William exhaled slowly and straightened up.

  “Well.”

  He looked at his hands, then at the wreckage around them.

  “That was fun.”

  Erica rested her sword across her shoulder, letting the st of the fmes die down. The scorch marks around her feet were deep.

  Alice lowered her sword Surtr. The storm clouds above slowly unraveled, the unnatural cold retreating as her Climate ability released. She looked around the clearing quietly.

  Drako returned to his normal form, the bone structures retracting smoothly. He said nothing, which was usual.

  Jericho stood still, watching the fallen beast.

  Then William turned around.

  “Jericho.”

  Not a question. Not exactly.

  Jericho gnced at him.

  “The copies.” William’s eyes were steady, the way they always got when he wasn’t letting something go. “What was that. And when did you learn it.”

  “I—” Jericho paused. “I did tell you. That I had a new ability. With the mercury.”

  “You said new ability.”

  “…Yes.”

  “That’s all you said.”

  “…Yes.”

  William stared at him for a long moment.

  Erica bit the inside of her cheek, clearly fighting something. Alice pressed her lips together and looked away.

  Drako said nothing. But his eyes hadn’t left Jericho since the copies appeared — and the look on his face was nothing short of reverent.

  “William I genuinely thought—”

  “You thought that—” William gestured broadly at the battlefield, at the remnants of the mercury figures still dissolving into the ground, “— was covered by new ability.”

  Jericho smiled nervously. “…It is a new ability.”

  That was what broke them.

  Erica ughed first — loud and unguarded, the kind she usually kept reined in. Alice followed, quieter but genuine, her shoulders shaking. Even the tension in the clearing seemed to exhale.

  William closed his eyes. Drew a slow, heavy breath.

  Let it out.

  “Fine,” he said. Ft. Final. Done.

  Drako crossed his arms and looked at Jericho the way someone looks at something they built themselves.

  Satisfied. Proud. Completely unsurprised that it was extraordinary.

  Jericho cleared his throat. “…So. Are we good?”

  “We’re moving,” William said, already turning. “Don’t tell me you have any other new abilities.

  “I mean—”

  “Jericho.”

  “I’m joking. Calm down.”

  A pause.

  “For the most part”

  ?

  “…It’s quiet,” Alice said.

  Jericho nodded once.

  “The control is gone.” He turned toward the forest’s edge. “Without it… the remaining creatures will return to what they were, different, still evolved, but not extra aggressive.”

  William stretched both arms above his head. “Four days in this cursed forest for that thing.”

  Erica’s mouth curved slightly. “At least it wasn’t boring.”

  Alice moved to stand beside Jericho. “So we’re done here?”

  He looked once more at the massive corpse. At the size of it. At what it had taken to bring it down.Then he nodded.

  “Yes.”

  He turned away.

  ?

  They walked in loose formation through the trees, the forest gradually thinning around them.

  The silence was different now. Lighter. The kind that follows something finished rather than something waiting.

  It was Alice who spoke first.

  “…What exactly was that thing?”

  William gnced back toward the clearing they’d left behind. “A very angry monster?”

  Drako shook his head.

  “No.” His voice was unhurried, the way it always was when he was being precise. “That was evolution.”

  Nobody interrupted him.

  “When soul energy entered the world, it didn’t just affect humans.” He stepped over a gnarled root without looking down. “It affected everything.”

  Jericho nodded slowly. “Animals. Creatures. Even the nd itself.”

  Erica frowned. “So that thing evolved because of soul energy?”

  “All the creatures on earth will evolve too, but that thing was simply the first to get that powerful.” Jericho’s eyes moved through the trees ahead. “and it definitely won’t be the st.”

  The words settled over the group quietly.

  William exhaled through his nose. “Great. So stronger monsters are just a normal thing now.”

  “Soul energy is fully rooted in the human continent,” Jericho said. “This was inevitable.”

  Erica rested Surtr back across her shoulder. “Then we deal with them when they appear.”

  Alice walked quietly for a moment.

  “…I suppose we’ll have to get used to it.”

  Drako said nothing.

  But he nodded once.

  The trees thinned further. Somewhere ahead, the forest ended.

  None of them looked back.

  Behind them, deep within the forest — far past where any of them could see — something shifted in the dark.

  A stillness that didn’t belong.

  Not the stillness of death.

  The stillness of something that had been very, very still for a very long time.

  And had just decided to stop.

  ?

  Kingdom of Vevaria — Demonoid Continent

  The inn was quiet at this hour.

  Most guests had retired. The distant noise of the city had thinned to something low and forgettable, and the ntern on the table between them cast everything in a warm, unhelpful light.

  Nass stood by the window.

  She hadn’t sat down since they began.

  “After what we’ve found out.” Her voice was calm. Not cold — just settled, the way someone sounds when they’ve already made peace with a decision before announcing it. “The alliance pn isn’t rumor anymore. It’s moving. The question now is how far it has moved and whether the opposition still has teeth.”

  Soren — the male subordinate — leaned forward slightly. “And you believe the court is the only pce that answer exists.”

  “Yes.”

  Mira, the female subordinate, was quiet for a moment. “You understand what walking back in there means.”

  It wasn’t a challenge. Just an acknowledgment.

  Nass turned from the window.

  In the ntern light her mark was visible along her neck — dark and dense, the kind that made people recalibrate the moment they saw it. She had long stopped noticing the way people looked at her because of it.

  “I do.”

  “The people who drove you out are still there,” Mira continued carefully. “Some of them will be watching the moment word gets out that you’ve returned.”

  “I know.”

  Soren gnced at Mira briefly, then back to Nass. “Then we find another way. We have contacts outside the court. We could—”

  “No.” Nass said it without sharpness. Simply. “Outside contacts will only get us so far. What Lord Jace needs is certainty. Not specution from people who overheard the wrong conversation in the right pce.” She moved to the table and pced both hands ft on its surface, looking at them evenly.

  “The court is where the real decisions are made. It always has been. And I need to be inside it.”

  Neither of them argued further.

  They knew that tone.

  “There is one path back in that doesn’t require me to fight for my pce from the ground up.” She straightened. “Lady Lo Val Deka.”

  The name nded differently than other names did.

  Soren sat back slightly. Mira’s expression shifted — not quite surprise, but close to it.

  “Who is that person?” Soren asked

  “My past Mentor… she gave me everything, back then.”

  “You think she’ll receive you?” Mira asked.

  “I think she never stopped believing I was innocent.” Nass said it without sentiment. Just fact. “And I think she is not the kind of woman who lets four years change what she knows to be true.”A pause settled over the room.

  “This is the pn,” Nass continued. “I approach Lady Val Deka privately before anyone else in the court knows I am here. If she agrees to vouch for my return, we move carefully and let her control the narrative. If she doesn’t—” A brief pause. “Then we return and inform lord Jace for what we already know.”

  Soren nodded slowly. “And if the people who framed you move against you before you’re established?”

  Nass looked at him.

  “Then they move against me.”

  She said it the way someone says something they have already accounted for and already accepted or pnned against.

  “We are here for Lord Jace. Not for my comfort.” She gnced between them both. “Rest tonight. Tomorrow I reach out to Lady Val Deka.”

  She moved toward her room.

  At the door she paused briefly, not turning around.

  “You’ve both done well getting us this far.”

  Then she was gone.

  Soren exhaled quietly.

  Mira stared at the ntern for a moment.

  “She’s going to walk back into the pce that almost had her executed,” he muttered. “And she said it like she was pnning a market visit.”

  Mira said nothing for a moment.

  “That’s Lady Nass,” she said finally.

  She reached over and turned the ntern down.

  ?

  Menssai — Approaching the City

  The first thing Tazz noticed was the fgs.

  Not Menssai’s alone — though those flew highest. Beneath them, on every tower and gatehouse lining the road, hung the banners of nations he recognized. Kingdoms and city states that had existed independently for generations.

  All of them flying under one seal now.

  Jace’s seal.

  The road itself was well maintained. Better than he expected. Wider too — built for movement, for supply lines, for the kind of infrastructure that said whoever was running this territory was thinking in terms of permanence not conquest alone.

  People moved through the streets with the particur rhythm of a city that knew what it was and who it belonged to. Not fearful — not exactly. But aware. The way people are aware when they live under something powerful enough that resistance stopped being a conversation worth having.

  Tazz said nothing as they passed through the outer gates.

  Guards marked them both without stopping them. Kolpa’s presence was apparently enough.

  The city grew denser toward the center. Larger buildings. More soldiers. The quiet hum of a capital that had absorbed the weight of surrounding nations and was still digesting it.

  “He’s already built something,” Tazz said quietly. Not to Kolpa specifically. Just aloud.

  “He has been busy,” Kolpa replied pleasantly.

  Tazz’s eyes moved across the skyline.

  The three great powers called Jace a tyrant. He had heard that word used so many times it had started to feel like a title rather than a condemnation. Sitting in the Holy Kingdom of Righteous, surrounded by alliance politics and his father’s endless guilt, Jace von Menssai had felt distant. Abstract. A name attached to a threat nobody was quite ready to address yet.

  He didn’t feel abstract now.

  He felt like the ground Tazz was riding across.

  Solid. Established. Already here.

  The castle rose ahead of them — old stone that had been reinforced rather than repced, wearing its history without apologizing for it. The gates opened before they reached them.

  Nobody asked who they were.

  Nobody needed to.

  ?

  It was vast and deliberately sparse.

  No crowd. No court. No performance of power through numbers or decoration.

  Just the hall itself — high stone walls, cold light falling through narrow windows, and at the far end a seat that wasn’t quite a throne but functioned as one through sheer positioning alone.

  Jace sat in it.

  He wasn’t doing anything dramatic when they entered. No deliberate posturing. No calcuted stillness. He simply existed in that seat the way certain people exist in rooms — like the space had organized itself around him rather than the other way around.

  White hair. golden eyes. that caught the hall’s cold light cleanly.

  He looked younger than Tazz.. because he really was.

  That was the first thing that surprised Tazz.

  The second thing was that he didn’t look up immediately.

  To the right of the seat, standing with his hands csped behind his back, was a tall figure. Dark skinned. Long bck hair pulled into a ponytail. His expression gave away nothing — not hostility, not welcome. Just presence. Watchful and precise.

  Demiurge.

  Kolpa stepped forward.

  “My lord.”

  Jace looked up then.

  His eyes moved past Kolpa almost immediately and settled on Tazz.

  He said nothing for a moment.

  Just looked.

  The kind of look that didn’t perform assessment — it simply arrived at conclusions.

  Tazz held his gaze. He was determined about that much.

  “So,” Jace said finally. His voice was even. Unhurried. Carrying the particur weight of someone who had never once in their life needed to raise it to be heard. “This is the prince who set fire to his own kingdom and ran.”

  It wasn’t a question.

  It wasn’t cruelty either — not exactly. Just a statement of fact delivered without the courtesy of softening it.

  Tazz’s jaw tightened.

  “I was betrayed,” he said. Steady. Controlled. “The failure was not—”

  “I know,” Jace said simply, knowing who exactly betrayed him too.

  Tazz stopped.

  “Kolpa’s reports were thorough.” Jace leaned back slightly, one arm resting along the side of the seat. “You were betrayed. Your timing was wrong. You moved before you were ready because you wanted it done before Kolpa returned.” He tilted his head slightly. “And your mother is dead because of it.”

  The words nded exactly where they were aimed.

  Tazz said nothing.

  His hands, steady until now, tightened at his sides.

  Demiurge watched without expression.

  Kolpa stood to the side with the particur stillness of someone content to observe.

  “I didn’t come here for a verdict,” Tazz said quietly. “I came because Kolpa said you could offer me something.”

  “Kolpa says a great many things,” Jace replied.

  A pause.

  “What is it you actually want, Prince of Righteous?”

  The title nded with a faint edge — not mockery, just precision. A reminder that the kingdom Tazz was prince of had just decred him a fugitive and stripped him of everything that title meant.