caused by me. A mutation of a DNA strain rather than a spell of the arcane…'
'Still, perhaps the two are not so different. Could the legends of 'curse magic' be misunderstood science? Or is my strain evolving into something that is similar to curse magic?
He made a note—mental, precise—to revisit the matter. If this mutation could be replicated, refined, controlled, it could serve as a foundation for a new class of soldiers to serve under him. But this was neither the time nor place for this.
Not yet.
What he needed now was data. A field test. And what more perfect opportunity than an actual battle.
Zainan sent a whisper into Felix's mind telling him the strategic plan he had come up with to kill the priest.
But no answer came. No flicker of acknowledgment. Felix did not react as he once had. There was no sense of reverence towards his 'divine message' at all.
'His mind is gone, Xiang Zainan realized. 'His humanity is drowned beneath a tide of bacterial instinct. The strain has consumed his cognitive framework… he probably couldn't tell his familiars apart from his enemies now.'
Fine. Then he would not use words.
Zainan focused, channeling his will not into Felix's mind, but directly into the seething mass of microbes crawling through the boy's bloodstream.
[Kill Anything Breathing.]
The command burned through Felix's nerves like a jolt of electricity.
The werewolf-like creature snarled. Its jaws opened—not in rage, but in a gleeful, bubbling hunger—and it dropped to all fours. The hair along its back bristled and twitched like fungal tendrils sensing prey.
Then, with a powerful heave of its mutated limbs, it sprinted forward, muscles ripping under the strain, regenerating as they tore. Each movement was wrong—too fast, too efficient, not animalistic but microbial, as though the body had forgotten it was ever human.
Eleven meters vanished beneath him in an instant. The monster leapt, its limbs coiling midair, and descended upon Aesteros like a falling star.
Aesteros took one step back, eyes locked on the abomination. Now that the beast was closer, he saw the cracks in its masquerade.
This was not a werewolf in any classical sense. It bore no tail nor any lupine grace. Its body was man-shaped but wrong. The 'fur' was not fur, but overgrown black hair—coarse and twitching with inner life, woven together like knotted wire. Patches of it were matted with blood. From the creature's open wounds leaked thick, slow drips of corrupted ichor. Within those wounds, something moved. Black bacteria slithered like eels in a stagnant pond.
The only appendages that could really be called similar to a wolf were just the shaped ears and slightly protruding jaw on the creature.
The creature twitched as it landed, and a gash tore across its left shoulder. From the flesh emerged tiny tendrils of decay, blindly reaching outward, consuming exposed skin to feed the whole.
Aesteros's jaw tightened.
'Zombification? But that's impossible.This...thing has already went through the process of mutation into a werewolf. The possibility that it went through a second mutation into an undead is absurd!'
Unless its creator was tremendously skilled in manipulating the corrupted arts. Aesteros began to think that this evil spirit had been slowly gathering strength and intelligence, waiting for the day to take over this city.
'I will die ten times over before your sacrilegious acts shall defile this holy ground. Goddess give me strength.'
He raised his scepter and muttered a prayer to give him the power to vanquish his foes.
"Sanctum Lucis, Resplende in Corruptione." Aesteros decided if he wanted to win this fight, his incantations needed to be at full strength. So he chose to use the language of Hades from now on.
A shield of golden light exploded outward, catching the monster mid-pounce. The beast howled, burning where the light touched it, but it did not fall back.
It endured the attack.
It clawed forward through the radiance, screaming as chunks of melting hair and flesh fell from its body only to be replaced by new growth, sprouting like fungus in a plague swamp.
As the beast neared Aesteros' feet, he quickly swiped upwards creating a rippling force from its claws that sent the priest flying out of his own spell.
Felix lunged again, claws tearing through the broken earth, and Aesteros barely dodged aside. The beast's talons carved through stone as though it were soft bark, sending shards of marble flying.
Aesteros spun his scepter and struck with a blinding arc of golden fire—"Luminis Lancea!"—and a spear of condensed light shot from the head of the weapon. It pierced Felix's side, burning a hole through the thick, pulsing mass of hair and tissue. The creature screeched and staggered, but it didn't fall.
Instead, it twisted unnaturally on its spine and swiped its claw in a wide circle, nearly catching the priest's throat.
Fast. Faster than before.
Aesteros muttered a second prayer under his breath, summoning radiant chains of divine origin—"Catenae Solis". The golden links surged forward and bound Felix's arms mid-swing, halting his momentum. But the bacteria inside him reacted instantly—bursting from his flesh as blackened tendrils, they snapped the holy chains like brittle twine.
A perfect biological counter.
Felix surged forward with a roar. Claw met steel as Aesteros raised his scepter to block the strike. The force sent the priest sliding backward, boots carving lines into the mud. His arms trembled under the blow. Felix pursued immediately, leaping high and then crashing down like a weighted corpse.
"Lux Impulsum!"
Aesteros thrust both palms forward and released a sphere of radiant impact. It exploded in a dome of golden force, blasting Felix back into a shattered column. For a moment, the beast lay still.
Now. Aesteros raised his scepter for a fatal strike—divine energy surging to a crescendo.
Then the air split with a shriek—a sound paralyzing to any living thing with cognition near it.
A pressure swept across the battlefield like an invisible wave. Xiang Zainan had intervened. From a corner of the ruins, a forgotten corpse jolted upright, animated by bacterial strands running through its limbs like puppet strings.
The corpse staggered toward Aesteros, face still bearing the curled expression of plague death. In that instant distraction, Felix moved again—violent and wordlessly.
He lunged from the debris with inhuman precision, grabbed Aesteros by the arm, and bit into his shoulder—not like a wolf, but like a disease claiming its host. The priest screamed, the gold glow flickering around his robes.
He retaliated with a blast of raw energy, point-blank—"Corona Severae!"
The light seared Felix's face, melting part of his snout and revealing teeth warped into splinters. But the beast didn't recoil.
He grinned through the burn.
Then he brought both claws together and drove them into Aesteros's ribs, lifting the priest off the ground. Black bacteria surged from his claws and began crawling into the wounds.
Aesteros's vision blurred. The bacteria were trying to eat his divine essence but they failed to do so, resulting in both his spirituality and the bacteria extinguishing each other. But his power could not keep up with the rapid regeneration of the black strands.
Backed into a corner with no other choice, Aesteros made a gamble.
He screamed a name—not a spell or scripture, nor in Hades, but a direct call to the Heavens themselves.
"Eryndor, Archangel of the Dawn! I invoke your vestige!"