The sky above BranLeaf continued to roar, split again and again by lightning of unnatural color. A heavy, suffocating atmosphere pressed down on everything below, felt equally by adventurers and monsters alike.

No one moved.

No one dared to.

It was as if everyone, without realizing it, was waiting for something to arrive. They didn’t know what. They didn’t know who. Only that something was coming.

The lightning kept flashing across the sky, illuminating the city in brief, flickering intervals before plunging it back into darkness.

And then, between one of those silent flashes, a figure appeared.

It hadn’t been there before.

And then it was.

At first, no one noticed. But when someone did, it spread like wildfire.

Voices erupted, first from the city, then from the battlefield.

"...That’s him."

"The Duke!"

"It’s Duke Greymark!"

The wave of relief that swept through the adventurers was almost physical. Voices multiplied, trembling, desperate, clinging to that figure like a rope thrown to someone drowning.

"We’re saved!"

"Haha, it’s over, finally..."

"The Duke is here!"

Some fell to their knees without even realizing it, exhausted, laughing with a hysteria that wasn’t joy but something closer to collapse. They had fought for hours. They had seen things they never wanted to see. And now, finally, someone greater than them was stepping forward.

But not everyone reacted that way.

Cedric didn’t move.

His breathing grew heavy. Slow. Controlled, the kind of control you exercise when your mind is working through something it’s struggling to read.

’No... something is not right.’

A cold shiver ran down his spine.

He studied the figure in the sky with the eyes of someone trained to assess threats, and what he saw matched nothing it should have. This wasn’t the presence of a man descending to protect his city. It was something else, a pressure bearing down from above like the weight of a sky that was slowly lowering itself, something that carried not the flavor of protection, but of imminence.

He wasn’t the only one feeling it.

The beasts began to tremble.

First one, then others, then all of them together, not the instinctive fear of a stronger opponent, but something more primitive, more visceral, rooted in parts of the mind that don’t reason but simply recognize. They retreated a few steps, one after another, as though receiving a signal no human present could perceive.

Even the Bluehorn Earth Dragon lowered its head slightly.

Its six eyes fixed on the figure in the sky with an intensity that had nothing submissive about it. It was the assessment of a proud creature confronting something it couldn’t categorize. The dragon’s blood roared inside it, refusing to allow it to bow before a mere human, its pride wouldn’t accept it.

Then, with a roar that shook the ground beneath everyone still standing, the dragon raised its head toward the sky and screamed.

An open challenge.

A declaration.

In the sky, the figure barely moved.

Veylan Greymark watched.

His face was calm. Too calm, the joyful expression from before was gone entirely. His eyes were no longer those of a man. The sclera had turned black as ink, the irises opened wide in a deep violet threaded with crimson veins that pulsed slowly, almost imperceptibly, like blood that had decided to follow a rhythm other than the heart’s.

He looked down.

Toward the city. Toward the streets. Toward the faces of the people staring up at him with wide eyes, with relief, with hope, with that immediate and unconditional devotion people reserve for whoever arrives when everything seems lost.

A slow smile spread across his face.

It was not the smile of a governor. It wasn’t even the smile of a man. It was something that had to do with the way certain creatures look at things smaller than themselves, not with contempt, but with a distance that produces the same effect.

Admiration. Adoration. Fear.

This was how they looked at him.

This was how people had always looked at the powerful. How they should have looked at him from the very beginning.

A sense of accomplishment, no, superiority, rose within him at the sight.

This was what he had always imagined. This was the reaction he had always wanted.

And now... he finally had it.

Then the dragon’s roar rang out again.

And that moment of gratification vanished.

His eyes turned cold. Empty. The same quality of the energy he had absorbed, pulling inward instead of pushing outward, now seemed reflected in his gaze.

"...Noise," he said.

His voice was low. Almost detached. Like someone commenting on the weather.

He raised one finger.

A small sphere formed at its tip. Orange for an instant, then it changed. The color distorted slowly, shifting toward a blackish violet, like a flame rotting from within. It was small, no larger than a playing ball, but the density it radiated bore no proportion to its size. Like holding a miniature star on the tip of a finger.

The dragon sensed it.

It didn’t hesitate.

Its horn blazed with blinding light as the entire creature was enveloped in a hexagonal barrier, layer upon layer, each level denser than the last, the full defense of a being that had survived countless battles and knew exactly when to attack and when to protect itself.

The Duke, however, didn’t react to this.

He didn’t seem remotely interested.

With a minimal gesture, almost lazy, he let the sphere go.

It didn’t fly. It snapped. It vanished from the tip of his finger and reappeared in front of the dragon in a fraction of a second, as though the space between the two points had simply ceased to exist.

The barrier shattered.

Without resistance. Without slowing. Like thin glass struck by a flying stone.

Cedric, the closest one to the beast, felt it before he even saw it.

An instinctive scream in his mind, not words, not articulated thoughts, but something primordial that recognized only one thing.

Death.

His body reacted before his mind had time to give orders. A cold light exploded from him as he activated his bloodline, gleaming antlers materialized above his head, a freezing aura wrapped his body like armor made of ice, and he threw himself backward with every ounce of speed he could gather in that instant.

It wasn’t enough.

BOOM!

The explosion arrived like the end of the world in miniature, loud and thunderous, loud enough to drown out the sound of the lightning above.

A hundred meters of space disappeared.

Not burned. Not destroyed in any conventional sense. Simply erased, as though that space had never existed, as though reality had decided to remove that section of itself. The trees, the ground, the rocks, the beasts within the area, all dissolved in a black and orange wave that expanded outward, then folded back on itself like a breath.

The adventurers who had been standing too close as well.

Bodies vaporized before they could understand what was happening. Weapons melted. Screams cut off halfway, severed so abruptly that the silence that followed felt almost offensive.

For a moment, no one spoke.

Then the crowd exploded.

"We won!"

"The dragon is dead!"

"It’s over!"

Laughter. Tears. Cries of relief. People embraced each other, some punched the air in triumph, others were too exhausted to stand but laughed anyway, faces in the mud, tears falling without them noticing.

It didn’t last.

A second attack fell.

A blackish violet sphere, identical to the first, dropped from the sky like a meteor and struck the battlefield three hundred meters from the first impact.

The blast swallowed the laughter.

Then another.

And another.

The spheres rained down at regular intervals, methodical, relentless, like hail that doesn’t concern itself with what it hits. Each impact erased an enormous radius. Beasts, yes, but also the ground where adventurers were still fighting. Also the positions where the wounded had been carried to safety. Also the groups that had been celebrating thirty seconds ago.

"wait, wha-"

"STOP!"

"THERE ARE PEOPLE IN THERE!"

A man watched his group disappear into the explosion right in front of his eyes. He stopped. He didn’t scream immediately, he simply stood there, mouth open, no sound coming out, as though his brain had decided not to process what it had just seen.

Then he screamed.

"No- NO— NOOO!"

His cry broke off when another sphere fell.

Silence.

The realization didn’t arrive all at once. It came in pieces, to different people, at different moments, each one when their own mind stopped resisting the evidence.

"...he’s not stopping."

"he’s hitting everyone..."

"us too..."

An adventurer with a shattered breastplate and blood on his face raised his eyes toward the sky. There was no more relief in them. No more hope. Only that cold, final understanding of someone who has realized they mistook one thing for another.

"...he’s killing us."

The voice was flat. Almost calm.

Then a single cry rose from somewhere in the crowd, carrying every ounce of rage a human body can hold:

"ENOUGH!"

Another followed.

"HAVE YOU LOST YOUR MIND?!"

"STOP!"

"YOU’RE KILLING US!"

The fear transformed. Slowly, then all at once, like water changing state, like something that cannot be undone. The hope that had filled that crowd thirty seconds ago inverted and became its opposite.

Rage. Despair. A sudden, burning hatred for that figure in the sky who kept looking down with those wrong eyes and that smile that was no longer human.

"MONSTER!"

⬇️