[The Dragon Monarch Invites you]

  The words do not sound like a safe haven because The Darkest Night is already behind me. My senses flare. I move on instinct, tearing myself away seconds before his fist slams into the sealed doors. The impact sends a tremor through the corridor and my bones as I try to keep my composure.

  I roll and get up fast enough to let go of my breath and inhale once again. I feel the rush along with the strain on my lungs. I wonder if this is how Nexus Beings feel when they fight.

  The whispers get louder as i make one more attempt to land a clean strike. I thrust and a blast of concentrated ether mixed with lightning explodes from the tip of my weapon.

  The Darkest Night’s eyes widen for a brief moment. It is in that moment that I notice a strain of worry cross the face it has chosen.

  This time, it doesn’t let the blast hit it. Its body becomes semi transparent and the collected energy destroys the wall behind it. Seeing my best effort being tarnished like this always sucks. Maybe if I had the gaunlet, the battle would’ve been manageable.

  I charge again. The sound of my boots silenced by the loud processing in my mind. I can’t beat the Darkest Night…but Nico might have an idea on how. This was supposed to be his target in the first place.

  “You are just a dormant human.” He stops my strongest swing with one hand. Not deflects. Not parries. He freaking stops it like a freesby.

  “You will never be as strong as I am.” His fingers close around Horus’s Agony like it’s nothing more than a piece of scrap metal. The blade screams as ether rips through it. I can feel it cracking from strength that far exceeds mine.

  His skin doesn’t break. There’s no blood. No reaction even my strength. Are these my limits? Perhaps. I am no Nexus Being in the first place.

  “I may not be able to kill you,” he says calmly, almost kindly, “but I can trap you and torture you in your mind.”

  His grip tightens. The sword trembles in my hands. It screams through the whispers and the pain has me wanting to scream stop.

  “Listen to me Astrid, think of the great things you and I could accomplish.” His voice deepens, slipping into something vast. “Other galaxies. Human gods. Constellations within, and beyond the veil. Believe me when I say this…” He leans closer. “I have seen so much. The Monarchs have only told your kind what they want.”

  The corridor seems to stretch. The darkness breathes. For a heartbeat, I glimpse things that don’t belong here. He shows me burning stars, sigils I’ve never seen, civilizations of angelic beings. Planets I do not know about.

  “Give yourself and let me show you what is possible with the power of Monarch who doesn’t belong in your realm.” He releases the sword and reaches for my hand.

  And suddenly, the whispers do not whisper anymore. They scream the moment something dark is unleashed from him.

  Pain detonates behind my eyes. My instincts take over before thought can interfere. I tear myself backward, barely avoiding his fingers as they graze the air where my wrist had been. The space he touches becomes disrupted . Reality stutters, like something just tried to overwrite me and failed.

  I stagger, boots skidding, heart hammering so hard I think it might rupture. “No,” I gasp. My voice feels wrong when I speak next. Like it’s cutting its way out of my throat.

  “Don’t touch me with Chaos!” The words leave my mouth and the world reacts suddenly. The ether inside me surges out of control, tearing loose like a living thing trying to escape my skin. My veins burn. My vision fractures at the edges. The air wraps around my hands, bending into wrong angles that make my stomach twist.

  “I don’t want to become a demon or corrupted.” Even though I have no clue what’s going on, I’ve already made up my mind.

  “Do I look like a de…” The Darkest Night cuts himself off when he notices a change. Not in sound. Not in light. But in the pressure.

  The kind of change that happens when a powerful item wakes up, and reality instinctively holds its breath. I feel it too. The corridor feels heavier, like something unseen just opened its eyes.

  His gaze snaps toward the darkness. A low grunt slips from his throat as his posture shifts into something predatory and cautious. He doesn’t attack. He listens. An unnatural silence settles over the corridor, thick enough to suffocate. Even the whispering ether dulls as if swallowed by shadow.

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  The darkness deepens. My sight collapses into useless shades of black stacked on black. Even with a body meant to be better, everything vanishes, and the corridor becomes a mouth closing around us.

  I know this trick. It’s from a magic item that grants Shadow Immersion and control. Nico. He’s shown it to me before, claiming it's his second trump card after the gauntlet.

  Relief hits me so hard my knees almost buckle.

  “Foolish tricks won’t work on me, you fox.” The Darkest Night warns, speaking like he’s already won. “I am the master of illusions.”

  The word illusions echoes wrong in the darkness, like its being chewed apart by something listening.

  He’s about to strike when a voice responds. It's Nico’s voice, sounding like the biggest ray of hope. “Illusions also happen to be my area, Mr Darkest Night.”

  Just then, a shape tears itself free from the shadows. Nico emerges from the blackness, as if the darkness itself is peeling away from him; his sword ignites in a sickly green glow, like condensed plasma. The light crawls across the walls, revealing distorted reflections and warped shadows that shouldn’t exist.

  For the first time since I woke up here, I feel like I’m not alone. And for the first time, I see something flicker behind the Darkest Night’s confidence.

  It's anger.

  Nico makes the first move by commanding the shadows to stretch, birthing multiple tentacle-like extensions that tear through the air toward the Darkest Night with impossible speed.

  I don’t see what happens next. It’s too fast.

  One blink—and there’s a flash of blinding steel in the old man’s hand. The shadow tentacles die mid-lunge, severed so cleanly they simply unravel into nothing, fading like burnt smoke. No resistance. No delay.

  Then he lunges.

  The floor where he stood detonates into fractured stone, the impact cracking outward like a spiderweb as he launches himself at Nico with murderous momentum.

  Nico’s body ignites with ether in response. His sword hums, the green glow sharpening into something predatory. For a heartbeat, there is absolute silence—like the world inhaling—and then the corridor erupts into a deadly dance of blades.

  Steel screams against plasma-bright ether. Sparks scatter like burning insects. The air buckles under the violence of their movements, pressure snapping against my skin in sharp invisible lashes. I can barely track their forms—afterimages colliding, separating, colliding again—each impact echoing like bone striking bone inside a coffin.

  My brother is no expert. But he survives. He bends when he should break. He twists through angles that feel wrong to the eye, slipping past killing arcs by inches that would’ve opened his throat. Every parry rattles his arms. Every clash threatens to tear the weapon from his grip. Yet he adapts, his movements growing sharper, more ruthless, revealing techniques I’ve never seen him use before.

  They vanish into motion again, and a crescent of force rips through the black walls as if they’re made of damp paper. The cut keeps going until the corridor shudders like a dying animal. Another slash follows, and the structure groans.

  Somewhere deep within the Spire, something massive shifts, disturbed from ancient sleep. Dust rains from invisible fractures, tasting old, bitter, and wrong in my mouth.

  The place is coming apart. I don’t know how long I have. Or how long Nico can keep this up.

  Therefore, while they butcher the air behind me, I sprint for the doors. My palms slam against the cold surface. The chill bites straight into my bones, leeching all my courage and leaving some hope.

  Sweat pours down my face and into my eyes, stinging like salt in open wounds. My heart is trying to escape my ribcage. The fear inside me feels dense enough to drown a city if it could spill out.

  Breathe. I hold my breath and scrape inward, clawing for what little ether I have left. Not power—crumbs. Shards. Filth scraped from the bottom of my soul. It burns as I drag it up, like pulling glass through my veins.

  The System stirs.

  [The Monarch Invites You]

  The words feel less like an offer and more like a grave opening its mouth.

  “And I accept his invite.”

  The moment the sentence leaves me, something inside my skull quiets. Not peace—never peace—but a thinning of terror, like a blade sliding between fear and thought.

  My hands tremble violently as invisible pressure presses back against me from the other side of the doors. It feels alive. A presence leaning in, breathing through the stone—metal surface, tasting me.

  I force the link.

  Ether spills out of me in ragged pulses, draining faster than my body can tolerate. My pool plummets…thirty… twenty. My vision darkens at the edges, veins screaming like overstretched wires. My muscles seize, threatening to fold me to the floor like a discarded corpse.

  My skin crawls as if something beneath it is trying to crawl out. My bones ache. My teeth grind until I taste blood. The cold metal under my palms feels like touching a buried corpse that hasn’t realized it’s dead yet. Pain detonates through my nerves in steady waves, methodical and cruel.

  But pain is familiar. Pain is home. It means I am alive.

  I shove harder, pouring the last of myself into the link, even as my body recoils in instinctive terror—because somewhere behind me, steel is still screaming, walls are still splitting, and death is sprinting closer with every heartbeat. If the dragon’s heart is beyond these doors, then I must get it and save Nico.

  Ten seconds later, the doors finally give in with a tortured grind, opening on their own as something deep within the mechanism groans like a wounded beast. The sound crawls down my spine. I don’t wait to see what answered it.

  I stumble through the gap.

  My legs nearly fold beneath me the moment I cross the threshold. The first thing I note is the gravity. It feels like gravity here feels wrong—too heavy, too eager—as if the room itself is trying to drag me down and press me into the floor. Every step sends a shock up my joints, my muscles screaming in delayed rebellion. My boots scrape uselessly as I fight to stay upright.

  A gravity suit would’ve been nice.

  The noise outside dies. In here, I feel like I’ve walked into a different world. A world that’s dark, silent. Like a living entity in slumber. I do not even hear the whispers anymore, even after I summon Horus’s Agony.

  [You have accepted a Nexus Challenge]

  What?

  [Let yee who hold no sin enter. However, Ye who has killed, yee who has bled the blood of her peers. Yee, who mocks death and those who shaped the universe, has stepped in, accepting her flaws. And because the host is a dragon, she will challenge the other as redemption.

  Fuck.