Crossworld Swordplay

What is this!? Selra stood frozen, her mouth slightly agape. They've turned into beasts?

She couldn't help but pause, unable to believe her eyes.

This shouldn't be possible. Monsters weren't supposed to exist—they were just tricks adults used to scare or discipline their children.

Yet as she took one step back, she couldn't refute the horror in front of her.

Her eyes darted toward the instructor and the second-years, waiting to see how they reacted.

Were they about to rush in to stop them? Were they also in the dark? Or would they tell them to go back to the dorms instead?

Selra watched them, noticing no real movement—only Instructor Kael stopping a girl from taking another picture.

Yet he didn't confiscate her camera—or destroy the glass plates that held the images.

Interesting, she realized.

This event would somehow be suppressed to an extent… but not erased. They weren't stopping them from watching it unfold.

And here I was entertaining the thought of challenging one of them.

"I guess I won't be earning that silver star," she muttered.

Kael turned, eyebrow raised.

"Oh?" he said dryly, voice amused. "You're the one who dragged me out here in the first place—hoping I'd watch your duel with one of them, weren't you?"

His gaze followed hers toward Damon.

"If you still want to duel a second-year," he added, "there are plenty around right now."

Selra only shook her head.

"I suddenly doubt I'd be able," she said, her confidence in her swordsmanship faltering.

"But instructor Kael… Do you mind if I ask what's going on with them?"

Kael looked at her, amused.

"What's with your lot asking for answers on stuff a year ahead of you all so suddenly?" He smiled.

"Though… I'm a little tempted to see what would happen if I made an exception for you too~."

He said this while narrowing his eyes at Damon, who flung a handful of salt at Cedric.

Hmm. How'd you get a different Sigil Stone? Don't tell me I was swindled, Kael thought, turning back to Selra.

"Say… do you like sparrows?"

Cedric lunged, a bestial roar tearing from his throat, his limbs no longer moving with human grace but with the erratic ferocity of a cornered predator.

Damon met him head-on.

His claws raked across Cedric's salt-burned face, tearing through fur and scorched flesh. The blow snapped Cedric's head sideways—just in time for Damon to follow up with a brutal palm strike to the jaw, slamming him hard against the marble.

Cedric snarled.

Damon's right hand curled into a fist, aiming to cave in his skull—

—but he missed.

His knuckles cracked against the stone, and in that brief hesitation, Cedric's claw slashed across his chest, forcing Damon to stagger back.

Pain flared—hot and raw.

Cedric surged up and punched him in the mouth, the blow cracking Damon's head to the side. Another fist came swinging—

—but Damon's jaws snapped open mid-swing.

His jagged teeth sank deep into Cedric's fist, tearing through skin and tendon.

Cedric screamed.

Damon's claws tore open the pouch of salt at his hip. He shoved the bag into Cedric's mouth, forcing the scorch-inducing grains down his throat.

Damon bit down—hard—and Cedric's hand tore free, mangled.

He swallowed it down with a vicious grin.

With his other hand, Damon clawed at Cedric's jaw, prying it open before the other boy could return the favor.

He ripped his hand free—blood trailing from torn knuckles—and tackled Cedric to the ground.

His fur thickened, black strands spreading across his body. His limbs bent at unnatural angles, spine shifting with a sickening crack as the transformation deepened.

A sound tore from his throat—"NEEEEHHHHRRGHHH!" —

A howl, twisted and broken, caught somewhere between horse and wolf.

Then he stomped forward—

His foot came down hard on the jagged spike protruding from Cedric's stomach.

Cedric writhed beneath him, blood bubbling from his mouth, but Damon didn't stop. His claws tore at flesh, his weight pressing down harder with each breath. The marble beneath them cracked, rain hissing against the steam rising from their mangled bodies.

Fur surged along Damon's neck. His mouth widened, canines jutting like knives from a jaw stretched too far. His eyes glowed yellow, narrow and feral, the whites long gone.

He snarled, pulling back his fist—no longer even a fist, but a twisted claw, muscles bulging and furred over.

And then—

Something cold and damp brushed against his shoulder.

He turned slightly—and froze.

Clinging to him like a shadow was a figure.

Her flesh was pale and rotten, stretched thin over brittle bone. Hair hung around her face like wet cobwebs, limp and clinging. Her white eyes shimmered with emptiness—not blindness, but absence. She reeked of grave dirt and a silence too heavy to be natural.

One thin arm coiled around his shoulders, its joints stretched unnaturally, as if her limbs had been forcibly pulled longer than a human body should allow. In her other hand, she held a silver short sword—its blade resting coldly against the artery in his neck.

She didn't breathe.

She only grinned—her jaw unhinged slightly, teeth clacking like bones in a wind chime. The noise matched the rhythm of his heartbeat.

She whispered.

But her lips did not move.

"Where is it?"

Her voice was a dead breath inside his head, too loud and seemingly too close.

"There it is," she cooed, and her hands—ghostly, yet solid—slid through his chest, curling around something that shouldn't be touched.

"Master will be pleased…"

A wave of unnatural cold surged through his body. 

—and something was ripped out of his stomach.

And without him knowing, his body was somehow thrown back mid-blink, his back skidding across the marble.

She stood behind him, holding something fleshy by its fingers—his blood still dripping from it.

"But I'll be taking this back."

He tensed, crouching low.

A growl rumbled from Damon's throat—low, guttural, and full of warning. His skin rippled. Muscles flexed beneath shifting flesh. Fur stretched down his arms in thick waves, while his heels hardened—jagged growths forming as his legs twisted into powerful, digitigrade limbs.

His back arched. His spine cracked. A mane of wild hair flared along his neck and down his upper back.

The sigil on his chest pulsed—faintly glowing with a bit of emerald now, not just the crimson or ruby—casting flickering light across his half-beast form.

He stood—transformed. A true hybrid.

No longer, man... Nor entirely beast.

But something in-between three distinct creatures that had just tasted the diamond sigil implanted in his palm he had devoured.

She didn't flinch.

She drifted to Cedric, who writhed and clawed at his throat. Her jaw creaked open, wide and wrong, and she slid herself down into him, folding like cloth into his wound, like water into cracks.

Then Cedric's mouth moved—but it was her voice that came out.

"I hate salt."

She held his half-mangled hand gently to his stub.

Then Cedric's body healed—though not at her will; instead, it was more so the fact she began removing the grains off him that triggered this rapid growth of new cells and tissue—and he grinned.

"Didn't expect you to be dirty," he said, voice still slightly layered with hers. He grabbed the pouch and poured what little salt remained over his ruined hand.

It hissed, sizzling and steaming on contact. 

"So you won't mind if I am too," he said, shaking off the salt from his newly joined wrist. 

As her presence sank deeper into him, Cedric's eyes rolled back—white as milk. Two hands—not his—ripped out of his spine, their fingers long and skinned like raw meat. Fur crept up their arms. He began to cough violently, gagging until a wave of drool and black bile spilled from his mouth—purging the salt.

Then he raised his head and smiled with two sets of lips.