The Sovereign-V2: C15: Fucking Pathetic

The Sovereign-V2: C15: Fucking Pathetic

The words didn't just land; they
detonated
within Shiro and Kuro. NOT READY. It wasn't just Corvin's voice. It was the grinding shriek threatening to reduce Shiro’s wrists to dust.
It was the ravenous, icy fire consuming Kuro from within, inch by agonizing inch. It was Juro’s disgust, Mira’s raw terror, the horrifying ease with which the entity flowed around their increasingly sluggish, pain riddled attacks, exploiting weaknesses they couldn't hide. They weren't warriors holding the line; they were wounded animals, lures, drawing the predator deeper. Their desperate training, their hard won synchronicity, hadn't forged weapons; it had merely polished the handles of their own coffins. The arrogance, the brittle confidence born of suffering, evaporated like mist under a noon sun, leaving only the cold, hard, crushing, undeniable truth: They were weak. Pathetic. Burdens. The Twin Star power wasn't salvation; it was a cancerous tumour, metastasizing with every uncontrolled flare, making them beacons of vulnerability that endangered everyone. The realization was a physical blow, a sucker punch to the soul, leaving them gasping on the frozen floor, not just broken in body, but shattered in spirit.
The void entity, sensing the collapse of their will as clearly as it sensed the flare of Kuro’s corruption, seemed to
swell
with malevolent satisfaction. The subsonic growl deepened into a predatory, vibrating
hum
that resonated in their bones, promising dissolution. Multiple limbs, tipped with needle sharp crystalline claws gleaming with void light, coalesced above the fallen Twin Stars. The sickly blue white voids focused, pulsing with cold, calculating intelligence, drinking in their despair. The air thickened to syrup, the cold intensifying to a point where lungs burned and thoughts froze. The cloying scent of decaying lilies and the sterile void reek became suffocating, a physical weight pressing down. The susurration of the million frozen voices coalesced into a single, silent scream of oblivion aimed directly at their souls.
Shiro’s Descent
Shiro lay sprawled on the freezing stone, the impact point on his chest a nova of agony that stole his breath and painted his vision with crimson static. He struggled to push himself up onto elbows that felt like they’d been shattered and reassembled with shards of glass. Every micro movement sent jagged bolts of white hot fire screaming up his forearms from his wrists, the fused bone fragments grinding like glass dust deep within the marrow, a sickening internal scrape that echoed the scrape scrape scrape of the void claws. He tasted blood, metallic and warm, mingling with the bitter tang of frost deep in his throat. His gaze, blurred with pain and the cold crystallizing his lashes, swept past the crude sword, lying uselessly yards away, its edge already rimed with void frost. It landed instead on the scar etched into his palm.
The Polaris scar in his palm throbbed dully, a trapped star pulsating with impotent light. No salvation. Only the searing, visceral memory of self destructive backlash: the phantom thorns of the manacles tearing his scar tissue open anew, the superheated crystal threatening to detonate his hand from within, the terrifying sensation of his fused wrist bones vibrating at a frequency that promised to reduce them to dust, the nerve flaying agony that had stolen his sight and voice in the cavern, the academy. It hadn’t been power. It had been a mutually assured seizure. A tumour they’d foolishly tried to wield.
Then, cutting through the physical torment with sharper agony, came the image: Aki. Not as she was now, hidden and frail, but as she’d been that last night in their shack. Humming softly over her small forge, the scent of hot metal and bitter herbs clinging to her worn tunic, her fingers, already weakening, tracing the grooves of Cassiopeia on the sun bleached plank. His hand guiding hers.
"Tilted west, see? Defiant, like us."
Her smile, fragile but bright. Then, the image shattered, replaced by Akuma’s star pupiled eyes, cold and reptilian, holding that same plank aloft like a grotesque trophy. The gleam of the flaying knives, not butcher’s tools, but instruments of meticulous desecration. Lowering towards the wood, towards Orion’s belt, towards the stars
he’d
carved with her, splinter by precious splinter.
Her defiance. Her soul. Being peeled away because he wasn’t there. Because he was here. Failing.
Is this it?
The thought wasn’t a whisper; it was a cold stone, slick with despair, sinking through his gut, heavy with the absolute finality of a tombstone slamming shut.
All that rage… the blood oath sworn over Kaya’s ashes… the promises screamed into Akuma’s smug face… the desperate hours of agony they’d endured, thinking it was forging them… ends here? Not on the Plaza under an open sky, facing down the bastard who took everything. Not saving her. Not even dying well.
He looked up, past the trembling, useless shield of his own ruined hands, into the descending forest of crystalline claws.
Just… frozen scraps. Meat for a void spawn. Another nameless exhibit in Nyxara’s gallery of despair, lost in Elara’s tomb. Because we were too fucking arrogant. Because we thought the pain we endured was strength. Because we believed… we were ready.
The humiliation was absolute, colder than Nyxara’s heart, deeper than the Frostway’s chill. It wasn’t just defeat; it was erasure. Their story, their defiance, ending not with a roar, but a whimper swallowed by the hungry dark.
Weak. Pathetic. A burden to the end.
Corvin’s distorted voice echoed in the hollow space where his courage had been: "You are NOT READY." It wasn’t a judgment anymore; it was their epitaph.
Kuro’s Abyss
Kuro knelt nearby, not in supplication, but in the ruin of his own body. He wasn't on his hands and knees; he was
pinned
by agony. The glacial termite wasn't just biting towards his heart; it was
dissolving
him from the inside. The invasive cold felt like liquid nitrogen flooding his veins, needles of absolute zero burrowing into the joint socket, scraping raw nerve endings with every pulse. The static buzz wasn't just noise; it was a physical violation, a million icy insectile legs scrabbling inside his skull, chewing his thoughts into incoherent fragments. Vomit, thick and metallic, burned his throat, a physical manifestation of the corruption feasting within him. He couldn’t lift his head. He could only stare down at the frost rimed stone, seeing not rock, but the grey translucence pulsing past his elbow, the skin stretched taut and brittle like ancient, frozen parchment. It wasn't an arm anymore. It was a beacon. A fucking dinner bell as his father called it for the void.
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, the infringement.
He forced his gaze upward, a monumental effort against the crushing weight of cold and despair. The pulsing voids of the entity loomed above, not eyes, but windows into an infinite, patient hunger. There was no malice there, no rage. Only the vast, indifferent appetite of the void.
Prince Kuro,
the thought formed, not with pride, but with the bitter, metallic taste of ash coating his tongue.
Kuro the Unforged Star. Heir to Ash. Son to Butcher King.
The titles he’d worn, sometimes with defiance, sometimes with secret shame, felt like grotesque jokes.
This is the legacy? Not reclaiming a broken kingdom. Not forging a new dawn from my mothers ashes. Not even a warrior’s death worthy of a song.
His breath hitched, a ragged, wet sound.
Dying on his knees. In the dark. Weak. Corrupted. Rotting from the inside out before the claws even strike. A liability who got his only friend killed. The ultimate failure.
The absurdity of their arrogance crashed over him then, a wave of icy despair so profound it felt like drowning.
We stood in this tomb of heroes and thought we belonged. We faced Juro’s fury and thought we’d won. We channelled the corruption and thought we’d mastered it. We looked into the abyss and thought… we were ready.
A choked, soundless laugh escaped him, more a sob than anything.
Ready for what? To be consumed? To prove Corvin fucking right?
He saw Shiro sprawled nearby, broken, exposed. He saw the others, Ryota’s light, Juro’s knives, Haruto’s focus, fighting
around
them,
despite
them. Drawn into this tomb, endangered, because the Twin Stars had been too proud, too desperate to prove they weren’t burdens, to retreat.
Fucking Pathetic.
The words weren't just self loathing; they were the final, crushing verdict. His corrupted hand spasmed against the stone, a useless claw. The crimson light of his scar was a dying ember, guttering against the all consuming void darkness.
Is this the grand finale the bards won’t sing?
The thought was bleakly hysterical.
‘Prince and Ghost Perish Pointlessly: Eaten by Hungry Dark After Arrogantly Ignoring Warnings’?
The claws descended, filling his vision, the scrape scrape scrape the only sound in the universe.
Yes,
the void seemed to whisper.
This is the fitting end. Not heroes. Not legends. Just… fuel.
Corvin’s words weren't an echo now; they were the void’s own voice, resonating in the frozen core of his being: "You are NOT READY." He closed his eye, not in peace, but in utter, shamed surrender.
This is how my story ends.
The space between heartbeats stretched into an eternity of shame. For Shiro, the grinding in his wrists was no longer just pain; it was the sound of his own worth being pulverised to dust. He was a tool broken in the hands of a greater purpose, his edge chipped, his core cracked. Every desperate attempt to summon his power now felt like a child screaming into a gale, the sound ripped away into nothingness. The memory of their training, the sparks, the flickers of connection. was a cruel joke. They hadn’t been honing a blade; they’d been playing with embers next to a powder keg, and now the fuse was at their feet. He was a liability who had led a knight, a spymaster, and a smuggler to their graves for the sake of a prideful, suicidal charge. He had promised Aki a new sky, and he couldn’t even protect the memory of the one she’d carved.
For Kuro, the cold was no longer an invader; it was a homecoming. This was what he was always meant to be: a vessel for a colder, more absolute power than his father’s. The Oji legacy wasn’t a throne; it was this slow, inexorable transformation into a monument of ice. The defiance, the rebellion, the shedding of his name, it was all just a delay of the inevitable. The corruption in his arm wasn't a disease; it was his true lineage asserting itself, the frozen blood of the Sovereign finally claiming its own. He had spent his life playing a part, and only now, on his knees, was he finally being unmade into his genuine form: a statue of despair, a focal point for the end of things. To think he had believed, even for a second, that he could be something else, a star, a beacon, was the most profound arrogance of all.
He tried to find Shiro’s gaze one last time, to offer some silent apology for dragging him into this final, fitting failure, but he couldn’t muster the strength. His body was no longer his to command. The will to fight had been not just broken, but extinguished, smothered under the absolute certainty of their inadequacy. There was no rage left, no fire. Only the hollow, ringing truth that they were exactly what their enemies had always said they were: a slum rat with delusions of grandeur and a spoiled prince playing at rebellion. The world was right. They were nothing.
The void entity’s satisfaction was a palpable force, a pressure that celebrated their surrender. It did not need to rush. Their despair was a finer vintage than their fear, and it drank deeply, the humming vibration seeming to purr with cosmic contentment. The crystalline claws slowed their descent, not out of mercy, but to savour the final moment, to let the absolute zero of their failure seep into every cell, to freeze the very concept of hope in their souls before they were unmade. This was the harvest Corvin had warned of, not of their lives, but of their spirit. And they were giving it to the void freely, a final, pathetic offering.
The claws descended, a forest of frozen death aimed to impale, to shatter bone, to consume flesh and spirit. Time stretched, thin and brittle. The scrape scrape scrape was the only sound, loud as doom. The cold was the absolute zero of oblivion. The whispers were a silent roar. This was the end. Corvin’s verdict, Ryota’s warning, Haruto’s cold analysis, Juro’s disgust, Mira’s terror, they all coalesced into the void’s final truth:
You are NOT READY.

V2: C15: Fucking Pathetic