Anthesis of Sadness
Chapter 127: The Enemy of the World

Chapter 127: The Enemy of the World

In that arena, there had been forty-eight at the start.

Forty-eight champions, among whom the twelve chosen by the gods were present, gathered before the eyes of the world, filled with glory, hope, and power. Forty-eight stories. Forty-eight reasons to believe we were about to accomplish something greater than ourselves. That our battle, however bloody, would still carry meaning.

But that illusion had already begun to crack.

And now... there were only forty-seven of us.

Just one body less.

But the silence it had left behind still echoed in the bones of the arena.

Tension was at its peak.

Not just in the eyes. But in the air. In the stone. In the barely raised weapons, ready to strike. In the spells that trembled at the tips of fingers. In the legs that had not yet run, but were already searching for where to flee.

And at the center...

At the center, there was this thing.

Not a figure. Not an ally. Not a name.

A beast.

The vampire.

The one who had struck cleanly, effortlessly, without explanation.

The one even the other vampires avoided looking at.

He didn’t speak.

He barely moved.

But everything in him radiated a foreign strength. Something too ancient. Too dense to be contained in a body.

And I looked at that form planted there, among the forty-seven survivors.

And I felt, without the shadow of a doubt...

That it would be him, and him alone, who would decide how many of us would still be alive.

The crowd cheered.

Without restraint. Without shame. With that primitive joy that peoples can still produce when they sense that death will be beautiful to witness. Each species had its way of exulting: the Dryads made their living vines tremble, the Giants pounded against the walls of the coliseum, the Demons burned symbols into their own flesh. Everyone seemed delighted. Unleashed. Fascinated by the imminence of carnage.

And amid that outpouring... I saw her.

Her too.

Anarael.

In the upper box, standing still, calm, her chin slightly raised like a sovereign contemplating her work. She didn’t speak. She barely moved. But she smiled.

A discreet smile. Tiny.

Terrible.

She had succeeded.

She had broken something no one had the right to break. She had taken a being, a vampire, a father maybe... and made him what the world expected: a weapon.

A monster.

I didn’t know what he had endured these past two weeks.

I knew nothing of the tortures, the training, the silences.

But what I saw now, what I felt down to my nerves, was that he was no longer the same man.

He stood there, motionless.

Near the group of trolls.

His body seemed ready to leap, but he didn’t move. Not a muscle. Not a glance toward his enemies. Not a sigh. He didn’t laugh. He hardly even breathed.

He wasn’t tense. He wasn’t calm. He was empty.

A puppet. A specter standing in a flesh-bound armor. And that puppet was animated by only one thing: a task to complete. Nothing else.

And I remained there, staring at him, unable to take a step, unable even to admit out loud what I had just understood.

At his side, I saw him.

Léonard.

The one who, once, considered me a brother — not a brother of blood, but of silence, of shared pain, of glances exchanged in the darkness of a world that offered us no direction. The one who had taught me to breathe differently, to stand even when everything pulled me to the ground, to see in survival something more than brutal chance. The one who once told me: Always look ahead. Only stop if it’s to catch someone.

He was there, just a few meters away, upright, solid, as if frozen in that posture that had always been his. He stood facing the creature I had stopped naming, for no word suited what he had become. He did not tremble. He did not retreat. He had not raised his voice. No cry for vengeance, no call to honor or memory. Nothing. Just a gesture, calm, perfect, like a ritual act that needed neither justification nor emotion.

He drew his sword.

And without hesitation, without the slightest tremor in his wrist, he drove his blade into Lukaris’s side.

I did not scream. I did not move. I was suspended, a stranger to the scene unfolding before my eyes yet intimately bound to it, in another depth.

His face showed nothing. No rage. No fear. Just the icy certainty of having done what had to be done, what was expected of him, what the world, perhaps, demanded.

But I already knew. I knew even before the steel touched the flesh. I felt it in my bones, in that strange, hollow beat that preceded the impact. In the total inertia of the body he struck. In that absence of tension in Lukaris’s muscles, as if none of it concerned him anymore.

The blood did not flow. It rose.

It burst against gravity, in an inverted, unreal spray, as if the very logic of the world had split under the violence of this useless gesture. A wave of flesh, of light, and of refusal burst from the point of impact, and in that flash of pure incoherence, another body was cleaved.

The troll, who had barely turned toward them, was sliced clean. His torso toppled silently, in a wet breath, and fell to the ground like a sack emptied of its name.

Léonard was literally cleaved in two.

Not cut. Not shredded. No. Cleft. Like an overripe fruit brushed by a blade heated white-hot.

There was no scream. No last-ditch gesture.

Just two halves.

Two halves of a brother.

Two halves of a mistake.

And I, breathless, understood that something, at that instant, had shifted irreversibly.

What followed was not a tournament.

Not a trial. Not a duel. Not a combat measured by rules and a codified ritual.

It was a massacre.

A one-sided massacre. A universal response to an anomaly too powerful to be tolerated. As if all races, without consulting each other, without even exchanging a word, had understood the same thing at the same moment: he had to be eliminated.

That thing, which should never have existed, had to be erased.

It wasn’t an explosion. It wasn’t disordered chaos. It was a silent pact. An instinctive synchronization. Each, in their own way, drew their weapons. Blades, spells, fangs, curses — everything the twelve species could unleash surged in a single wave, aimed at a single point.

As if Lukaris, in his silence, in his stillness, had become the enemy of all species.

Not an opponent.

A rejection.

Incantations burst in all languages. Ancient words, lost prayers, war pacts thrown into the air with the force of desperation. The healers began weaving protective circles, blessing flesh, reinforcing minds before contact burned them.

The assassins vanished into the shadows, as if swallowed by the ground. They slipped into the invisible lines, ready to strike where the eye does not look.

The warriors, for their part, formed a circle. Wide. Dense. Perfectly structured. Each movement was disciplined, each step precise. They surrounded him without haste. Without shouting. As if they were hunting a monster whose end they had already read in forbidden tales.

And at the center...

He remained.

Lukaris.

Standing. Alone. Silent.

He didn’t raise his eyes. He didn’t step back. He didn’t adopt any defensive stance. He didn’t even turn to look for a way out.

But did he need one?

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