Bloodbound Codex: I Grow Stronger in Secret

”You...Why do you carry so much Hatred inside you?”

The voice echoed through the entire room with an authority that didn’t need volume behind it, it simply filled the space and settled there.

Atlas’s eyes went wide and a horrified look surfaced in them as one thought formed before anything else, ’...How?...’

’How can someone sense another person’s Hatred? Or is it all emotions, not just that one?’

Before that thought could go further the man sitting at the far end of the room simply ceased to be there, Atlas blinked and the couch was empty, he hadn’t sensed any movement, hadn’t seen any blur of speed, the man had not moved in any way he could detect, he had simply gone from one place to no place at all.

Atlas turned his head left and right in a sharp panic, then the voice came from directly behind him, ”I asked you a question did I not? Why is there so much Hatred inside you?”

His Instincts fired and his body moved before he decided anything, he blurred forward and reappeared several meters deeper into the room, turning as he landed to face the man properly.

Dravenson Rosaria.

He was tall, roughly the same height as Atlas at around six foot six, but broader across the shoulders in a way that came from something more than just physical build, his face was mature and handsome with a beard and mustache that fit the rest of him, and behind him were wings unlike anything Atlas had seen on any Angel so far, their color was complete gold with only a faint grey shade threading through them, not silver, something closer to aged gold.

Atlas’s thoughts were not on any of that though, they were on one thing only, ’I couldn’t sense him at all...SS-rank and I am just A-rank, even if I used the Active Vector I doubt I could even scratch him.’

On the other side of the room Dravenson stood with his hands crossed behind his back in a relaxed position, his eyes narrowed toward Atlas, and his thoughts were sitting on something specific, ’His right hand...it remained completely fine even after I released my pressure.’

He was not surprised by Atlas’s movement, survival Instincts producing that kind of reaction was expected, what had his attention was that right hand, he had even attempted to use an ability of his to pierce through the gloves covering it and see what was sitting underneath...but he had failed, whatever was radiating from that hand had blocked his perception entirely, he could only sense something ominous leaking from it, something his own Instincts were flagging even now.

What he didn’t know was that Reiden had activated automatically the moment Atlas jumped back, the Null working as a barrier on that hand without Atlas himself being aware of it, which was exactly why the hand had been able to move freely while the rest of his body had been locked under Dravenson’s pressure.

Dravenson turned his eyes back to Atlas’s hooded and masked face and spoke, ”I asked you a question and this will be the last time I ask this - Why do you carry so much Hatred inside you?”

”Even though it is suppressed it is still far too much and far too dangerous if released all at once...and entering my house carrying that much Hatred, I do not keep anyone like that around my household.”

Atlas felt his jaw tighten, the irritation in him rising, the pressure Dravenson had released had retreated by this point but the words sitting in the air between them were doing something similar to it.

He forced the irritation down and spoke, ”Why would I answer about my personal matters to anyone? And it wasn’t me who wanted to come here in the first place, you called me here, and even if I had come here for business with Lady Seraphiel, she was the one who approached me first and invited me to this mansion days ago.”

Dravenson parted his lips to respond, but before he could a voice came from the far end of the room, from that same couch where he had been sitting when Atlas first walked in.

”Father, you are crossing a line here, first you attacked a guest who you yourself invited for a meeting, and then you asked him personal questions about his life?”

Atlas turned to the voice, he had sensed Seraphiel the moment he had entered the room and located Dravenson, but everything had escalated so fast that not even a full minute had passed before he was standing in this defensive position inside the room.

”I informed you that I had formed a contract with Mr. Atlas, inside that contract was a clause stating that no member of the Rosaria Household could harm him in any way, and now you have broken that clause...and the result?” Seraphiel spoke as she lifted her hand and turned it backwards, showing the back of her palm to the room.

Five tiny stars sat there, black, carved into the skin, and as Atlas and Dravenson both watched, one of them faded away slowly until it was gone.

Dravenson’s eyes went wide and he went silent before trying to say ”You...”

Seraphiel continued in a low voice, ”Yes, I used an Ancestral grade Contract Relic, I saw value in Mr. Atlas that matched its worth, and he brought back a Mythic Rank Relic from an Abyss-Rank Ruin for this household.”

Silence took the room after that.

Then footsteps came from behind Atlas, through the same door he had entered, and Maristella walked in, her steps echoing in the quiet for a few moments before she looked at Seraphiel, then Atlas, then Dravenson, her eyes reading the room in a few seconds before she spoke, her tone carrying none of the playfulness it had carried when Atlas had first come to this household.

”Dravy, did you attack our guest just now?”

Dravenson said nothing out loud, instead he lifted one finger and pointed it toward Atlas’s chest, speaking directly into Maristella’s mind, ’Look inside his ’Emotion Vessel’ with your Mystic Light Eyes, it is completely pitch black, filled with Hatred to a degree I have never encountered before, and when I felt what was inside it...I felt fear from him.’

Maristella turned toward Atlas and activated her ability, Atlas could only narrow his eyes slightly as he felt Spirit energy move from her toward him without understanding what it was doing, he had assumed when he first came here that Maristella was simply an ordinary Angel looking after her daughter, but as he saw the Spirit movement now he corrected that, ’Another SS-rank...’

Maristella looked inside what they called the Emotion Vessel and what she found there hit her with a force she hadn’t prepared for, immense shock, then something closer to horror settling over her as she took in what was actually sitting inside this young man in front of her.

She had seen Emotion Vessels before, she had lived for long enough to have looked inside many of them, people carrying grief, people carrying guilt, people carrying ambition that had curdled into something dangerous, she had seen all of it, but she had never seen one that looked like this.

It was pitch black, not the black of something dark that still had edges and shapes inside it, but the black of something that had been filled so completely and for so long that nothing else had been able to exist alongside it, pure unfiltered Hatred that had been burning in this person, Hatred that had been growing in the dark without anyone ever seeing it or acknowledging it or giving it any reason to become something else.

And underneath all of that Hatred, buried so deep it was almost invisible even to her ability, was something else entirely, something that had never been given any room or air or light to grow, a quiet and desperate want, not for power, not for revenge, just to exist without being used, just to be a person in a world that had been constantly using or throwing him away from his birth.

Maristella turned away from Atlas and looked at the four remaining stars on the back of Seraphiel’s hand, and she could only exhale slowly and think, ’You made a Spirit contract with someone like this, Seraphiel?...’

She looked at Atlas again, at the young man standing in the middle of the room with his hood and mask and his gloved hands and his body that had clearly been through more than it should have been at his age, standing in a defensive position inside a Noble household with no fear on the surface, only that cold steadiness that had replaced whatever softer things had been there before they were removed from him one by one.

’He is so dangerous that even beasts from Greatest of Ruins can’t compare to his hatred...’

She thought it, and then the thought that followed it was quieter and carried something different in it than the first one.

’...He is a Monster in human skin.’

But even as she thought it, some part of her that had lived long enough to know the difference between a person who was born dangerous and a person who was made that way could not quite settle on whether that word fit him, or whether the real answer was something far sadder than that.

- - -

[A/N: If any of you feel this is getting way slow paced, don’t worry the next Chapters after this are going to be picking up the pace and the Arc’s main events will begin happening one after another..

Shower this poor author with his first Supergift guys...(╥﹏╥) (╥﹏╥)]