The sky was dark. Maybe distorted.
It wasn't night—it felt like something had bled into the sky and kept bleeding, staining it with layers of shadow no storm could wash away.
You couldn't see where it ended, or if it ever began.
Just rolling black above, stretching in every direction like it wanted to smother the world beneath it.
But when the lightning came—
That flash—
It didn't strike. It peeled.
And for half a breath, the world underneath was visible.
Bodies.
Piled high.
Men and women, young and old.
Some still in pieces, others so still they looked carved from wax, mouths agape like they'd been screaming when time froze.
The children were the worst. Their limbs bent in ways no limbs should.
Eyes wide. Eyes gone. Torn dresses, crushed skulls, hands still clinging to things that weren't there anymore.
They were everywhere. Littered like offerings around a dark altar I couldn't see.
No. I wasn't sure if it was an altar. I wasn't sure of anything.
The ground felt wet beneath my feet, but when I looked down, I couldn't find my legs.
Couldn't even find the ground. Just black, rippling like oil and pulsing softly—as if the entire world was a wound that hadn't clotted.
Another flash.
Far ahead. A wall. A great obsidian gate, taller than mountains.
Closed. But covered in... no, not carvings. Things. Shapes that writhed even though the wind wasn't moving.
I couldn't make them out, but they were twitching. Breathing.
There were no stars in this sky. No wind.
No sounds except a low humming—like something was singing a lullaby in reverse. Slow, garbled, wrong.
My own breath came ragged.
I didn't remember breathing. I didn't remember walking here.
But something told me I wasn't dreaming.
And I wasn't supposed to be here.
You weren't supposed to see this.
I turned. Tried to run. The piles shifted.
Something cracked beneath me. Something soft.
A child's shoe.
My foot had landed on it. The leg it had once belonged to was a meter away.
I froze. I could feel something watching me. Not from above.
Not from behind.
From beneath.
It wanted me to move. To step again. To bring the stench with me.
To carry it out of here.
But I couldn't move. Not because I was scared—though I was.
Because I couldn't tell which direction would take me away.
Because it all looked the same.
Everywhere I turned, the world was still bleeding, still humming, still broken.
But then—
Ahead.
Or what felt like ahead, because direction didn't exist here.
Right and wrong were illusions in this place.
Concepts that had long since bled out.
There—amid the haze and distant haze of red lightning—I saw them.
Figures.
Three.
Two women. One man—or no… not a man. Not exactly.
The first woman stood tall, her body graceful in a way that felt sculpted by something ancient.
Even from here, I could see the blood streaked across her face, a thin line trailing down from the corner of her eye, like a single crimson tear.
Her outfit was… elegant, if not strange.
A dress, maybe. Or armor. Or both.
It shimmered with a silver sheen that flickered like broken glass under starlight—except there were no stars here.
The blood didn't make her hideous.
It made her lethal.
Like a blade pulled clean from a holy corpse.
And she held a blade too.
A long sword, thin but jagged at the edge—like it had been carved from the spine of something divine.
It pulsed faintly, not with magic, but with memory. I could feel it thrum in my teeth.
Beside her, the second woman was stiller. Quieter. Colder.
If the first was deadly beauty, this one was divine death.
Her robes flowed as if caught in a wind I couldn't feel.
Deep black, but not empty—stitched through with threads of blue so dark they looked like veins in a corpse.
Her skin was pale, translucent almost, and her eyes—if she had them—were sunken beneath a hood that didn't belong to any culture I knew.
She held a staff. Or no… a scythe.
A reaper's staff, long and jagged, its edge glowing faintly with something that wasn't light.
It pulled. Not toward itself—but downward. Like gravity, but crueler.
They didn't speak. They didn't move.
They just stood there—watching something I couldn't see. But that's when I saw it.
And ahead of them—framed like some final judgment—was a man.
No. Not a man.
An angel.
He was taller than the women. Taller than me.
Taller than anything in this dream.
His wings stretched out wide, wider than the sky should have allowed—wider than the dream itself.
Each feather shimmered with impossible patterns, like runes etched in frost and flame, overlapping infinitely.
He was beautiful. Radiant. A face carved from light and sorrow.
A kind of beauty that didn't welcome you—it commanded you to kneel.
But then I saw them.
The horns.
Two of them, curling back from his brow like twisted obsidian. Sharp. Splintered.
And just like that, the beauty became unbearable.
He was divine.
But not of heaven.
They stood there—those three—only a few meters ahead of me.
But it was like they couldn't see me. Like I was trapped behind a sheet of glass.
Like I wasn't supposed to witness this.
Their mouths moved. But I heard no words.
Just that same garbled hum, louder now, like language choking on itself.
Then the noise shifted.
Like a veil was pulled aside.
And words—real, impossible words—began to pour through.
But they didn't speak as mortals do.
No.
Their voices were like scripture.
Every word they said fell heavy and holy, like divine law cast into flame.
I didn't understand most of it—my mind couldn't stretch far enough to hold their meaning—but I felt the weight.
The first woman, silver sword in hand, lifted her gaze and spoke.
"Woe be upon the harbinger born of unlight,
who breaketh the seals with breath not thine.
The scroll was sealed sevenfold—
yet here thou standest, crowned in false dawn."
The woman cloaked in death joined her, her tone a cold psalm.
"He who was chained beneath the rivers of sleep,
who drank of the void and spat stars into ruin,
thou wast not summoned by prayer,
but by hunger unclean and thirst unending."
I couldn't make sense of it.
Scrolls? Seals? Rivers of sleep?
What were they saying? What did it mean?
But my soul trembled at every word.
I knew this wasn't a battle.
It was a reckoning.
A confrontation long promised by forces beyond mortal reach.
I wasn't supposed to be here.
I wasn't supposed to hear any of this.
Still, they continued.
"Shall the heavens crack anew, and the throne fall once more?
Shall the name that was struck from the Book be spoken again?
Wilt thou reach for the Root of the Tree, though it burneth with holy flame?"
The angel-man—no, that thing wearing an angel's skin—smiled as they condemned him.
Not a trace of shame. Not a flicker of guilt.
He hovered in the air, his wings stretched so far they looked like curtains drawn across the sky itself.
The two women lifted their weapons, light gathering, shadows curling.
The reaper's staff spun once, and the world shuddered.
They were about to clash.
And that's when he spoke.
He hadn't said a word until now.
You'd expect his voice to be ruin.
You'd expect it to be blood and thunder and screams torn from dying stars.
But it wasn't.
It was beautiful.
A sound so flawless it made your heart ache.
It rang like silver in water, like lullabies sung in forgotten languages.
And that made it worse.
Because something that monstrous shouldn't be allowed to sound so divine.
"Lo, ye daughters of flame and ash,
speaketh thou of chains, yet forget not who forged them.
The Book was sealed, aye,
but who among ye hath not read from its pages in secret?"
The moment he spoke, something changed.
Even the sky recoiled.
The two women shouted something then—but the meaning was lost to me, drowned beneath the rush of light and force as they leapt toward him.
Their blades collided.
Sword and staff met wing and horn and golden fire.
And the world exploded.
A blinding light erupted, searing through my vision like the sun had fallen from the heavens.
I shut my eyes, but it didn't help.
The light went through my eyelids.
Through my mind.
And then—
Silence.
Warm and soft fabric beneath my cheek.
My eyes flew open—
I was in my penthouse.
In my damn bed.
In my clothes.
In the real world or what felt like it now.
I sat up violently, drenched in sweat, my breath sharp and ragged.
"What the fuck!!"
My chest rose and fell too fast. My body was cold, but my hands were shaking with heat.
The kind of heat you get from fear, not flame.
My thoughts scrambled like startled birds in a cage.
What the hell just happened?
That… that definitely wasn't one of Eden's memories.
{Correct.}
The voice chimed inside my mind like the soft stroke of a bell. Echo. Calm. Collected. Not the least bit rattled.
{That was not a memory, Snowflakes. That was a revelation—a past revelation, fractured and ancient.
And it occurred due to your bloodline ability: Eyes of Horus.}
I blinked hard, trying to scrub the lingering blinding light from behind my eyes.
'I didn't activate it.'
{Indeed}
{You did not
However, that is one of the known—or rather, unknown—side effects of using Eyes of Horus.
Some side effects are immediate.
Others... arrive later.
And when they do, they may trigger a skill without your permission. The visions, the glimpses—they're not always yours to choose.}
I went still.
'So you're saying…'
'The more I use it, the more weird things like this are going to keep happening?'
I rubbed my face with both hands, trying to drag myself back to reality.
'And sometimes I could just—what—wake up in another place entirely, or go insane?'
There was a short pause. Then her reply, crisp and merciless.
{Affirmative.}
I closed my eyes.
Of course. Of course that was the price. Nothing ever comes without a cost, right?
Supernatural eyes that show you the future, reality, secrets, echoes of war between beings I can't even name?
Yeah, totally balanced.
My gaze dropped to the ring on my finger.
That black, half-glowing thing I could never seem to take off.
I exhaled. Slow. Long.
Let the air chill my tongue, center my thoughts.
No time to be afraid now.
No time to collapse.
"Keep it together," I whispered to myself.
The words weren't strong. They weren't dramatic.
But they were all I had.
My fingers clenched over the sheets. I could still feel the echo of his voice.
That beautiful, impossible voice—
And the weight of words I couldn't understand but knew were meant to reshape worlds.
Whatever that revelation was…
It wasn't just some side effect.
It was a warning.
A vision I shouldn't have seen.
And I had a feeling it wouldn't be the last.
Whatever that memory was…
It wasn't just some side effect.
It was a warning.
I stared at the dim light filtering through the curtains of the penthouse.
My penthouse. And yet, it suddenly didn't feel real.
Or maybe… this was real, and that was the lie. Either way—
"Echo."
My voice was low. Dry.
'Those people I saw. The two women. That… man. You recognized them, didn't you?'
{Yes.}
Her answer came quickly. Too quickly.
{The two women were goddesses of dual judgment.
Serynda, the Blade of Reckoning—and Nyrelle, Keeper of Final Sleep.
They were among the few who stood during the Celestial Rupture, long before the first epoch.
And the one they faced… he is not merely dangerous. He is not simply wrong. He is an error in existence.}
{He is the descendant of a fallen god—Sanath Nagar.}
My blood chilled.
'Hold on.'
I sat up straighter, the pieces clicking violently in my head.
'Did you just say Sanath Nagar?'
{Yes. Are you… familiar with that name?}
'Familiar?' I let out a weak, stunned laugh.
'I don't just know him, Echo. I've played through his resurrection.'
I rubbed my forehead like it might stop the headache forming.
'It happened in the Fifth Arc. Chapter 7. One of the major events in that chapter.
His occultic worshippers finally succeeded in the resurrection ritual.
By Chapter 8 and 9—it was already too late.
A full-blown massacre. Cities fell. Whole factions wiped.
You either had a stacked alliance or you didn't make it out at all.
And even then you were still half-dead.'
{Why was it so difficult in the game?}
'Because by then—by the time Sanath Nagar rose—you were already weakened.
You'd just come off the back of Arc 3 and 4.
That's where you fight Archon Elara Vex.'
'Two chapters of consecutive war.
No downtime. Barely any resource gain. Everyone entered Arc 5 already bleeding.'
{So Sanath Nagar's return was a checkmate event?}
'More like a cosmic middle finger,' I muttered.
'You don't beat him. Not clean. You just survive.
And that's if you're lucky.'
I rubbed my eyes again.
'God, my brain hurts.'
{Then hear me well, Eden} Echo said, her voice soft but unwavering.
{If his resurrection is occurring again—here, now—then you will not survive this alone.
You must get stronger. You must form powerful alliances. There is no path forward without them.}
I let out a long sigh.
'Yh, I know. Of course it all comes down to the good ol' cliché: Get strong. Form a squad.
Preferably one that's 95% gorgeous women and maybe one morally grey swordsman with tragic backstory.'
{I did not specify the alliances must consist of only women}
'Yea, but you weren't stopping me either.'
{I have no control over your taste in combat companions.}
'It's called strategy, Echo. Ever heard of distraction tactics?'
She didn't answer. Probably calculating my stupidity ratio.
I groaned and swung my legs off the bed.
My feet touched the cool floor with a slap that reminded me I was still alive—even if the revelation didn't want me to be.
I glanced at the wall-clock.
Shit.
Classes were about to start soon.
And if memory served—and it always did when I didn't want it to—today was the beginning of Arc 1, Chapter 2.
Which meant...
'Today's the day they send assassins after one of the main heroines.'
{How did they infiltrate the Academy?}
'No fucking idea. The devs never explained it.
They just dropped ten masked freaks into the story and said survive. Immersion!'
{Will you stop them?}
'No. Justin will.'
I stretched, bones popping.
'That's his big moment. Heroic timing, moral dilemma, all that nonsense.'
{And if he fails?}
I paused halfway through pulling of my clothes.
'…Then I guess this villain gets to play hero.'
'But all that aside—I gotta move. Don't want to be late for class.'
Glory's still pissed I missed orientation.
{Indeed} Echo replied.
{She considered pouring ice water on your face before leaving.}
'What a sister.'