The training hell, I finally broke.
Collapsed mid-swing during a shadow duel with Cerberus. My flames sputtered out. My body hit the dirt with a dull thud. Everything felt numb.
Cerberus stood over me. He didn't speak right away. Just waited. Watched.
Then, without a word, he turned and began walking away.
"Get up."
"I can't," I gasped.
"Then die here."
Something in me flared at that. It wasn't anger. It was something more primal. More defiant.
I forced myself to my knees. Blood trickled from my lip. My hands trembled. But I looked up.
"Again."
Cerberus smiled. Not kindly. Like a wolf who saw its cub finally bare its teeth.
That night, the real training began.
He took me below the station—to a place that shouldn't exist. An underground coliseum built from black stone and bone. A training ground from another age.
Here, he unleashed the full wrath of his hellhounds—ghostly beasts with eyes like molten gold. They didn't fight like animals. They tested my mind, my fear, my control.
And when they pinned me, Cerberus made me face illusions: twisted visions of me losing control. Burning down my home. Incinerating my mother. Watching Aria die by my hands.
I screamed. I begged. I fought.
Until I stopped fearing the visions.
Until I commanded them to end.
And that was when the fire returned—not in rage, but in clarity.
A controlled blaze that obeyed.
A golden flame that wrapped around me like armor.
Cerberus stood at the edge of the arena, arms crossed.
"Now you're starting to own it."
....
Pain had become so normal I no longer feared it. It was the silence I feared now—the moments between training, when the screams of my body faded, and all that remained was the fire inside me.
The new regimen Cerberus had promised, I began to understand what he meant when he said "we break the leash." He wasn't talking about the leash around my power. He was talking about the leash around my mind.
I woke that morning to the smell of blood—not from a wound, but from the metallic scent that clung to my sweat-soaked clothes. The underground arena we trained in reeked of smoke and sulfur. The stone walls bore claw marks and scorched handprints—mine. They were proof I'd survived. So far.
Cerberus waited in the center of the arena, arms crossed, silent as ever. His body, massive and cut like a statue, barely moved as I staggered to my feet.
"You're late," he grunted.
"I needed a minute," I muttered.
"You don't get minutes. You get seconds. And those seconds decide whether you live or die."
I clenched my fists. "Then let's not waste time."
He tossed me a chain. Heavy, rusted, sparking faintly with hellfire.
"You're fighting with that today?" I asked, skeptical.
"You're fighting against it," he corrected. "Wear it. Around your arms."
I hesitated. "Why?"
"Because you rely on your fire too much. Fire is freedom. Now learn what power feels like in restraint."
I didn't argue. I wrapped the chains around my forearms, biting down the pain as the heat seared my skin. They were cursed. I could feel the way they pulsed with suppressive magic—dimming the fire inside me like fog choking sunlight.
Cerberus growled, "You're learning to use flame without being consumed by it. But that's not enough. You must know yourself without it too. Can you be strong without the thing you've relied on most?"
He snapped his fingers—and the hellhounds emerged again, howling, flickering into form from the shadows like echoes of nightmares. But these weren't illusions.
These were real.
Flesh and fang.
The first leaped. I dodged barely in time, the weight of the chain throwing off my balance. A second came from the left—I blocked, but the force knocked me back.
I rolled across the black sand and came up gasping.
"Fight!" Cerberus roared.
I threw a punch. The chains burned. The beast caught my arm with its jaws, but I twisted free. My blood smeared the sand. My vision blurred. Another came at me—and this time I let instinct guide me.
No fire.
No fear.
Just me.
I moved with new rhythm—raw and clumsy at first, but sharper with every strike. I wasn't winning. Not yet. But I was enduring. I ducked low, slammed an elbow into the ribs of one hound, twisted away from another's bite, vaulted over a snarling mouth.
One by one, I brought them down.
Not with fire. Not with magic.
With will.
Cerberus called them off before the final strike. I collapsed onto my knees, bloodied and heaving.
"Why stop them?" I gasped. "I could've—"
"You could've died," he interrupted. "And that wouldn't help anyone. Not her. Not yourself."
He meant Aria. He didn't say her name. He rarely did.
I met his gaze. "She's been... different."
Cerberus gave me a long look before answering. "Her time's running out."
"What do you mean?"
"You think you're the only one training for a war?" He crouched beside me. "She's bracing for something worse. Every day she walks like she might never see another sunrise."
I said nothing. The silence, again, was heavier than pain.
Aria's POV
"The seal's thinning faster than we thought," I said, my arms folded as I watched Kai sleep.
Cerberus stood beside the dying fire, his back to me. "The Earth won't hold for long. The Gate Demons were just the first ripple."
"If we fail... it's not just him who dies," I said.
Cerberus nodded slowly. "It's the world."
I swallowed hard. "Michael gave me until the seventh moon. That's one day from now."
"And then?"
"I cease. Not death. Erasure. My memory... my existence. Even Heaven will forget me."
"You're still going through with it?" he asked.
"If I don't, they'll send someone else. Someone who will kill him."
Cerberus turned then. His eyes—usually filled with mirth or fire—were solemn. "You're not the same angel who descended to guard him. You care."
"I always cared. But now it's different."
We stood in silence for a while, the fire crackling low.
Then she whispered, almost too softly for even me to hear: "He's not just Lucifer's son. He's more than that. The flame... it's not his inheritance. It's his origin. And it's changing."
Cerberus glanced back at Kai's sleeping form. "What happens if he chooses neither Heaven nor Hell?"
"I don't know."
"Maybe," Cerberus said quietly, "that's the point."
As the embers faded, we looked to the stars peeking through the old station's collapsed roof.