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Chapter 5 - How Do You Kill a Legend?

The city was a corpse on the horizon , silent, stripped, and half-eaten by rust. We stood miles away from it, inside the skeleton of what was once a power facility. The wind whistled through broken vents and cracked glass, carrying the smell of oil and old storms. Every footstep echoed too loud, every shadow moved a fraction too slow.

Drokmar went first, his frame brushing against steel beams that once held entire turbines. The floor trembled slightly beneath his weight, dust falling like grey rain. Lyren followed him, ghostlike, her blade drawn but angled low. I watched her reflection flicker in every shard of broken glass we passed , a phantom within a phantom.

Aurelius trailed behind me, muttering equations under his breath like a priest repeating scripture. He carried that same calm arrogance, the kind that made me want to punch him and thank him in the same breath.

"This place hums," he said. "Residual energy. Not natural."

I knew what he meant before he said it. The storm inside me , the thing I still pretended I could control , began to stir. My fingertips itched. The air crackled faintly, a heartbeat buried in metal.

"This was one of the old conduits," Drokmar said, brushing ash off a corroded generator. "Used to channel energy from the relics before the Seals broke."

"How do you know that?" I asked.

He didn't answer. Just looked at me with that mountain silence of his , the kind that carried history older than war. I had stopped asking Drokmar about his past weeks ago. The man wasn't hiding something; he was surviving it.

Lyren crouched near a pile of torn cables, fingers brushing over what looked like scorch marks. "Someone was here," she said. "Recently. Boots with metal soles, heavy tread."

"Varok's?" I asked.

She didn't look up. "Or one of his pets."

The word hung in the air. Pets. The Iron Prince didn't keep soldiers; he rebuilt them. Flesh grafted with relic metal, bones replaced by molten steel, hearts replaced by engines. The things he called "Wardens."

Aurelius walked to a control panel, swiping away grime. "They're experimenting," he said. "The Seal fragments… they're trying to integrate them with relic tech. If they succeed, "

"They won't," I said too fast. Too hard.

Aurelius raised an eyebrow. "Confidence or denial?"

"Both," I said. "Keeps me breathing."

He smiled faintly, like a man watching a storm from behind a glass wall. "You have not yet learned, Kaelion. Breathing is easy. Living after what comes next, that is the difficult part."

I ignored him, because he was probably right.

We moved deeper into the facility. The corridors narrowed, lined with cracked insulation and half-collapsed ducts. Every few steps, I felt the storm inside me pulse harder. It wasn't reacting to danger , it was reacting to something older.

At the far end of the hallway, a massive steel door stood ajar. The hinges had melted, fused with slag. Drokmar went to push it open, but the metal had fused solid. He grunted once, then pressed his palm against the door.

The ground shivered. Stone veins crawled up the walls like roots awakening. With a low growl, Drokmar clenched his fist , and the door crumbled into dust.

"Remind me not to shake your hand," Aurelius said.

Drokmar smirked. "You talk too much for a man with so little muscle."

They would have kept bickering, but Lyren hissed softly. "Shut up. Look."

The room beyond the door was vast, circular, and filled with light , not sunlight, but the kind that hums inside your skull. In the center, suspended above a cracked reactor, floated a relic fragment , a shard of glass and lightning, pulsing in rhythm with my heart.

I stepped forward without thinking.

The storm inside me surged, electric veins crawling across my arms. I felt the pull , the kind you feel in dreams, when you're falling and your body refuses to wake.

"Kaelion," Aurelius warned. "Step back."

"I cannot."

The relic called to me , not in words, but in memory. I saw flashes: ancient battles, skies split by gods, the first storm being born from the blood of creation. And in all of it… a face. My own.

Then the ground erupted.

From the shadows at the edge of the room, molten metal began to crawl, pulling itself into shape. A figure emerged , taller than any man, body forged from blackened steel, veins glowing red like magma. The Warden. Its face was a mask of iron with no eyes, only slits leaking fire.

"Contact," Lyren said calmly, already moving.

Aurelius snapped his fingers, and time itself seemed to slow , just enough for Lyren to dash forward, her blade catching sparks as she struck. The blow landed, but the metal healed almost instantly.

Drokmar roared and slammed both fists into the floor. The tiles buckled, concrete turned to waves, but the Warden did not fall , it simply advanced, heavy and inevitable.

The storm inside me screamed. I felt it begging to be released, clawing at my chest.

I raised my hand. Lightning cracked the air, raw and violent, slamming into the Warden's chest. The impact tore half its torso away , for a moment, I thought it was enough.

Then it reformed.

The Warden straightened, molten metal dripping from its limbs. It remembered the shape it wanted to be , and became it again.

Aurelius shouted, "It is forged with a fragment! You cannot destroy memory!"

Memory. That word. It hit something deep.

I reached again, this time not just calling the storm , listening to it. The voice that had haunted my dreams whispered in the static: You cannot kill what remembers its name.

Then show me, I thought.

The storm answered.

Lightning exploded outward, bending through metal, burning symbols into the ground. I felt my body fade into the current , my thoughts dissolving into thunder. The relic shard above the reactor pulsed once, then flared.

The Warden turned toward me , or toward the storm I had become , and charged. The clash wasn't physical; it was elemental. Metal against memory, storm against stone.

When it was over, the room was ash. The relic fragment shattered. The Warden was gone.

And I was on my knees, smoke curling from my hands.

Drokmar's voice rumbled behind me. "You nearly died."

"Nearly," I said, my voice hoarse.

Lyren wiped blood from her cheek. "What did the storm say to you this time?"

I hesitated. "It said the same thing it always does. That I am not ready to hold what it truly is."

Aurelius knelt beside me, eyes sharp. "Then we have a problem. Because Varok is."

I looked up. The relic's light had died, but the hum remained , faint, deep beneath the floor, like something sleeping.

I asked the question aloud, though I didn't expect an answer.

"How do you kill a legend?"

Aurelius gave a thin smile. "By becoming one worth fearing."

I didn't tell him the truth , that the storm's voice had already answered.

You don't kill a legend. You replace it.

We left the ruins before dawn. The city skyline was a smear of steel and smoke behind us, the storm clouds above it turning slow and violet. No one spoke for a while. Drokmar walked ahead, silent as ever. Lyren kept to the shadows, blade still stained with Warden ash. Aurelius walked beside me, his expression unreadable , like a man already calculating the next battle before this one's dust had settled.

The hum under my skin had not stopped. The storm was quieter now, but not gone , it never really went. It just waited.

As we crossed the bridge leading back into the city's forgotten quarter, Aurelius finally broke the silence.

"You heard it again, did you not?"

I nodded. "Yes."

"And?"

"It said something new this time."

He gave a thin, knowing smile. "Good. It means it has started remembering you."

I did not ask what that meant. Some truths sounded better when you pretended not to hear them.

Ahead, lightning flickered once , not from the sky, but from the city itself. A pulse beneath the streets. Like the storm wasn't above us anymore… it was waking below.

Lyren glanced back, her eyes cold. "He is moving his armies. Whatever Varok is planning, it begins soon."

I tightened my grip on the cracked edge of my gauntlet. The storm hummed in answer, alive and impatient.

"Then we have no time to wait," I said. "If the legends are waking… we wake with them."

The wind picked up, scattering ash from the ruined factory into the dawn. The first light of morning split through the clouds, faint, fractured, but enough to see the path ahead.

And just like that, I knew the question for the next chapter.

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