Chapter 15: The Devil Form
They followed him now.
Not with cheers, not with chants, but with silence. With stares that lingered a little too long. With the kind of careful distance reserved for things not entirely trusted, but too powerful to ignore.
Aleister felt it.
In the way the camp shifted when he walked through. How conversations cut off. How even Lira, who once mocked his silence, now waited for him to speak first. He hadn't asked to lead them. He hadn't claimed the title they whispered: Null Flame. But it stuck. And with it came weight.
So when the Arcstorm rolled in, none of them questioned him. They followed.
The horizon cracked open in lightless blue. The trees bent toward the south as if bowing. And from somewhere deep in the Witherpass, came the howling.
Not wind. Not beast.
Something older.
They moved quickly, scavenging only what they could carry. The youngest were paired with older ones, and Aleister led from the front. His veins burned again, not in pain, but anticipation. The Null Mark had reached his shoulders now. When he looked in the puddles, his reflection seemed wrong. Off-centered. Flickering. Sometimes his own eyes glowed faintly red.
They reached the old war nest by dusk. A collapsed outpost from the early nation wars. Mostly concrete and rust, but still stable underground. They sealed the hatch just as the Arcstorm hit.
It screamed.
For two days, no one slept.
Some of the Nullborn curled up in corners, hands over ears, whispering prayers not to gods, but to their own memory. To the people they had been before the card system turned them into afterthoughts.
On the third day, it found them.
A sound like splintering bone echoed through the vents. Then silence. Then footsteps. Heavy. Unnatural.
Lira turned pale.
"It's an Arc-binder," she whispered. "A collector."
Aleister had only heard rumors.
They weren't soldiers. Not really. More like erasers. Sent by the ruling colleges when anomalies needed to be dealt with off-record. Not destroyed, corrected. Rewritten.
The thing dropped into the shelter's main hallway with the sound of a falling anvil. Its armor was smooth. Iridescent. Its gloves bore no runes. Just a sigil shaped like a spiral turning inward.
No face.
Just a mirrored plate.
It raised one hand.
Three Nullborn dropped before it even moved, choking, spasming, like their cards had imploded from within. Lira screamed and tried to drag one to cover, but even touching them made her recoil. Their skin steamed.
"Run," Aleister said.
No one did.
The air was too thick. The Arcfield inside the collector's armor was distorting reality. Aleister could feel it trying to rewrite his presence, not kill him, just erase him.
Something inside him snapped.
He stepped forward.
The collector turned its mirrored face toward him. No weapon. No posture. Just calm, quiet intention.
Aleister didn't wait.
The shift began in his gut.
The air inside the shelter thickened, folding in on itself. The Arc-binder's mirrored mask reflected only one thing now, Aleister standing still while the Nullborn around him whimpered, curled, or whispered half-prayers. The collector raised its hand again.
Something inside Aleister twisted.
Not his bones. Not yet.
Something deeper.
The moment was quiet. Not dramatic. Not loud. Like a breath being drawn in the belly of a storm.
Then the ground beneath him cracked.
A low rumble. The earth rejecting its own shape.
The marks on Aleister's skin, the Null Mark pulsed once, then began to bleed light. Not bright, not holy. A molten, bruised red. Like blood under fire. The veins lit up first, then the skin darkened, burned away not by heat but by force of something leaking through.
Then came the tearing.
His muscles didn't swell. They split. Not gory clean. Like fabric being unstitched from within.
Out of his back, ridged protrusions rose. Not wings. Not exactly. They were like jagged slivers of bone and shadow, twitching with residual Arc disruption. They twitched and folded down into a shape not meant for flight, but dominance.
His jaw widened. Cheekbones sharpened. Horns, not like Irikrit's, but smoother, curved like crescent blades erupted through his scalp with a sound like shattering stone. His eyes went black, then opened anew inside the darkness. Two crimson points that didn't glow so much as consume the space around them.
Then the voice came.
Not from Aleister.
From within him. Not in words.
In hunger.
The kind that wasn't about eating, but returning. Reclaiming. Becoming what was denied.
You are not wearing the form. The form remembers you.
His hands, clawed now, obsidian-dark with streaks of bright ash along the knuckles closed into fists. The Arc-binder struck then, impossibly fast, its mirrored arm swinging toward Aleister's neck.
It didn't land.
Aleister caught the blow mid-air.
The force rippled through the shelter, but Aleister didn't move.
He didn't flinch.
The collector's arm began to twist, its mirrored finish warping. As if Aleister's grip wasn't just breaking the structure, but rewriting its possibility to exist. The metal screamed.
The collector screamed too, or tried. But the mask couldn't vocalize terror.
Aleister looked into the mirrored face and saw not his reflection, but the face he was meant to wear, the horned one, the ashen one, the version of himself that had never forgotten its origin.
His voice, when it came, was not just his.
It echoed.
"I remember," Aleister said. "What you erased. I remember."
The collector stumbled back.
Aleister stepped forward.
Each step left a black scorch on the concrete. The Nullborn watched from behind cover, too afraid to move, too entranced to look away.
The morph reached its peak. Aleister was taller now, broader, but not grotesque. His skin like a dark alloy wrapped in old symbols. His chest bore a single rune, not from the five schools. Not from any nation. It pulsed once, in rhythm with his heart. Then again. Slower.
He raised a single clawed hand.
The collector didn't try to block the attack. It tried to vanish.
It failed.
When Aleister's palm opened, the space in front of it bent. Folded like paper. Not destroyed. Just forgotten. A ripple ran through the Arcfield, and the Arc-binder's armor turned to ash, then memory, then nothing.
Not disintegrated.
Unwritten.
The crater left behind was shallow, but glowing with lines that no Nullborn could read. Only Aleister could. The language was not Alcrayan.
It was the First Vein.
When he collapsed, the morph faded like smoke. No residue. No horns. Only the marks on his body, now etched deep into his skin. Not glowing. Resting. Like tattoos on the edge of awareness.
He didn't dream that night.
But those who watched him sleep whispered one word over and over.
Devil.
Not as insult.
As omen.
As proof.
As prophecy.
He woke hours later in the lower chamber, surrounded by silence.
The Nullborn were watching.
Not afraid.
Changed.
No one asked what he was.
They knew.
Lira sat next to him, legs crossed. She didn't speak for a while. Then, softly, "You didn't just fight Arc. You denied it."
Aleister didn't respond.
She turned to him. "Do you know what they'll say about this?"
He did. And he didn't care.
They would call him a devil.
But the real fear wasn't the morph.
It was that he didn't need the card to do it.
The devil form wasn't power drawn from the Arc. It was something older. Something rooted in Alcraya's bones. In the places where the card system didn't reach.
He had touched that.
And it had welcomed him.
Later that night, someone asked him what to do next. For the first time, Aleister answered without hesitation.
"We move east."
"Why?"
"There's a temple beneath the Vein Wastes. Buried. The Arcsingers used to train there. Before the Glove. Before the card system."
"You think it's still there?"
"I think it remembers."
They packed in silence.
And when they left, they didn't march like a band of outcasts.
They moved like a beginning.
The Nullborn had no nation. No college. No Arc.
But they had Aleister.
And for the first time, they didn't just believe in survival.
They believed in change.
In fracture.
In fire.