Second Genesis

Brad roared, and this time something answered.

The sound tore out of his ruined throat raw enough to scrape blood from somewhere deep inside, but the roar itself seemed to carry something more than sound.

His will slammed into the Dominion wrapped around the hammer, punched through the pressure that had been grinding him down for days, and sank into the weapon itself. For the first time since Brad had touched it, the hammer stopped trying to change him.

Grey felt it happen.

The Dominion crushing down around his Quasi Dominion trembled, then cracked. At first it was only a thin fracture, something Grey almost mistook for his own Last Paladin Spirit finally gaining ground, but then the entire thing shattered at once. The Relentless’ will broke apart like old glass, the pressure vanished from Grey’s shoulders, and the white-gold threads around him snapped outward as his Quasi Dominion suddenly had nothing left to fight.

"Holy shit."

Grey looked toward Brad, but Brad wasn’t looking at anyone anymore.

Something had opened inside the hammer.

Maybe The Relentless was simply too far away to reinforce his hold, or maybe Brad’s stubborn bastard of a will had finally found the one crack the Guardian had never managed to close. Whatever the reason, the Dominion that had bent the weapon into The Relentless’ shape was gone, and beneath it, buried under years of force and refinement, the hammer remembered what it had been before him.

An ancient relic of the Church. Or at least, that was what the Church called it now.

The weapon had come from a fallen Race so long ago that even the memories within it had become fragmented. Enemy, ally, something in between, the hammer itself either didn’t remember or didn’t care anymore. It remembered hands unlike human hands gripping its haft, remembered battles beneath skies that no longer existed, then centuries of silence before the Church eventually claimed it.

And then came The Relentless.

Guardians were failed Paladins, but failure had never stopped them from stealing pieces of the path and forcing them into shapes they could use. Every Guardian took some unconventional route to complete the Paladin Abilities their bloodlines couldn’t properly support, and The Relentless had found the hammer while trying to decide what his own route would become. He had recognized something useful in it immediately, then spent years forcing the weapon to bend around his Resonant Frame until, after finally stepping into the Dominion Class, he beat its resistance down enough to earn acknowledgement.

But acknowledgement wasn’t compatibility. The hammer had never been meant for a Resonant Frame.

No matter how powerful The Relentless became, there were flaws in the path that refused to disappear. His Frame wanted to spread outward, resonate, dominate the world around it, while the hammer wanted something far simpler, something direct, something that would take its burden into the body and carry it without needing to project anything at all.

A Linear Frame.

Grey’s eyes widened as pieces of the story bled through the resonance around him.

"So that’s why..."

The Relentless hadn’t gathered disciples because he liked teaching. If anything, Grey could believe the bastard probably hated every second of it. He gathered them because every new disciple was another fresh perspective on his incomplete path, another experiment, another chance that someone might stumble across the answer he had failed to find himself.

If he could groom the perfect disciple, study their changes, watch how they adapted his techniques from the beginning, maybe he could use that disciple as the final stepping stone he needed to break through the canopy hanging over his head.

Then Brad came along.

Brad, with his painfully "ordinary" Linear Frame. Brad, who had no business completing a Paladin-derived trial. The big, lumbering oaf who had spent three days refusing to let go even while the hammer tore his Neural Frame apart, trying to force him to conform into something he wasn’t.

And then, finally, somewhere along the way, the hammer seemed to realize that Brad wasn’t the wrong one. The Relentless was.

The huge weapon tore free from the stone.

BOOM.

Brad dropped onto his ass with it, the hammer crashing beside him hard enough to crack the courtyard while one skeletal hand remained wrapped around its handle. His cheeks had sunk so far that his smile looked almost frightening, but none of that stopped the laugh bubbling out of him.

It started weak, then it grew.

Brad laughed and laughed until he could barely breathe, his whole ruined body shaking with it as tears slipped from the corners of his eyes.

Someone, or something, had finally picked him. The hammer had picked him because he was the best fit. He was the best. Finally, he was the best.

Better than The Relentless, a fucking Guardian.

Brad wanted to laugh harder at that, wanted to hear the rest of the memories pouring through his mind, wanted to understand the path suddenly unfolding in front of him and exactly what the hammer expected from him next. Unfortunately, his body had been running on spite for several days already. He was nothing but bone, skin, and fumes at this point.

His eyes rolled to the back of his head and he collapsed across the shattered stone, passing out with a skeletal grin still stretched across his face.

**

Far, far away, The Relentless stopped walking.

His chest seized. He coughed once, then again, and a mouthful of blood exploded across his palm.

For several seconds, he only stared at the scarlet liquid pooling between his fingers. His expression went blank, disbelief holding him perfectly still as he felt for a connection that had been part of him for so long he had almost forgotten what it was like not to have it.

Nothing.

The hammer was gone.

His eyes bulged.

"WHO?!"

The roar tore across the land.

BOOM.

The earth beneath The Relentless collapsed, mountains split apart in the distance, and the land for as far as the eye could see shattered beneath the force of his fury, leaving destruction behind him like a continent-sized crater had fallen from the clouds above.

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!