Chapter 27: The Story Is Written By The Victors

The tree troll cleanup had gone smoothly. With the Giant Tree Troll already down, the smaller ones hadn’t lasted long against the combined effort of Zelda, Freya, the agents, and the supervisors.

Now the cave had settled into a tired but functional quiet, and the harvesting teams were moving through the bodies collecting energy stones with the efficiency of people who had been doing it for days.

Freya sat in the pavilion with her chin resting on her hand, watching them work through the entrance gap.

"I wonder how Winston is doing."

Zelda glanced at her from across the space.

"I thought you weren’t concerned."

"I’m not concerned." Freya’s eyes didn’t move from the workers outside. "I’m only curious."

Zelda looked at the white-haired girl for a moment longer than necessary, then said nothing.

She had known Winston for six years and Freya had known him for three, and somehow the two of them had ended up in the same category of people she couldn’t fully read.

Mark approached before the silence stretched too far, stopping just inside the pavilion entrance with a short bow.

"Boss. Energy stones have all been collected. What’s the next order?"

"Are the injured tended to?"

"Yes, boss."

"Then have everyone rest, for now we wait."

Mark nodded and turned back toward the rest of the camp. Freya watched him go, tracking the easy deference in his posture, the way he moved with purpose around Zelda rather than around himself.

"He really respects you," Freya said.

Zelda’s expression shifted to something dry and a little distant.

"He’s paying back a debt. The Mark I knew wouldn’t have shown me respect, not with my background." She said it casually, like she’d already made peace with the fact a long time ago.

Freya caught the word. Background. She filed it away without asking. The honest truth was that she hadn’t heard of either Winston or Zelda before this gate.

She knew Mark was among the top ten at Nightwing, she also knew his family name on record.

But Winston and Zelda had come from somewhere the rankings hadn’t bothered to look.

’I’ll find out when we get out of here.’

The thought finished and then every single person in the secret realm went rigid at the same moment.

The pull hit like a physical force and it was a deep bone-level recognition that every class holder felt when a beacon converted into a stable exit portal.

Every face in the cave turned in the same direction. Mark. John. Rebecca. Josh, Carly, Spencer, Drake. Students and agents alike, all of them frozen with wide eyes pointed toward the west side of the secret realm.

Freya’s hand dropped from her chin. Her eyes went wide too, then steadied quickly, the calm reasserting itself within a few seconds.

Zelda turned toward the beacon’s direction and said nothing for a moment. Then a smile broke across her face, quiet and full of something that had been sitting compressed in her chest for three days.

"He did it." Her voice came out softer than she intended. "He actually did it."

Mark reached Zelda at a near-run, stopping just short of the pavilion entrance.

"Boss — the gate—" He paused. He had seen a lot of expressions on Zelda’s face over the past three days. This one was new.

"Was it Winston? Did he actually do it?"

Zelda turned to him with the same quiet smile still in place.

"Pass word to everyone. We gather at the west side of the secret realm. Tell them we’re finally leaving."

Mark didn’t need to be told twice. He was already moving before she finished the sentence, relaying the message outward through the base in quick, efficient passes.

The reaction that spread through the cave was strange. Although it wasn’t an immediate celebration, it was a stunned, disbelieving quiet that moved faster than the words did.

Most of them still couldn’t process it.

They knew what this gate was. It led to a Tier Three region. A place reserved for Rank Three Champions operating at full capacity, not fresh initiates who had awakened their classes days ago.

The fact that anyone had survived this long was already a statistical anomaly. The idea that one of them had actually closed the beacon and that the exit was open, didn’t fit the framework they’d been operating inside.

Josh’s group received the order from their supervisor and started moving west. Carly walked beside him, voice low.

"Do you think it was actually Winston? He did say he would."

Josh and the others were quiet for a moment. They had seen what Winston could do. They had watched him drop out of the sky and kill a Level 30 Rock Golem without breaking stride.

But when he’d said he was going to close the gate, none of them had believed it. Not really. What other explanation was there now?

Nobody answered Carly’s question. They just kept walking.

The gathering at the west wall came together quickly as students, agents, and supervisors, all filled into position with the wordless efficiency of people who had been following instructions for days and were very ready to stop.

The secret realm had kept them alive. Without it, the survival rate for this First Entry would have been close to nothing. But it had served its purpose, and now it was time to leave it behind.

One by one they stepped through the wall and into the beacon zone.

They just moved through, each person crossing that threshold and disappearing to the other side.

Mark went through. Then the agents. Then the students.

Freya stepped through without looking back.

Zelda was last. She stood alone in the empty cave for a moment — the crystal pond still, the lanterns in the abandoned tents still flickering, the pavilion hanging open and quiet.

Three days of surviving the impossible had happened in this space but now it was coming to an end.

She turned and walked through the wall.

[You Have Entered the Beacon Zone]

[Mastery and Spells Cannot Be Earned Here]

Zelda dismissed the notification before it finished fading and looked up at what had stopped everyone in front of her.

The cavern floor was covered in bodies.

Monsters of every size and classification that had occupied this region lay scattered across the stone in every direction, some were intact and some weren’t.

The silence that had fallen over the gathered students and agents wasn’t reverent, it was just stunned.

"This looks like a warzone." Someone near the back said it quietly, like they weren’t sure they wanted to be heard. "Was this really done by one person?"

"Those levels—" Another voice, sharpened.

"They’re all Level 50 and above."

That landed on the crowd like a weight. Nobody spoke after it. They just looked at the corpses and tried to reconcile what they were seeing with the framework they had for what a freshly awakened initiate was supposed to be capable of.

Zelda was already moving before the murmuring could start again. She pushed through to the front and broke into a jog without deciding to, her body had made the decision before her mind caught up.

If the cavern looked like this, the fight inside had been something else entirely. Winston could be badly injured or worse.

Freya fell into step beside her without a word.

The rest followed.

Inside the pagoda, the floors told the same story, monsters far above Tier Two levels, all dead, the trail of the fight clear in the damage left on walls and stone.

They moved through each floor fast, barely stopping, until they reached the third floor staircase and climbed to the top.

Zelda pushed the throne room door open and stopped.

The ceiling was gone, the floor was cracked and the dais was in rubble. In the center of the room, a headless corpse sat on the floor with its own head placed deliberately on its back, positioned with a care that felt intentional, almost ceremonial.

And on the throne, which somehow remained completely intact amid all the destruction, sat Winston.

His right leg crossed over his left, his elbow rested on the armrest and his head leaned against his loosely folded hand.

The Black Dragonic Armor was still on his frame, the Yari leaned against the throne beside him and he had a smile on his face that had been sitting there for a while.

Every student, every agent, every person who had just walked through that door went completely still.

Winston’s crimson eyes moved from Zelda to Freya and back again, carrying the particular weight of someone who had been waiting with patience they had to work to maintain.

"Took you long enough."