On the battlefield, the adventurers who were still alive had barely shaken off their stupor over what had just happened when they noticed the situation in the city. Many of them rushed there immediately, while others scrambled to contact anyone who might be able to help.

Most of them obviously had no such connections, but they were desperate enough to try anything, because the alternative was fleeing into the forest, where, despite the dramatic thinning of the beast population from the massacre moments ago, dangerous predators still roamed.

One person among them, however, was not entirely powerless in this situation.

"Reporting in, Father. We have a situation here."

Cedric’s voice rang out, exhausted and strained from his wounds.

He was currently propped against the trunk of a tree at the edge of the battlefield, his condition as bad as it could be without crossing into dead. Torn clothing, cuts and burns across his face, and an entire section of his left arm simply gone.

He had pushed every ounce of his A-rank strength, even activating his bloodline just to survive that single blow, and had barely made it out alive.

He was still stunned by everything that had unfolded, but he understood clearly that whatever was happening here was far more serious than it appeared.

The Duke had already reached a level beyond his own. S-rank, he had assumed at first, but he had sparred with his father in the past, and his father was an S-rank. And for some reason, Veylan felt more dangerous. That realization did nothing to ease his mind.

And from the way the Duke was currently burning his own city by his own hand, it was clear that whatever he had done had long since slipped beyond any semblance of control.

Cedric didn’t hesitate to contact his father and hand over every piece of information he had.

At a glance, this situation might have seemed ideal for moving against their rival house. But things had escalated to a point where all of that had been pushed to the back of the mind, because what stood before him now was something worse, something that even the King himself would likely need to pay attention to.

It was a matter of the highest urgency. One in which Cedric could not afford to stand aside, because doing so would make him responsible for the casualties, but one in which he could not actively participate either, given that he was already half dead, and even if he were completely unharmed, there was nothing he could do.

He understood this clearly, which was why he didn’t soften his words when he reported everything. The urgency was more than apparent.

’Let’s hope they send someone quickly, because this city won’t last much longer,’ he thought, as he tried to channel his mana to begin recovering, but it was a struggle. Something seemed to be interfering with it, something he couldn’t quite identify or understand.

***

In the city, amid the screams of fear and despair, Elena was still standing.

Battered, drained, her body completely hollowed out by wounds and the near total absence of remaining energy, she was on the verge of collapsing at any moment, but she held on. Even at the cost of biting into her own lip, she did not pass out.

She couldn’t. Not with what was in front of her.

Her father, who had sacrificed everything and more to bring his family this far, who had always been searching for ways to surpass their rivals, was now destroying it all with his own hands. He was eliminating his own people, his own family, and even when she had tried to stop him, he hadn’t even seemed to consider it. If anything, in that very moment a dark fireball was pointed directly at her.

But none of that mattered to her right now. Her attention was fixed solely on her father. On his face. Almost unrecognizable.

That man was no longer her father. That man was no longer even a human being. He was something else entirely...

"Y-you..." she managed, the words struggling to leave her mouth. "Who are you?"

Veylan, however, didn’t seem to give those words any weight.

"My dear daughter," he said, with no emotion in his voice or his tone. "Is this your way of begging for your life? Who am I? I am your father. Who else would I be?"

But Elena didn’t accept those words.

"No..." Her voice grew stronger, a rage building in her eyes, different from before, no longer directed at her father’s cruel actions, but at something else entirely, as though she were looking at a stranger, something dangerous that was destroying the last remaining fragment of the person she remembered. "You’re not him. You... who the fuck are you?"

The Duke said nothing.

A second passed.

Nothing happened.

Then a wide smile appeared on the Duke’s face, completely at odds with everything around him. Unsettling in a way that had nothing to do with madness and everything to do with something far older.

Cracks appeared on Veylan’s face.

Piece by piece, sections of skin began to peel away, and what was revealed beneath them was not the bloody layer of muscle one would expect, but a dark violet surface, not solid, more like concentrated energy that seeped slowly through the widening cracks, causing them to expand further as more pieces of skin fell away.

"Oh... quite sharp, aren’t you? But that’s fine too. At this point, there’s no point in pretending anymore," he said, his voice no longer the same as before. Higher. Different. Strange in a way that seemed to make Elena’s vision swim.

"Since you’ve proven yourself quite clever, allow me to reward you in your father’s place."

As he spoke, the rest of his body trembled. Cracks spread across every visible surface of exposed skin, and from them dark violet energy seeped outward like smoke with a will of its own, smoke that, rather than rising toward the sky, seemed to coil inward, slowly consuming Veylan’s body from the outside in.

Soon, something began to rise from within his chest. A source of dark light that somehow managed to illuminate even the densest shadows around it.

And within it, visible through the fractures in his form, was a crystal. Strange. Luminous. Radiating a sensation of danger that Elena felt deep in her bones.

’Father... what in the world have you done?’ she thought, a sense of dread she could not put into words as she stared at what stood before her. 𝘧𝑟𝑒𝑒𝘸𝘦𝘣𝑛𝑜𝘷𝑒𝓁.𝘤𝘰𝓂

What stood before her was no longer a man. It was a creature, one she couldn’t define, but one thing she knew with absolute certainty, there was no way anyone could face this being.

And as if to confirm her thoughts, what happened next seemed to do exactly that.

The sky above the city, already twisted into a vortex, began to roar louder and louder as a strange energy started condensing at the center of the spiral.

A deep reverberation rang out across the city and its surroundings, one that made everyone’s ears bleed. And before anyone could understand what was happening, a voice rang out.

"To think that Veylan could sink so low as to end up in the hands of something like you."