Three more years ground past in the subterranean vault.
Ritsu was now sixteen years old.
The boy who had once run through the sunlit corridors of his family’s estate was entirely dead.
In his place sat a battle-hardened, terrifyingly calm young man, his body forged into a lean, muscular weapon through years of unimaginable agony.
His skin, though inherently fair, was a crisscrossed tapestry of pale scars.
His messy blackish hair had grown long, falling into his cold, dark-green eyes.
Over the past three years, a bizarre and chilling revelation had taken root in Ritsu’s mind.
He had begun to test himself.
During the meager thirty minutes he was allowed in his stone cell, Ritsu no longer spent the time cowering or ravenously eating.
Instead, he observed the changes Null’s alchemy had forced upon his Gladeon biology.
The first test had been an accident.
While devouring the bloody steak provided to him, Ritsu had bitten his tongue so hard he severed a sizable chunk of the muscle.
Instead of bleeding out in the dark, the wound had instantly seared with a blinding, white-hot heat.
Before he could even swallow the blood, his tongue had flawlessly, perfectly regenerated.
Shock had paralyzed him.
But that shock quickly morphed into a cold, calculating curiosity.
The next day, Ritsu used a jagged edge of his broken fingernail.
He intentionally thrust it deep into his own cheek.
The pain was sharp, but compared to Null’s bone-drills, it was a mere insect bite.
He pulled the nail out and watched, mesmerized, as the flesh knitted itself back together in a matter of heartbeats.
There was no scar.
No lingering pain.
He was regenerating.
As Ritsu lay on his stiff bed, his mind constantly rang with questions.
What happens now?
Am I immortal?
Can I not die?
Why are they creating me like this?
What do they want from me?
The tortures Null inflicted had not lessened; they had escalated.
Null was no longer simply trying to cause pain.
He was testing the limits of Ritsu’s newfound immortality.
Null would completely sever Ritsu’s arm at the bicep, only to stand back in silence and watch as the bone, muscle, and skin violently reconstructed themselves in a shower of steaming blood and raw aura.
Ritsu had stopped screaming entirely.
He no longer begged.
He merely gritted his teeth and endured, his dark-green eyes locked onto the blank, black-and-white mask, studying the assassin’s flash-step movements, his breathing, and the exact way he held a blade.
One day, directly at the stroke of midday, the heavy iron door shrieked open.
Ritsu expected Null, but the heavy footfalls belonged to Zenjiro.
His father stepped into the dungeon.
Over the span of eleven years, Zenjiro had not aged a single day.
The imposing Gladeon stood before the iron chair, his pure black eyes regarding the muscular, heavily scarred teenager chained before him.
Ritsu did not look away.
He tilted his head up, meeting his father’s dark, tired gaze with absolute defiance.
“Why have you come here, Zenjiro?” Ritsu asked, his voice a low, gravelly baritone that echoed off the damp stone walls.
He no longer called the man ‘Father.’
Zenjiro’s expression remained bored and unreadable.
“I am your father. I came here to see my beautiful child, Ritsu, growing up.”
“I am not Ritsu anymore,” the teenager replied, his tone chillingly flat.
“I am… Kenshin.”
Zenjiro ignored the name change entirely.
He folded his arms across his broad chest, his dark mantle shifting slightly.
“Whatever,” Zenjiro said dismissively.
Then, his cold expression darkened, turning a fraction more serious.
“I have news for you.”
Kenshin’s jaw tightened.
He remembered the last two times Zenjiro had visited.
The death of Akari.
The disappearance of Ren.
His racing heart gave a single, painful throb against his ribs.
Zenjiro looked Kenshin dead in the eyes and delivered the final, crushing blow.
“Your mother… is no more. And I… killed her.”
The world stopped.
The image of Asuka—her sweet, soft smile, her beautiful dark-green hair, the scent of crushed lilac—flashed across Kenshin’s mind, instantly followed by the image of Zenjiro standing over her lifeless body.
A sound escaped Kenshin’s throat.
It was not a scream of sorrow.
It was a roar of absolute, primordial rage.
The heavy iron chains bolted to the chair did not just snap taut.
They groaned, bent, and violently shattered.
Kenshin surged upward, his muscles bulging with unnatural, terrifying strength.
He ripped his arms free, tearing the iron cuffs directly out of the heavy armrests.
With the remnants of the heavy iron chair still attached to his back and ankles, Kenshin launched himself into the air, flying straight at Zenjiro with murderous intent.
Before Kenshin’s fist could connect with Zenjiro’s face, a blur of motion intercepted him.
Null.
The masked assassin appeared out of thin air, delivering a devastating, flash-step kick directly to the iron chair still strapped to Kenshin’s back.
The impact shattered the remaining iron, freeing Kenshin completely.
Kenshin hit the ground, but he did not falter.
He instantly spun around, grabbing a massive, jagged piece of the broken iron chair with one hand.
Moving with a speed he didn’t know he possessed, Kenshin flipped backward in the air and hurled the heavy iron directly at Null’s head.
Null barely dodged, the iron grazing his shoulder pauldron.
Before Null could recover his balance, Kenshin drove a brutal, aura-infused kick straight into the assassin’s chest.
Null was sent flying backward, crashing heavily against the stone wall.
But the assassin instantly sprang back to his feet, his cyan eyes narrowing behind his mask.
Kenshin stood in the center of the dungeon, his chest heaving, his dark-green eyes burning with a feral, murderous light.
Blood dripped from his wrists where the cuffs had torn his skin, but the wounds were already searing shut, regenerating in a hiss of steam.
“I will kill you…” Kenshin growled, his voice vibrating with absolute hatred as he glared at Zenjiro.
“I will kill everyone… all of you!”
Zenjiro stood perfectly still, unbothered by the sudden burst of violence.
He looked at his son, a flicker of something unreadable passing through his dark eyes.
“Farewell, my son Ritsu…” Zenjiro said softly.
“Or should I say, Kenshin?”
Instantly, a thick, dark magical miasma flooded the dungeon, swirling around Zenjiro like a localized hurricane.
Kenshin roared, lunging forward, his hands outstretched to grab Zenjiro’s throat.
His fingers closed on empty air.
The smoke dissipated.
Zenjiro had vanished.
“ZENJIRO!” Kenshin bellowed to the empty ceiling.
Before Kenshin could react, a heavy, bludgeoning strike slammed into his ribs.
Null had flash-stepped into the dissipating smoke, launching a rapid flurry of lethal strikes.
Kenshin stumbled back, coughing up a spatter of blood as Null’s fists and knees struck with the force of thunderous impacts.
Null moved too fast.
The assassin was an expert, aiming for nerve clusters and joints, attempting to force the teenager back into submission.
But as Null landed a brutal strike to Kenshin’s jaw, a strange, suffocating sensation washed over Kenshin’s mind.
The world seemed to slow down.
The damp dungeon faded into a hazy, blood-red blur.
And then, a voice echoed inside Kenshin’s head.
It was a deep, ancient, and terrifyingly powerful voice—one that only Kenshin could hear.
“Be brave… be strong… be a man, if you want revenge.”
Kenshin’s eyes snapped open.
The dull, dark-green irises suddenly flashed with a terrifying, unnatural light.
Null vanished, attempting to flash-step behind Kenshin for a lethal strike to the back of the neck.
But Kenshin had already anticipated the move.
Acting on pure instinct and the adrenaline of the mysterious voice, Kenshin threw his right arm backward.
His hand clamped like a steel vice around Null’s wrist, stopping the assassin’s strike dead in its tracks.
Null’s cyan eyes widened in absolute shock behind his mask.
Kenshin spun around, using Null’s own momentum against him.
He leaped onto the assassin, tackling him violently to the cold stone floor.
Before Null could draw his blade, Kenshin snatched the thick, heavy iron chain that had bound him to the chair for eleven years.
With a roar of fury, Kenshin wrapped the iron chain tightly around Null’s neck, pulling it taut.
Null choked, his hands flying up to desperately claw at the iron, but Kenshin’s newfound, unnatural strength was overwhelming.
Kenshin leaned in close, his face inches from the black-and-white mask.
His body trembled with rage, his eyes wide and manic, a terrifying, unbroken laugh escaping his lips.
“Count from 700,000 now!” Kenshin roared, the sound manic and unhinged.
Null could not speak, nor did he scream.
He simply stared up at the boy he had tortured for over a decade.
The rage in Kenshin’s mind boiled over.
Driven by an animalistic, bloodthirsty impulse, Kenshin leaned forward, opened his mouth, and sank his teeth directly into the exposed, pale flesh of Null’s neck, right below the jawline of the mask.
Kenshin bit down with bone-crushing force, tearing into the assassin’s skin.
With a violent, brutal pull of his head, Kenshin ripped a massive chunk of flesh and muscle completely away.
Blood sprayed across the damp stone floor.
Kenshin sat back, laughing mindlessly as he spat the bloody flesh onto the ground, his teeth stained crimson.
Null did not stumble.
He did not cry out.
Instead, the assassin’s body erupted into a blinding flash of cyan lightning.
With a speed that shattered the air, Null vanished entirely from the dungeon, leaving absolutely no trace behind save for a puddle of his own blood.
Kenshin was left alone on the floor, his laughter echoing into the dark, empty vault.
The chains were broken.
The torturer had fled.
He was finally free.