Aphelia spat a mouthful of bright blood. Heat flared in her chest like a coal in snow. Pain pressed from every joint like grinding millstones, and that pain yanked her upright. She lurched aside, a reed in a rushing flood, as the Ghoul King’s alabaster claws plowed new furrows into the rock. She slipped through its finger-gaps by a hair and sprinted toward Hercules.
Damn those Heller elders. To shield their prodigy and their secrets, they’d stayed silent about what the Twelve Trials truly grant before the later Tests. That silence was a trap laid like a hunter’s pit. Fury rose in her ribcage like wildfire; she hadn’t thought fellow hunter clans could be so cold-blooded.
How do you collar a monster of this tier with human hands alone?
It wasn’t that Aphelia lacked Angel’s Dust. She had low-grade vials. But whenever she triggered it, the stuff meeting her blood turned her veins into fuses. One touch, and Ophelius’s blood—whatever slept inside it—became high explosive.
If she pushed too hard, she’d detonate from within before the Dust ever hit its usual limit. Viscera to ash, like paper to flame. So she avoided it, every dose a barbed gift. It crippled her after and might still fail against a Ghoul King. No one could say what the Dust would awaken this time.
Angel’s Dust, at its core, drags human potential to the edge. Rites hidden in the Dust guide the flesh, coaxes a buried wellspring to rise, and lends a power beyond human. The toll is brutal. The higher the concentration, the sharper the knife. Unless it’s truly life or death, no hunter touches that snow-bright poison.
Hunters meet monsters with death in their eyes, yes, but they still want to walk out. There was a case: a hunting squad cornered by a vampire count. The captain cracked his first Angel’s Dust. Fire bloomed in him like a sunrise over oil. He could ignite the count’s blood in any form; the count burned with nowhere to hide. The squad lived. The captain didn’t have much left. The Dust drained him in a blink, a dry season after one thunderclap. Killing the count took a single move. The Dust didn’t care. It hit like a hammer, and the price hit back.
It’s a hard medicine with a venomous tail; use it at all, and the tail will strike. How much you took never mattered. That’s why Aphelia treated it like a venomous flower—beautiful, deadly, and not to be touched. Once, at her peak, she used it. The next instant was a blackout, as if some ancient drumbeat drowned her mind.
What happened in that gap?
Her memory was a blank page scorched at the edges. She only remembered a wave of power surging up from her bones, a heart pounding like a war drum from the age of beasts, and then—nothing.
When she came to, the underground arena lay in ruins. Scars marked the walls like a storm of energy weapons had swept through. Around her, other traces showed something that devoured at impossible speed, leaving bitten edges in stone. She couldn’t name the power. Even the chimera caged in iron had been reduced to fine ash; a breeze would’ve scattered it like snow. Her strength had been that ruthless.
Then came the emptiness. It strangled like a cold current under ice. She’d never imagined every organ could enter total fatigue. That day, after the Dust, she learned the fear of being unmade.
Her senses sank as if packed in wool. Sounds blurred. Scents died. The world smudged to charcoal, and even bitterness abandoned her tongue. Her body felt hollow, like a shell forgotten by the tide. She doubted she still existed. She knew the signs: overdrawn to the brink. Organs were failing, so the five senses shut like frostbitten buds.
Fortunately, she’d laid aftercare in advance. A flood of energy compounds and drugs dragged her back from the Reaper’s shadow. Brushing past Death face to face leaves a chill. Since then, her fear of Angel’s Dust became a stone in her gut. More precisely, fear of the thing inside herself that wakes with it.
Damn it. I don’t want to use that.
Teeth clenched, she wove past those tank-sized claws again and again. She slipped into the narrow fissure where Hercules lay. His eyes shone like trapped stars, but his body refused to move. Aphelia saw it at once.
The body couldn’t keep up with the power.
Hercules was a talent, sure. He’d grasped bits of the First and Second Trials. Bits weren’t truth. Without the heart of them, he had no edge against the dark brood and got hammered like iron on an anvil.
At the cliff’s edge, the powers of the First and Second must’ve sensed their host drowning. They tried to boot up on their own, to pry him free. But his body didn’t meet the mark. Genius he was, still a teenager, far from the antique physique the ancients trained as a baseline. Mind and power collided like rams, and he writhed between them.
If that’s how it is—oh come on! Could you stop hurrying me to my grave?
As Aphelia reached toward that power, the Ghoul King slammed its claws into the cavern wall with a quake like thunder cracking mountains. Rock rained from the ceiling like a stony hailstorm. It meant to pry them out like clams. The tremors punched her bones; a curse slipped free.
It also meant time had run dry. No more thinking. Runes were blooming around Hercules like fireflies forming a circle. Aphelia exhaled, long and heavy. She reached into the ring of Runes and spoke softly.
Sorry.
She knew this kind of secret-trial legacy could likely transfer to one person at most. She didn’t lack secret arts. But her own tools couldn’t fell the Ghoul King outside. She could imagine Hercules’s fate once those legacies were stripped. Still, if they didn’t both live through today, tomorrow had no meaning.
Her pale fingertip touched the intricate Runes. Light poured out like molten daybreak and filled the cave. The Ghoul King recoiled, step by grinding step. It raised two colossal bone claws to ward the radiance spearing from the fissure. It had no eyes, but the banshee of death nested within it shrieked in silent instinct at that light.
Aphelia stepped from the crack no longer a blood-smeared wreck. Her white robe had become gold armor, bright as noon over dunes. The fit was perfect, a second skin hammered by gods. The plates were blank—no emblems, no flourish—save for constellations etched on both pauldrons. The breastplate and fauld bore no ornament at all.
Beneath the armor, her ruined black robes had turned silver-white, a cool sheen like moonlight threading gold. Even in this black cavern, she shone.
Her weapon looked born, not forged. A greatbow as tall as she was, grown from the bones of beasts, rough and primal. In its center, a single bestial eye glared open, a hunter’s glare fixed on the towering Ghoul King.
So that’s it. Little Hercules got it wrong. How did he split the summoning array for the legacy armament into two simple reinforcement Runes?
Aphelia flexed, listening to the armor and the power she wore. She sighed, weighty as a judge’s gavel. The Twelve Trials’ first two weren’t just speed and strength buffs. Those were add-ons from the summoning array, meant to brace the user so they could bear the armor and wield the weapon.
Her cuirass held two built-in weapon belts tucked along her ribs. One thought, and a weapon would spring from the armor, silver fish on fine chains, leaping into her hands. Even so, she felt she could crush the Ghoul King bare-fisted, like snapping rotten wood.
There’s a saying: strength without study is a dull blade.
Compared to unstudied Hercules, Aphelia had lived in the old letters till they sang. The ancient Runes of the Twelve Trials read like ink to her; decoding them was a river running downhill.
Power surged through her body like spring thaw. Even without Angel’s Dust, she felt the changes unfold. Her displaced arm bones slid back into place at once. The broken ribs lodged in her organs eased free with gentle guidance, like thorns drawn from flesh, then knitted fast. Warmth seeped through her limbs, a bath of sunlit water.
Come. Let’s end this farce.
A feral smile lifted her mouth. The Ghoul King’s twin claws hammered forward like falling gates. She slid one step back, light on her heels. She didn’t nock an arrow. She drew the greatbow bare, string singing like a hawk’s cry, and sighted on the two vast bones swelling to fill her vision.
