The Trials

'Till Death do Us Part

BEFORE READING: The first chapter is very confusing, but I promise throughout the story it will clear up significantly more!


"Admit it, Zami," The six-and-a-half foot tall man stood a few feet away from me. "You are weaker than me, and this just proves it. I've fought with you for so long, memorized your fighting style, hell, even your strategies!" He said while approaching, the black cloak had draped over his shoulders with the hood hovering itself just over the skull he had for a face. A warm yet fiery glow emitted from areas where human flesh should be, the glow only being shown at his face and neck. The rest of his body was covered with a black tuxedo and red 'bib', going along with black chino pants. Where his hands would normally be rested a pair of cloth gloves. His style was sharp and his posture was sharper, and that's the Aiero I know. Or.. knew.

"All of those years," I coughed out while on the ground, my hands digging into the dried tar. "All that we fought for, all that we had done for them-"

"-Was nothing but a waste of your time and a plan for my vision of the future," He cut off, chuckling lowly while slowly walking towards where I lay on the ground. Aiero put his foot down on my neck, slowly putting down all of his weight. It didn't hurt me one bit, one advantage I had currently was my form being made out of enchanted, living, breathing metal.

Every single part of me was made of metal. From my toes to the skin on my head, all of it was metal and fused together. My feet were molded into heel boots, with the metal branching off into creating sleek designs. My arms' muscles were thickened, my fingers being covered in white. The rest of my body was relatively normal, excluding the fact that my head didn't have eyes, yet I could still see. Around my forehead, metal had branched out and created a curved arrow with a pointed tip towards the direction of my face.

"I knew the moment you left," I started speaking, struggling to keep my neck straight. "Things were going to go to shit." Aiero had heat equivalent to flames seething through his boot. A horrible situation for me when heat can soften my body. "I was too blind to the hope that you'd come back to real-" The heat had sent a sharp, stabbing wave of pain throughout my body, and Aiero's boot had made a dent into the back of my neck. My vision started to go blurry and fade out, the lower part of my body struggling to keep moving.

"I'm not going to waste my resources killing you brutally. You have proven yourself to be quite durable over the years, haven't you?" Aiero said, lifting his leg up for a second only to follow back with a hard stomp. "I've seen how much it would take to even get you to stay down on one leg. After all, why wouldn't I utilize the exact blessing that was bestowed upon me? Your weakness." With the few final seconds I had left, my ability to scream and yell and thrash around was out the window. I felt pain I had never felt before, and it was in no way something that I hadn't dreaded coming.

Every single nerve felt like it was on fire. They were being crushed. Cooked. Twisted. Snapped. I felt it all at once, and I knew that now it was unfixable. My eyesight had completely vanished, and I heard the faint and drowned-out sound of a motor before everything went dark.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

"Hey," A voice rang throughout my head. I didn't feel anything, mentally or physically. There was only a high-pitched ringing in my head that unfortunately had to be accompanied by an echoed voice.

"Zami." It called out again.

"Hmmmng?" I tried to reply in my head, nothing coherent coming out.

"Get up."

"Nnhh-hmm.."

"You're alive. And I don't think I'm liking where we are."