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The first time he met him… when was it? The memory sloshed around in his head like something waterlogged and mildly pissed off. He only remembered pieces: the rain, the sand, the exhaustion grinding through his bones after fighting off what felt like half the server.
He shoved his soaked hair out of his eyes with an irritated flick. The rain hit his skin with a faint sizzle, nothing dangerous—just humiliatingly uncomfortable.
It always felt like an insult against his skin, like the weather was personally trying to extinguish him. Blaze hybrids—even mixed ones—and storms didn’t mix well. Never had, never would.
“Hey.”
Flame flinched so hard his shoulder screamed. His hand shot to the hilt of his sword on instinct before his brain caught up and registered the figure in front of him. There was no visible weapon in hand, nor were they primed to strike. Instead they were just… standing there.
Not harmless, though. Definitely not harmless.
Flame squinted up through rain-heavy lashes, blinking against the sting. God, even his eyelids felt tired—everything blurred into streaks of black and grey, shapes shivering in the downpour.
The guy looked like he’d stepped out of some soggy pirate cosplay: long coat plastered to his frame, a single short braid limp over his shoulder, hat drooping sadly under the weight of rain. And his face—if Flame could even call it that—was mostly a void. Black mask. Shadowed features. Only the eyes visible, steady and annoyingly unreadable.
Flame tried to push himself straighter and immediately regretted moving. His back slammed against the rock behind him hard. Pain tore through his torso where that long slash still bled, even though he’d wrapped it so many times the bandages were starting to feel like wet cardboard.
He’d been ambushed—over and over. At first it was fun. Then irritating. Then borderline lethal.
Humiliating, honestly.
Him. The Immortal Demon. Currently a damp, shivering, possibly delirious pile of meat on a rock after only a week on this cursed server.
A week.
He sucked in a breath that tasted like blood and rain. In front of him, the stranger moved—just a shift of weight, a step forward—but Flame reacted like a struck match. His whole body locked up, ready to bolt, to swing, to—
A hand.
Just… a hand extended toward him through the rain.
Flame blinked once, hard.
For a split second, Flame didn’t trust the stillness of that gesture. Nothing in this server came without teeth.
His eyes tracked up from the hand to the arm to the shadowed face above it, and even though he couldn’t see a smile, something in the tilt of the guy’s head felt like one—cocky, almost amused. Like he’d seen the state Flame was in and wasn’t even pretending to be worried.
“Hey,” the stranger repeated, voice easy, like they weren’t on a battlefield being casually waterboarded by the sky. “You look injured. Saw you demolish the players that ambushed you earlier.”
The hand didn’t waver.
“Wanna team up?”
Flame hesitated.
Was he really about to team up with some shady-ass stranger who wandered up to him the second he was bleeding out on a rock looking like a tragic stray that got punted into a storm?
…Apparently, yeah. Because this was survival. And Flame always survived.
The wound across his chest pulsed again, deep and hot. His armor was basically decorative. His boots were one sprint away from snapping in half. Helmet? Gone. Pride? Hanging by a thread.
“Fine,” Flame muttered, voice steadier than his body felt. “But if you stab me in the back, I’m gutting you before I hit the ground. Just—fair warning.”
He reached up and grabbed the guy’s hand. Rainwater and blood slicked his palm, and the squeak of leather meeting wet skin felt gross, slippery in a way Flame didn’t trust.
But the stranger only grinned, wide enough to be annoying, controlled enough to be deliberate. Like he’d expected the yes but didn't bother gloating.
“You made the right choice.”
Before Flame could snark back, the stranger yanked him upright with a strength that made Flame’s ribs flare. It was unexpectedly solid, like someone who knew how to throw weight around even if he wasn’t built for it.
Flame’s brain clicked into autopilot: weight distribution, wrist angle, stance, escape routes, potential counters—
“Hold on tight.”
Flame barely processed the words before the guy suddenly hoisted him up, hard enough that Flame’s horns thunked against the stranger’s shoulder.
The stranger made a startled, “Ow—hey, careful—” noise and shifted Flame’s weight with a quick, practiced adjustment.
“Maybe warn a guy about the head spikes next time,” he shouted over the rising wind.
Flame, insulted on principle despite hanging half-dead over the guy’s shoulder, snapped back, “Maybe don’t grab me like a sack of potatoes and we won’t have this problem!”
The stranger huffed a laugh—short, amused, not even remotely apologetic. “Noted.”
Then the world blurred.
Air roared past them. The rain vanished into a distant hiss. The sound of thunder clipped mid-boom, like someone hit pause on the world.
They shot upward, so fast the pressure left Flame’s stomach somewhere below them, probably still sitting on that stupid boulder. For half a heartbeat, they were suspended in a quiet, impossible pocket of sky—high enough that the clouds looked close enough to tear open with his fingertips.
Then everything slammed back at once.
Wind knifed past his ears. Rain lashed his face like a thousand needles. His wound flared white-hot, agony up the length of his torso. His stomach lurched violently from the sudden altitude and speed—he gagged once, tasting copper and rain and the bitter edge of panic.
“Ugh—” Flame forced the sound down, breathing through clenched teeth.
He hated this. The helplessness. The positioning. Being thrown over someone’s shoulder like some loot item he hadn’t agreed to be.
But the speed… okay, yeah, it was cool. Infuriatingly cool.
They tore through the storm like it was paper. The world blurred below them, smeared gold and grey, too far away to matter. The motion was so smooth it felt unreal, almost numbing, his pain blurring into the roar of the rain around them.
And then Flame felt it—the drag of wind twisting unnaturally, the faint electric hum of enchantment.
With the way they cut through the air… it must be a trident with Riptide. Couldn't be anything else.
Flame forced his eyes open.
From this distance—this close, pressed half against the guy’s shoulder—he finally saw his face. His skin was warm tan under the rain. His eyes were such a dark blue they bordered black, sharp and bright even in the storm. His expression sat somewhere between sharp and confident, like he treated the storm as just another thing to work with.
The rain hammered against their skin, turning the world into blurred blues and greys. It made the guy look even shadier, even more unnerving—especially when Flame caught the glint of those dark blue eyes, sharp and confident and completely unfazed by the downpour.
Water streamed through his hair and straight into his eyes, but the guy didn’t even react—not a blink, not a flinch. They just kept running over his cheeks like fake tears that refused to stick. It was eerie, calm in a way that didn’t match the storm.
Flame blinked, and that’s when he noticed something else—half-hidden under the collar of the stranger’s soaked coat, right where Flame’s cheek almost bumped his neck. Too close, too intimate, too—
Slits.
Three of them on each side, thin and pale and twitching slightly with every breath. Gills.
They fluttered with every breath, delicate and alien in the stormlight.
Of course.
Of course the soggy pirate cosplay man with a Riptide trident was some sort of aquatic hybrid on top of it.
There was something almost funny about it. A storm-chasing, trident-wielding ocean type scooping up a half-dead blaze-human-demon. Fire carried through a storm by something made for water.
Ridiculous. Almost poetic. Mostly irritating.
The stranger glanced back at him—eyebrow raised in a way that said he knew Flame was staring but didn’t care enough to comment.
Over the roar of the wind, he shouted:
“Name’s Jaden, by the way! Looking forward to working with you, Immortal Demon!”
The delivery was all casual confidence tossed over his shoulder, warmed by a hint of humor he didn’t bother to hide.
Flame would’ve rolled his eyes if his stomach hadn’t chosen that moment to lurch again. Not as violently as before, just a sharp twist under his ribs, the kind that whispered hey, remember you almost died ten minutes ago? He clenched his jaw, breathing through it until the world stopped tilting.
Instead of answering, Flame groaned low and dug his fingers into Jaden’s shoulder, more to anchor himself than anything. “If you drop me,” he muttered, “I’m haunting you. Forever. I’m gonna be the worst ghost you’ve ever met.”
Jaden let out a short, amused breath—closer to a snort than a laugh—and replied, “Yeah, let’s not test that.”
He sounded irritatingly casual—amused, like carrying half-dead strangers through thunderstorms was something he did for fun.
Figures.
Of course the soggy pirate wannabe, with his mask and his gills and the confidence of a man who had never once regretted anything in his life, had a name like Jaden. Trouble condensed into two syllables.
And of course Flame—bleeding, exhausted, running on spite and muscle memory—had agreed to team up with him.
Lightning split the sky. For a moment, Jaden’s mouth quirked—just the slightest hook at the corner, like he couldn’t help it.
Flame squeezed his eyes shut as another brief wave of nausea flickered through him. Not enough to stop him thinking, just enough to piss him off.
He wasn’t sure if what he felt was dread, interest, or his stomach trying to claw up his throat.
Honestly?
Probably all three.