Supreme Hunter of Beautiful Souls

Kael woke with a start. The air was cold—damp and heavy like a soaked sheet. He rose slowly, his eyes still blurred with sleep, and then stopped.

Everything around him had changed.

Mist covered the ruins like a supernatural veil, thick and silent. The broken columns, once visible in the moonlight, were now just flickering shadows. The damp stone floor seemed to dissolve beneath his feet, as if the world were being devoured by something that was not part of nature.

He blinked a few times, trying to dispel the numbness in his mind—but the strangeness refused to go away.

"Exelia?" he called, his voice echoing muffled. Almost swallowed by the fog.

Silence.

"Liora?!"

Nothing. No footsteps, no breathing, no response.

Kael stood up straight, his hand automatically reaching for the hilt of his sword. His instincts screamed that something was wrong. Very wrong.

He took a few steps, the echo of his own movements his only companion. The place seemed different—as if time had bent there, as if the ruins were sinking into an endless dream.

"Damn..." he muttered, narrowing his eyes, trying to find any sign of the fire or familiar silhouettes.

But there was only white. An oppressive white, which was not light—it was absence.

A few more steps, and Kael stopped. He was sure he had turned around, but... the ruin he saw ahead was different from the one he remembered.

"Exelia! Liora!!" he shouted louder, now with urgency rising up his spine. Still nothing. Not even the sound of animals or the rustling of vegetation. The whole world seemed suspended, unreal.

Fear began to creep in—not of a visible enemy, but of being completely alone.

Kael closed his eyes for a moment, expanding his aura to try to pick up any trace of familiar mana. But the fog was too thick. Too hot. It was as if it had a will of its own. As if it were absorbing his energy, his perception.

He turned to go back. But the path had disappeared.

"This isn't ordinary fog..." he whispered, his eyes now scanning the void like a cornered animal. "This is magic."

Kael walked faster now, almost running, passing crooked columns and trees he didn't remember being there before. With each step, he seemed further from where he started. With each breath, the fog seemed to tighten his chest a little more.

And then... a silhouette.

Ahead, a motionless shadow. Human.

Kael stopped, instinctively drawing his sword from its sheath.

"...Liora?" His voice was no longer a call, but a plea.

The figure did not respond.

He advanced cautiously. But when he got close enough, he realized—it wasn't Liora. Nor was it Exelia. It was just a dead tree, twisted into an almost human shape.

Kael shouted in frustration, his voice lost like everything else in that cursed fog.

Alone, lost, and surrounded by a void that seemed to whisper with a thousand forgotten tongues, he stopped.

And for a moment, something inside him gave way—a thin thread of fear, of restrained pain, snapped.

But only for a moment.

Because Kael took a deep breath, dug his feet into the invisible ground beneath the fog, and muttered to himself:

"If this is a test... then I'll pass it. Even if I have to go through hell again."

And he took the next step, even without knowing where he was, or if there was an end to that fog. Because retreating... was never an option.

Kael walked for an indefinite amount of time — minutes? Hours? The fog did not allow time to pass, nor logic to remain. Each step seemed to echo to nowhere, each breath torn from a world without air.

But then... he felt it.

A presence.

Subtle, almost imperceptible. But different from the fog. Alive.

Kael stopped instantly, his eyes narrowing. It was an aura—ancient, deep, with a trace of power that made his skin crawl. It wasn't hostile... but it wasn't welcoming either. It seemed to be watching him. Judging him.

"Someone is here."

He muttered this instinctively, and his hand tightened on the hilt of his sword. The mist around him shuddered as if something were breathing through it.

He followed the trail of the aura, guided more by feeling than by any concrete perception. The magic there was too dense to track accurately—but there was a magnetism, an invisible pull in his chest, as if the world whispered: This way.

And then... he saw it.

Slowly emerging from the fog, like an ancient monster rising from the mist, stood a wooden structure darkened by time.

It was a house.

Old, twisted, covered in dead vines and arcane symbols carved into the beams, worn by time — but still pulsing with a restless energy.

The windows were boarded up, but a faint violet light escaped through the cracks, pulsing at the same rhythm as the aura Kael had felt before.

He approached slowly. No sound. No movement. Just the very subtle creaking of wood — as if the house were breathing.

"What is this place?" he murmured, trying to read the symbols on the door.

He recognized one of them.

It was a sealing rune... from the same school of magic that the Witch Queen used.

Kael frowned. The aura intensified for a moment—not threatening, but almost... inquisitive. As if it were waiting for something from him.

A test?

He reached out, hesitating for a moment. Then he touched the corroded iron doorknob.

Cold. Very cold.

And as he turned it, a crack echoed, not from the wood... but from the magic itself. As if something had been unlocked.

The door creaked slowly, revealing a dark interior, lit only by floating embers in shades of violet and pale blue, as if suspended in a permanent spell.

Kael stepped inside.

The air there was different.

It smelled of ancient times, wet wood, magical dust accumulated over centuries.

In the center of the room was a rocking chair. Empty. But rocking. Alone.

And on the opposite wall was a huge mirror. Oval, ornamented with bones and intertwined dry branches.

Kael approached, staring at his own reflection.

Kael stared at the mirror. The reflection was... almost accurate.

But something was wrong.

He saw himself there—but the background behind his reflection was not the house. It was a field on fire. The sky cracked by violet lightning. And behind him, three black moons, pale as the eyes of corpses, hovered in the inverted sky.

And then, Kael's reflection blinked.

But he hadn't blinked.

Kael took a step back. The reflection smiled. But it was a smile that didn't belong to him — it was crooked, dangerous, laden with a cruel promise.

The mirror cracked.

Not like glass cracking, but like an ancient egg splitting from within. And then the liquid surface of the mirror... gave way.

Something came out.

A pale arm passed through the reflection as if it were water—elegant and elongated, the fingers with black nails sharp as claws.

Then the other.

Kael took another step back, sword already raised, heart pounding in his chest.

The figure emerged completely from the mirror, as if the world of the reflection was vomiting it into reality.

It was a woman.

Tall. Slender. Impossibly beautiful—and dangerously wrong.

Her skin was pale as marble in the moonlight, but there was a slight grayish tinge to it, as if it had been touched by death. Red horns, curving backward like those of a dragon, sprouted from her golden forehead, shining like freshly bled rubies.

Her hair fell like a golden waterfall mixed with streaks of flaming red, rippling with a life of its own, as if each strand were a fragment of contained fire.

She wore a short black leather skirt, adorned with intertwined strips of black metal and small bones that jingled softly with each step. Her bare feet made no sound on the floor—but where she stepped, the wood darkened, rotting slightly.

Her eyes...

Both were of an almost indescribable color—burnt amber, as if there were an eternal sunset trapped inside her pupils, mixed with blood and smoke. And they stared at him as if she already knew who he was. As if she had known him before her own birth.

She stopped a few steps away from Kael, her head tilted with an almost feline interest.

"You took a long time to arrive..." Her voice was low, but it resonated like an ancient song, echoing in Kael's wood and blood at the same time. "I wanted to meet my Darling."

Kael gripped his sword. "How so?"

She laughed. A low, sweet, and completely inhuman laugh. "The right question would be: why am I here?"

She took a step forward.

Kael pointed his sword at her chest. "One more and I'll cut you in half."

She didn't stop. She just raised one hand in a subtle gesture—and Kael's sword became heavy, as heavy as stone, as if gravity itself had turned against him. He had to retreat, his muscles trembling.

"If I wanted to fight... you'd already be on the ground," she whispered, her eyes dancing between amber and red sparks. There was a strange pleasure in her presence—a beauty that bordered on predatory.

"But that's not why I came. I'm... interested in you."

Kael narrowed his eyes. "Interested in whom, exactly?"

She smiled. Slowly. As if savoring the sound of her own answer. "In you."

He crossed his arms, letting out a sigh that resonated with more boredom than fear.

"Okay. Great. But send me back," he said, his voice firm, unhurried. "I'm not interested."

The creature froze for a moment.

As if reality had choked her.

"What?" She raised an eyebrow, a sharp gleam passing through her eyes. That answer... was not part of the game she had expected.

Kael shrugged, as if refusing a bad dish. "You heard me. Go away. Open that mirror, I don't know. I have friends to meet."

She tilted her head, her smile dissolving into something darker.

"You... refuse me?"

"I refuse," he replied bluntly. "It's not personal. I just don't do business with creatures that come out of magic mirrors in haunted houses in the middle of the fog. I have a reputation to uphold."

There was a moment of silence.

The black flame she held went out with a sharp crack.

Then she started laughing.

But it wasn't a hysterical laugh—it was low, surprised. Authentic. As if, for a brief moment, he had broken the mask she wore.

"I love you," she said as her eyes drew hearts, her horns glowed. "I want you for myself!!"