Chapter 104
The sun had not yet risen, but Daniel Rothchester was already moving. As he always does every day while everybody is still in deep sleep.
Far from the elegant halls of the Royal Academy and the towering spires of its spellcasting chambers, he stood barefoot on a dew-soaked stone platform at the edge of the training fields—an unmarked place the students had long abandoned. Since the passing of the Law of Earned Combat, no one dared train here anymore. There were no enchantments, no safety resets, and no mana-safety rings. Just silence. Cold air. Hard ground. And pain that mattered.
He moved through it all without sound. A breath. A step. A pivot. A flick of the wrist that followed the torque of his waist and the subtle tightening of his lower spine. There were no glowing sigils or incantations, just pure movement, born from years of muscle memory carved into his body by two masters long gone.
From the side, seated like a silent observer of myth, Melgil Veara Gehinnom watched from atop a flat boulder. She didn't speak. She didn't interrupt. She simply bore witness to the evolution of something not yet named.
Daniel had spent his life trying to reconcile two fighting philosophies that should never have met. His father, a retired Black Ops soldier from a shadowed war no history book recorded, had taught him how to move with brutal purpose. No wasted strikes. No pretty motions. Every blow was lethal, or it was nothing. "When you fight," his father once said, "don't aim to win. Aim to erase the option of resistance."
His mother, quiet and sharper than any steel she bore, had passed down the legacy of a hidden bloodline, assassins descended from samurai who had once silenced entire courts without a trace. She taught him the art of restraint, the grace of killing without anger, and how to see an opening before it was born. "Control your weapon," she had whispered once, binding a charm to his wrist. "Or you'll become one."
Daniel carried both their legacies, but he wasn't content to follow either one. He wanted something else, something born from them but no longer defined by them. He trained here, alone and in secret, not because he lacked options, but because he craved reality. He wanted to feel the weight of his limbs, the sting of effort, and the wind's drag on his motion. He wanted every inch of mastery to be earned, not simulated.
What he sought was more than a fighting style; it was a new philosophy. A fusion of instinct and understanding, of fire and electricity, of martial precision and the unstable rhythm of chaos magic.
Unlike many of his peers at the Academy, Daniel refused to depend on magic. He saw it not as power, but as information, something to analyze, exploit, and counter. He studied spell scrolls not to cast them, but to interrupt their rhythm. He didn't learn how to create a fireball to throw one. He learned its tempo and its structure so he could move before it reached its apex and strike through the gap it left behind.
The elements he could command, fire and lightning, he didn't treat as spells either. They were extensions of movement. Fire was misdirection, a flash that drew the eye or scorched the air. Lightning was a weapon of timing, disrupting magical currents, short-circuiting enchantments, and paralyzing nerves before a caster could lift their hand. He didn't need to master water or earth. Every object had electrical potential. Every breath carried static. Every moment could be shifted with precision.
But his true edge, which was also his most dangerous, was the chaos energy pulsing through him like a second bloodstream. Others feared it. Some envied it. Most couldn't use it without madness.
Daniel didn't try to control it. He understood it. Chaos wasn't a force to wield; it was a rhythm to ride. In the space between reaction and control, between form and formlessness, Daniel had found a path. He used chaos not to destroy, but to bend. With it, he could heighten his reflexes, distort perception, and even fracture reality for a heartbeat to create an opening.
His goal was simple but radical: to move in a way that could not be predicted. To strike before a mage finished thinking. To break the pattern of a spell mid-cast. To walk into a storm of elemental fury and never need a shield because the caster would already be unconscious on the floor.
He wasn't trying to become the strongest warrior. Nor the most gifted mage. What Daniel sought was far more dangerous than either.
He wanted to become the unanswerable.
He moved like a dancer taught by wolves and monks. Every slide became a feint. Every punch disguised a micro-sigil. His backstep ignited fire at his heel, which vanished a moment later in a burst of electric static. He wasn't casting spells; he was the spell. He wasn't dodging—he was rewriting the path of reality around him.
And the most terrifying part? He was still holding back.
Melgil continued to watch in silence, as she always knew Dane's thoughts and traits; beside him she was at peace and in control, hunted beside him, and bled and healed in the same fires. And yet even she had never done this. What she witnessed now was no longer a prodigy refining his talent. It was something new being born.
Daniel's plan, ambitious as it seemed, was grounded in clarity. He didn't want to be a weapon others feared. He wanted to be a response no one could prepare for. He wanted a style his parents could look at and recognize, not because it mimicked their methods, but because it honored the truths behind them. Discipline and instinct. Precision and unpredictability. Mastery and surrender.
He finished the final movement, a rising hook-slice trailed with an arc of violet lightning, and came to stillness. His chest rose and fell with slow, even breaths. Sweat clung to his skin like armor.
He turned to Melgil then, eyes unreadable. He wasn't asking for praise. He was seeking clarity.
"Was it clean?" he asked.
Melgil blinked slowly. Then she nodded, her voice just a breath above the morning wind.
"It wasn't clean," she said. "It was alive."
Daniel allowed himself a rare smile, quiet and tired, as though a heavy weight had shifted slightly on his shoulders.
"Then it's almost ready; casting spells is fundamentally flawed when faced with a melee fighter," he whispered.
"Having a nearly endless supply of energy is not a guaranteed victory, as there are thousands of different spells being created."
"and beings that are evolving from those that I and my team imagined and designed in the virtual game that came real"
"I can have a slow, easy life here, but my instinct is calling me. I feel more alive when I face the unknown and gamble toward the thrill of hunting, exploration, and adventure."
"I made this world. If I must burn its core to fix it… so be it."
Every morning, even in this new world, he trained. His movements were a fusion of Azai swordplay and Lazarus tactical efficiency, grace and brutality blended in seamless form. To him, combat was not about winning. It was a form of expression. A necessity. A kind of language spoken through motion. A sword, after all, was not drawn to win. It was drawn to prevent the need to.
Though his demeanor was stoic, there was something buried deep within him, a protective instinct, quiet but powerful. Perhaps it was a remnant of his parents' teachings or a glitch in the cold machine of his mind. Whatever it was, Dane often found himself drawn to the vulnerable, the overlooked, and the broken.
His version of justice was never driven by fury. It was exact. Surgical. He did not scream when something enraged him. He acted. Calculated. Clean. And when he did, he became something others mistook for a monster.
But monsters, he often thought, didn't always growl. Sometimes, they coded. Taught. Smiled.
As the original architect of Arcane Crusade, Dane possessed knowledge that bordered on divine. He remembered the backend systems, the unpatched exploits, and the core mechanics buried under layers of illusion. It gave him power, almost omniscient awareness, but it also gave him guilt.
The game he once built to inspire creativity and escape had become a twisted reality, imprisoning minds, reshaping destinies, and fueling a god's cruel experiment. He had not meant to play God. But now he walked among the pieces of the board he built, trying to fix what had spiraled beyond control.
He did not lead armies. He did not broadcast his intentions. He worked in silence, in shadows, manipulating the current systems that have evolved, rerouting fate like a chessmaster with no name on the board. If he had to burn his creation to fix it, he would. That was the weight he carried. And yet, for all his control, Dane feared himself more than any enemy.
There were times, though, when he faltered. Alone in silence, remembering the smiles of his parents, or watching someone struggle beneath the weight of the world, he would feel something distant, unfamiliar, and almost dangerous.
But those moments were fleeting. He buried them. He always did.
To Dane, justice was not about emotion. It was about logic, cause and effect, and protecting what was vulnerable through action, not words. Strength, he believed, without purpose, was just tyranny in disguise. And this world, the one he had been punished to live in, was broken code. It needed someone who could see the patterns to reset it.
Rebirth was not redemption.
It was a test.
Dane Lazarus was a paradox in motion. Cold, yet filled with purpose. Detached, yet still loyal to the memory of love and what it should represent in another person's eyes. A man who had once dreamed of hunting alongside his family… now forced to hunt monsters of his own making. He hated the chaos he helped unleash, but he was the only one capable of ending it.
And so he moved forward, calm, efficient, and calculating.
Not because he wanted to be the strongest, but because the world he built had no place for anything less.
And somewhere, not far, something stirred in the shadows. Watching. Waiting. Perhaps one of those who was weary of his existence, as he was an anomaly in the system itself,