CHAPTER 43: TO SEE BEYOND

The first vision came without warning.

It was a morning like any other, cold, gray, and merciless. The courtyard was draped in dawn mist, the kind that clung to skin and dulled the edges of breath.

Ahce’s blade gleamed faintly beneath the rising sun, her arms aching as she followed her instructor’s barked commands. Each strike, each parry, was mechanical, born from exhaustion rather than will. Sweat clung to her temple. Her body moved, but her mind drifted.

Then, everything stopped.

The clang of steel ceased midair. The air itself thickened, the mist frozen in place like a held breath. For a fraction of a second, there was no sound, no wind, no pulse, no world. And when Ahce blinked, the courtyard was gone.

She stood instead amid ruin.

Where am I?

What is this place?

Wait...

I think I know...

The sky above was bleeding red, the color of rust and sunset mixed with smoke. Buildings lay gutted, glass shattered into rivers of light beneath her boots. The stench of burning metal and flesh filled her lungs.

Ash fell like snow. She knew this city, City E7, the industrial core of the Xirudah Republic. But the proud skyline she remembered was reduced to jagged silhouettes, its streets choked with fire and silence.

Then came the sound.

Low. Guttural. Wrong.

From the haze crawled figures, human at first glance, until they moved. Their limbs jerked with unnatural speed, backs arched, claws raking the ground. Skin rippled like something alive squirmed beneath it. Their eyes, crimson, faintly glowing, locked on her as a chorus of growls rolled across the broken avenue.

"Tainted Bloods," Ahce whispered. Her voice barely rose above the wind.

They swarmed. Hundreds, no, thousands. A wave of hunger and madness. Once-human forms now consumed by the experiments, she’d only heard whispers of the new serum that turned soldiers into weapons... and then into beasts.

Some still clutched fragments of memory, mouthing names as if pleading for salvation. Others had lost all trace of humanity, their bodies deforming as the corruption deepened. And then she saw it, the insignia burned into the debris. The Division’s emblem. Richard’s old unit’s flag, tattered and blackened, was half-buried in the rubble.

Her stomach turned. Her pulse pounded.

Flashes followed, images tearing through her mind like shards of glass. Soldiers screaming. Laboratories collapsing. Scientists injecting blue serums into trembling arms. Men and women begging for help before their eyes turned red and their veins blackened. The end of everything she once fought to protect.

"Stop it," she gasped, clutching her head. "Make it stop, please..."

But the vision only grew stronger.

The ground split open beneath her, and from it rose a colossal form, a creature with the head of a lion and the body of a man, taller than any skyscraper, its roar shattering the sky. Armies fired missiles, bullets, beams of light, but nothing pierced its hide. The city dissolved into flame and screaming metal.

Then she saw herself.

High above the chaos, standing on a fractured tower, wielding a weapon that burned brighter than lightning. A blade of light, shaped like memory and fury. Her eyes glowed gold, just like the Duchess’s had in the mirror. Around her stood people, soldiers, humans, and altered beings alike, waiting for her command. And beside her... stood a man.

Black uniform. Emblem of a phoenix.

The scar tracing the back of his neck.

Her breath caught. "Richard..."

Before she could call to him, the sky split open. From the wound in the heavens came a voice, ancient, divine, distorted like echoes through stone.

"The war of blood and will begins. The cursed bloodline will either save the world... or end it."

Then, silence.

Ahce’s knees struck the ground. She gasped for air, vision snapping back to the courtyard. Instructors surrounded her, their shouts muffled as though she were underwater. Her hands trembled violently. Her pulse roared in her ears. And beneath the chaos of her own breathing, a whisper lingered, soft and sorrowful.

"You’ve seen the end, successor," murmured the Duchess’s voice from somewhere deep inside her mind. "The question is... will you stop it, or fulfill it?"

Ahce looked down. Her fingertips were streaked with crimson, not red blood, but blackened, metallic veins, the same shade that had consumed the creatures in her vision. The color pulsed faintly under her skin. For the first time, she wasn’t sure whether she had seen the future... or a reflection of what she was becoming.

Hell.

That was the only word to describe what followed.

After that day, the Duchess’s spirit did not console her. It simply judged.

"Good," it said. "The bloodline has awakened."

From that moment, her real training began.

Exhaustion became her companion. Sleep turned into a rare mercy. The old routine, combat, history, and strategy were nothing compared to the trials of awakening a Pentecase heir’s mind. Each dawn began the same. The toll of the ancestral bell.

It wasn’t an ordinary sound. It resonated inside her skull, stirring her psychic core like a storm. Every chime tore at her nerves, widening the gates of her consciousness. By the time she reached the courtyard, her nose was already bleeding.

The Mentors of Sight, ancient instructors who wore veils over their eyes, oversaw her new training. Their methods bordered on cruelty. At night, they blindfolded her and left her alone in the mansion’s labyrinthine halls.

"Find your way out before sunrise," they ordered.

The corridors shifted as she walked. Walls elongated, staircases looped back on themselves. Shadows whispered her name from the corners. Sometimes, she heard her own voice calling back, soft, pleading, not hers at all.

Each success honed her power. She learned to sense presence, to distinguish fear from hostility, emotion from intent. But every victory came with a cost, nosebleeds, migraines, flickers of memories that weren’t her own.

The combat lessons grew worse.

Wooden blades were replaced with real swords. Practice targets with spirits, echoes of fallen Pentecase warriors conjured from psychic residue. They fought like humans, thought like humans, but their eyes were hollow. Their strikes burned with ghostfire.

"Focus your mind," one mentor barked as her blade clashed with a phantom’s. "The enemy won’t wait for you to think. Either act, or perish."

By noon, her body was painted with bruises. By midnight, her mind was drowning in visions.

Sometimes, she saw Richard, his smile, his touch, his voice, and then, in the next heartbeat, his face dissolved into a monster’s snarl. Sometimes, she saw the world burning again, her own reflection wielding that light-born blade against an endless night.

But what frightened her most was not the pain, it was the ease. Each day, the power grew more natural. She could hear thoughts with a touch. Move objects with her will. Bend the air to mimic another’s voice. It was intoxicating and dangerous.

She could feel the curse creeping in, whispering promises of control, of omniscience, of release. Some nights, she woke with scratches down her arms. Other nights, the whispers crawled into her dreams.

"Open the door."

"Finish what the ancestors began."

And yet, she endured.

Because somewhere within this madness, beneath the layers of bloodline and curse, lay the truth, about the Tainted Bloods, the Pentecase gift, and Richard’s disappearance. She had already seen the end once. She refused to let it come true again.

If she had to walk through fire, if she had to become the very monster the world feared, so be it. For the world may have called her cursed, but Ahce Pentecase had already seen the apocalypse. And she was determined to rewrite it.