The place was a trap designed by the gods: a precipice at the very edge of the Sanctuary, where Athena’s Mantle—an invisible barrier protecting the sacred domain—crushed the cosmos like a stone slab pressed against the chest. The air was dense and cold, burning the lungs with every breath. There, among shattered rocks and dust sharp as glass, Seiya, twelve years old, trained.

The wind at the borders of the Sanctuary did not blow—it howled, like a beast determined to tear flesh from bone. There, where Athena’s Mantle weighed heavier than the marble of the sacred columns, a twelve-year-old boy moved through the shadows. He had no name, only nicknames.

“Look, the Eastern Rat is crawling back again!” one of the guards mocked from the higher ridges, where the air was still breathable.

The men who watched the frontier wore bastard mantles—imitation armors forged from the remnants of dead Cosmos, alchemical relics recycled by the House of Aries for the expendable. They were soldiers with no future, but with more than enough power to make life unbearable for a child without lineage.

At first, they had treated him like vermin. They stole his food, set traps with sharpened stones, and called him “Rat” every time he coughed blood from the strain. But something changed after a year and many broken bones.

“That’s our pet!” the largest of them roared the day Seiya, lips split and bleeding, managed to remain standing beneath the Mantle for seventeen minutes.

They no longer spat on him. They hurled boulders for him to dodge, shouted “Run, damn you!” when the wind threatened to throw him into the abyss, and when the boy collapsed unconscious—which was always—they dragged him back to the House of Healing, feigning irritation.

“One more day and he won’t come back,” they muttered.

“You say that every time,” another replied, hiding a smile.

Aiolia watched from afar. He did not intervene. He knew those men had once been like Seiya: with nothing, starving for purpose. And now, without meaning to, they were teaching him the cruelest lesson of all: “If you want the wolves to respect you, you must first bleed like them.”

Winter at the Sanctuary’s edge knew no mercy. A cutting wind, heavy with frost and resentment, lashed the cliffs where Athena’s Mantle weighed like a divine curse. There, among the shadows of eroded columns, four figures moved in a dance of survival and strange camaraderie.

Seiya, now thirteen but with eyes far older, bled from his knuckles as he clung to the rough stone. Behind him, the three guards watched from their usual elevated position, where the air was less hostile.

“Come on, Eastern Rat! You’re not going to fall today, are you?” shouted Lico, the thinnest of them, as he hurled a stone that grazed past the boy’s ear.

Dario, the scarred giant, grunted.
“If he falls, it’s Nestor’s turn to carry him again. And we all know how that ends—with the pretty boy whining about his back.”

Nestor, handsome and meticulously adjusting his false mantle, replied calmly:
“I’d rather carry the brat than see your ugly face in the morning, Dario. At least he doesn’t stink of defeat like you do.”

The weeks passed in a whirlwind of sweat, blood, and harsh words that concealed something none of them dared to call affection. In the mornings, Lico taught Seiya the weak points of the rocks, the places where he could brace himself without slipping. In the afternoons, Nestor showed him how to move his feet to keep his balance, whispering advice about how to tell an Amazon apart by the tone of her voice.

“The one with darker hair will always look at you first,” he murmured with a roguish smile, “but the blonde is the one truly worth your time.”

And at night, when the others slept, Dario would approach the fire where Seiya warmed his battered hands.

“You have to learn how to take a hit,” he said once, without preamble. “You won’t always be able to dodge.”

Then he showed him how to tense his muscles, how to turn his body to absorb the impact. Harsh lessons, taught with fists and words equally rough, yet lessons the boy treasured in silence.

The real change came with spring.

Seiya, now more agile and marked by scars that were beginning to form a map of survival across his skin, faced Dario in a real fight for the first time. The giant relied on brute strength, but the boy endured, using everything he had learned. When Dario’s fist struck his side, everyone heard the crack of a rib. But Seiya did not fall. He straightened, spat blood, and smiled.

“Is that all an aspiring Cygnus has?”

The silence that followed was shattered by Lico’s laughter, sharp and genuine.

“Well said, little demon!”

Nestor stepped closer and slung an arm around Seiya’s shoulders, ignoring the boy’s hiss of pain.

“Now you’re starting to look like one of us. A true wolf of the precipice.”

But Dario, watching the child who no longer trembled, saw something else—something that reminded him why he had once dreamed of becoming a Saint.

“No,” he corrected, his voice softer than any of them had ever heard. “He’s not a wolf.”

Seiya lifted his gaze, defiant even through the pain.

“Then what am I?”

Dario tossed him a piece of hard bread, the way one throws a bone to a valuable beast.

“A damn lion. And that’s worse.”

That night, for the first time, they shared their meal without insults. And when Seiya fell asleep from exhaustion, none of the guards mentioned that Dario had covered the boy with his own mantle.

The Sanctuary remained a cruel place. But at the edge of the world, where the wind howled the loudest, something had changed.

Morning began with an uneasy silence.

Dario was the first to sense it. His hands, usually busy adjusting the straps of his imitation mantle, froze in midair. The muscles of his back tightened like drawn bowstrings.

“Something’s coming,” he murmured.

Seiya, still rubbing the sleep from his eyes, felt the change before he understood it. The air—always heavy on the precipice—now vibrated with a hostility that did not come from the wind. Something—or someone—was watching them.

Then came the laughter.

A cold, razor-edged sound that echoed from the upper cliffs like ice cracking beneath a boot.

“How pathetic.”

Everyone looked up.

Above them, framed against the pale morning sky, a man leaned casually against the rocks with lethal nonchalance. His armor was nothing like the crude imitations worn by the guards, nor even like the Bronze Cloths Seiya had glimpsed elsewhere in the Sanctuary. These scales were a deep ocean blue, like the sea on a moonless night, and they shimmered with a glow that seemed to rise from within. Each plate moved with organic fluidity, as if it were breathing.

“Just look at you,” the stranger went on, baring teeth a little too sharp. “The rabble of the precipice, playing at warriors in their blood-soaked rags.”

Nestor, ever the quickest with his tongue, stepped forward.

“And who are you supposed to be, fish out of water?” he shot back. “Poseidon’s court jester?”

The man in blue scales did not flinch. His gaze swept over them with the same attention a cook gives ingredients before chopping them.

“I am Delo of the Mako Shark Scales,” he said, as though the name itself should make them tremble. “And you… well. You’re not even worth my time.”

A spike of anger shot through Seiya as he saw Dario—Dario, always unmovable—take a single step back.

“What do you want?” the giant growled.

Delo leapt down from the cliff, landing before them without a sound. Up close, his armor was even more intimidating. The scales on his shoulders ended in blade-like points, and his helmet—shaped like a shark’s gills—hid everything but his eyes, cold as the deepest waters.

“The Sanctuary is full of rats,” he said, staring straight at Seiya. “But today I came to hunt a lion.”

Lico, reckless as ever, spat at the intruder’s feet.

“All I see is a big fish flopping outside his tank.”

The air crackled as Delo’s expression sharpened.

“The Sanctuary is vulnerable,” the Marina said, sliding the words like a knife between ribs. “No Gold Saints on watch, a goddess in hiding, and a Grand Pope no one truly respects… Do you really think I’d leave without testing my luck?”

Dario did not hesitate. Years as a guard screamed the truth at him: this was more than a fight—it was an incursion.

“Nestor, get the boy out of here,” he ordered, never taking his eyes off the enemy. “Lico, run toward the—”

The attack came before the sentence could be finished.

“Thalassa’s Vortex!”

Delo raised one hand, and the air itself twisted into a maelstrom of oceanic force. But Lico—the quickest of them all—threw himself in the way.

“NO!” Dario roared.

The blow struck Lico square in the torso with the sound of shattering crystal. His cuirass—that mocked imitation of a Cloth they had all laughed at—disintegrated like soaked paper. The Marina’s blue scales tore through flesh and bone without resistance, leaving a clean, bleeding void where his heart had been.

Lico dropped to his knees, then pitched forward. His eyes, still open, found Seiya one last time.

“Run… idiot…” he whispered, before collapsing.

Something broke inside Seiya.

Without thought, without technique, he hurled himself at Delo.

His fists struck empty air where the Marina had been an instant before.

“Pathetic!” Delo laughed, sidestepping with the fluid grace of a shark. “Is that all you—?”

CRACK!

Delo’s kick slammed into Seiya’s jaw with enough force to lift the boy off the ground. The world spun, sound collapsed into silence, and then… darkness.

Dario’s final attack was a flash of doomed glory.

Through blurred vision and searing pain, Seiya barely caught the moment: Dario’s right arm glowing with a cold blue radiance, the air around it crystallizing into fractals of ice.

“Diamanti Kónis! (Diamond Dust!)”

The giant’s fist crashed into Delo’s chest, and for a heartbeat, the world froze.

Cold spread like a plague. Frost raced across the Marina’s scales, cracking under the weight of the attack. Then, with a sudden, violent motion, Delo smiled.

“Nice trick.”

He snapped his fingers, and the ice exploded into a thousand shards, revealing the scales beneath—untouched.

“But I’ve already been through the Swan’s hell.”

The counterattack came as a streak of blue lightning.

“Prion Odóntōn!”

Dario’s right arm was severed in an instant, torn clean from the shoulder. Scorched flesh hissed and smoked, but the giant did not scream. He only growled as he fell to his knees, blood soaking the ground.

Nestor—the last guard—stepped between Seiya and the Marina.

His imitation mantle hung in tatters, and his usually mocking face had hardened into a mask of silent fury.

“Don’t touch the boy,” he said, drawing a dagger he had always kept hidden in his boot.

Delo yawned.

“Another powerless hero. Boring.”

He raised his hand, charging another electric surge—

And then the universe held its breath.

A Cosmo unlike anything Seiya had ever felt wrapped around the precipice. It was not Aiolia’s brutal fire, nor the cold discipline of the Sanctuary’s masters. It was something ancient, like the first breath of creation itself.

Everyone—Delo included—turned toward its source.

At the top of the cliff stood the Grand Pope, wrapped in white robes worn thin by time, observing the scene.

His armor was a grotesque imitation: mismatched plates, dull and lifeless. But his helmet was different—a relic of Amazon design, its mask hiding everything but the eyes, two abysses of infinite knowledge.

“Enough.”

The word, spoken without effort, crushed the air like a hammer.

Delo stepped back, uncertain for the first time.

“You…? But you’re just a—”

The Pontiff raised a finger.

And the world exploded in golden light.

The Grand Pope’s gesture was as simple as tossing a stone into a lake.

A dimensional shockwave tore through the air.

Delo’s body buckled as if an entire planet had been dropped onto his shoulders. His knees slammed into the ground with such force that rock turned to powder. His prized scales—those that had mocked Dario’s attack moments before—began to fracture. Not with the clang of breaking metal, but with the wet, brittle sound of clay drying under the sun.

“W-What… are… you…?” Delo managed to choke out, blood filling his mouth.

The Pontiff did not bother to answer. He stepped closer, his robes moving in a wind that did not exist, until he stood inches from the Marina’s face.

“I will not kill you,” he said, his voice resonating in three tones at once, as if multiple beings spoke through him. “But you will carry a message.”

He clenched his fist.

Space itself twisted.

Delo screamed—truly screamed—as an unfathomable force crushed not his body, but his very existence, folding him along dimensions no human mind could perceive.

“Tell your lord,” the Pontiff continued as Delo’s armor shattered into nothing, “that humanity can defend itself. That we are not pawns. That we are not expendable flesh in his eternal game.”

One final motion of the hand.

The Marina vanished.

Not teleportation. Not speed.

He was erased from the place, as if a page had been torn cleanly from a book.