CHAPTER 51: CHAPTER: 51 CHARLOTTE, I WILL BE JOINING YOU SOON.

Kafrik frowned as he looked at Vivian. There wasn’t any visible change from the last time he’d left him, brutally tortured and broken, but something felt wrong.

’Why does he seem different?’ The thought deepened his frown.

From the moment he stepped into the room, a strange hostility pressed against him, sharp and invisible, like needles pricking his skin.

He couldn’t quite grasp what it was, so he kept staring at Vivian, brow furrowed.

His thoughts shattered when Vivian tried to speak. "Af... rik..." The sound rasped out, broken, incomplete, his throat too damaged for real words.

Yet Kafrik understood.

Vivian was trying to say his name. To spit it out like venom.

If he still had eyes, they would have been bloodshot, burning with hatred.

’Why is he showing such hatred all of a sudden?’ Kafrik wondered.

On the surface, nothing seemed unusual, but in Vivian’s case, it was.

Normally, he would tremble, plead, wear that familiar mask of despair that begged for release. But today was different.

There was no pleading. No despair. Only a fierce will to live, and beneath it, a hatred that pulsed with grief.

’How did he change so suddenly?’ Kafrik’s mind offered no reason, yet one thing became certain: breaking him would be entertaining.

A crooked smile touched his lips as he stretched his hands, joints cracking in anticipation of his favorite pastime.

He had exhausted nearly every method of torment he knew, but repetition didn’t bother him.

Pain, after all, was a patient teacher, and he intended to make Vivian relearn every lesson until his spirit shattered completely.

Kafrik dragged out the old toolbox, the same one he’d used for months to break Vivian piece by piece.

He laid out the instruments of pain, letting them clink and scrape against each other.

Vivian couldn’t see, but he could hear, each metallic sound a cruel reminder of what was coming.

Usually, that alone was enough to make him tremble. But today, nothing. No shaking. No pleas. Only silence, and beneath that silence, something burning.

Hatred.

Resolve.

Kafrik’s brow furrowed. He despised that defiant stillness, that arrogance in a man who should have been broken long ago.

"I’m going to repeat everything I did over the past few months," he said, voice dripping with contempt, hoping to ignite the familiar fear.

But there was none. Vivian’s face, though gaunt and wounded, carried an unyielding will, a will to live, to endure, to return every shard of pain Charlotte had suffered.

Seeing the same reaction again and again made Kafrik sneer. "I see those eyes have healed a little," he said, amusement curling through his voice. "Should I cut them again?"

He waited for the familiar tremor, the pleading, the fear, but nothing came. Not even a flinch.

Vivian’s silence felt like mockery. It stoked something ugly in Kafrik. His grin faltered, replaced by anger. "Let’s see how long you can keep up that arrogance!" he shouted.

Then the grin returned, crooked, cruel, as he began his twisted ritual once more.

He took his time, reopening old wounds, retracing every scar he had ever carved into Vivian’s flesh. But to his surprise, not a single scream escaped those bloodied lips.

Vivian endured it all.

Each strike, each cut, met only with stillness.

And within that stillness, there was no hatred, no despair, only the image of a single face, glowing faintly in the darkness of his mind.

Charlotte.

Charlotte’s face rose in his mind: her last smile, smeared with blood. Grief flooded Vivian as memories unspooled, small, terrible moments that kept returning like knives.

’Charlotte... you shouldn’t have gone ahead of me,’ he thought, and something wet leaked from his hollow eyes.

The tears were darkened with blood; they mixed with the fresh blood that ran from his ruined sockets.

Kafrik couldn’t tell whether they were tears or the bleeding of his eyes, and he didn’t care. He kept torturing him anyway.

But the grief hardened into something else. ’Don’t worry,’ he promised silently, each word like a vow. ’After I avenge you, I will join you.’

Tears became resolve.

The pain that should have broken him instead ignited a ruthless will to live, and to take away the life of this accursed bastard, Kafrik.

After what felt like an eternity, Kafrik finally stopped. His breath came ragged and uneven.

’Even after all that... he still hadn’t broken?’

Kafrik stared in disbelief. He had pushed Vivian beyond anything a body should endure.

The man should have been screaming, begging, but instead, there was only silence. Not even a groan.

’How?’ The same creature who used to tremble at the sound of a blade now sat motionless, drenched in blood, his head bowed yet unbroken.

Kafrik drew a sharp breath. For the first time, doubt stirred, a thin thread of dread winding through his chest as he looked at the ruined figure before him.

"No... this won’t do," he muttered. A dark thought slithered into his mind, twisting his grin back into place.

"So... you’ve gotten used to it, huh?"

There was no response from Vivian, unsurprising.

Kafrik leaned closer, voice dripping with mockery. "Didn’t you once say the Tramplins were honorable?"

He watched for any flicker of reaction. Nothing.

"How naive," he said softly. "Didn’t your respected father ever tell you?"

He paused, a wicked grin curling across his face.

"About your illness?"

At that, something twitched in Vivian’s expression, a flicker too faint to be called surprise, yet enough to feed Kafrik’s cruelty.

"That illness that stunted your growth," Kafrik continued, savoring every word, "was our doing. A gift from the Tramplins."

His voice grew darker as he spoke, weaving the story like a poison.

He told him how the curse had been placed into his body, how it had weakened him year by year, all in meticulous detail.

Vivian didn’t move, but the silence felt heavier now, like hatred had filled the air itself.

"And that," Kafrik finished, his tone thick with disdain, "is how we cursed that pathetic body of yours. My father was afraid, afraid of the Zenithara’s power. So he poured everything into this plan."

"We even had help from beyond our borders. But in the end, it was my father who stopped you from becoming the youngest swordmaster in history. And now this suffering you endure?" He chuckled slowly. "That too is thanks to him."

Vivian flinched the tiniest fraction when Kafrik mentioned outside help, not enough to break the stillness, but enough to register in the corners of Kafrik’s mind. The silence held, stubborn as stone.

"No reaction?" Kafrik sneered and leaned in, venom slow and deliberate. "Once our plan succeeds, the Zenithara family will kneel before us. Then I’ll kill them one by one, in front of you."

At the name of his family something inside Vivian cracked. Anger flared, braided with hatred, and it slammed toward Kafrik like a silent wave.

He still didn’t speak or scream, but the air around him thickened, charged with something raw and dangerous.

Kafrik, oblivious to the true shape of that charge, grinned wider. "I’ll make you watch. I’ll torture every one of them while you beg for mercy. First your brother, what’s his name? Ah, Edward. I’ll make Edward die slow."

He outlined the rest of the plan like a butcher naming cuts of meat, each sentence crueler than the last.

With every vile detail, something built in Vivian, a stored weight that pressed against his ribs and gathered at his throat.

The anger grew hotter, sharper; it pulsed outward in little tremors that set the room on edge.

Kafrik noticed it, at last, a tiny, wrong chill that snagged at his skin. He blamed the draft, the flicker of a candle.

He didn’t stop. "And in the end," he said, low and certain, "I’ll kill that bitch Charlotte. She’ll pay for humiliating me."

And then the dam broke.

All the hatred, all the grief and rage that had been coiled inside Vivian burst free, surging through his chest like fire and ice at once.

Kafrik felt it immediately.

The air thickened, heavy as smoke. His instincts screamed at him. He stumbled back a few steps, breath shallow, eyes darting around the room.

Something was wrong, horribly wrong.

The energy in the air shifted, no longer just anger. It was becoming something else, something more deep, raw, and alive.

That boiling hatred twisted and condensed in Vivian’s chest, and the air began to hum.

Kafrik’s pulse hammered as an invisible pressure pushed against his lungs.

"What... is this?" he whispered, voice trembling. His lips formed the word before he could stop himself. "Intuition?"

His vision wavered. Shadows pooled unnaturally around Vivian’s figure, spreading like spilled ink.

They thickened, darkening until they rose, slow and deliberate, shaping themselves into something that shouldn’t exist.

Kafrik’s breath hitched. The thing moved.

A black, formless shadow detached itself from Vivian and glided toward him, soundless, unstoppable.

But Kafrik wasn’t without defense.

Fortunately, or so he thought, he still had the artifact.

A relic said to withstand even the strike of a grandmaster. It had been given to him by ’that’ person, and he had sworn never to use it lightly.

His hand trembled as he pulled it free. The decision hurt almost as much as the fear, but hesitation now meant death. He activated it.

A surge of crimson light burst from the charm, wrapping him in a glowing barrier that hissed against the dark. For a heartbeat, he could breathe again.

Then came the sound, soft, delicate, final.

Chik.

The barrier flickered. A shadow cleaved through it like silk.

Pain exploded through his arm.

He looked down and saw his right hand tumbling away, blood scattering like droplets of ink.

He staggered back, clutching the stump, his breath catching between disbelief and terror.

The artifact pulsed weakly, its red light dimming as if ashamed of its failure.

"No..." he rasped, eyes wide and wet. "Impossible..."

Kafrik stared at Vivian with trembling eyes. Then he saw it, Vivian was smiling.

It wasn’t madness or joy, just quiet satisfaction, as if he believed Kafrik was already dead.

Maybe he did. With no mana and only a newly awakened intuition, Vivian couldn’t sense him properly.

But to Kafrik, that smile looked like mockery.

Rage burned through the fear twisting in his gut. He drew a dagger from his waist and lunged.

Without hesitation, he drove the blade straight into Vivian’s throat.

"Die! die! die you fucking bastard"

Kafrik kept stabbing until Vivian’s throat was completely severed.

Then he stopped, chest heaving, each breath scraping against his lungs.

Vivian, in those final moments, felt the world fading.

His body no longer hurt; the pain had drifted somewhere distant, unreachable.

Thoughts of his family flickered through the haze, his mother, his father, his brother.

’Mother... Father... Edward... this is goodbye.’

’If there truly is a next life, I pray I’ll be born as your real son, not one who must borrow another’s body just to feel what love means.’

A faint smile touched his bloodied lips as another image surfaced, Charlotte.

’Charlotte... I’ll be joining you soon.’

With that thought, the last breath slipped from his body. His head was severed, his soul unbound.

And then, light.

A pure, white radiance enveloped what remained of him, soft and soundless, as if the heavens themselves had reached down to carry him away.