Vigince. Some might even argue it was the defining trait of a man. To stay sharp. To stay aware. Because danger was never courteous enough to knock—it slithered, it crept, it pounced when least expected. And in that hiccup between heartbeats? What armor have you forged? What shields those who nest in your ribs?

  Vigince.

  But life’s never content with clean binaries, is it? When does a watchtower become a prison of one’s own paranoia? Veyan once fancied that climbing power’s dder would shrink the shadows at his heels—that his aura alone would crisp the ambitions of upstart rivals. Yet reality, that cheeky saboteur, had other drafts for his script. Authority didn’t erase the crosshairs; it embroidered them in neon thread, stitching a target so luminous even blind poets could take aim.

  A serpent’s hiss of breath escaped him, his eyes scanning the warped pocket of space he had woven around himself—a feint, a deception, a trick of the light and void. From this concealed vantage point, he watched. Watched as one by one, his guests crumpled, their bodies colpsing like marionettes with cut strings. His slitted eyes, cold and unblinking, tracked every fall with the precision of a surgeon.

  Dimensional resonance.A damn disaster, for everyone in this room.

  And the food—something had been slipped into it. Subtle. Designed with his abilities in mind. He scowled. Whoever was behind this had done their homework. Worse still, they’d chosen a moment when his own talents were in flux. His ascension to Gold Core had come through resonance with the concept of Metal, grounding his strength in unyielding, immovable power—but at the cost of his spatial abilities gging behind. They would catch up, given time. But four years was a blink in the life of a Gold Core.

  He bit back a curse. If only he’d been more vigint. If only he’d honed his spatial mana more aggressively. But regrets are hindsight’s useless jewelry. The elders’ adage rang true: Don’t lick yesterday’s wounds. Forge tomorrow’s armor.

  And forge he would.

  The psychic link fred to life, a connection bridging his mind to a singur presence—the Matriarch of the Fmecw Sect.

  [Assuming the situation is dire.]

  Dry. Unfppable. Predictably magnificent. She occupied the slim ledger of beings he’d trust to hold his soul in escrow. When he was knee-high to a dagger’s hilt, her exploits were already etching themselves into legend’s skin. More crucially—she’d been the whetstone to his first bde, gifted by his father’s trembling hands. She’d smelled the ambition in his marrow before his own bones recognized the scent.

  Veyan closed his eyes.

  [Staying behind was a wise choice, Master.]

  From another Gold Rank, the word might have felt sour, curdled with reluctant submission. But not from him. She was one of the rare few who had earned his reverence.

  [Save your courtesies. Five Golds versus one is less a battle than a flex of overcompensation. Guard your brood. We’ll handle the pest control.]

  The connection snapped.

  Veyan’s spatial awareness erupted like a starved inkblot, drenching the city in a heartbeat. For one crystalline moment, he charted every alley, every arch, every twitch of existence. And there—on the horizon’s frayed hem—the spatial ruptures pulsed. The skirmish had ignited. That Vor’akh fossil hadn’t come to tango alone.

  Not that it mattered.

  Every pawn under her thumb would choke on the battle’s backwash, dying like starved strays in a nobleman’s gutter. He had sharper knives to juggle.

  It was finally happening.

  The ritual had reached its crescendo, reality itself beginning to fray at the seams. Foreign mana poured in like a relentless tide, drowning the hall in crushing pressure.

  By now, anyone still conscious was swiftly losing that privilege.

  Except, of course, for the ones who had orchestrated this disaster.

  The moles who had been right under his nose all along.

  And then he saw him.

  The man he had personally chosen to teach his daughter. The man who had once saved her life. A traitor.

  Something inside Veyan snapped.

  Of course.Of course, he was one of them.

  He’d prided himself on smelling the rancid marrow in men’s smiles. Once again, the universe had scribbled “fool” in his ledger.

  His fingers twitched, power crackling at his fingertips, but he forced himself to hold back.

  There was a reason he hadn’t stopped the ritual. One wrong move and the accumuted energy could detonate, killing everyone in this hall in a single cataclysmic bst. And while he had little concern for most of them, his daughter was here. He could save her—perhaps a few others—but it would be reckless. Too reckless.

  No. He needed the ritual to finish.Which meant no killing.Not yet.

  His hands clenched. Almost. It was almost done.

  He moved, stepping beneath the mirror. His eyes flicked downward, brow furrowing.

  That vixen.

  The same woman who had shown him all of this was now feigning unconsciousness. And she wasn’t alone. A silver-haired girl y beside her, pying dead just as well.

  Veyan wasn’t sure how he felt about this woman. He hated her for tampering with his daughter’s dress, embedding those sacred symbols into the fabric without permission. But in the end, it was her warning that had led him here.

  Amid a nest of serpents, she’d been the crow bearing omens.

  Her methods were… creative. A choreographer of chaos. But without her, he shuddered to think what might have happened.

  She was cunning. Too cunning. Cunning enough that he suspected she had a backup pn in pce in case their earlier conversation had gone south.

  A true Faerin.

  As for the silver-haired girl, Veyan had no immediate judgment. One thing was certain—she and the vixen were communicating. The subtle shifts in the air between them gave it away. That meant they were working together.

  Accomplices.

  Hmm. He’d make sure to reward them ter. And maybe pry out exactly how the woman knew their sect’s secret script, not to mention how they had uncovered this conspiracy in the first pce.

  But first—he had bigger problems.

  His head snapped upward. The fabric of the earth continued to tear, the abyss in the mirror growing restless, shadow within coiled and uncoiled, serpentine and starving.

  It was time.

  Whatever they were summoning—he couldn’t let it cross over.

  Because once it did, it would drink the essence of every marked soul in the vicinity to sustain itself.

  Which meant everyone here would die.

  His gaze locked onto the fractured space—a gateway into a technicolor abyss pulsing at its core.

  No alternatives. He’d have to dive into the wound and cauterize the infection at its source.

  Veyan bared his teeth, spatial energy cyclone-ing around him as he torpedoed into the rift.

  --

  There were reasons breaching the Parda merited execution.

  Reason One? Mortal minds weren’t built to process the things wriggling beyond the Parda.

  The Seven Realms—some were merely inhospitable. The Astral Pne, for instance, was a prickly guest but tolerable, its denizens open to negotiation (read: mutually assured incineration).

  But realms like the Nether? The Abyss? Hell?

  Ancestors spare you that tourism.

  Unless you were a gold core, stepping through meant your obituary wrote itself mid-transit.

  --

  Light—searing, spiteful—engulfed him.

  Veyan’s eyes adjusted instantly as his spatial sense fred outward.

  Scorched nd stretched endlessly before him.

  A bleeding, molten eye loomed in the sky, dripping va like tears of fire. Jagged, impossible mountains cwed at the heavens. And overhead, shadows circled like vultures waiting for prey.

  He stood on a floating isnd of crimson ste, its underbelly fused to magma rivers. The sheer concentration of fire mana was staggering.

  He didn’t need a guide to tell him where he was.

  “Hell,” Veyan cursed.

  He was in Hell.

  And worse—the tear in space was still widening behind him.

  His gaze flickered to the side—just beyond the rift, something skittered and dashed across the scorched terrain.

  A lesser hell fiend.

  It had a red-scaled serpentine body, each pte gleaming with infernal heat. Wherever it slithered, the ground cracked and burned, fmes licking at its tail.

  He recognized it immediately. The same creature he had seen in the mirror.

  It had been running wild, sensing something was happening. Sensing freedom.

  But… this didn’t make any sense.

  Before the fiend could even process its liberation, Veyan flexed his mana.

  The creature burst apart in mid-air—ripped to shreds where it stood.

  He withdrew his power, feeling the released essence greedily devoured by his Gold Core.

  That was it?

  That was what those bastards had been trying to summon?

  …Just that simple?

  Veyan watched in cold detachment as the clean-cut pieces of demon flesh hit the molten ground with a sickening hiss.

  A lesser hell fiend would typically rank as a low red core in standard cssifications. Strong, yes—its sheer size and brute force made it a menace even for high red core mages. And with its affinity for destructive fire mana, lesser foes would struggle.

  But to him?

  It was nothing.

  Still… a flicker of unease passed through him.

  His gaze drifted upward, where shadows silently passed overhead—dark forms gliding beyond the molten sky. One of them, he was certain, had been a high-winged fiend. Gold core, just like him.

  That alone should have been cause for concern. But other than that fiend, and the one he had just cut to pieces, there was…

  Nothing.

  Just an endless pteau, wreathed in molten rock and scorched, skeletal trees. No other demons.

  And that felt wrong.

  His spatial sense fred outward, but all it met was an eerie, oppressive silence. The more he searched, the more that unnerving sensation crept up his spine.

  This was Hell.

  It should be crawling with demons.

  Yet even the high-ranked ones in the sky—the ones who should have been drawn like moths to a fme by the open rift—were not nding.

  Why?

  It wasn’t hesitation.

  It was fear.

  As if something hungrier had already cimed this patch of damnation.

  Then—

  A ugh. Gravel-dry. Honey-thick.

  Veyan’s pulse spiked. His body tensed, and his eyes snapped toward the source—

  Nothing.

  His spatial sense—which had never failed him before—detected nothing.

  Then the voice came again.

  Low. Raspy. Close.

  Too close.

  “Little, little serpent.”

  A pause. A sigh.

  “Little bold serpent.”

  Another ugh, jagged as broken gss.

  “Haa… To think you’d waltz into the demon’s pantry and volunteer as supper.”

  Veyan whirled around.

  The voice had come from behind him.

  Mana coalesced instantly.

  Bdes—massive, jagged, forged from sheer metallic force—erupted around him, cleaving through molten rock like butter.

  The very air groaned under their weight.

  Space itself trembled.

  —And Veyan was gone.

  One blink—he reappeared midair, hovering just above where he had stood.

  Sword in hand.

  Heart pounding in his throat.

  “Show yourself!”

  His voice rang through the hellscape, unwavering despite the unease cwing at his gut.

  That lesser fiend—there was no way it had been the summoning’s intended result.

  And this thing?

  No.

  This was no demon.

  Demons didn’t croon in the mortal tongue. They didn’t taunt. They razed. They feasted.

  A worthy foe should’ve set his blood singing.

  But for the first time since cwing his way to Gold, Veyan tasted the acrid tang of truth—

  The hunter’s boots now pinned the mouse’s tail.

  And that ughter came again—gravelly, grating, like molten rock grinding against itself. A shadow flickered into Veyan’s perception, solidifying in an instant.

  Drakkari. No doubt about it.

  No clothes draped his form, but he hardly needed them—his body was a tapestry of ruby-red scales, gleaming like freshly spilled blood. Cws sharp as daggers. A sneer carved onto his face. Heat rippled outward the moment he revealed himself, the very air bending with the surge of va at his feet.

  So, he had been hiding. But there was something about him—something wrong. A wrongness that crawled up Veyan’s spine and made his blood run cold.

  Because this man didn't belong in Hell.

  He was beastkin. One of Vraal’Kor.

  And with that realization, the final piece clicked into pce. The reason even gold-ranked demons avoided this pce, steering clear of a gaping portal to Earth despite the temptation it offered.

  There was a predator here.

  And if those demons—creatures of greed and power—had deemed the risk too great, then just how dangerous was the man standing before him?

  Very.

  Veyan’s ascension had honed his perception to something beyond mortal sight—his Metal-core granted him an instinctual ability to unearth weaknesses at a gnce. In mere seconds, he could pinpoint the vulnerabilities of anything he id eyes on.

  And yet, when he looked at this man… nothing.

  No weak points. No openings.

  “Ahh, overthinker’s curse, little snake.” the drakkari drawled, amusement dancing in his ember-bright eyes. “Preferred you when you struck first and philosophized never. Not that your toothpicks could scratch me… but enthusiasm! So… mortal. Always a sight to—"

  Veyan didn’t let him finish.

  The ground beneath the drakkari erupted with razor-sharp pilrs of metal, a forest of piercing nces spearing upward in an instant.

  Cull.

  Metal Mana wasn’t just about strength—it was about hunting. And in the eyes of a hunter, everything was prey. Every attack Veyan unleashed didn’t just strike—it sought vital points, weaknesses, the fault lines in an enemy’s form.

  Against anything below gold-rank, that meant death. Simple as that.

  But the drakkari only grinned, untouched, unfazed. "Mind of Steel. Hah. I’d only ever heard of it, but I guess it’s true. Not even flinching at my presence, my subtle mental probes bouncing off like pebbles against a wall, and my aura isn’t knocking you ft on your back. Impressive."

  That was when Veyan noticed the mark. A dragon’s head, inked into the drakkari’s hand.

  Vorakh’s.

  A member of them—out here in Hell of all pces. Why? How? The answer mattered far less than the immediate problem: survival.

  Veyan tightened his grip on his sword. It pulsed in his hands, light coiling around the bde.

  [Weapon Augmentation]

  He was outcssed. He knew that.

  Didn’t mean he was going down without a fight.

  The sword shimmered, vibrating at a frequency so intense it nearly vanished from sight. Then, in one fluid motion, he swung—closing the distance in the blink of an eye, the very air parting like a wound in space.

  And as his strike flew toward the drakkari’s grinning face, a psychic message left his mind—a silent one, cast into the ether.

  [It seems I’ll die here today, Master. Please save my daughter.]