Part 1

“Pathetic”

I opened my eyes believing I had heard something. A call perhaps. But nothing was around me. In front of my eyes extended a sea of blackness. A deep dark blackness filled everywhere I turned. The sky, the ground, everything around me. I could see nothing. Hear nothing. I wasn’t even sure that the ground existed, my feet didn’t feel like they touched anything.

“Disgraceful”

A voice rang in my head. Strong, majestic...prideful yet somewhat dissatisfied. The tone of the voice expressed clear contempt. But for what I kept wandering. I knew this voice yet I was sure that I had never heard it in my entire life. Both lives. Still, it felt...familiar as if me and the owner of this voice went way back.

I looked around me once more, restlessly trying to find where this mysterious voice came from. I tried moving my feet and legs, walking forward, running even, yet my body didn’t move an inch nor I felt any pain. I looked down, remembering I had just been pierced by the fiend’s antlers. The holes were there but blood was not flowing out and, even if I moved my body around, the darkness surrounding me made it so that it was impossible for me to see if I was moving at all or not.

“Miserable”

The voice rang again. Louder, stronger, deeper. It seemed to me that it’s tone grew more and more hostile as I fumbled around looking for it. I looked around me once more but the voice was surrounding me. It came from the sky...then from the ground. Maybe from the left...no, from the right.

[I’m missing something! What’s this place? Who’s speaking? What the hell happened to me?]

“Who are you?”

“Such a waste”

“Where am I? What do you want from me?” I asked, slightly raising my voice. All those offences were starting to tick me off and I was growing impatient about the situation.

“Do you feel no shame...Raphael?”

“Stop fucking around like that!-” I shouted in a restless driven anger “-Just tell me what you want with me!”

“It is truly a shame...do you not even recognize yourself, Raphael?”

“HOW COULD I NO-”

As I turned around, finally recognizing the whereabouts of the source of the voice, my own voice stopped. Right in front of me, not even an arm distant from me, was...me. I was standing right in front of me. The same face, the same eyes, the same scar on the left eye and earring. Everything was the same, even the shocked expression I was wearing on my face.

Though that wasn’t me. A thin, lucid and transparent lid separated me from that image. It was nothing but a reflection. I began walking backwards, to get a better view of what was in front of me. And to my surprise, what appeared in front of me was a colossal eyeball. Only the cat-like pupil was double my size; I wasn’t even able to see where the white on top finished. But what amazed me the most was the iris. It’s color was one of pure dark gold, as if a smithy had just poured down a freshly melted bucket of gold onto the eye. It was breathtaking. The small, darker veins only added depth to the already majestic eye. I was in awe yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had already seen such an eye.

“What’s the meaning of this?” I asked. My heart was still pounding hard and the suspicions about the strange voice still remained, but it was fruitless to keep inquiring about them.

“Your cowardice and lack of judgement brought us here...Your body. I hope you realize in how bad of a shape it is. That pathetic “fight” you displayed against the fiend was the cause. Is this really all YOU amount to?”

“How can you say it was a pathetic fight, uh? That thing was a damn fiend. A silver-tier monster! I can’t fight it, I’m just a-”

“You are just a what?! A twelve year old boy? A practitioner-tier mage? You really are pathetic indeed!”

“What do you even know about me?! You are nothing more than an illusion, stop deluding yourself as to being on the same level as me!” I blurted out in a clear rage.

A moment of deep silence fell between me and the voice. The eye was unchanged yet I inexplicably felt a gaze on me. A gaze void of all hostility and just full of sorrow and pity. I felt repulsed by such a look. I had always hated that look of pity coming from someone else who thought themselves as superior. I thought of it as the most disgusting way to look down on someone.

“What do I know about you? Everything. I know just how much you really fear Gallher, even though you put on the cold show for your brother. I know how worried you are for Sora, even though you won’t admit it. I know how many spells you got stored inside that head of yours but you fake being a mediocre mage so that you may appear “normal”. I know how scared you are of being seen as an anomaly, being shunned, hated and cast aside. I know how dreadful the thought of being left alone is for you...I know of the constant pain you are in, always remembered of your failure, with the image of that girl, Kei, branded in fire in the back of your head. I know of the sleepless nights, the choked cries and the unfulfilled wishes...I know you better than you know yourself. Be it Keichiro or Raphael, be it the athlete or the young mage. Whatever you are, I am. That is because I’m you as much as you are me. We are one and the same. Two sides of an identical coin. The only difference stands in how easy it is for you to look outside and for me to look inside. You figured it out now, right?”

I couldn't believe my ears. Every word pronounced by that voice was nothing but utter truth. The feelings I had buried deep inside me were discovered so easily by that voice. How was it able to figure out? Was the question I kept asking myself during its whole speech, yet the only plausible answer was the one that same voice gave me. Who other than me could know such secrets? I only realized it after it had finished talking but even the tone in which it spoke, just as the subject, felt a lot more sympathetic and personal. More...humane.

“My subconscious?” I thought out loud.

“Close, but not quite right. A piece of your soul would describe me better”

“A piece of...soul?”

“Correct. You asked me my reasons before...well, I’m here to show you the right path that you are clearly falling off from”

“What do you mean?”

“Strength to protect myself and those I hold dear. That is the reason why you strive for power, yet look at you now? Laying on the cold ground like any other pathetic soldier does once their life is extinguished. You’ve been beaten and toyed with by a monster, something lower than you...lower than us! Is that all your pride amounts too? In your last moments of consciousness you thought “now Lucas is safe”, but what about after they reach the school? What will Gallher do without you? I believe you know the answer already”

“...”

“This charade of limiting yourself, all in order to conform to this world’s concept of normality. This crushing fear of yours to be abandoned again. All you’ve done since you went to the academy...scrap it. You are starting to delude yourself as weaker than you really are...and the results are shown. This is why I called you pathetic and disgraceful. Do not shame us Raphael! Why do you bow your head to all those weaker than you? Where has the pride your master though you gone?”

The voice’s words echoed through my head and vibrated down my whole body. Every fiber of my being started shaking in discontent, as if a revolution was accouring into my very own body.

[Was I...wrong?]

“You are far stronger, far superior than all those who believe themselves stronger than you! Then I ask you, is it right for those weaker than you to treat you like a nullity?”

“...No”

“Is it right for those weaker than you to claim something that you hold dear for themselves?”

“...No!”

“Is it right for you to stand below those who are weaker? Bow your head and comply with the demands of the weak? Playing a game devised by those same weak people?”

“...NO!”

“Then don’t! You are not like them so show it! Protect what you hold dear with all your might so that none would think of ever taking it from you again! Hold your head high so that your enemies may fear and respect you! Take some pride in your power and stop limiting yourself!...We had enough! SHOW ALL THE BASTARDS WHO DARE TO BEAR THEIR FANGS AT YOU JUST HOW BAD THEY MESSED UP! LET YOUR ENEMIES KNOW YOUR NAME, RAPHAEL!”

“YES!”

A sudden hot feverish feeling permeated my body. All the energy, anger and the mixture of other feelings that created from the voice’s words, in an instant exploded. The sheer amount of what felt like adrenaline or excitement was something I believed impossible. Only then I realized that my consciousness was fading once again. The black room and the eye were disappearing in the distance as I fell further and further from them. My legs and torso began hurting once again, only to reach the peek of pain as I opened my eyes again.

I was laying on the ground, right where I fell in the fight with the fiend. Under me was a pool of half solid, half liquid red blood. A cold breeze was running through my hair and walking all over my exposed skin. I instinctively stood up and looked around for a place to repair myself from the cold. To my surprise, after a couple of wobbling steps, my legs were working fine as the pain was nowhere to be felt. I was delighted to feel that way, yet also cautious as to not mistake a painless sense inducted by adrenaline with the real absence of pain.

After a minute or so of walking I found a fallen hollow tree, wide enough for me to sit inside it’s trunk and hide at least a bit from the cold. As I sat myself inside I started to examine my injuries, starting with my legs. Dropping my pants I expected to be greeted by the hole the antlers created but instead the only thing I saw was a pale white circular chunk of skin covering the place where the hole should have been. Rapidly I checked under my shirt and the situation was the same. All my injuries were cured and in their place was a scar that looked as if a completely new generated meat had taken its place. Even my legs felt fine. Just to be sure I applied what healing magic I could to the spots where the scars were. It was then that I saw a black circular spot the size of a small coin in the lower side of my left waist. I tried scratching it off, thinking it was some kind of dirt stain, but it didn’t come off. I didn’t really pay much mind to it believing that a bath would have taken care of it.

A warm ray of sun was rising from behind the trees.

“Is it morning?-” I asked myself “-Haha I’ve been knocked down for quite a while uh!...They must be worried…I promised Lucas to be at the academy for lunch. If I were to start walking now maybe I could be there in time! Haha, I can’t wait to tell him how I surviv-”

Was surviving enough? I just had a chat with my own soul about it so was surviving really enough? Just happily going away with my life but my pride shattered. No!

I slapped myself as hard as I could. All that conversation, all those feelings they amounted to nothing as soon as I woke up. I couldn’t let myself be swayed by that weak mentality once again.

I looked forward to where the forest was supposed to end, where the exit to that nightmarish experience was. Rays of the morning sun were shining upon it, making the fresh morning dew glitter like a fairy’s wings. A sense of comfort filled my head as I laid my eyes on that warm sight. But I ignored that feeling. I closed my eyes and breathed in all the cold air I possibly could. The coldness gathered in my lungs quickly spread out to my other organs, giving me some faint shivers of freshly newfound energy.

I turned around facing the direction where the fiend escaped to.

“Let me take my pride back...fiend!”

Part 2

- LUCAS BLUESCALE’S POV-

Blood. My brother’s blood.

Everywhere I walked I could see my brother’s blood. In the midst of that awful pool of crimson liquid were scattered, some over here, others farther away, all of my brother’s possessions. His clothes, his blue wand, the light sword he carried, the golden earring...all of them were there. Though I couldn’t seem to see his body.

I was panicking. Panicking so much that my legs were barely able to move forward. Even my vision was shaking, foggy, almost as if my brain was trying to censor out parts of that dreadful scenery. Then, shakingly following that path of blood, I reached the entrance of a cave, right at the foot of a higher rocky hill. The stench of rotten flesh and blood was filling the air. Reluctantly I took a step forward.

The dark cave was lit only by rare torches laying around the blood. Through that dim light I was able to see the various skeletons laying around the walls and ground. I felt like vomiting but nothing came out, my stomach was completely blocked.

Then I saw it. Right at the end of the cave where the fiend laid dormant. My brother's torn body. It was in an awful shape. Both legs were missing, an arm was laying on the ground right beside his body, half of the face was chewed out and some of his ribs were poking out of his chest. I trembled, fell on my knees and screamed out of horror and regret. Painful burning tears started covering my face.

“It’s my fault! IT’S ALL MY FAULT!”

My voice echoed through the cave, shaking the very walls of that rocky hill. Even though the noise would have woken up even a dragon, they seemed ineffective on the fiend who simply kept snoring.

“Lucas-san…” A voice whispered to me from where my dead brother’s body was.

“Lucas-san…” I looked around, searching for the source of the voice, but I was alone in that cave, nothing alive was there other than me and the fied.

“Lucas-san…” The voice was getting louder and louder the more I approached my brother’s body. Only then I realized that his lips were moving. I touched his cheek without knowing what else to do and then…

“Lucas-san? Are you there?”

A female voice snapped me back to reality. Away from that dreadful nightmare. My breath was heavy and sweat covered my forehead, forming the small drops to steadily fall from there onto my face only to end up splashing on the ground. I looked to my right. There, with her usual cheering expression now turned into a more worried one, was Sora.

“Are you ok Lucas-san? You looked troubled so I just-”

“I-I’m fine thanks. No need to worry”

“You don’t look very fine to me...Is everything ok?”

I hesitated to answer. I wanted to tell someone what was going through my mind. I wanted to tell her all about what happened. “But it’s not time yet, it’s not lunch yet” I thought to myself. It has been almost an entire day since I left my brother’s side, left him in that forest...with that thing. I wanted to get help and go to his side at that right moment, but what if he was all fine. It would mean that I simply didn’ trust him.

“Is this about Raphael-san, right?”

“I...uhh...It’s a….It’s not what you-”

“It’s a girl, I knew it! He’s with another girl am I right?”

[Eh? What?]

“A...girl? HAHAHA I thought you weren’t the kind to make jokes Sora-chan!”

“Eh? But I wasn’t joking…” Her perplexed expression told me she really was convinced of her words.

“Pfff you don’t have to worry about that...Honestly I would feel reassured if I saw him with a girl!”

“H-how can you say that? Y-you know that I’m his f-f-fia-”

“I know. It’s just that...I would feel much better knowing that he’s with a girl rather than where he is now….God dammit! Why the fuck did I leave him!?”

“Leave him? What do you mean?” Said the girl with a slightly cracking voice.

“...Fuck it! Sorry Raph!...”

In the next minutes I spilled everything. From when we entered the forest to when the fied attacked us. She silently listened to every word that came out of my mouth, never breaking eye contact and maintaining an expressionless face. But I could see her eyes tremble as soon as I reached the last bits of the story.

“...he told us to run and so we did. I tried to stay behind but his reasoning was solid and I could do nothing but run to the horses with Astar-san. He said he’d be back before today’s lunch and if he weren’t he asked me to go search him...I-I should have stayed with him. Fuck!”

She kept eye contact for another ten seconds or so, waiting for something. Then, without saying a word, she stood up from the bench and began walking away towards the school back entrance.

“W-Where are you going?”

“Youm”

“Youm?”

“He knows where to get horses”

“Eh? Horses?”

“I’m going to pick up that idiot of your brother...then I’ll give the both of you one hell of a scolding”

“No no no, what about the lunch thing? He said he’d be bac-”

“Do you really think he can take on a fiend all by himself? I know that he’s strong. I know it, ok? But I know that he’s not strong enough to take on by himself a gold tier monster. Certainly not after a fight!”

“Ehm..it’s actually a silver tier thou-” A cold glare full of anger unbefitting of her usual sweet personality stopped me from speaking further.

“I-I’ll go with you!”

“Uuh?! Of course you are coming! How else could I be able to find him?”

Her usual cheerfulness and sweetness had totally disappeared, in their stead a cold, decisive and direct Sora had taken place. Was this her being serious and worried? I silently followed her around the academy and the city. First picking up her brother, then running full speed through the city’s streets until we reached a stable, almost throwing a handful of coins to the stable-boy and jumping on the back of three horses. We left the city around the time when the first lesson of the day should have started.

Part 3

Around two and a half hours passed since our group of three left the city. We rode nonstop and for all those hours Sora didn’t utter a single word, unlike Youm who asked me many times over what the situation was like. Something was up with her. It was as if she wasn’t even herself.

I remember Raphael talking about the fact that she knew that he wasn’t interested in women for the time being and he was planning on travelling as soon as he finished studying. Furthermore he told me about the time they spoke of marriage and how he made it clear that he agreed on all the fianceè thing out of consideration for father. Then why? Why was she so moved? Anyone in their right mind would have already moved forward if they heard what he said.

[Is she...really in love with HIM? Her in love with my brother? I understand being married out of benefit for both families but falling in love? No no, impossible! I heard they only saw each other twice until they met at the academy!...Then how can this be explained?]

My thoughts lingered on those matters as the treetops of the higher trees finally came into our field of vision. A knot in my stomach started forming. The vision of my dead brother was still haunting me. Remembering that vividness of details and the repulsion I felt as I saw his spilled blood sent cold shivers down my spine. But it was not the time for me to lose hope in false nightmares. I planted my heels deeper into the horse skin and swung the bridle. The horse fastened it’s gallop as an answer.

Ten minutes later we were almost at the border of the forest, tying the horses to a wooden pole dug on the ground two minutes away from the first line of trees. It was then that happened. Something out of a dream, better yet a nightmare.

That day the sky was clear, only some lonely white clouds were running around that clear blue expanse. Gentle rays of sun were warming up our bodies only covered by the school uniforms. No one would have believed us if we told them that a small portion of the sky suddenly turned as black as the night. But that's exactly what happened.

In the mere span of seconds, the sky on top of the forest was filled with deep black clouds. Heavy rain began falling from them almost instantly and the crackling sound of thunder followed soon after. All three of us watched in awe as none could understand what was happening. The black clouds were expanding both in size and area covered. Once they reached a certain extent and the cracking sound became almost deafening, they shrunk.

As if they were being sucked in by something in the midst of that sea of clouds, all of them rapidly gathered in the center. The rain came down harder. What was dropping weren’t simple drops but entire buckets of water. Just like the cloud itself casting [Waterball] in replay.

[...casting waterball…..black clouds….drops as big as a waterball…..crackling sound of thunder….]

“No...impossible…” I said out loud with my jaw dropped and a shocked expression on my face.

“What? What happened Lucas-san?” Asked worried Youm, now covering his face from the sudden gusts of wind that came out of the woods.

It only hit me then. I knew what was coming after the black clouds, the drops and the crackling sounds. The same person who was doing them was the one who explained them to me once. A spell he decided to write off in his book as “dangerous”, weird for one who was able to clad himself in an armor of fire I thought at that time. But now that I was seeing it in person I understood why he never showed it to me or never tried it.

“That’s thun-”

The crackling sound reached its peak as the spell reached its climax. The heavy rain and the crackling sound were only the prelude for what was to come. What the real spell was like.

A torrent of thunderbolts fell in the forest.

One...three...seven...twelve...I lost count.

They all generated on different sides of the cloud, some at the very end, some in the middle, some in very small clouds generated close to the main huge one. But they all fell into the same spot as if manually controlled one by one.

The light was blinding and the sound was deafening to the point where my words lost themselves inside it, unable to reach my friends’ ears. I knew the spell, I knew what it could do and what it meant for my brother to use that spell...yet I stood there, in awe. Being able to witness such a thing, such a finely concocted miracle of magic and knowledge. It was at times like these where I envied my brother’s genius.

As rapidly as it came, the lake of black clouds disappeared into thin air. The sudden absence of noise snapped me out of my open-eyed trance. I knew his position so I started running. As fast as I could without a care in the world for what was in my way. Following me were both Youm and Sora, trying to keep up with my better physique. Youm was doing a good job while Sora was having her good share of difficulties. It was probably due to the difference in their training.

“Where are we going? Isn’t that the direction where the lightning came from?” Shouted Youm from two meters behind me.

“Raphael” Was my only response

We ran and ran, covering a seemingly endless amount of meters, sometimes changing direction in order to dodge a river others to evade a fight with the local monsters. Either way we never stopped running.

I knew he was alive. I saw the spell. It was clearly his spell. But I couldn’t shake this nasty feeling that something was off. What made him choose to use that spell? Without me even realizing it, our group reached a clearing. Not a naturally generated clearing but a man made one. Blackened ground was all around the entrance of a small cave on the side of a rocky hill. Trees were burned from top to roots, not even a leaf was speared. Some trees had fallen while others could have been pushed down by even the gentlest breeze.

Sitting on the burned stump of a fallen tree, with half of his clothes missing due to burns and the other fully covered in blood, was my brother with the most relaxed expression I had ever seen him doing. Blood was falling from some cuts on the unclothed side of his body, some blood was even on his face. Though not all blood was his. In the midst of the crimson paint were some stains of blue blood which clearly originated from the now scorched carcass of the late fiend lying at the entrance of the cave.

“Uh you’re *cough* early brother-” Said Raphael with a faint voice, almost as if he was putting all of his energies into barely whispering those words “-look...I got my pride back!”

With a bloodied hand still holding his blue wand he pointed the carcass of the monster. A smile full of pride and satisfaction was stretching from side to side on his face, fully showcasing some of his blood-covered teeth.

I could do nothing but sigh in relief.