Men’s Bad Day Comes
Beyond the lands, in a faraway realm, there once lived a king who dreamed of ruling all thirty-two kingdoms. He gathered armies beyond counting and marched to war. The thirty-two kingdoms, lost in their own quarrels, fell like wheat before the scythe. Fifteen were conquered before the remaining seventeen finally set aside pride and united.
The conqueror was called the King of Fire and Blood.
His name was Jerafoth.
He rode two dragons: the Dragon of Insanity, which let him think beyond the limits of imagination until genius and madness became one, and the Dragon of Blood and War. Three billion soldiers followed him. A thousand royal knights on obsidian griffins—the rarest, deadliest of their kind—rode at his side. He seemed unstoppable.
The allied seventeen kingdoms mustered 1.9 billion souls. Thirty-four princes, each bearing the blood of a different royal dragon (Light, Storms, Earth, Fire, Frost, Wind, Oceans, Darkness, Nature, Thunder and Lightning, Wisdom, Shadow, Gravity, Annihilation, Destruction, Foresight, and Spirits), led the resistance. Each commanded two hundred holy knights blessed by the Church.
The war raged for over a century. Generations were born, lived, and died knowing nothing but fire and blood.
Then one day Prince Leonardos, bearer of the Dragon of Light, walked through the chaos and slid a sword through the dark lord’s heart.
Peace—impossible, fragile peace—returned.
“Miss Emelia, wake up!”
Professor Sera’s voice cracked like a whip across the lecture hall of the Academy of Haultin. Emelia Dimfulsen, daughter of Count Franklin Dimfulsen, blinked awake, hair a golden-red mess.
“Why are you all in my bedroom…?”
Veins bulged on Professor Sera’s forehead. “Stand outside, stay awake, or shall I summon your father?”
Emelia shot upright, finally seeing rows of desks and the blackboard covered with the War of Fire and Blood. “I’m so sorry! I was up all night doing homework—”
“Then show me this homework.”
Emelia giggled nervously. “I gave it to my servant Josh to carry, and he—”
The door opened.
A young man in the Dimfulsen crest stepped in—fit, neat brown hair, clear blue eyes. He bowed. “Lady Emelia, I forgot to return your homework.” He handed over the books, then turned to the professor. “My apologies for entering unannounced, Professor Sera. May I leave?”
Professor Sera stared, golden eyes narrowing. “Permission granted.”
Josh bowed again and vanished.
Emelia started to sit.
“Who told you you could sit?” the professor snapped.
Emelia froze.
“You did the work,” Professor Sera said, “but sleeping through the most important lesson of the year is unbecoming of a noble. This time you are excused. There will not be another.”
“Yes, Professor,” Emelia squeaked.
The lecture resumed. Most students barely reacted; Lady Emelia’s chaos was legendary. But one watched with quiet fascination.
Prince Agusten, sixth son of the King of Ramura, golden hair and rare violet eyes, leaned against the window and smiled. To him, Emelia was fire—dangerous if you stood too close, yet impossible to live without.
Outside, Josh waited. He had found her unfinished homework that morning, completed it himself, and sprinted across the academy to save her. Annoyed, but relieved.
He had not always been a servant.
Once he was a farmer’s son. Then mountain bandits razed his village. Men were slaughtered. Women and children were chained. Night after night the bandit leader called Josh and two girls to his tent. Some captives broke. Some were forced into horrors too dark to name. Josh cleaned the blood afterward.
He learned why meat still appeared on plates when no new livestock arrived.
Rage kept him sane.
One night he drove a sharpened stone into the leader’s throat and burned the camp. Some captives chose to stay in the flames rather than live as husks. Some bandits begged for water. Josh walked away.
He reached Ramura half-dead, surviving on scraps and pity. “By death comes life,” he told himself.
Then a little girl with innocent golden eyes found him in an alley.
“Hey, yellow there! Hungry?”
He didn’t look up.
She stayed. “Want some chicken?”
The smell hit him. When he finally raised his eyes, she was offering an entire fried chicken like it was the most normal thing in the world. Those eyes—bright, untainted—were the first kindness he had seen since the world ended.
Years later, that same girl tackled him in gratitude for saving her from detention. Josh’s head struck a rock. He woke foaming at the mouth.
“JOSH!”
The scream shattered Prince Agusten’s teacup two floors above. He arrived to find Emelia panicking and Josh unconscious, blood on the grass. The prince sighed. “Be careful next time, Emelia.” She flushed crimson.
That night Emelia bandaged Josh herself, chattering about how heroic he was. Josh only smiled.
“Without you that day, holding out that fried chicken,” he said quietly, “I wouldn’t be here.”
She tilted her head. “Is this not what you wanted?”
Little Josh had stared at the chicken in disbelief. “Why are you acting like this is normal?”
Little Emelia had grinned. “Then can I give you a hug instead?”
She had hugged him without hesitation. “Don’t worry. Everything will be fine. I’ll give you a home.”
Two days later they lay beneath the great tree on the Dimfulsen estate.
“This,” Emelia said, tracing the bark, “is where my great-grandfather proposed, then my grandfather, then my father. Our family’s sacred tree.”
Golden sunlight dripped through the leaves. Josh noticed something. “Look—that rock is shielding a tiny flower from wind and rain.”
Emelia’s eyes lit up. “Just like in fairy tales! The knight protecting his princess.”
Josh smiled softly. “Then I can be the rock, and you can be the flower.”
She punched his shoulder. “Do you think I’m that weak?”
“Well, you do seem too weak to catch me—”
He stole her book and ran.
The chase lasted until sunset. Exhausted and laughing, they collapsed shoulder to shoulder beneath the tree, fairy-tale books scattered like petals. They fell asleep in the orange glow.
When the evening breeze woke Josh, he gently roused Emelia. As they walked away, he glanced back.
“Let’s call it the Promise Tree,” he said.
“It sounds wonderful,” she answered.
Neither saw the protecting stone crack, nor the second flower beginning to grow beside the first.
Years passed.
Josh’s talent with weapons was discovered. He was conscripted. Training was brutal—100-kilometre runs with sandbags on every limb, dwarven-forged weapons, mastery of aura (the force that unified body, blade, and soul, multiplying strength thirtyfold).
Then came the griffin trial.
Most tamed chicks to become holy knights. Some claimed adult silver griffins and slew twenty-seven wyverns to earn royal rank.
Josh fought a full-grown golden griffin—rarest of all—and slew fifty wyverns from its back. He became Paladin, secret Holy Royal Knight, guardian of crown and kingdom. A decoy stood in public; the real Josh worked in shadow.
The Church rebuilt his body with an aether core and the gifts of legendary beasts: eyes of the Roc, heart of the iron-toothed lion-tiger, bones of the fearless wolverine, regeneration of the immortal axolotl, speed of the thunder-cheetah, strength of the mountain bear, hide of the honey badger, and dozens more. He died for ten hours on the operating table. Then he opened his eyes and lived again.
While Josh vanished into duty, Emelia and Prince Agusten grew closer.
Agusten’s connection to the Dragon of Storms was weak—royal brothers killed for power, sisters smiled while sharpening knives. Emotions were weapons. Maids quit when his storms lashed out. Emelia stayed. She stayed when lightning nearly took her life. Slowly, the prince learned trust.
On an academy field trip, a demi-earth-worm—draconic monster swollen with earth-crystal essence—burst from the ground.
Panic.
Then Emelia’s voice, magically amplified, cut through the chaos:
“Thunder-affinity students—channel everything into the back of its skull! Gravity-affinity—lock it in place! Everyone else—barriers, now!”
Students obeyed instantly. Gravity pinned the beast. Thunder struck. It broke free, shattering the barriers.
Emelia turned to Agusten. “My prince, would you do the honour?”
He met her fearless golden eyes, summoned the storm in his blood, and beheaded the monster in a single lightning-wreathed strike.
Afterward, students whispered not about the prince, but about Emelia Dimfulsen—who had taken command without hesitation and passed out from sheer adrenaline the moment it was over.
War came again. El Zi Bond, the King of the Nine Seas—once a broken traveller who found the lost treasure and memories of eighty pirate kings—challenged the continent.
Josh met him in single combat atop storm-tossed waves. When it ended, Josh had lost his right eye; the Sea King bore a scar across his chest. The war was declared a draw. The pirate sailed free.
A victory celebration followed.
At its climax, Prince Agusten and Lady Emelia of House Dimfulsen were married.
Knights lined the aisle, swords raised, heads bowed. As the couple passed, Emelia felt something—tightness in her chest—at one motionless knight. She glanced up for a heartbeat.
Beneath the helmet, a single tear fell from the only eye he had left.
“I have the sword to protect you,” the knight whispered, “but not the heart to stand beside you.”
A blue eye watched them exchange vows.
Decades later, the gates to the demon realms tore open.
Every race marched to war:
• Centaurs, masters of bow and spear.
• Elves—high, dark, frost, half-blood.
• Dwarves of north, east, west, and south.
• Humans, merfolk, naga, gorgons, birdfolk, beastmen, treants, rock giants.
Kings and dragon-blooded led the charge.
Josh, scarred and unbreakable, faced Baheyal, Monarch of the Fifty-Four Legions of Hell.
He was losing. Yet he raised his sword.
Time stopped.
The Goddess appeared, her True Dragon—the progenitor of all dragons—coiled behind her.
“Who are you?”
“I am Josh.”
“What is your duty?”
“To protect.”
“Do you know the price of that strike?”
“I know.”
She smiled.
Time resumed.
Light exploded. Golden armour formed from his flesh.
“SAMAEL.”
One swing closed the gates forever.
When armies arrived, they found only another corpse among millions.
Far away, Queen Emelia felt something impossible slip from the world—like a name on the tip of her tongue suddenly erased.
They say an unknown hero sealed the gates and purged the remaining demons. 2.1 billion lives were lost across all wars.
Every fallen warrior’s weapon was driven into the earth as a memorial—a forest of steel.
One sword glowed for half a heartbeat.
Only Emelia saw.
Then it vanished.
The price of that final strike was the complete erasure of one man’s existence—no past, no present, no future.
History remembers only “the Hero.”
But sometimes, beneath the Promise Tree, an old queen dreams of a boy with one blue eye offering fried chicken to a starving child, and wakes crying for a name she can never quite recall.
At the tree’s roots, two white flowers bloom where a cracked stone once stood.
Even the tiniest flower, given enough time, can split a mountain of rock in two.
