The Path of Titles and Shadows
Three months on foot with the exosuit grinding beneath every step, the journey back to Lowmarch was as punishing as it was essential. I—Kael Veyrarax, no longer Revenant—had walked the 1,400 kilometers from Ironlan to Romania once more, my body tempered like steel with each step. My exosuit, scarred from constant use, creaked at the joints, but it remained loyal, enabling me to keep a brutal pace of 50 kilometers per day.
Lowmarch hadn't changed much. Grey stone streets, the scent of iron in the mist, and watchful eyes that never blinked. As I stepped into the village outskirts, my boots echoing against the cracked cobblestones, a familiar silhouette stood waiting.
Not Vakill this time—but the messenger.
He bowed, respectful. "RoyalKnight Kael… or should I say, soon-to-be?"
I narrowed my eyes. "Don't mock titles I don't have."
The man shook his head and smiled faintly. "Then allow the Veyraxicos council to correct that. Vakill asked me to deliver this personally—he believes you're overdue for recognition."
He handed me a sealed letter with the insignia of the Veyrax Royal Palace, once the Kremlin in Moscow, now the heart of power for Exosword practitioners. Within were the preliminary approvals for an official rank examination—an attempt to secure my place at 7.1, qualifying me for the title of RoyalKnight.
"This title system," I muttered as I read, "is it just politics?"
"Politics," he replied, "is just war with fancier rules. You need the status if you intend to stand against Eastborn. Titles sway borders, commanders, and crowns."
That name again—Eastborn.
A title, not a name. A title given to the strongest swordbearer in the Eastern regions, and one that now belonged to a man I once thought a mere distant relative of Kazakov. But everything changed after the last assassination attempt.
Kazakov himself had appeared—not just a whisper, not a rumor, but in the flesh. The emperor of the Veyrax Kingdom. His presence turned men to silence. Vakill's voice echoed in my memory:
"What kind of father wouldn't try to save his son?"
That was the moment everything shifted. Eastborn wasn't a nephew. Not adopted. Not a political pawn. He was Kazakov's biological son—half-blooded, yes, but blood nonetheless. Maybe passed over. Maybe deliberately hidden. But not forgotten.
And now, I knew. This wasn't just a regional fight. This was royal war.
---
Back in Lowmarch, the Firstborn Armor project was underway—but far from complete. Ten days ago, Vakill and I began its design. Now, only the inner layer—the padded interface, spinal reinforcements, and exoskeletal struts—had taken form. The outer protection, the tungsten-carbide plating and reinforced shell, hadn't even begun.
Vakill had left town earlier that morning, heading to find a rumored blacksmith known for trading in tungsten carbide—an essential resource for Firstborn's shell. We hadn't worried about the weight. The hyper-exoskeleton, powered directly by the Starcore, was capable of managing over 5,000 horsepower. Strength wasn't the issue. Resources were.
I stood before the half-assembled armor frame, sweat on my brow, and the weight of war on my shoulders.
And then came the chaos.
Assassination attempts. Dozens.
The moment I returned to Lowmarch, the shadows followed. The first bolt came from a rooftop—Vakill caught it midair with a snap of his blade. The next was a vendor offering poisoned bread. Then came the flood.
Three men ambushed me in the alley by the forge—one had a shatter-blade, the other two lashed chain-whips laced with aether venom. I smashed one's skull with a pipe. Vakill scorched another.
On the fifth day, five more. Coordinated. Two were swift-style blades, moving like ghosts. Blood spilled. Villagers died. One of my engineers didn't make it.
By the tenth day, Lowmarch was no longer a sleepy outpost. It was a fort under siege. And I had barely slept.
---
In those sleepless nights, when the mind sharpens or shatters, I stared into the Starcore—our miniaturized reactor, salvaged from beneath Ironlan. I had one insane idea: reverse fusion.
Normal fusion made heavier elements. Hydrogen into helium. Helium into iron. But I theorized I could reverse it—break heavy elements down, and control their recombination. My body didn't have the resonance of Lucien's bloodline, so Body Recognition, the healing art of the Veyrax descendants, rejected me. Every attempt failed.
I wasn't born with a core. Mine was implanted.
The descendants' bodies were symphonic to their cores. Mine was dissonance. So I abandoned that path.
Instead, I turned to material hardening. Made my body a weapon.
I forged fingertip blades. Reinforced my joints. Powered my limbs to fracture stone. If I couldn't heal, I'd never get wounded. And if I was wounded… I'd keep going.
---
I experimented with reverse fusion daily.
A mist of H₂O to blind enemies.
A blast of methane to ignite a room.
A blade of pure carbon forged in a heartbeat.
I could conjure iron, copper, and lead—but anything heavier, like tungsten, drained the Starcore rapidly. One tungsten spike cost 10% of its power. Uranium? Impossible—for now.
Precision was everything.
The outer layer of Firstborn would need tungsten carbide—light enough to wear, dense enough to withstand an ExoKnight's strike. But we didn't have the materials yet.
Not until Vakill returned.
And still, the assassins came.
They came at dawn. At dusk. In the dark. With smiles and weapons. Some were children. Some were priests. Some carried blades with Eastborn's crest.
But I was Kael Veyrarax now.
I had walked 1,400 kilometers for this war. I had given up healing to become a weapon. I had cast aside my old name to honor the man whose body I now wore.
Let them come.
I would make the road to Eastborn paved in their bones.
---
The eleventh night brought silence. No assassins. No poisoned bread. No shadow slipping past broken gutters. Just wind, and the pulse of the Starcore beneath my skin.
I didn't trust it.
I stayed awake.
And at 3:43 AM, the forge exploded.
Flames ate the eastern side of Lowmarch. The blast wave flung me into a support pillar and splintered my left shoulder. I dragged myself upright through smoke and burning debris. Screams echoed—men, women, metal bending under fire. The partial Firstborn frame was gone—reduced to shrapnel and molten steel.
They had finally stopped aiming for me.
They went for the armor.
The symbol.
I found three survivors clawing their way from the ash. One was Edek, a welder boy who joined us five days ago. Half his face was scorched. One eye gone.
"Forgive me," he whispered. "I let them in… they wore forge tags."
I gripped his hand. "You held the line. That's all that matters."
He died seconds later.
---
By morning, I ordered every working hand to gather in the square. Thirty-seven of us left. Not enough.
I needed Vakill back. We needed tungsten. We needed armor. But all we had was fear, tools, and a forge turned to ruin.
And so I gave them fear of me instead.
"This ends now," I said. My voice wasn't loud, but the reactor in my chest hummed with fury.
"You've seen fire. Blood. Blades in the dark. But now they fear us. Because we're still here."
I stood atop the ruined forge, one arm wrapped in crude carbon plating, blood dripping from the other. I reached out and clenched my fist.
From the ground, from the air, from vapor itself—I drew elements. Not just carbon. Not just water. I broke copper pipes, absorbed their makeup, and rebuilt them—fused carbon sheaths with iron bands to reinforce my ribs. Every movement came easier now. Faster.
"You want protection?" I said. "We'll become our own armor."
I wasn't waiting for tungsten anymore.
If we couldn't build Firstborn…
We would become Warfather.
---
On the twelfth night, Vakill returned.
His cloak was ripped. His leg, burned. But on his back, wrapped in four layers of scrapmetal cloth, were two bricks of tungsten carbide and a near-forgotten blade forged by a blacksmith whose shop sat on a mine shaft long swallowed by time.
"You look like shit," I told him.
"Had to kill a priest," he said, limping. "They're getting creative."
He didn't ask how many we'd lost. He looked around and already knew.
When he saw the remnants of Firstborn, he didn't curse or break. He nodded once, and then dropped the metal into the ash pile.
"We start again. This time, make it lighter."
"We have Starcore output for 5,000 horsepower. We can carry the weight."
"I'm not worried about us carrying it," he said. "I'm worried about how many others need to wear it too."
My silence answered him.
We weren't building one armor anymore.
We were building a revolution.
---
The blade cooled in my hand, but I did not.
I had no time.
Not for celebration.
Not for recovery.
The Starcore still pulsed—deep under the forge's floor like a dormant god stirring in its sleep. I stared down into the vent, where raw energy licked the air in slow spirals of heat and radiation.
This isn't enough, I realized. A weapon was not enough.
We would need armor—a symbol.
Something they couldn't ignore.
But the forge was dying.
And so was I.
My fingers trembled from the backlash. I had poured too much of myself into the weapon. And now the forge needed more. Steel alone couldn't withstand what was coming—not against ExoKnights, not against Eastborn's god-tier arsenal. It needed something beyond forged metal.
It needed a sacrament.
I stood, took off what remained of my shirt, and walked to the edge of the Starcore's vent.
"Kael," Vakill rasped behind me, "what are you doing?"
"I'm done wearing armor," I said. "From now on… I am the forge."
And then I stepped into the core's edge.
The heat should have killed me instantly.
But I channeled it—through the spine of Veyraxos, which I stabbed into the crucible beside me. The blade became my conduit. My bones hummed with nuclear current. My skin cracked—burned—then hardened as nanocarbon dust, tungsten shavings, and plasma-forged alloy dust fused directly into my flesh.
Vakill screamed.
He tried to pull me out.
He couldn't.
I was becoming something else.
Six hours passed.
Then twelve.
Then a full day.
I did not move.
I could not.
The metal fused around my arms, my chest, my ribs. It crawled like vines—growing into armor that had no seam, no hinge, no false face. I was encased in the thing I had bled to build. The cost?
I couldn't fight. Not yet.
My muscles were raw cables of fatigue, wrapped in titanium nerves and bone grafts so hot they steamed under the cold.
I was a statue.
A breathing monument to revenge.
---
Night fell.
That's when the assassin came.
He didn't make a sound.
He never had to.
He dropped from the rafters—pure obsidian exosuit, plated in light-absorbent crystal. A Shadow-Class hunter, bred for one purpose: killing awakened souls before they fully matured.
Vakill met him mid-strike, ancient spine-sword catching the first blow—but barely. The assassin moved like silence made flesh, a dagger sliding from his sleeve and slashing straight through Vakill's shoulder.
"Coward!" Vakill roared, stumbling back.
The assassin didn't answer.
He lunged again—and this time, Vakill barely managed to twist aside, losing a chunk of his armor.
And I…
I couldn't move.
I stood in the forge's center, molten armor steaming on my body, muscles locked by heat-graft paralysis.
But I couldn't watch Vakill fall.
Not like this.
I forced my knee to shift.
Agony.
Then another step.
I roared—not in rage, but in rebellion. My body screamed. My lungs tasted metal. But I reached out, grabbed a fallen pipe, and hurled it like a javelin.
The assassin dodged.
But he saw me now.
And he smiled.
He turned.
Rushed me.
I couldn't fight. Not really. But I could act as a shield.
He struck me straight through the ribs with a carbon blade—expecting to pierce flesh.
He hit plated bone instead.
I didn't flinch.
He did.
And that's when the ground trembled.
Not the forge.
Me.
My pupils burned gold.
My breath exhaled with something ancient.
Something not mine.
And then I heard it—inside me:
"Let go. I'll take it from here."
Lucien.
He surged forward—through me, as me.
My muscles moved again, but not under my control. My hand lifted the fallen blade Vakill had dropped. My body bent like it remembered forms I had never learned.
Lucien moved like a ghost returned to war.
He parried three strikes in half a second. Then slammed the assassin into the far wall with a knee so fast it cracked stone.
Vakill blinked.
"…Lucien?"
Lucien didn't answer.
He just fought.
The assassin tried to blink out—cloak—vanish—but Lucien had already predicted it. He surged into a side roll, caught the assassin mid-phase, and drove Veyraxos into his thigh.
The weapon, even half-wielded, screamed with suppressed power.
The assassin howled and retreated, bleeding black from the wound.
Lucien didn't chase.
He stood there, smoke rising from the armor Kael had forged, golden eyes burning like twin suns.
Then he looked at Vakill and said one sentence:
"Tell the others: Three months."
Vakill blinked. "Why?"
Lucien looked down at my hands—his hands—and exhaled.
"This body is fractured. It needs time. Time to regrow, to become whole."
He turned toward the stars beyond the forge skylight.
"…And then we end Eastborn."
---