The Eastern Front had been entirely subjugated by the sheer, devastating weight of the Third Seal.

The ancient, indestructible bedrock of the continent was sunken into a perfectly circular, mile-wide crater. At the absolute epicenter stood Luna Zephyros. He was no longer just a mortal boy holding a borrowed power; he had become a living celestial event. Thick, shining silver blood floated upward from his cracked, porcelain-like skin, defying the natural laws of the world. The blinding supernova burning in his left eye cast a stark, terrifying illumination over the ruined plains, completely eradicating the oppressive despair aura that had choked the Solaris army.

Pinned to the liquefied gray ash ten feet away was the Fallen Monarch. The primeval god, the entity that had brought the mortal champions to their knees with a mere whisper, was vehemently forced to bow. The absolute gravity radiating from Luna was so intensely catastrophic that it actively warped the light around the god’s midnight armor. The indestructible void metal groaned and shrieked, buckling inward under the impossible, crushing pressure. The elegant, living shadows that served as the Monarch’s cape were pinned flat against the ground, entirely unable to rise or evolve.

"You cannot hold this," the Fallen Monarch whispered.

Even crushed against the earth, the ancient god’s melodic voice remained eerily calm, resonating within the marrow of Luna’s bones. The hollow, void-like eyes of the Monarch stared up at the glowing, bleeding boy. "Your physical body is disintegrating. You are bleeding the cosmos into the fragile body. You will die before my armor breaks."

Luna coughed harshly, a thick spray of silver starlight and mortal blood staining his torn uniform jacket. The death price of the Third Seal was an excruciating, agonizing fire tearing through his nervous system. Every single heartbeat felt like a dying star collapsing inside his chest.

But Luna did not yield. The arrogant, undeniable smirk that defined the Night Emperor crawled slowly across his cracked, bleeding lips.

"I don’t need to break your armor," Luna rasped vehemently, his dual-resonating voice reverberating the bedrock. "Physical matter is just a shell. To kill a god of the void, I just have to erase the shadow from the inside out."

The Fallen Monarch’s hollow eyes narrowed infinitesimally. For the first time, a flicker of genuine apprehension crossed the ancient entity’s gaze.

Luna did not raise a weapon. He did not try to gather another wave of gravity to physically crush the god. Instead, he maintained the gravitational lock on the Monarch’s physical body, ensuring that he could not move a single muscle, and turned his focus inward.

Luna closed his normal right eye. He didn’t just attack the Fallen Monarch’s physical form. He weaponized the infinite, primordial mana flooding his brain and projected his own consciousness out of his physical body. He launched a catastrophic, mental invasion into the ancient god’s mind.

The transition from the physical battlefield to the abyss was rigid and jarring. Luna’s consciousness slammed into a massive, impenetrable wall of pure darkness. This was the Fallen Monarch’s mental barrier, a towering, infinite fortress forged from millions of years of absolute despair and ancient malice. The sheer density of the mental defense was suffocating. It felt like diving headfirst into an ocean of frozen tar. The void aggressively lashed out, trying to consume Luna’s astral projection, attempting to strip away his sanity and dissolve his identity into the endless dark.

"You are trespassing in the dark, mortal," the Fallen Monarch’s voice echoed from every direction at once, amplified a thousand times inside the mind. "This is the abyss. You have no power here."

"I am the Night Emperor," Luna’s consciousness roared back.

He didn’t try to patiently unravel the mental defenses. He didn’t use subtle telepathy. He used the catastrophic weight of the Third Seal.

Luna manifested his astral form as a blazing, blinding spear of solid silver starlight. He applied the conceptual gravity of a black hole directly against the conscious fortress.

CRACK!!

The sound of the ancient mental barrier splintering echoed like a shattering universe. The infinite despair of the Fallen Monarch was dense, but gravity is the fundamental force that binds the cosmos together. Luna’s raw, unfiltered willpower vehemently crushed the shadow wall. The darkness spider-webbed, fracturing under the impossible weight until it finally shattered into a billion jagged pieces.

Luna breached the perimeter. His consciousness plummeted fiercely into the Fallen Monarch’s mindscape. It was a terrifying, surreal realm of eternal shadows. There was no sky, no ground, no horizon. It was an endless vortex of broken realities. Luna saw fleeting, nightmarish glimpses of worlds the ancient men had consumed in the distant past. He saw crumbling cities of forgotten eras, oceans turning to black ash, and skies weeping toxic blood. The sheer volume of destruction housed within the god’s memories was enough to drive any ordinary mortal to instant, irreversible madness.

The lingering despair tried to latch onto Luna’s mind, whispering agonizing doubts. It showed him visions of Velanor dying in the dirt, of Catherine freezing to death, of Soltheia failing to reach the East in time.

"Get out of my head," Luna commanded vehemently.

He flared the silver starlight of his astral form, instantly burning away the illusionary nightmares. He ignored the swirling vortex of destruction. He knew that the chaos and the despair were just superficial layers. They were weapons the Monarch used to intimidate and break his enemies.

Luna was looking for the core. He was searching for the origin of the void. He needed to find out exactly why this monarch existed, and more importantly, why he had been sealed away in the first place.

He pushed deeper into the abyss, diving past hundreds of years of dark memories. The deeper he went, the heavier the mental resistance became. The shadows turned from a liquid state into a solid, crushing pressure, desperately trying to halt his descent.

"You cannot go further!" the Fallen Monarch’s voice shrieked, the melodic calm gone, replaced by a frantic, primal urgency. "Turn back, fragile vessel! The truth will only accelerate your doom!"

"If you’re so scared of me seeing it, then I’m definitely going to look," Luna smirked, pushing his cosmic gravity to its limit.

He forcefully tore through the final layer of absolute darkness.

Suddenly, the suffocating pressure vanished. The endless, swirling vortex of shadows and destruction abruptly ended.

Luna’s consciousness drifted into the epicenter of the Fallen Monarch’s mind.

He expected to find a core of pure, rotting malice. He expected to see a throne of skulls or a beating heart of dark magic.

Instead, he found complete, utter silence.

The deepest layer of the monarch’s mind was a pristine, serene void. It was empty, save for a single, massive construct floating in the center of the nothingness.

It was a colossal, heavy door forged from an unknown, gleaming white metal.

Luna floated closer, his astral form illuminating the dark. The door was not a weapon. It was a vault. But what struck Luna with paralyzing shock were the restraints binding the door shut.

The massive white door was tightly wrapped in five distinct, thick chains of pure magical energy.

Luna recognized the magical signatures instantly. He had felt these elements every single day in the Colosseum. One chain was forged of swirling, razor-sharp wind, identical to Aeryth Dracortis’s magic, but infinitely older and more profound.

Another chain was made of freezing ice and flowing water, throbbing with a power that dwarfed Catherine’s capabilities.

The third chain burned with roaring fire, hotter than Ignis or Daemon could ever produce.

The fourth chain was a solid beam of obscuring, warm holy light, remarkably similar to the divine aura Seyana radiated.

The fifth and final chain was constructed of ultra-dense, unbreakable continental earth, resonating with the same deep vibration as Velanor’s bedrock.

"What is this?" Luna whispered profoundly, his astral hand hovering over the chains.

These were not dark magic restraints. They were elemental seals. The pinnacle of mortal magic elements had been used to lock away the deepest memories of the Fallen Monarch.

And they had not been placed there by the Fallen Monarch himself. They had been placed there by external forces.

"You were sealed," Luna realized, the truth clicking into place. "You weren’t just a god born from the void to destroy the world. You were imprisoned. Someone locked your true memories away."

The Fallen Monarch’s voice echoed in the serene void, devoid of its previous arrogance. It sounded fractured, full of a deep, buried agony.

"Do not touch them," the ancient god pleaded softly. "Do not open the door."

"I am opening everything," Luna declared.

He didn’t use gravity to break the chains. He could sense that the elemental locks were strong, their magic slowly fraying over the years. The seals had been weakening for centuries, allowing the Fallen Monarch’s despair to leak out and plague the mortal world.

Luna placed his shimmering, silver astral hands onto the massive white door, gripping the center where the five elemental chains intersected.

He channeled the infinite primordial mana of the Third Seal into his palms. He flooded the ancient locking mechanism with raw, unfiltered cosmic energy, forcefully overriding the frayed elemental magic.

The five massive chains expeditiously shuddered. The wind dissipated. The ice melted. The fire was extinguished. The light faded. The earth crumbled to dust.

The locks snapped open.

SNAPP!! RUMBLEE!!

A deafening, heavy grinding sound echoed through the void as the colossal white doors slowly began to swing outward.

The darkness of the Fallen Monarch’s mind was instantly flooded with a blinding, pristine light. Luna’s consciousness was forcefully sucked through the doorway, pulled into the oldest, most tightly guarded memory of the ancient god.

The void vanished entirely. Luna found himself standing in a grand, magnificent hall. It was a chamber of breathtaking, divine architecture, forged of polished white marble and gold. Tall, elegant pillars reached toward a ceiling painted with vibrant, living constellations.

It was a place of undeniable divinity. Luna looked around in sheer, unadulterated shock with a thought unraveling in his mind. This was the Void Era? This pristine, holy palace was the origin of the nightmares?

THUD! THUD!

Before he could process the impossible scenery, the heavy, echoing sound of footsteps drew his attention.

Sitting around a massive, circular table in the center of the grand hall were six figures. They did not look like towering monsters or shifting shadows. They looked remarkably human, though their auras radiated a power that made the current strongest in the Dawn Era look like mere children playing with sparks.

Luna slowly walked forward, his astral form hidden as he observed the memory perfectly playing out. He looked at the five figures sitting on one side of the table. They were arguing heatedly, their voices filled with concern.

"The balance is shifting," one of the figures, a man with fierce, burning red hair and eyes of roaring fire, stated vehemently. "The mortal realms cannot handle the anomaly much longer. We have to intervene."

"Patience, Drake," another figure, a calm, elegant man radiating pure light, replied softly. "If we act rashly, we risk tearing the fabric of the upcoming Era."

Luna stared at them. The elemental magic pouring off them matched the chains perfectly. Fire, Light, Earth, Wind, and Water.

Then, Luna looked at the sixth figure sitting at the head of the table. It was a tall, handsome man with raven-black hair and eyes that resembled a calm, starry night. He wore elegant, dark robes, but he did not radiate despair or malice. He radiated a profound, quiet intellect and a deep, overarching protective aura.

Luna instantly recognized the magical signature. It was the exact same signature as the Fallen Monarch, only uncorrupted.

"We will not act rashly," the dark-haired man spoke, his melodic voice carrying the authority of a leader. "We will protect her. We are family. We are the Valkyros."

Luna’s breath caught in his throat. The ancient god of the void, the monster that had nearly slaughtered the Eastern Front, was not a demon born of darkness. He was one of them. He was part of a family.

Luna stood frozen in the memory, watching as the true history of the ancient world began to unfold. The secrets of the Void Era were no longer buried, and the terrifying truth of the Fallen Monarch was exposed to the light.