The Hunter's Trial.

His lungs gasped relentlessly, struggling to endure the noxious air that permeated the dungeon. The torment echoed in a ceaseless rhythm.

Regardless of the inquisitor's relentless lashings, he held his head bent, refusing to give in.

The Delta's smoldering gaze bore down on him with scorn, rendering words meaningless.

Panting heavily, Higgins managed to muster the strength to speak. "Is that the best you can do, inquisitor? Put your back into it."

His bold grin revealed his fortitude, as he dared to believe that the suffering inflicted upon him was mere child's play.

He refused to let the Delta feel any pity for him.

However, the Delta's unfazed expression, accompanied by a mild grin, suggested that such thoughts didn't even cross his mind.

"If you say so. Don't hold back, you weakling! Tear him apart until his skin is shredded and his spirit is melted," Ramsy declared.

Delta Ramsy refused to acknowledge the inquisitor's perception of him as a living being, if he even did so in the first place.

"Hmmph," the inquisitor grunted, belittling Ramsy's higher rank.

As a Beta, he had no say in opposing the Delta, as Ramsy's rank surpassed his own. Yet, the inquisitor seemed more inclined to whip Ramsy than the persistent nuisance at his side.

But in reality, the inquisitor was nothing more than a misguided Beta whose penchant for torture earned him a title and rank in the dungeon.

His duty was to kill, whether slowly or swiftly, and he reveled in the pain he inflicted.

Ramsy ordered him to do just that, and the inquisitor's libido soared at the thought.

Higgins showed no signs of backing down, and it exhilarated him.

With his magical prowess, as a sorcerer capable of facing death and tempting fate, he called upon the deity, daring it to take him if it could. It felt otherworldly.

***

Abraham Van Helsing, the Dutch vampire hunter, had once had an apprentice whom he admired and held in high regard, long before he even considered the holy order as a potential calling.

Helsing betrayed his apprentice and thought he had disposed of him.

However, the tales surrounding this event were shrouded in insufficient recounting and relied solely on rumors.

Higgins, renowned for his extraordinary ability to communicate with the dead, was known as the Necromancer Hunter. His expertise lay in influencing the living through the use of the deceased as conduits.

His discarded body had washed up on the shores of a massive island housing several packs of werewolves, one of which belonged to the Nefario legacy.

The Nefario pack, an empire of sorts, had gained enough reverence to become the namesake of a pack in its honor.

Located in the eastern Himalayas of Aracord, a distant continent dominated by werewolf packs known for their frequent interpack raids, the Nefario pack was where Higgins found himself.

The hunter was not dead, but his fate seemed even worse, as he was trapped on an island that once provided him love but had taken it away, along with any reason to stay.

Having lost his mate, his child, and all that he had built, his life as a prisoner of war was dedicated to seeking death.

"I've suffered enough. It's time to end it," Higgins thought to himself.

Blood flowed down his scalp, and his struggling breath reminded him of the singular reason he had allowed himself to be captured.

As a necromancer, his prophesied fate was grim: confined to an island that managed to provide someone to love him, took her and the only other light at the entrance of his tunnel and left him nothing.

Having been rid of any justification or reason to remain, no way to escape the taunting reality of memories made with his mate or the island itself, to end his life after years of mourning became the only way, his only salvation.

His being a human ensured that he saw enough scorn to assure that, but his words fed the flames to make them desire it more instead of seeing potential in his long lost abilities.

Humans had been reduced to mere tools that always managed to reproduce and serve as important resources for the werewolves to thrive.

They worked as slaves, were dealt with as needless, sex derived pawns and some even organized resistance that Higgins managed to have hidden under the facadé of, with their being thwarted at every turn up until it happened.

Every full moon, new omegas emerged from human that had received the werewolf curse from an Alpha's bite, and when they died at the hands of their fellow creatures, the circle of life proceeded with an unsheathed equilibrium, allowing a system to emerge.

Higgins' seized regalia included the limitless skulls of omegas-green-eyed, recently transformed werewolves that exhibited characteristics of havoc-loving wolves yielding to their primal urges-as well as other weapons he had collected from his several attempts kill as many werewolves as possible.

They become insane and are powerless to halt their never-ending terrible urge to slaughter because no Alpha has welcomed them to join their packs as scout ranks.

Scout rank teaches them how to maintain their composure before their grey skin transforms into the vicious, brown-furred, quadrupedal stance adopted by betas, not to mention their sensitivity to silver.

They formed the majority members of a pack and receive belitting remarks from betas.

Higgins had one goal: scavenge the wasteland left by the werewolves in their usurpation attempts, scour their vastness, and save as many lives as he could using the alchemy abilities he had adopted along the way.

All this was who he has been something more than ten years ago, before he met her, lost both of them and became a shadow of his former self.

Unfortunately, he was seized and held hostage in the Nefario pack Alpha's Dungeon, about to be lifted to a platform where the vulture-like vampires circled the rays of the full moon, ready to gorge on his convicted-to-death remains.

This was no mistake actually, he wanted to get captured, he wanted to die and since his hands couldn't do it on his own...

"Ahhhh!!!" Higgins' screeched to the reverb of the whip that rebounded about his body, feigning ignorance to the death that chose to elude him.

"Do you have any last words Necromancer? Alpha Damian wouldn't see truth in your attempts at laying blemish to my name so you thought the best way would be to show him, it wasn't a sensible option if you ask me. My being a Delta holds more reverence than a hunter like yourself ever would. The resistance holds no backing in Nefarios' activities." Ramsy boasted.

Delta Ramsy mustered little heed to Higgins' pitiful state as the spat to the soon to-be corpse in his wake.

Hunters were members of the resistance, who were mostly humans that had their only goal to be liberating their people and domineering the greater mass of carnivorous beast that desired to usurp any attempts they made to establish a system like theirs or breed enough to try.

Higgins' life was dangling on a thin thread, his hands laid across the two ends of the baracade by chains anchored to his wrists and a weakened resolve from that death that just insisted on taking its time before truly drawing the life out of him.

"I am not in the resistance, I left them years ago. So you were an asshole the whole time?" Higgins spoke out in an outlandish tone.

He was able to raise his attention to the rust-encrusted bars of the cell he had been confined to.

His entire attempt to disclose Ramsy's goal appeared to be a farce designed to prove his suspicions that he was actually out for something sinister.

Higgins' gaze was fixed on the Delta Ramsy with such intensity that it would take a simpleton to conclude his intentions as not been to flee in any way, but rather to stare him down, ignore the pain from blood being drawn by the chain restrained to his wrist, and see through his arrived decision to have the vultures gourge his flesh, or so it seemed.

Was this really the end of a legacy never built.

Ramsy hid more than a melodious intent in the tapping of his feet that he had begun.

"What are you playing at Necromancer? You came off as being so eager to be apprehended that it almost seemed as if..." Ramsy inquired, as Higgins boldly impeded his train of thoughts.

"I'm pretty sure you're the one with doubts, I mean you pulled me away from my attempts at Damian, told him that you would 'take care of me' and now, you're thinking I would just allow you to kill me, the f***? I am the king of death. The grim reaper has nothing on me." Higgins boasted.

He had finally proclaimed who he was and judging by the reverb in his tone, there was extra meaning instilled into his declaration.

He wanted Ramsy to try harder because the pain that stood parallel to the inquisitor's every attempt was far from even rendering him unconscious.

"You see yourself as a god but I would belittle your tainted nature, deicide you if I could." Ramsy made towards Higgins and drew on his chin, in a bid to indulge his' focus partially towards his words. "...if only you weren't the only one to know of what I need." Ramsy revealed.

Higgins' became struck, as a bewildered expression engraved itself unto his gaze following Ramsy's reveal, it basically threw him off.

"How'd you figure?" He led without a thought. "I could count a million more moons you could have come up with a better excuse, but this."

What could have been so important that Ramsy would opt to spare him and torture out instead? Higgins traced the entirety of his mind-scape for what this meant.

"Could it be what I'm thinking?" He insinuated, but solely in his thoughts.