The sun rose with great difficulty over the smoking ruins of the Ward. It was a pale, sickly disc struggling to break through the thick layers of toxic smog. In the kitchen of the Broken Horn, the air hung heavy with the smell of old grease and stale coffee. Juro sat at the shaky wooden table with his broad shoulders hunched, as if he carried the weight of the entire sky. He stared with a misty gaze into his cold cup of coffee, while his pipe rested in the corner of his mouth without a single spark of fire.
“I should have given him special gloves,” Juro muttered to his own reflection in the black liquid. “Something with smoke effects. Something mysterious. A scarf that flutters in the wind like a forgotten soul. Something special, you know? Something that screams he is the apprentice of the Smoke King. Now he walks around with those blinding mythical sun things and I look like an extra in his story. An old man watching the youth steal the show.”
Vespera sat opposite him, with her silver needles flashing rhythmically as she stitched a complex symbol structure into a silk cloth. She let out a deep, weary sigh without looking up. “Juro, stop with that bruised ego. The myth says that Frey has a pig named Gullinbursti. A beast made from pure gold. Do you see a pig anywhere around here? In this stinking hole of a district? No? Then that boy still needs a mentor to teach him how to survive when the gods are not home. And watch what you say about the gods, even if you think they are not listening.”
Juro suddenly looked around startled, with his eyes darting to the dark corners of the kitchen. “No. Nowhere a pig. Not a grunt to be found. Only rats and shadows.” He began to sit up slowly while his spine cracked loudly. His eyes caught fire again as the passion of the old warrior flowed through his veins. “Wait a minute. Nobody brings me down! The smoke is still the master of this battlefield! The shadow is where the fight is won!” He leaned forward and whispered quickly, “Thanks, VE!” before storming out of the kitchen like a man possessed, leaving a trail of sparks from his pipe.
Juro found Silarias on the makeshift training field behind the tavern. A place covered with rusted scrap and broken dreams. Without warning, and with the speed of an advancing forest fire, Juro grabbed the boy by his waist and threw him into the air with a powerful swing.
“Wake up, sunshine! Time to see if you have grown or if you have just started glowing harder!”
They collided in mid-air. Juro fought with an intensity the mentors rarely saw from him. He was excited, wilder, and faster than usual. His movements were a smooth dance of tricks and smoke. Silarias blocked the blows with his new gloves, while the metal sang at every impact. Juro noticed it immediately because the boy had physically changed. He was stronger and his reflexes were sharper, almost natural.
But Juro was a veteran of the forgotten martial arts. A man who had survived a thousand defeats to earn a single victory. With a cunning smoke trick letting his form literally dissolve into a gray mist, he appeared behind the boy and swept him off his feet with a well-aimed kick.
Silarias slammed into the dust, but he did not stay down. He laughed with a bright sound that broke the heaviness of the morning. “Not bad, Juro. You are getting faster as you get older. But bring the rest of them out, because I have discovered something new.”
He pulled out an old parchment book he had borrowed from Nyx with permission. Well, almost permission. The paper was yellowed and smelled of ancient magic. “This is about special powers and the hidden fighting styles of the islands. I am a Nobody, I know, but I am special. So I have to fight special, just like you do.”
Juro let out a roar of laughter, which was a raw sound from his deepest being. Tears of pure pride rolled down his lined cheeks. “WAIT HERE, LITTLE LION!” He ran inside with unlikely speed and dragged Moria, Bones, and Beat outside, while each was more surprised than the last. “Look at this little cub! Show them what you said, Sil! Show them that the sun does not just illuminate, it devours!”
In the corner of the square, Nyx sat leaning against the massive side of Toji. The dog was small again, but his eyes radiated an unnatural wisdom. Nyx’s gaze fell on the book in Silarias’s hands and her face immediately began to turn deep red. Steam almost seemed to come from her ears.
“THIEF! THIEF! THAT IS MY TEMPLE BOOK! I STOLE THAT FIRST!” she barked sharply, with her voice cutting across the square.
Silarias froze instantly. The golden aura of his lion power flickered restlessly like a candle in the wind. “I, uh. Sorry, Nyx! Really! I wanted to ask but you were sleeping so soundly and I did not want to break the flow and…”
Nyx cut him off brutally. She stood up and raised her fist with a sinister, almost mischievous smile on her face to mask her true anger. “We share everything, right, stupid lion? Next time you ask, or I will feed you to Toji!” She laughed briefly, but her eyes remained sharp and probing. “So what now? Should these old fossils help you burn the world down?”
Silarias’s expression changed instantly. The childlike innocence disappeared and was replaced by a cold focus that made the mentors shiver.
“I believe it went like this. COME. GET. SOME!”
Silarias slammed his two gloves together with a deafening clap. The sound was not metal on metal, but the crack of a lightning strike. Instead of a normal energy explosion, the power around him began to pull inward, as if he were creating a black hole. His body began to visibly change while his muscles became more compact and his stature more robust. He transformed into a beast-man, which was a hybrid of divine power and animal instinct.
The ancient mysticism from the book began to join with his bones and nerves. His pupils narrowed into vertical slits that were golden and wild, like those of a predator from the jungle. He grew half a meter on the spot, with his clothes tearing under the pressure of his new form.
The boy unleashed a primal cry that shook the foundations of the district.
The shockwave of his aura was so extreme that Sato and Beat were literally thrown through the air, where they landed with a hard thud against the brick wall of the tavern. Juro held his ground with the greatest difficulty, while his boots dug deep trenches into the hard earth as he fought the pressure. Moria had to hook her four extra mechanical arms deep into Juro’s heavy armor to keep from being blown away like a leaf in a storm.
The smoke from the discharge slowly cleared. Silarias stood in the center, with his skin steaming with a scorching golden heat that made the air vibrate.
The mentors looked at each other. The initial shock turned in a fraction of a second into pure, unfiltered adrenaline. The hunter’s spirit within them awakened. “HA HA HA! LET’S GO!” Moria roared, while her mechanical arms began to scream.
They all dove at him at once in a coordinated attack by the best fighters the Ward had ever known. Silarias met them in the air while floating on the pure heat pressure of his solar aura. While he fought, he began to nonchalantly explain what he was doing, with his voice sounding deeper and calmer, as if he were a teacher giving a lesson.
“I got this from the book, but also by watching Jane. Her movements were smooth, like water flowing through a valley. I am a Nobody, so I have no form of my own. I copy what I see. I am the mirror of your strength.”
He tried to steal Beat’s impossible speed while moving to a rhythm that followed the heartbeat of the sun itself. “SOLAR SONAR!” With every movement, he sent out a pulse of heat that gave away his opponents’ positions in the smoke.
Then he rammed his arms into the ground with a dull thud, while his face twisted by the immense effort. “KINGDOM OF BATHALA!”
The ground beneath the square ripped open. Golden pillars decorated with ancient signs shot up from the asphalt with brute force. But the technique was unstable because the pillars shook violently and collapsed into glowing rubble after a few seconds. He had not managed to execute the techniques perfectly yet, but the attempt alone was insane. He behaved like a sponge, soaking up the decades of experience from the mentors and creating his own flawed but deadly version of it.
Juro dodged a devastating punch that made the air behind him explode. “He is learning faster than the smoke can spread!” he shouted to the others. “He is no Nobody. He is a mirror of the gods using our own sins against us!”
Silarias now stood eye to eye with Juro, with his fist only centimeters from Juro’s face. The heat was so intense that the mentor’s beard began to singe. Silarias breathed heavily while the markings on his arms glowed bright like lava.
“Another round, mentor?” Silarias asked hoarsely.
Behind them in the deep shadow of the tavern, Toji’s eyes glowed golden. The dog saw something the mentors missed in their battle passion. Silarias’s shadow on the wall was no longer that of a little boy, but that of a grown king ruling over a burning world from a throne of ash.
But then the boy’s eyes flickered. The immense pressure of the power fusion and the failed attempt to summon the kingdom was simply too much for his thirteen-year-old body. The gold in his veins, which had been flowing like liquid fire, suddenly retreated into the gloves with a painful hiss.
“One. More. Round.” His voice died away. His legs gave out immediately and he collapsed forward. Before his face even hit the ground, he had already drifted into a deep, dreamless sleep of total exhaustion. The silence that followed was heavy and oppressive, while only the soft hissing of steam rising from his overheated body could be heard.
Juro wiped the sweat from his forehead with a shaking hand and lowered his guard. His heart was still pounding in his throat. “That little cub. He almost had us.” He stopped mid-sentence. His ears, which were trained on every tiny sound in the smoke, flickered. Out of the thick clouds of smoke came a sound that did not belong on an apocalyptic battlefield at all.
A distinct, rhythmic grunt echoed through the ruins.
Juro looked around confused, while his pipe had actually fallen to the ground now. “Did I hear that right? Tell me the smoke has not permanently damaged my brain. Did I hear a pig?”
Beat shot past Juro like a blue flash with his eyes wide with childlike enthusiasm. “PIG! PIGGY! Look there! Where are you going, little bacon bit?!”
Beat tried to catch the animal with his super speed, which was a move that would normally freeze time itself. But to everyone’s surprise, the fastest man in the Ward stumbled in a way that seemed physically impossible. It was as if the ground beneath his feet had deliberately moved to stop him. He slammed face first into the dust, kicking up a cloud of sand.
The smoke finally cleared completely and the mentors froze in place. There he stood. Not an ordinary pig, but a wonder of mythical technology and divine craftsmanship. The animal had bristles of glowing metal that spread a warm golden glow in the eternal darkness of the Ward. His eyes were small, intelligent rubies that sparkled with ancient knowledge, while his hooves left trails of melted gold in the black asphalt.
Vespera whispered with a voice full of respect, “The legend is true. Gullinbursti. The golden bristles that can light up the night like day.”
The pig ignored the mighty mentors completely. He walked with a royal, almost arrogant gait toward the unconscious Silarias. With his snout, he gently and softly nudged the boy’s cheek, as if greeting an old friend he had not seen in far too long.
Despite his modest size, the golden boar slid his back with perfect precision under Silarias’s limp arm. With a strength that would make an armored tank shake, he lifted the boy onto his back. Silarias lay there fast asleep while the pig’s golden bristles formed a warm, protective force field around him. This field immediately began to heal the exhaustion and repair the damage to his muscles with a soft, pulsing energy.
Juro stood watching with his mouth open. “So Vespera was right. Frey really did send his pig. But how in the name of the corrupted god did that thing get through the Ward’s barriers without our sensors even making a peep?”
The pig looked at Juro once with a look that radiated pure contempt for human ignorance. He gave a short, proud grunt and began to walk calmly toward the tavern with Silarias safe and stable on his back.
Moria laughed hoarsely while her mechanical arms finally relaxed. “Well, Juro, there goes your apprentice. He officially has a better means of transport than your old smoke clouds. The gods sent their own taxi.”
Nyx watched from the sidelines with her eyes wide with amazement and a hint of jealousy, while Toji growled softly beside her. The guardian of the underworld and the bearer of the sun had found each other.
The golden swine stopped for a moment at the door of the Broken Horn. He turned his head and looked into the distant shadows where the Prince’s spies were hiding. His golden bristles suddenly flashed so brightly that the entire street was bathed in the light of a real sun. A warning to the darkness. The lion sleeps, but the forge is hot.
