Chapter 204: Ordeal

"When I turned twelve, I obtained the reverse aspect of the Full Eclipse Curse. I awakened an incredibly powerful Blessing and discovered that I possessed an enormous reserve of mana..."

Ars had awakened the Golden Arsenal Blessing, an extraordinarily powerful ability that allowed him to create weapons out of nothing.

Alongside it came a vast mana reserve that surpassed even those of mages.

At first, he hadn’t noticed anything particularly remarkable about his mana capacity, since the difference between him and his peers was relatively small at lower levels.

If an ordinary Level One hunter possessed a mana reserve of five, Ars would have seven or eight.

Slightly above average, but nothing extraordinary.

However, the difference began widening dramatically as his level increased.

Eventually, his mana reserves grew to several times those of hunters at an equivalent rank. The disparity became so enormous that even Asterion barely possessed a quarter of his total mana.

Ars used his newfound power to become a hunter.

He struggled terribly in the beginning, and the persecution he continued to face made gaining recognition as a hunter exceptionally difficult.

But he ultimately claimed the title through sheer force, fighting battles to the death in Maria Reckoning.

Speaking of Maria...

She had still been alive during the Golden Dawn Knight’s era, and she was among the very few people who had treated him as a human being during his early years.

She had even helped him by teaching him how to fight, although their time together had been brief.

Brief as it was, that period had been enough for Ars to earn the right to call her his teacher.

Their relationship had been remarkably similar to the one I shared with Asterion.

Unfortunately, Maria died shortly after teaching him, while carrying out a suicidal mission assigned to her by the ruling Arden family.

She had been so powerful that they decided to use her to eliminate a formidable warrior who was regarded as the strongest on the continent at the time.

Maria confronted him and succeeded in killing him, but the victory came at the cost of her own life.

The Arden family had achieved its objective, since the warrior had been their enemy.

Despite Maria’s death, however, they showed little concern, treating her as nothing more than a weapon that had fulfilled its purpose.

Afterward, they began preparing for the emergence of another supreme hunter who could take her place.

Ars grew up to become that hunter.

Using his Blessing, he constructed an extraordinarily powerful suit of armor and infused it with his Aura Armor, creating a formidable defense that compensated for his fatal weakness and protected his single point of HP.

His enormous mana reserves allowed him to create a seemingly limitless number of weapons without restriction.

He became a ferocious monster whom no one could match, rapidly ascending to the pinnacle of strength as the most powerful living hunter following Maria’s death.

The Heart Clan’s sacred duel would later be named in her honor.

Maria Reckoning.

Ars became known as the Golden Dawn Knight.

Where he had once been met with mockery and humiliation, he was now regarded with awe and reverence.

He had finally earned respect, yet he remained distant from other hunters and humanity in general.

At the beginning of his life, he had stood far beneath everyone else.

By the end of it, he stood above them all.

He became the ruling family’s most powerful weapon, and they used him to crush anything that stood in their way.

During his long years of fighting, Ars was subjected to the Ordeal.

And gradually, he began to understand what it was.

Without realizing it, he had been undergoing a secret trial orchestrated by an entity he knew absolutely nothing about.

"The Ordeal remains a mystery whose answer has eluded me even to this day."

The Ordeal consisted of trials that grew increasingly severe each time Ars managed to survive them.

At first, he hadn’t even realized he was being tested. But as time passed, he began to suspect that everything he was experiencing was being controlled by some unseen entity pulling the strings from behind the scenes.

Once he became aware of that horrifying truth, Ars began noticing the Messengers of Wisdom all around him.

People he had seen every day turned out to be worshippers of those vile entities, secretly weaving conspiracies around him without his knowledge.

By that point, he was no longer known as Ars.

He was the Golden Dawn Knight.

He had become so powerful that he managed to kill every one of those messengers himself, causing the Ordeal to advance to its next stage.

What followed was a nightmare that nearly claimed his life.

Ars escaped death by the narrowest of margins.

And I found myself utterly stunned when I realized what the next stage had entailed.

The hunter had become the hunted.

The Golden Dawn Knight had been marked as a target of the Wild Hunt.

He was subjected to a terrifying pursuit that lasted for weeks. Throughout those weeks, everyone who accompanied him or came too close was killed, forcing him to flee without rest while the Legion of Death relentlessly pursued him.

And during that desperate escape, the Golden Dawn Knight encountered a walking calamity.

I froze in disbelief the moment I saw it.

"This..."

My voice trembled.

"One of the Night Lords... The commander of the Wild Hunt, known as the Champion of Night."

The Golden Dawn Knight had fought one of the Night Lords face-to-face.

He had confronted a horrifying entity possessing unimaginable power.

And somehow, he had survived.

"Don’t think for even a moment that I survived because of my own strength. My survival was nothing more than a stroke of luck."

Ars spoke, correcting the assumption forming in my mind.

"I fought with everything I had and unleashed every deadly attack at my disposal. But none of them worked, and I suffered a crushing defeat..."

The Golden Dawn Knight seemed genuinely terrified by the memory of his battle against the Champion of Night, despite how much time had passed since that encounter.

He had ultimately managed to escape by some miracle, but he explained that the commander of the Wild Hunt could have killed him in the end.

For some reason, however, the Night Lord had chosen not to.

He had merely shattered Ars’s golden armor.

"That Night Lord was absurdly powerful. Defeating him would require at least one God-rank warrior accompanied by an entire squad. And that’s just to kill him alone. Add the Legion of Death that follows him, and defeating him becomes impossible..."

There was genuine despair in his words.

Having suffered such a miserable defeat, he couldn’t even imagine that creature ever being killed.

The encounter haunted Ars with nightmares for a long time afterward.

But he had survived, and life continued.

The Ordeal advanced to another stage.

Then came the incident involving Matheus.

The Golden Dawn Knight defeated him with ease and bound him before the throne of his dungeon.

But that was merely the beginning of the downfall of Old Ashvarn.

The curse descended upon the city, and the members of the clan began transforming into monsters one after another.

Following orders from the Arden family, the Golden Dawn Knight plunged into the chaos and fought to stop the catastrophe.

But he failed.

His failure prompted the ruling family to resort to the great conflagration that annihilated half of the Heart Clan.

And amid all that chaos, Ars himself fell victim to Aldrich.

He could have survived if a powerful priest had been present to help him.

But the ruling family’s decision to isolate the battlefield with fire left him completely alone, allowing the insidious monster to seize control of his body.

And so his story ended in the worst possible way.

"I failed the Ordeal, so I cannot claim to understand it. But after enduring its trials for so long, I learned one important thing..."

"The Ordeal destroys those who are subjected to it, and it destroys everything around them."

"I lost my entire city. I lost my teacher... I lost myself and everything I had."

"It is a curse that forces you to keep living while you watch everything around you burn."

"If you value the lives of your companions, run. Run, Ethan, and distance yourself from everyone. Otherwise, you’ll drag them all to their doom alongside you."

The Golden Dawn Knight delivered his warning in a heavy, solemn voice.

And with those words, he made me realize that a dark future was waiting for me.

One that might be much closer than I thought.