The first thing he noticed was the silence.
Not total silence, no. The wind kept running over the scorched grass, somewhere in the distance a bird was singing, and beneath his back he could still feel the cold, uneven ground of the battlefield where he had opened his eyes again for the first time since reappearing.
But in front of him, nothing.
He stayed lying there, motionless, staring at what should have been the sky.
"Why can't I see anything?"
He blinked once, without much conviction, almost expecting the simple gesture alone to fix everything. Then he tried again, more slowly this time, trying to feel every movement of his eyelashes, every tiny contraction of the muscles around his eyes.
Nothing changed. The darkness in front of him remained exactly the same darkness, whether his eyelids were closed or wide open, just as dense and uniform either way.
He raised a trembling hand, still heavy with exhaustion, and brought it slowly to his face. His fingers found his nose first, then moved up, hesitant, until they brushed against his eyelids.
Open. He could feel it clearly under his fingers. Wide open.
And yet, absolutely nothing reached him.
Not the faintest variation in brightness. Not the faintest patch of paler light that might have betrayed the sun somewhere above him. Nothing but a void so total it felt almost tangible.
"No... no, no, no..."
His voice broke on those words, more fragile than he would have liked.
He searched frantically for dried blood around his eyes, a crust, a wound, anything he could have cleaned off to bring the world back. His fingers found only his own skin, intact, aside from the numerous scrapes scattered across the rest of his face.
He remembered then, with an almost unbearable clarity, that explosion of white light that had struck him right before he lost consciousness. That name, spoken with an almost cruel nonchalance.
Sun bite.
"He... he really burned my eyes."
His breathing quickened. He felt his heart slam against his ribs, each beat echoing painfully in his still-aching skull. For long minutes, he stayed like that, lying on the cold ground, unable to think of anything but this void that refused to leave.
Then, slowly, something colder began to take over from the panic.
Think. Don't panic, and think.
He breathed in deeply, as much as his bruised ribs allowed.
Alright. Let's go over this. I can't see anything at all. Not the faintest variation, even with my eyes closed. This isn't ordinary darkness, otherwise I'd at least perceive a difference between my eyelids open and closed. My eyes seem intact to the touch. So either the problem comes from them directly, or it comes from somewhere else, my head maybe. Either way, the result is the same.
"I'm blind."
He let that thought settle without trying to run from it any further.
But an objection surfaced in his mind almost immediately, a lifeline he grabbed onto with the energy of desperation.
Wait. What if it wasn't really my eyes? What if it was actually... a curse?
After all, he was in a world where magic reigned supreme. An attack like the one that had struck him, a light capable of taking him down in a single blow, could very well have left behind something more than a simple injury. A spell. A mark. Something that wouldn't heal like an ordinary wound, but that could, in theory, be broken.
And if that's the case, maybe I have a way to fix it.
He immediately thought of Medea. The sorceress with the tragic fate, whose life had been ruined by Aphrodite and Jason. And above all, of that dagger, the very symbol of the betrayal she had shown and that had been inflicted upon her in turn, capable of nullifying any spell, any pact, any curse, provided it touched its target.
Rule Breaker.
"It's worth a try."
He closed his eyes, a gesture that felt almost pointless in his case, and gathered his magical energy, channeling it carefully toward a precise image in his mind. A curved, broken blade, as if frozen mid-lightning-strike, its shifting reflections — which he could somehow tell were pearlescent, purple, bluish — coming to him through borrowed memories that weren't his own. A golden guard spread out like two wings ringed in dark red, engraved with runes along the handle and the base of the blade, lined at each tip with fine metal fringes he felt jingle softly between his fingers.
He immediately felt a quarter of his magical energy get pulled into the summoning, sucked out in one sharp draw, with no way to slow the flow. After a few seconds of concentration, a light weight finally formed in his palm.
A cold grip. A thin blade.
He had done it.
But even now, he could feel his magical energy still slowly draining away. It was negligible, it would certainly take several hours before he ran out, but he hurried all the same.
He had received Medea's memories, including the ones that would let him use Rule Breaker properly.
Without wasting a moment, afraid the copy might dissipate before he could use it, he turned the dagger toward himself and drove it in a sharp motion into his own abdomen, with the senseless hope that mere contact would be enough to undo whatever afflicted him.
No pain followed the blow. No tearing flesh, no warm blood against his hand.
The blade simply vanished inside him, swallowed up in what he assumed was a luminous ripple, if his memories of the anime were accurate.
He stayed motionless for a long moment, almost begging inwardly for even the faintest glimmer to finally pierce that void.
Still nothing.
The black silence in front of him remained exactly the same, just as thick and just as final as before.
A new weight, heavier still than the first, settled onto his shoulders.
So it wasn't a curse. Nothing to break, nothing to undo. Just eyes that had truly been destroyed, beyond anything that rule-breaking magic could repair.
And the truth struck him even harder than before.
This is probably permanent.
A fresh wave of despair threatened to sweep everything away, but he clenched his jaw and pushed it back, with that same icy determination that had gripped him just minutes earlier, before he'd noticed his condition.
I didn't go through all of that just to collapse now over one more disability.
He clenched his fists.
Istill have my ears. I still have my haki. I still have my legs, even if they can barely hold me up.
Bracing himself on his elbows, he managed, with some difficulty, to pull himself up into a sitting position, every movement wringing a silent grimace out of him. Around him, his hands found nothing but low grass and loose soil, stretching as far as his reach in every direction. Not a single stone. Not the slightest bit of relief. Nothing but a flat meadow that seemed to stretch on forever.
He activated his Observation Haki then.
At once, the world took shape again, different but no less real. Colored particles began dancing all around him, in the ground, in the air, in the blades of grass he could still feel beneath his palms. Shades of brown and gray rising from the earth, faint traces of green in the vegetation, and that familiar black backdrop filling the spaces between everything.
An immense relief washed over him.
It still works. At least it still works.
But very quickly, a new concern tempered that relief. He closed his hand around a fistful of torn-up earth and grass, trying to mentally trace the outline of what he held through the particles he could perceive.
Impossible to find its precise edge.
The particles simply grew sparser the further he moved from the center of his palm, never forming a clean boundary between what still existed and what no longer did.
"Damn it."
He understood then the full scope of the problem.
My haki shows me what's there. Not where it stops.
That had always been true, really. It was just that before, his eyes had compensated for that gap without him ever needing to think about it. Now, without them, haki alone was no longer enough to navigate the world properly. He could sense the presence of matter. Never its exact edges.
All of it would look the same to his haki, nothing but a simple variation in the density and color of particles, with never a clear boundary to warn him of danger before it was too late.
That realization chilled him even more than the announcement of his blindness itself.
That means I could fall into any hole without ever seeing it coming. Literally.
He stayed silent for a long moment, letting that fact settle in.
Then he deactivated his haki, letting the world of colored particles fade away once more, replaced by that same uniform void as before.
No point keeping it on constantly. It costs me mental energy, and it won't help against this kind of danger anyway. I'll save it for sensing a hostile presence approaching. For everything else... I'll have to manage some other way.
He listened closely.
The rustle of the scorched grass in the wind. The distant song of that bird he still couldn't identify. And on his left cheek, a cold, steady caress.
The wind.
It blew from his left, constant, almost reassuring in its steadiness.
An idea took root in his mind then, as simple as it was obvious.
I have no idea where I am. No idea where to go. But that wind isn't likely to change anytime soon.
He thought of his mother, somewhere out there in this world he could no longer see. Of the promise he had made himself. Of this very meadow, ravaged all around him, where he had nearly died, where he had left Drainda behind, where a girl whose fate he still didn't know might have managed to escape for good.
Staying here won't do any good.
So I might as well follow this wind. Wherever it takes me.
He got back to his feet, unsteady, one hand held out in front of him to fend off the most obvious obstacles, his face turned slightly to the left to keep contact with this breeze that had become, overnight, his only guide.
The following days all blurred together, in an almost hypnotic monotony.
Emrys kept moving, guided by that same cold caress on his cheek, stopping now and then to listen closely, activating his haki for a few seconds whenever a suspicious noise or too heavy a silence worried him, before releasing it again right away to conserve what mental energy he had left.
Having no hunger, thirst, or need for sleep to fight, unlike an ordinary human, only the fatigue of his muscles and the monotony of the darkness marked the passing of his days. He quickly lost count of the time that had gone by. One day blurred into the next without any dawn or dusk ever marking the boundary between them, since for him, everything was now just one single, endless night.
With nothing to help him probe the ground ahead, he moved forward in small, careful steps, one foot sliding rather than lifting cleanly, ready to stop at the slightest sign of ground giving way beneath him. The low grass kept stretching on, identical to itself, kilometer after kilometer, never offering the slightest landmark besides the steady breath on his left cheek.
He learned to make out, beneath his feet, the tiniest variations in the ground: drier soil in some spots, damper in others, small dips he sensed before putting his full weight on them. Above all, he learned to muzzle the fear that rose every time a step felt slightly less certain than the last.
One evening, if he could still call it evening, he sat down right in the grass and stayed motionless for a long while, his legs pulled up against him.
"Wherever the wind takes me," he murmured, almost to himself.
He repeated the phrase several times, like an incantation, until it lost all meaning and became nothing more than a string of familiar sounds. It helped him, in a way he couldn't have explained. It reminded him that he still had a voice, a body, a will, even without his eyes.
The soft grass of the meadow eventually gave way, little by little, to harder ground, then to scattered stones here and there, a sign that the landscape was finally beginning to change after so many days of identical monotony.
He kept going regardless, again and again, carried by that same cold determination that hadn't left him since he'd woken up.
The terrain grew more and more rugged as the days, or perhaps the weeks, piled up. Bigger stones sometimes rolled underfoot. Steeper slopes forced him to slow down further. Groping around, he eventually found a solid branch, fallen from a tree he couldn't see, and began using it from then on to probe the ground ahead of him with every step.
The wind itself started to whistle differently, as if it were now sweeping through far steeper terrain than before.
Emrys slowed his pace even more, more careful than ever, instinctively sensing that he was approaching somewhere different from anything he'd crossed so far.
The ground beneath his feet turned rocky, unstable in places. His branch, probing ahead of him, now met uneven surfaces, sharp edges, sometimes even a few centimeters of nothing before finding purchase again.
The wind blew with a new force, harsher, as if nothing stood in its way anymore.
He kept moving forward regardless.
One step.
His branch touched the ground. Solid.
Another step.
His branch touched the ground again. Still solid.
Then, on the next step, in a motion that had become almost mechanical from repetition, he extended it forward...
And it met nothing.
He first assumed it was just an irregularity, a harmless dip like the dozens he'd already crossed. He advanced his foot with that same mechanical confidence.
The void.
"What—"
He didn't have time to finish his sentence.
His body pitched forward, carried by its own momentum, and he fell.
He couldn't even scream. The air was instantly torn from his lungs, sucked away by the speed of his fall, while his body slammed violently into rocky outcroppings several times during his descent, each impact tearing a stifled groan out of him, the branch slipping from his hands for good in the very first instant.
Then, finally, the ground.
A dull, brutal impact that knocked the breath out of him for good.
And then, nothing at all.
At the foot of the cliff, in an open quarry carved straight into the rock, a colossus with shoulders as wide as tree trunks was busy extracting chunks of raw ore, his hammer coming down in a steady rhythm against the stone with enough force to shake the ground with every blow.
He suddenly stopped, his hammer suspended in mid-air, brow furrowed.
An unusual sound had just echoed nearby. A dull impact, different from the sound of the rock he usually split.
He turned toward it, squinting at a pile of debris freshly fallen from the top of the cliff.
And that's when he saw it.
A small body, motionless, half-buried under dust and rubble, its white hair caked with blood and dirt.
The colossus dropped his hammer and rushed over.
Spam power stones please