Pain crashed over Raizen like a savage tide, drowning him in the sensation of flesh and sinew torn asunder, flung into a colossal grinder, then clumsily stitched back together, warped and wrong. His head buzzed with a chaotic clamor, as if a thousand discordant bells screamed within his skull. The world before his eyes was a murky haze of gray. Only the sharp whistle of wind slicing through jagged stone reached his ears—a sinister nocturne from a place utterly alien.
He forced his eyes open, pupils contracting and dilating frantically to pierce the thick darkness. A dank cave surrounded him, its stone walls slick with green moss and cloaked in dust so ancient it seemed forgotten for centuries. The air reeked of moldy earth, laced with the sharp, coppery tang of dried blood crusted hard.
"What the hell… is happening?" he muttered to himself, his hand instinctively clenching against the icy stone floor, pain spiking through his battered body.
His last memory struck like a sledgehammer, a haunting slow-motion reel: the laboratory spiraling into chaos, bathed in a blinding white glare; the Asvaria machine roaring with feral madness before erupting in a maelstrom of fire and ruin; Kael and Seiryu's desperate screams echoing faintly through the pandemonium; and then, that cold, metallic voice—belonging neither to Valen Kabe nor anyone he knew… What had it done? Where had it flung him?
"Where… in damnation am I?" he whispered, his heart pounding as if it might burst from his chest, gripped by panic and dread. This was not Saigon—no familiar hum of plasma engines shrieking along skyways, no kaleidoscope of neon lights dancing across towering spires. Only suffocating darkness, bone-chilling cold, and a crushing solitude that made him feel like the last living soul on a forsaken world. His mother's face flashed in his mind—her frail, warm hands cradling him in their tiny slum hovel, her faint voice whispering before her final breath: "You must survive, Raizen, even if this world crumbles entirely."
But survive where? And for what? He staggered to his feet, fighting the dizziness threatening to drag him down, his mind reeling with a thousand unanswered questions. "Is this a dream? Or am I dead, and this is hell? No… I have to get back to Saigon! I have to uncover the truth!" he told himself, though a cold sliver of reason insisted this was no illusion. "Kael? Seiryu? Are they okay? Were they pulled here too? Veyra? Leon? Anya? Roric, Elara… all the others in that cursed lab—what's become of them? Did anyone else escape that explosion? Or am I the only one cast into this wretched purgatory?" A sharp pang for his friends—comrades forged in the crucible of the Eternal Seed project—clutched his heart, more agonizing than the wounds racking his body.
He stumbled toward the cave's mouth, half-dragging himself, gulping the frigid, arid air outside. A dim, feeble light from an eternally gray sky—neither dawn nor dusk—cast a desolate glow over a scene that pierced his soul: a dead forest, utterly lifeless. Trees stood as blackened, skeletal husks, scorched centuries ago, their brittle branches clawing skyward like bony arms pleading in silent anguish. Far off, where a foggy horizon blurred into oblivion, a roiling black storm churned, its massive lightning bolts slashing the sky, briefly illuminating a towering, grotesque silhouette—unlike any creature from his darkest nightmares, its crimson eyes glinting like smoldering coals in the gloom. Near the cave's entrance, a skeleton sprawled in the dust, clad in tattered leather armor of some nameless warrior, beside deep claw marks gouged into the rock wall—mute testament to a brutal battle recently ended.
Scrape… scrape…
A faint, razor-sharp sound, like claws raking stone, drifted from the depths of the dead forest. Raizen whipped around, his pulse hammering. A shadowy form, swift and fluid, flickered between the barren trees—silent, graceful, a predator patiently stalking its doomed prey. Instinctively, he stepped back, his hand snatching a weathered stone axe, its blade chipped, lying near the skeleton. His honed warrior's gaze swept the darkness, straining to pinpoint the lurking threat. "Damn it," he muttered bitterly, realizing the crude tool was his only defense.
Whoosh!
Before he could brace himself, a wooden arrow, lethally sharp and blindingly fast, streaked past his face, thudding into the ashen ground mere inches from his boots.
From the shadows of the withered trees, four figures emerged. Clad in rough, frayed hides, they gripped long wooden spears tipped with dark, crusted blood. Their eyes bore into him, brimming with suspicion and hostility. The leader, a grizzled man with matted hair like a raven's nest and a long scar slashing his cheek, raised a wooden bow toward Raizen, his rasping voice barking in an ancient, unfamiliar tongue: "Who are you? Outsiders aren't welcome in Noxvaria!"
Raizen froze, not just from the warning shot or the spears leveled at him, but from something uncanny: the strange words, unlike any language he'd studied in Thiên Long's grueling training, rang clear and coherent in his mind, as if they were his native tongue. He opened his mouth to reply and flinched again as his own voice spilled forth in the same ancient cadence, fluent and flawless to his shock: "I… I don't know where I am."
"What the hell is going on?" he thought, cold sweat beading at his nape, unease eclipsing his fear of the strangers. "What am I saying? How can I understand and speak this language so naturally?" A chilling notion gripped him: "It can't be Asvaria. That machine was just technology, no matter how advanced—it couldn't do this. Something—or someone—has tampered with me. That metallic voice… what does it want?"
Another shrill, menacing scrape from the forest, closer and more piercing, sliced through his spiraling fears. He tightened his grip on the broken stone axe, forcing himself to focus on the immediate danger. Survive now—answers later.
Raizen stood poised, his ragged breaths mingling with the icy air of the dead forest, the chipped axe his sole shield. The four natives held their defensive stance, spear-tips unwavering, ready to strike at any moment.
The leader repeated his demand, his gravelly voice thick with distrust and impatience: "Who are you? Don't play innocent—no one stumbles into Noxvaria and lives without a purpose!"
Raizen paused, his mind still churning with unanswerable questions: why was he here, why could he grasp this language, and above all, where were his friends, his comrades? His gaze dropped to the Eternal pendant at his neck—Kael's keepsake, a tether to his closest friend, now lost somewhere in this hellish world, his fate unknown.
"Kael… were you dragged here too? Seiryu? Veyra? Leon? Anya? Everyone in that lab—what happened to them? Are any of them still alive? Or am I alone, cast into this infernal abyss?" The thought stabbed his heart, a vague sorrow and worry flaring as he recalled the grueling yet hopeful days they'd shared, their dreams of a brighter world now scattered like ash. He gripped the axe's rough handle tighter.
"I don't know where I am," he said again, striving to keep his voice steady, signaling goodwill as best he could—after all, if they'd meant to kill him outright, that arrow wouldn't have struck the ground. "I come from a place far, far away. A catastrophic accident I couldn't foresee threw me here."
The leader's brow furrowed, his spear dipping slightly, though his eyes still gleamed with ingrained suspicion. "Thrown here?" he murmured, as if the phrase stirred something familiar or fearsome. "No one reaches Noxvaria by chance. Where do you hail from? Vesparis? Drakovia? Solzareth?" His voice quavered faintly at those names, as if they carried a deep-seated horror or pain.
Before Raizen could ponder a reply, another sharp, murderous scrape shattered the stillness—not from the four before him, but from the dense shadows of the dead forest nearby. He spun on reflex, his heart racing as a tall, warped figure slowly materialized under the faint flash of the distant storm's lightning. It was no human—its body twisted grotesquely, born of nightmares, its ashen-gray skin lifeless as barren earth. Crimson eyes burned like embers in a forge, jagged teeth like daggers jutted from a distorted maw, and long, curved claws gleamed like reapers' scythes in the dark. Most striking, on its gnarled forehead, a faint red spiral symbol glowed—the same mark Raizen had seen on Asvaria's control panel before chaos consumed everything.
"You…" Raizen breathed, his voice faltering with shock and a creeping dread, the metallic voice's cryptic prophecy echoing like a curse he couldn't shake: The chosen one will shatter the wheel of fate.
The creature tilted its malformed head, as if curiously sizing up its new prey, then unleashed a deafening, inhuman roar that reverberated through the forest, jolting the four natives with raw terror.
"They're here! Damn Twistfangs!" the leader bellowed, his eyes wide with panic, primal fear overriding his earlier suspicion of Raizen.