The Gifted Divide

"It is unwise to let a man who isn't king sit on a throne for too long." - Costanza Casati (Clytemnestra)

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Hours slipped past with agonising slowness, and the first pale fingers of dawn were just beginning to pry apart the night's grasp over the horizon when Walden's ragged breath hitched into a pained groan.

Pain—sharp, unyielding, merciless pain, coursed through every fibre of his battered body. It wrapped around him like a vice, squeezing and suffocating, a constant reminder that survival had become a torment in itself.

For years, he had dismissed the whispered legends and chilling rumours about the Death Reaper as mere myth. Ghost stories told in shadowed corners, exaggerated tales designed to frighten the reckless.

Yet now, hanging upside down and stripped bare beneath a twisting, gnarled tree, Walden understood the brutal truth. He had tasted her "tender mercies" firsthand, and that was a cruelty far worse than death.

The footsteps came then, soft but distinct, crunching on the frosted leaves and brittle twigs littering the forest floor. Walden's head lolled painfully as he forced his swollen eyes open.

From his inverted vantage, he could barely discern the approaching figure—a dark silhouette shrouded beneath a heavy, black hood that swallowed the face entirely.

"Help me, please…" he croaked, his voice cracked and brittle as dry branches.

The figure stopped a breath away, and a low chuckle rippled through the night air. The chuckle was neither kind nor warm—it was cold, clinical, and almost amused in its dismissiveness.

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The stranger's voice came smooth, tinged with chilling certainty. "I don't think so," he said, his hands shoved casually into the pockets of his long coat, his posture relaxed, almost indifferent. "I was originally here for you. But it seems Sera and Aegis got to you first."

The clouds parted, allowing a shard of cold moonlight to spill over the figure's lowered hood. Slowly, deliberately, he pulled the hood back, and Walden's gaze snapped upward.

Recognition slammed into him like a bullet.

"Y-You…!" Walden's voice was a cracked whisper, shaking with a sudden, raw terror that stripped away all bravado.

Despite the nightmares he'd inflicted on so many, this boy—this young man—cut through him like a blade, igniting every primal fear he had buried deep beneath layers of cruelty.

If Sera Kroix was a force of ruthless vengeance, then this man was a living nightmare incarnate.

If he had survived the genocide on Blade all those years back, then none of the hunters are going to be safe. If one thought that Sera Kroix was ruthless, then they have to find another different meaning for that word when it comes to this young man.

Zexter—Zest, might be the second-in-command, but it is this young man in front of him that is the Left Hand, and every single hunter knows it.

This young man, the infamous Left Hand of Blade. His presence alone spoke of annihilation, a promise that no hunter, no matter how depraved, could escape his cold justice.

"I'm here," The young man said, his voice smooth and merciless, a faint, cruel smirk playing at the corners of his lips. "It's been a long time, Walden."

"Why are you still alive? How… How did you survive?" Walden stammered, struggling to comprehend the impossibility. He remembered the moment he pulled the trigger. How could this boy still stand before him, whole and unbroken?

The young man shrugged with casual arrogance, as if immortality were nothing more than a petty inconvenience. "I'm bad at dying. Like Sera, I learned early on not to do what people expect. You think we're just going to let what you did slide?" His gaze sharpened, eyes narrowing to slits filled with unrelenting fury. "I know Sera. She won't. Neither will the others." His voice rose, carrying over the skeletal trees and whispering winds. "But you… You crossed the line this time. You targeted children. Innocent children."

Walden's breath hitched, a cold shiver crawling down his spine as the true weight of his deeds pressed down on him. The boy before him was no longer just an executioner. He was the embodiment of reckoning.

The young man's hand slid slowly to the gleaming silver blade strapped to his side, pulling it free with a whisper of steel against leather. The moonlight gleamed cruelly along the blade's edge, casting ghostly reflections on the young man's neck—a stark tattoo of a blade etched there, a mark of deadly purpose.

"We've got all night," he said softly, stepping forward, his figure a dark promise beneath the indifferent stars.

Walden's heart hammered wildly, every instinct screaming that the end had come, and that no torment could match what was to follow.