Chapter One: Shadows of Expectation
The year was 310 A.G.M.— three centuries after the Great Massacre, when one hundred heroes bled the ground red and ten Paragons rose to carve a future from ash.
But none of that glory mattered to me.
For me, the world had ended thirty years ago, in 280 A.G.M., when my parents never came home. Both died Hunters in the trenches, names carved on the Wall of the Fallen. People called them heroes. I called them ghosts.
And ten years ago, my brother — the prodigy of Lionheart, the one meant to reclaim our legacy — fell silent. He’d saved me, throwing himself in front of a Greater Demon’s strike. He killed it, yes, but his fate core cracked. Since then, he’d been trapped in a stasis pod, neither living nor dead.
“Should’ve been you in that bed, Lionheart.”
The words weren’t new. They came from across the training hall, spat like venom. Laughter followed, sharp and familiar. Armor gleamed on their bodies, futures bright, while I stood apart, fists bleeding from clenched nails.
Eight times I had stood before the Tower of Hope, the ten-kilometer Celestial monument where fate tested us. Eight times it rejected me.
Through the window, the Tower loomed now, blotting out the morning sun. Once, it had been a beacon. Now it was just a shadow.
I turned from it, bitterness burning in my chest. “I’m done with the Knights.”
The words came out sharp. Final.
If the Knights didn’t want me, then I’d take my fate elsewhere — into the Baneblade Division. They didn’t care about bloodlines or broken legacies. They only cared if you could kill demons.
And killing demons was all I had left.
But there’s a truth I’ve come to learn — others may have tried to determine my destiny, to write my story for me. They whispered of what I was supposed to be, of the legacy I should carry, of the hero I *must* become. Yet, no matter their words, I made my own path.
Because in a world built on expectations and shadows, I decided that my fate wouldn’t be dictated by ghosts of the past or the echoes of others’ dreams. I would forge it myself — in fire, in blood, in defiance.
And so, I turned away from the Tower, from the whispers, from the ghosts. My story was mine to write. No one else’s.
And I would make sure that, one day, when the dust settled and the shadows receded, it would be my name that echoed in the halls of heroes — not as a ghost, but as a legend forged by my own hands.
