Elsicic Continent
The blood mist hung thick as clotted phlegm, the air a coppery stench of rust and slaughter. In that swirling crimson, Lucian's world fell apart.
One moment, he was back-to-back with Jaxon, drawing on the warmth and strength of his brother-in-arms. The next, a jagged, rusty blade slid silently through Jaxon's throat. It wasn't a battle cry that escaped him, just a choked, hopeless gurgle. A geyser of hot arterial blood erupted, dousing Lucian's face in a sudden, sickening shower. The heat wasn't the warmth of life, but the soul-scalding flash of a life being ripped away. Before Lucian could even wipe it off, the blood turned cold, clinging to his face like a dead, icy snake.
"Julian—!"
The name was swallowed by an agonized scream from across the field. It was Julian, the ace sniper who'd always squint through a haze of cigarette smoke and claim, "Ain't nothin' a bullet can't solve." The man who taught Lucian to find death in his sights from a mile away. Now he was ensnared, crushed by a writhing mass of mutated, violet-gold vines. Ghastly flowers bloomed on their stalks, their pistils lashing out like thorns to pierce his chest. Through the gore, Lucian saw it: Julian's eye—the costly, crimson god-eye he'd had implanted—still burning like a defiant star in its final moments, stubbornly fixed on the space just behind Lucian.
"Lucian, behind you!"
It was Elara's voice. The squad's kid sister, the one who'd always blush while talking about saving up for the most beautiful wedding dress. She threw herself toward him, a butterfly caught in a hurricane. Lucian's pupils contracted to pinpricks. He saw them: two bone-white spurs had already burst through the flesh of her slender back, piercing her skin like a pair of shattered, broken wings. It was her last flight—a final, sacrificial warning.
But it was too late.
An irresistible, annihilating force punched through him from behind. There was no pain, not at first. Just a deep, absolute cold that seemed to freeze his very soul. Then came the fire, an unspeakable heat. Lucian could smell his own blood and viscera vaporizing against the spear's superheated tip.
Slowly, inch by agonizing inch, he forced his head down.
His eyes fell on the golden spearhead and the familiar dragon totem carved into its shaft. Every scale, every line, was an image he had traced in his boyish dreams a thousand times over.
It was his master's spear. His mentor's. The icon he had sworn his entire life to surpass—"Dragon King" X.
Why…
The thought was a dull blade, sawing back and forth in his mind, inflicting a pain far deeper than any physical wound. He looked up, through the bloody haze, and saw the figure. So familiar, yet a total stranger. X stood as tall as ever, but his expression was a mask of glacial frost, like a god with no capacity for emotion.
Rage and betrayal boiled into one last surge of strength. Lucian's hands clamped around the searing-hot shaft of the spear, the smell of his own sizzling flesh filling the air. He wanted X to feel it. He wanted him to feel the lingering warmth of the soul he had just personally snuffed out.
"You… remember this…" Lucian snarled, biting down hard on his tongue. The sharp pain was the only thing keeping him lucid.
"…Remember… the look… in your brothers'… eyes."
A single, dark red drop of blood, heavy with his unbroken curse and bottomless grief, trickled from the corner of his mouth.
It fell.
It struck the fractured earth and seeped into a black crevice. As if it had completed some ancient ritual, a low thrumming from the depths of the chasm grew suddenly loud and powerful. It was the sound of a sleeping giant slowly opening its eyes.
Far off, a figure stood silhouetted on a pile of rubble, emanating a familiar yet spine-chilling authority.
In another time and space, the sky is clear and blue, and the streets are bustling with traffic.
"Lucian… Lucian! Wake the hell up!"
A heavy cloud of Dior perfume and a frantic voice pierced the fog of his dream. Lucian shot up from his desk, a film of cold sweat on his forehead, the raw terror of the nightmare still flickering in his eyes. The feeling—of being hunted by an endless dark, of his heart being ripped from his chest—was so real it left him breathless.
He forced his vision to focus. Standing before him was Lisa, the company's most dazzling fixture. She was poured into a tailored black pencil skirt that sketched out a heart-stopping silhouette, but the killer smile she was famous for was gone, replaced by a mask of pure, undiluted panic.
Lisa. The undisputed queen of ABC Corporation's China Division HR, its youngest-ever director. They called her the "Red Rose"—beautiful, thorny, and no one dared to cross her.
"Lisa?" Lucian's voice was hoarse. "What's going on? You look like you've seen a ghost."
She leaned in close, her heels silent on the plush carpet. Her voice was a low, urgent whisper, every word a needle. "Something big. I just got a tip from the inside. A team from HQ's Asia-Pacific Compliance division is on their way. Private jet. And they have a target, Lucian. You. They're here to tear you out of that chair for good. That's all I can tell you. You need to figure something out, now. I have to go before someone sees me."
Before the last word was out, she had spun around, leaving only the fading, heart-pounding click of her heels and a wisp of perfume in her wake.
Lucian sat alone in the empty office, the last vestiges of sleep and nightmare burned away by a surge of ice-cold fury. He leaned back slowly in his chair, a cold smirk twisting his lips.
"Well, now… The sons of bitches."
He muttered it to himself, his voice laced with contempt. The years flashed through his mind like a movie reel. He was the one who cleared the path for the company, who bled for it. All those gray-area operations, the deals that danced on the razor's edge of compliance—who else but him had been the tip of that spear? He drank risk like wine and ate pressure for breakfast, and in return, he'd landed one impossible multinational contract after another. Now the birds were all shot, and it was time to cook the hunting dog. The war was over, and it was time to execute the expendable soldier. They were going to use him as a stepping stone, the fall guy to make the company look clean.
"Alright," Lucian's gaze hardened, turning into a bottomless, icy chasm. "You want a piece of me? Let's go. Let's see who hits the floor first."
Half an hour later. Conference Room 201.
The massive table was polished to a black mirror, reflecting the cold, sterile light of the shadowless lamps above. The AC was cranked so high the air felt heavy, thick with an oppressive silence.
At the head of the table, a middle-aged woman with gold-rimmed glasses fixed him with a predatory stare. This was Jessica, Director of APAC Compliance, a woman with a corporate reputation for being ruthless and having an iron fist. Her voice was completely devoid of warmth. "Director Lucian. The three of us are here today to address a very serious matter: a formal investigation into your alleged gross violations of company compliance policy in past projects."
To her left sat Michael, a man from Compliance with a face set in stone, his eyes perpetually downcast as if he were an unfeeling statue. And to her right, to Lucian's shock, sat Lisa. The "Red Rose" now wore a professional, detached expression, her gaze distant, as if the frantic informant from thirty minutes ago had never existed.
Jessica gently pushed a manila envelope and a USB drive across the table.
"Here," she said, "are the complete files on the Japanese CCA project, the American Fuma project, and the German BWW project. On the thumb drive, you will find all the recordings, call logs, and encrypted chat screenshots provided by an anonymous whistleblower."
She paused, adjusting her glasses with a graceful movement that was nonetheless thick with menace. "It's a lot of material. A lot of information. Take your time. You can use the laptop next to you for the projector at any time. We are all ears for your explanation. Oh, and one more thing. As per procedure, please hand over your company phone. As for your office computer, we've already dispatched IT to retrieve it from your office. Thank you for your cooperation."
Every word was a nail being hammered into his coffin.
The smile on Lucian's face widened, though it never reached his eyes. He coolly opened the package and began to leaf through the "evidence" that was meant to end his career, his movements slow and deliberate. He knew with perfect clarity that this storm hadn't brewed overnight. Without at least six months of careful planning, without collaborators at the highest levels of the company, it would have been impossible to gather details this intimate, this fatal. Some of the information here was known to only a handful of people.
One page, then two… He turned them slowly, but his heart was sinking faster and faster.
Suddenly, his fingers stopped. His gaze froze.
He was looking at a document. A report on the flow of project funds.
The report detailed specifics that had only ever been discussed in a private, drunken conversation between him and Mike. It was their secret, a rule Lucian had bent to help Mike keep his job. For this to be here… this was a death sentence. It was a direct accusation from his most trusted man.
Mike.
The name was a white-hot brand seared onto his soul.
The star protégé he had discovered in a pile of new recruits and taught everything he knew. The kid he had personally nicknamed "War Dog," hoping he would win the contracts with the ferocity of a rabid animal. The Ivy League graduate with the humble smile, the one he had chosen to trust unconditionally, even when his colleagues called him a "smiling tiger."
When Mike's mother was gravely ill, it was Lucian who had pulled every string he had to snatch a bed from the city's best hospital director. The surgeon was the top in the country, booked a year out; it was Lucian who had shown up at his door late at night with a heavy gift, begging for a surgical slot. He had taught him every negotiating tactic, handed him his fattest client lists, even cut into his own bonuses to subsidize him…
Lucian believed he had treated him like a son.
He never thought the most fatal blow would come from his most trusted ally, the one he had protected under his own wing. This wasn't a knife in the back. This was a bomb detonated from the inside.
Lucian slowly closed the file, the inscrutable smile still plastered on his face. He stood up and addressed Jessica and the others. "It's a bit stuffy in here. I'm going for a smoke. I'll be right back."
He didn't look at anyone as he walked straight to the smoking lounge.
Click. The sound of his Zippo was sharp and loud in the silent room. A plume of blue-white smoke rose, twisting in the light. Lucian took a deep drag, the harsh smoke flooding his lungs with a numbing sting.
He watched the smoke swirl, thicken, and then dissipate into the air, just like all his years of work, his achievements, his glory.
He suddenly let out a low laugh. It was a hoarse, hollow sound, filled with infinite self-mockery and despair.
He had planned for everything. He'd planned for the soullessness of HQ, for the treachery of his peers. The one thing he never planned for was having his throat ripped out by the wolf cub he had raised with his own two hands.
"What an ungrateful… little monster," he murmured, then shook his head, crushing the cigarette butt into the ashtray with brutal finality.
"No," he said, his voice barely a whisper. "I was the one who was blind. I fucking deserved this."