"Say, Lilly... Pls check up on Croc. As far as I can tell, she's just sleeping," Dan said slowly, his voice dropping into a dangerously quiet register. His hand tightened with a white-knuckled grip around the empty fabric of Isis's black dress, the material crumpling in his fist. Without another word, he turned his back to them, his heavy boots clicking against the obsidian rock as he started moving deeper into the dark, uncharted depths of the demon realm.
"Where exactly are you going?!" Lilly asked loudly, her voice echoing frantically across the desolate plains.
She quickly knelt down beside Croc to check her vital signs. Gently, Lilly parted the girl's dark hair and placed two fingers firmly against her neck. A soft, steady pulse beat against her fingertips. Croc was breathing perfectly well, her chest rising and falling in a deep, undisturbed slumber, and a massive wave of relief washed through Lilly's chest.
"I hope you're not planning on doing anything entirely dangerous," she continued anxiously, looking up from the unconscious girl toward Dan's retreating figure.
Dan paused.
He stood frozen amidst the swirling ash and howling, sulfurous winds, his silhouette cutting a lonely, striking figure against the jagged horizon. His long white hair blew forward, completely obscuring his eyes from view, casting a heavy shadow across his face. He didn't turn around to look at Lilly, nor did he cast a single glance back at Croc.
"I'm going to continue her story," he said simply.
And before the words could even fade from the air, space violently buckled around him, and he completely vanished from sight, leaving nothing but the whistling wind behind.
The Demon King sat rigidly upon his jagged obsidian throne, his posture oozing a cold, ancient authority.
His face was completely covered in pristine white wraps, acting as a blindfold over his ruined sight, while his long hair, as violently red as the crimson sky above, drifted lazily in the hot wind. He rested his chin heavily on the back of his hand, his red crescent moon earrings catching the dim light of the realm as he waited for his uninvited guest. The grand fortress, which had been absolutely pulverized during his previous catastrophic clash with Croc, had been meticulously restored by dark magic—yet it remained completely devoid of a roof, leaving the shattered stone throne room entirely exposed to the bleeding sky.
Dan walked slowly into the ruined chambers of the king.
His boots clicked heavily against the stone, his left hand still clenched with a white-knuckled, desperate grip around the empty fabric of Isis's tattered black dress. He stopped short, staring directly at the blindfolded demon on the throne with dead, unblinking eyes. As the residual divine energy of the dead god finally cleared from the air, the intense, reality-shattering red color of Dan's eyes slowly faded away, revealing their original, deep reddish-orange nature. At the exact same time, the blinding white hair of his awakened state burned away like melting snow, reverting back to his original, pitch-black strands with subtle, jagged lines of red running here and there through the dark locks.
Both cosmic anomalies stared at one another across the empty, roofless hall for a long, suffocating interval. Finally, the Demon King broke the silence, his bare chest exposed where his shirt had been completely torn to shreds from his prior fight with Croc.
"Are you going to try and kill me?" the king asked calmly, not a single muscle in his body flinching. "Since you forced yourself into her divine consciousness, I am entirely positive you saw the exact part of her memories where I put up a grand front about how she belongs to me. Of course... it was all a pathetic, calculated lie to test her. I am sure you also know that the locked memories I forcibly unlocked for her are what truly killed her, destroying her fragile soul significantly faster than she would have naturally died."
Dan let out a long, heavy sigh, his shoulders slumping under a mountain of exhaustion. "I am not going to attack you."
The Demon King's head tilted slightly beneath his blindfold.
"You did absolutely nothing wrong," Dan said, his voice dropping into a hollow, realistic rasp. "As one of the ancient, primordial beings she completely humiliated and defeated in the tragic past, I know it was entirely within your right to do what you did to survive and take back your pride. Besides... she was going to die sooner or later anyway." As the brutal words left his mouth, Dan bit his lower lip so violently that a thin trickle of dark blood broke the skin, running down his chin.
"Then why on earth did you steal her soul?" the Demon King asked coldly, his tone sharpening as he leaned forward off his hand. "Why didn't you just let her spirit pass on naturally to the underworld? Are you actively trying to pick a lethal fight with the King of Hell?"
"I am not letting her go down into that deep, unforgiving darkness," Dan said, his voice instantly hardening into an unyielding wall of absolute conviction. "I'll hang onto her soul with everything I have... until the day I face God himself."
"Such greed,You can't expect everything to go your way now can you? A completely fruitless, suicidal endeavor," the Demon King waved his hand airily, his red crescent earrings swaying with his dismissive movement. "Facing a conceptual being such as the Entity will only ever lead to your immediate, agonizing death error or not. Well... enough of that boring nonsense. I am entirely certain there is a specific thing you came all this way to ask of me. Spit it out right now; I am growing incredibly impatient."
"Malakor. He is still alive, isn't he?" Dan asked slowly.
The Demon King's blindfolded gaze remained anchored heavily on him. The air inside the roofless, ruined hall grew impossibly, suffocatingly still, as if the entire world was holding its breath. "If he is... are you truly planning on hunting down and killing a man?"
"It's not like it is something entirely new to me," Dan continued, his voice a cool, detached monotone. "Though I was completely unconscious during the actual events, Areia told me clearly after the fact. I've killed someone before. Two people, infact. Granted, it was during my earlier, more reckless days, but it is still blood on my hands. It's still something." Dan shifted his weight, his reddish-orange eyes locking onto the white cloth covering the king's face. "And from the very defensive nature of your question, I'm going to safely assume he is very much alive."
"Yes," the Demon King admitted, leaning back against his obsidian throne, his red crescent moon earrings swaying gently against his neck. "He lives. But I am deeply curious as to how exactly you came to know that. Accurate records of his current whereabouts shouldn't exist within Isis's divine memories. She was violently sealed away immediately after the tragedy and could have had absolutely no recollection as to what became of him over the eras. So... how did you figure it out?" The demon's voice dropped, turning ice cold.
"Well, I don't know his particular physical location," Dan said coolly, a sharp, knowing edge cutting through his dead expression. "But I do know that he has been relentlessly watching us. Watching me, watching you, watching everyone. Like a detached commander sitting in a high office. Even right now, at this very microsecond, his gaze is resting heavily upon us. And I am entirely certain an ancient being like you can feel that artificial presence too, so please don't play dumb with me."
Dan slowly broke his gaze from the throne, tilting his head back to look directly up into the empty crimson sky, staring fixedly at an invisible point in the air currents.
"Isn't that right... Malakor?"
Deep within the subterranean heart of the Elven Kingdom, down through the forbidden, echoing vaults, and far past the jagged stone wall the Elf King had once desperately breached in search of ancient power, a hidden sanctuary of cold iron existed.
There, sitting on a magnificent, high-backed office chair, sat the Immortal King.
Discarded cybernetic tool parts, rusted gears, and exposed wires lay scattered all around his boots like the shedding skin of a technological beast. Surrounding his desk, a massive, towering wall of multiple digital monitors glowed with a ghostly intensity, portraying different people across entirely different times and places. He sat completely immersed in the neon blue light, his sharp, silver-gray hair still looking just as young, full of life, and pristine as it did thousands of years ago.
His face was entirely smooth and youthful, aside from a highly complex, terrifyingly precise mechanical structure now etched permanently into his flesh around his jawline. It was a cybernetic vocal apparatus built directly into his skull to help him speak—since Isis had conceptually sealed his biological mouth shut, and to this very day, he hadn't been able to reverse the effects of her divine curse, even long after her tragic death.
As Dan's reddish-orange eyes stared directly into the hidden camera lens from a dimension away, the mechanical structure on Malakor's face whirred to life, pulling his synthetic lips into a cruel, artificial smile.
His twin blue star eyes narrowed into predatory slits as he stared back at the screen, looking at the boy who could see through the veil.
"This boy..." Malakor's synthesized, metallic voice muttered, echoing hollowly into the heavy silence of the cold iron room, where mindless automation units and humming neon blue lines moved systematically around him in the dark. "...is going to be a lot of trouble."
.......
"Umm... Areia?" Mandevor began, his voice breaking the heavy, rustic silence of the countryside.
He reached up, grasping the brim of his weathered straw hat, and slowly pulled it off his head. His unruly brown hair immediately caught the breeze, lifting gently in the ambient air. Mandevor adjusted the heavy leather strap of the broadsword secured across his back, his dark brown eyes scanning the horizon.
Before them lay a breathtaking, impossible ocean of agriculture. A warm, rhythmic wind brushed softly against his face, sweeping across the golden plains. It rippled through endless fields of towering corn and lush, heavy rice stalks alike, the golden-green stalks swaying in perfect harmony, stretching on as far as the naked eye could see. Mandevor swallowed hard, looking entirely out of place in his traveler's jacket.
"Didn't you... didn't you explicitly say this place was supposed to be a brutal, industrial breeding ground for weapons like yourself?"
The wind rippled again, far more violently this time, catching Areia's long, snow-white hair. It whipped the pristine locks around her face and shoulders, far harder than it had Mandevor's—her hair was significantly longer, after all, cascading down her back like a frozen waterfall. Slowly, she turned her striking, amethyst-purple eyes toward the vast expanse of the radiant fields.
She was still wearing the thick, heavy white fur coat from the harsh winter just outside the conceptual barrier—the very same barrier she had shattered with her own blade just moments prior. Underneath the coat, her dark skirt fluttered against the tops of her rugged, knee-high leather boots. She was as breathtakingly pretty as anyone could ever imagine, a flawless porcelain doll carved for slaughter, but right now, her pale, beautiful face was completely frozen.
The sight before her stunned her far more deeply than Mandevor could ever comprehend.
This is... my home? her mind reeled, a sudden, violent dizziness slamming into her consciousness.
The Lair of Amag that she knew, the one etched into her nightmares with branding irons and broken glass, was a cold, unforgiving wasteland. It was supposed to be an endless labyrinth of iron sheds, smoking factories, and towering stone fortresses. It was a place crowded with horrific machinery and specialized tools specifically designed to rip a human being apart or whip them into a state of absolute, mindless obedience.
It's wrong, she thought frantically, her chest heaving as the phantom scent of old blood threatened to choke her. Where are the shackles? Where is the ash?
Standing in the middle of the sun-drenched crop field, her mind violently forced her backward into the dark. She remembered, with terrifying clarity,the bottle she was bred in,the exact spot where her abdominal organs had been ruthlessly ripped open by one of those jagged training tools when she was just a child. She remembered the blinding, nauseating agony of being impaled to the freezing dirt by a massive, mechanized crossbow bolt simply because she had been a fraction of a second too slow on her feet to dodge it in time. She remembered an entire population of sour-looking, hollow-eyed people, completely devoid of life, shuffling through the mud beneath a permanent, sunless sky. The air had always tasted of iron, copper, and rotting flesh.
But this... this paradise of golden grain was not the hell she had left behind.
I don't understand, her inner monologue screamed in a panic. Yes, I slaughtered the high directors. Yes, I systematically executed the leaders and killed quite a large sum of their vanguard armies and the armored giants helping them back in the battle of Villia... but for an entire nationwide breeding ground to transform this drastically just because the heads were cut off? It's completely impossible. Soil doesn't heal like this. Slaves don't just become farmers.
The sheer cognitive dissonance made the world spin on its axis. Her vision blurred. Clutching her temples with both hands, Areia stumbled backward, her heavy knee-high boots tripping over a loose root in the dirt.
Seeing her falter, Mandevor's eyes widened in alarm. "Areia!" he yelled, instinctively rushing forward, extending his arms to catch her before she hit the ground.
SHING.
Before his fingers could even graze the white fur of her coat, Areia's hand flew to the hilt of the sword resting at her waist. She didn't draw it, but the sheer, icy pressure of her intent stopped Mandevor dead in his tracks. She raised a single pale hand, her amethyst eyes locking onto him with a frightening, absolute coldness.
"Only Master is permitted to touch me," she said softly.
Though her voice was quiet, it carried the unyielding weight of reinforced iron, leaving zero room for argument. Mandevor slowly raised his hands, stepping back out of her personal space, his brown eyes filled with deep concern.
Areia lowered her hand, her fingers still trembling slightly against her skirt. She stared blankly back out at the endless, swaying fields of gold, her pale, devastatingly pretty face furrowing into a deep, agonizing knot of confusion.
Just what on earth... is truly going on in this place?
Mandevor's dark brown eyes squinted against the bright afternoon sun, spotting a small group of young men in the distance. They were leisurely walking down a dirt path cutting through the crop rows, carrying wooden hoes over their broad shoulders and engaging in a remarkably lighthearted discussion. Their carefree, playful laughter echoed warmly throughout the massive expanse of the golden land, carrying perfectly on the gentle breeze.
Areia saw them too.
The moment the sound of their laughter hit her ears, her breath hitched, and she recognized them instantly. It was an uncanny, jarring feeling. The last time she had laid eyes on these faces, she was a tiny, stone-faced girl of eight years old, surviving on scraps and sheer instinct. Now, she stood here at eighteen. A whole decade—ten long, bloody years—had passed, and they had grown considerably into full-grown, healthy young adults.
During her dark, repetitive days in the Lair of Amag, humanity was entirely stripped away; they had been addressed strictly by numbers rather than actual names.
Areia had been branded as Number 1.
Though she wasn't always regarded as the pinnacle of the facility, she had ruthlessly overtaken the previous number one at a very young, volatile age, and the numbers of the other children were pushed down accordingly like cogs in a machine. She stood perfectly still, but her mind was suddenly flooded with the gruesome images of the sheer, ungodly amount of kids who had miserably died during the agonizing training sessions right in her presence, their bodies dragged away like garbage.
Because she was a flawless, terrifying prodigy, the directors had treated her with absolute priority back then. She had been isolated, placed in a higher tier, and never permitted to truly interact or bond with the other kids. She had been a god among slaves.
But now, standing in the warm air, looking at the boys she had once stood above, a strange, completely foreign emotion bloomed inside her chest. After being freed from the shackles of that hellhole by Dan's hand, she had subconsciously developed a faint, lingering sense of empathy for them. They were survivors of the same nightmare.
Initially, she had made this grueling, winter-defying journey back to her home facility with a dark, unyielding resolve. She had come either to systematically finish off the remaining remnants of Amag to ensure they could never rise again, or to deliver a cold, bloody warning that if they ever tried to take up arms against her beloved Master Dan, she would personally slaughter them all.
But now... looking at the sun-drenched corn, hearing the peaceful laughter of nameless numbers who had somehow turned into free men, she didn't know what to think anymore.
Areia took an involuntary, trembling step forward toward the boys, her hands unconsciously outstretching into the empty air, her mind caught in a paralyzing limbo between the ruthless weapon she was raised to be, and the human being she was desperately trying to become.
The boys stopped dead in their tracks the exact microsecond they spotted her.
The lighthearted laughter vanished, replaced by an intense, breathless silence. Areia froze, her battle instincts violently flaring as she instinctively reached for the hilt of her blade, her fingers wrapping around the cold iron. She braced herself for a coordinated ambush. They looked at her for what felt like an eternity, their eyes wide, scanning her white fur coat, her dark skirt, and her unmistakable snow-white hair.
Then, the tallest and probably the eldest of the group yelled. It was the boy Areia recognized down to his very bone structure as Number 2.
"Go get Master Berald quick! Hurry, all of you!" Number 2 barked, his voice filled with a frantic, electrifying urgency. "I'll bring her to the grand hall! Tell him Areia has finally returned! Hurry!"
Immediately, the other boys moved like a living tornado, parting with a sudden, violent burst of trained speed, their boots kicking up dust as they vanished into the towering rows of corn.
They... they know my name? Areia's mind fractured in complete shock. Her hand trembled against her sword. How is that conceptually possible? I didn't possess a name while I was trapped in this hellhole. Dan gave me that name... Dan named me Areia. So how do they know? And Berald... Berald is still alive? Master Dan didn't kill him back during the slaughter at Villia?
"Hey there, Areia," Number 2 called out softly.
He intentionally abandoned his wooden hoe, letting it drop to the dirt some distance off, showing his open, unarmed hands. His messy chestnut hair blew wildly against the rustic wind as he approached her with a slow, deliberate pace. "It's been a really long while, hasn't it?" he continued, a remarkably warm, genuine smile breaking across his sun-kissed face.
Areia, completely at a loss on what to do, froze entirely. The legendary, unyielding composure of the cold-blooded weapon completely shattered, entirely beating her character. She stood paralyzed like a porcelain statue.
Before she could even process his movement, the boy stepped into her guard, reached out, and pulled her into a tight, fierce hug.
"It's so incredibly good to see that you're doing well," he whispered directly into her ear, his voice thick with a strange, deep-seated relief.
Areia's breath literally froze inside her lungs under the sudden weight of his embrace. A few paces away, Mandevor stared blankly, his jaw slightly slack as he tried to figure out what to do with his hands. He couldn't help but feel a sharp, petty sting of pain in his chest—Areia had literally threatened to cut his hands off for trying to help her earlier, yet she was just letting this random chestnut-haired boy hug her without a fight.
Number 2 finally let her go, stepping back a couple of inches to properly stare at her face. The moment his eyes locked onto her flawless features up close, his cheeks flushed into a large, burning shade of crimson. He scrambled backward quickly, waving his hands in a flustered panic.
"I... I didn't fully notice at first when I saw you from a distance, but what are you, some sort of mythical forest fairy?!" he huffed, pouting with an exaggerated, boyish jealousy. "You're literally hogging all the world's beauty entirely for yourself! No fair!"
"Uh...? Ummm... What... You... Me...?"
Areia's silver tongue completely failed her. A chaotic storm of questions, strategic assessments, and sheer panic kept popping into her mind, making her lips twitch uselessly.
"I go by Toby now," the boy smiled sweetly, scratching the back of his neck as his blush slowly faded. "Please don't address me by my old facility number anymore. And as to how exactly we all know your true name... well, you'll find out the answers to that very soon. And as you can clearly tell by looking around... things are completely different than how they used to be. We have you to thank for that, Areia."
Toby's expression suddenly turned profoundly serious, a deep, heavy reverence settling over his eyes. He stepped back, squared his shoulders, and took a deep, formal bow before her, his head nearly touching his knees.
"Thank you, Areia," Toby said softly, his voice echoing over the rustling corn. "Me, the boys, and every single one of the kids left around this place are forever, deeply grateful to you."
Areia stood rooted to the dirt, her amethyst eyes wide with a mild, overwhelming panic as she stared down at his bowed form.
M-me? her inner monologue screamed in absolute confusion. What did I ever do? Are they... are they mistaking me for an entirely different person?
"Well, it's been a really long while... Areia."
A cold, aged voice echoed behind her.
Areia recognized that voice like second nature. It was the exact same voice that had screamed "discipline" into her ears until they bled; the same voice that had roared in absolute fury anytime she got a combat skill a fraction of a millimeter wrong; the same voice that had screeched while brutally beating her body black and blue anytime she failed a designated mission.
But now... the voice sounded incredibly old, fragile, and tired.
She turned around with agonizing slowness, a white-hot, suffocating anger rising in her throat like acid. She turned to face a deeply withered old man with long white hair, barely holding himself upright with a wooden cane. His physical features were so old they were practically slumping down his face.
But it was the man standing directly beside him that made her breath stop entirely.
It was a bald, dark-skinned man. A man Areia knew very, very well. Though they had only physically crossed blades a single time, he was permanently etched into her memory—because he was the exact spatial sorcerer who had sent her away and trapped her inside that terrifying, empty alternate dimension during the chaotic battle of Villia. The very same man she was completely certain Cyra had slaughtered on the battlefield.
She looked around erratically. Dozens, hundreds of kids of entirely different ages and teenagers were gathering in a massive circle all around the clearing. They weren't looking at her with fear. They were staring at her with bright, starry eyes, looking at her like she was a mythical hero.
The utter contradiction of it all made something snap deep inside her brain.
Areia's magic core violently violently exploded.
BOOM!
The raw, unadulterated energy erupted from her small frame, tearing through the rich earth like a magical bomb. A crushing shockwave of purple kinetic force detonated outward, and everyone close to her—including Mandevor, the surrounding teenagers, and Toby—was violently thrown through the air, crashing hard into the dirt rows.
Only the old man with the cane and the bald sorcerer stood perfectly still, the bald man hastily raising a crackling spatial barrier just in time to absorb the blunt force of the blast.
Areia slowly raised her right hand, pointing her index finger straight toward the weeping sky. She had only one singular, absolute thought echoing in her mind at that exact microsecond: Kill the old man standing before me. Erase him from existence.
"Areia!!! NO!!!" Toby and Mandevor screamed in absolute, horrified unison from a distance, desperately trying to scramble to their feet through the dirt.
The violent air currents that had just pushed everyone away suddenly reversed. The atmosphere began to be sucked heavily inward, compressing tightly around her glowing fingertip. A terrifying, twisting purple sphere began brewing directly above her head. It was an absolute gravity well—a localized mini black hole. The violent suction began instantly tearing up the beautiful fields of crops, pulling up heavy chunks of the ground, ripping the wooden roofs off the distant housing, and dragging everything it could reach into its crushing, spinning vortex.
Areia held the catastrophic sphere up with a trembling arm, her pale, pretty face completely contorted with pure, unbridled fury, while fresh, hot tears burned down her cheeks.
Master lied to me, the thought cut through her brain like a jagged blade, twisting her heart into a million pieces. He told me he was dead. He explicitly told me this evil, monstrous man was dead! So why... why am I still staring at him right now?! Why is his supposedly immortal body suddenly so ancient and withered?! Why did Dan lie to me?! Didn't he know... didn't he know exactly how much this disgusting man made me suffer?!
The old man stared up at her defiantly through the howling gale, the sheer gravitational pull whipping his white hair wildly around his face. He didn't lift his cane. He didn't make a single gesture to protect his life.
Instead, he slowly reached into the deep, heavy hem of his tattered robe and pulled out a crisp, sealed parchment letter.
"It's been a very long time since this has been sitting in my custody," the old man spoke softly, his weak voice carrying surprisingly clear over the roar of the black hole. "It's from that boyfriend of yours. He explicitly told me that if you were ever to return to this facility, I should hand it directly over to you."
Areia's amethyst eyes widened slightly, her magic fluctuating.
"I haven't read a single word of it, so I don't know the context," the old man said simply, his grip tightening as the paper strained and crackled, the fierce gravity of the purple sphere ready to pull the letter straight out of his hands and shred it into atomic dust. "But it is from your Master... to you. I suggest you at least read it before that magnificent spell of yours completely destroys it."