Beast Gacha System: All Mine

"ISAIAH!"

The name tore from his throat. It was like a war cry, desperate, broken and howling. It echoed across the empty sky, swallowed by the vast indifference of the ocean below and the stars above, and no answer came.

He was sure this was the same world. He had been so sure. The corrupted ocean, the rift scars, the taste of the magic in the air, it all matched.

It all aligned with the corrupted ocean he entered in the dam incident. This was the same world. This was the world where Isaiah—

He had been looking for so long. Weeks. A month. He had lost track of time somewhere between the first rift he closed and the dozen others he had found and fought and sealed. He had been searching the whole time.

Beneath every battle, behind every monster, under every wave, he had been searching.

"ANSWER ME—!"

The rift core pulsed in his claws, its sickly light flickering as though mocking him. The sky remained silent. The sea remained silent. The world, this world that he had been so certain was the right one, offered him nothing but the cold, empty expanse of its indifference.

He needed to find him once more.

"My wife—" His voice cracked. "My wife is waiting for me... please—please let me..."

He almost broke down once more. His wings faltered. His massive body, which had torn through armies of corrupted monsters without flinching, began to tremble.

The rift core slipped in his grip, and he caught it reflexively, his claws tightening around the pulsing shard of corrupted seed. He stared at it. He stared at the ocean. He stared at the sky.

Was this just a similar world after all? Had he been chasing ghosts across dimensions, following the faintest trail of a hope that had never been real?

Was he in the wrong world—had he been in the wrong world this entire time?

"Isaiah..." His voice dropped to a whisper, and the tears he had been holding back for weeks finally broke free.

They streamed down his scaled cheeks, cutting silver trails through the dried ichor and salt, falling into the void below. "I... I’m scared."

The Dragon Lord. The Key. The ancient, powerful being who had lived centuries and carried the weight of destiny on his shoulders. He was scared. He was so scared.

"Father, I’m scared—"

He had never called anyone Father before.

"Please—"

He raised his head to the sky. The vast, empty sky. The stars blinked down at him, a billion billion points of light that had witnessed the birth and death of galaxies and had never once intervened.

"She’s trying her hardest to bear the burden for me..." His voice was barely a whisper now, the words scraping against his throat like broken glass. "And all I can do is die...?"

The question hung in the void. No answer came.

"WHY?!"

The roar exploded from him, a dragon’s roar, full-throated and terrible, the kind of sound that had made armies flee and kingdoms tremble.

It ripped across the sky, shattering the silence, sending ripples across the ocean’s surface far below. His wings snapped wide. The rift core shuddered in his grip, its light flickering wildly.

"TAKE IT AWAY FROM HER! TAKE IT ALL AWAY—"

He was screaming now, screaming at the stars, screaming at whatever power had made him the Key.

"LET ME BE WITH HER—TAKE THE KEY AWAY—"

His voice cracked. His chest heaved. The tears that had been streaming down his face were indistinguishable now from the salt spray that had dried on his scales, from the black ichor that still spattered his snout and claws.

"FATHER!"

The word echoed. Faded. Died.

"Father—"

As he yelled into the void, his voice slowly deserted him entirely. The roar that had shaken the sky dwindled to a rasp, then a whisper, then nothing at all.

"...I was even mad at her for something she should’ve been mad at me—"

She had wanted a child. She had wanted his child.

She had chosen to carry his egg, knowing what it would mean, knowing what he was, knowing that the Key might pass to the next generation and doom them both.

And instead of being grateful, instead of falling to his knees and thanking her for loving him enough to take that risk, loving him enough to let go of that dream, of that baby once everything ended, just for him, he had been mad. He had been furious.

He had fled into the night—like a fucking coward, running to find his father for answers—

And he couldn’t even find him.

"WHY DO YOU LET ME BE MAD AT MY WIFE FOR WANTING A CHILD?!"

The fury behind the words were blazing in his eyes, burning in his chest, directed now not at Cecilia, not at the world, not even at the Key, but at himself.

"ANSWER ME, ISAIAH!"

"The last time I answered prayers, it didn’t bode well for my children."

Oathran flinched.

Like last time, the voice was not loud. It was not thunderous or booming or any of the things the voice of a god should be.

It was quiet. Gentle, even. Like the creak of a mountain that had stood for too long and was beginning to settle.

He turned. His massive dragon form shimmered and contracted, scales folding inward, wings drawing back, bones reshaping themselves, a transformation he had performed a thousand times.

In the space of a heartbeat, he stood in his humanoid form upon the clouds, his white wings still half-furled behind him, his eyes wide and disbelieving.

He saw the figure clearer now.

The last time they had met, he had been a black haze. A towering, imposing silhouette, featureless, like the suggestion of a presence rather than a presence itself.

But now, suspended in the empty air above the endless sea, he was fully visible. Fully real.

He was terrifying... yet beautiful.

Seven feet of divine ruin, his presence pressing against Oathran’s senses like the weight of a dying star.

His face was handsome in the way a shattered cathedral was beautiful, elegant bones and perfect symmetry interrupted by open wounds that did not heal, that gleamed with a faint grey light as though the flesh itself had decided to become something other than flesh.

His cheekbones were high and exposed, the skin peeled back to reveal the gleam of bone beneath. His teeth, visible through a gash that ran from the corner of his mouth to his jaw, were straight and white and unsettling.

His eyebrows arched like twin swords above deep-set eyes that glowed with the cold grey light of a winter sky, patient and unbearably sad.

His horns were gone. Both of them. Where they should have risen from his temples, there were only stumps. But even these were beautiful in their destruction.

Jagged and deformed, they caught the starlight and scattered it like a field of black diamonds embedded in raw earth, the fractures glittering with a dark, crystalline brilliance that hurt to look at.

His hair fell past his body. Pitch black. So long it seemed to have no end, drifting in the windless air like ink spilled into water, like the tail of a comet frozen mid-descent.

It pooled around his feet, bare and scarred that had walked through the ruins of realms and never stopped walking.

"You already know what happened to Ierofey."

Isaiah said, a quiet that came after a great noise had ended.

"He called my name and took it." Isaiah’s grey eyes were steady on Oathran’s face. "Even forgetting who he was, until it was too late."

Oathran’s eyes widened. His wings, still half-furled behind him, trembled. "Isai—"

"I am not wise, my child." Isaiah’s voice cracked and the sound of it was worse than any scream. "I am a god with the most mistakes."

Oathran’s eyes faltered. He had not known what he expected when he called out. An answer, perhaps. A sign. A solution. Something that would tell him how to go back, how to fix what he had broken, how to be the man Cecilia deserved and the father his child needed.

But he had found him.

A god who admitted he was wrong. A father who did not pretend to have all the answers.

"My humble answer..." Isaiah raised one scarred hand, palm up. "I don’t think it will ever satisfy your heart."