"Sh-she is actually from earth?" I gasped, my lips parting in shock. "No, there must be something more to it."

I shook my head, deciding not to jump to immediate conclusions.

Now in her undergarments, Ezekiel moved towards the wooden desk placed before the window. She opened the drawer and drew out the books, pen, hairpin box and ink placed neatly inside it, completely emptying it.

From the pocket of her loose tunic, she took a metallic key and inserted it into a hole at the far corner of the drawer’s surface, hidden beneath the books.

After a few rotations, the wooden slab at the surface shifted slightly. She took out a hairpin from the box and inserted it into the risen part of the wooden slab to lift it completely.

Beneath it, a diary of thick cover was revealed.

She took out the diary and began scrolling through its pages. After moving past hundreds of pale yellow pages written in the English language, she stopped at the first unwritten page.

She dipped the tip of her fountain pen into the inkstone and began writing.

Today is the 7th of the 5th month of the year 1356. It has been ten years since I was summoned to this unknown world.

I went to the borders again to fight the monsters. There were more than five hundred of them this time. I suffered many injuries and lost some of my subordinates, whose names and faces I do not even remember, yet I managed to survive again.

But I am not sure about the next time, or the time after that.

The waves of monsters are endless. They will not stop until the empire is destroyed and turned to ruins.

It is so unfair. I do not wish to fight. This is not my world. All of them are strangers to me. Why should I endanger my life for them? I hate this place. I hate it here so much.

I want to return to earth. To my family.

Her hand began trembling. She pressed her pen hard into the page, bleeding the ink through several pages beneath it. Her blue irises shook, glistening, and before she knew it, tears began falling from them, dropping silently onto the pale yellow surface.

Once she had calmed herself, she placed the diary back into the hidden compartment, sealed the drawer shut and moved to her bed.

The vision before me began distorting, dissolving into a cloud of spinning colors.

After a few seconds, the cloud slowly spread outward, materializing the world around me once again.

This time, I was at the border of the city. Ezekiel was covered in her heavy silver armor once more, her whole unit of five hundred soldiers standing behind her in neat, disciplined rows. The troops were about five times the size they had been from the day she had returned to the city.

In front of her stood the Queen herself, looking at her with eyes filled with worry, fear and something deeper.

"I pray for your victory. Please return safely, Sir Ezekiel," the Queen said, extending her hand forward. Resting upon her palm was a silken red handkerchief.

"I will," Ezekiel replied, grabbing the handkerchief firmly. She had deliberately deepened her voice again, in complete contrast to the soft, quiet voice I had heard back in the room.

"Is it another expedition?" I thought, watching everything from above.

After the farewell was exchanged, Ezekiel and her army moved out from the city, disappearing beyond the border into the open distance.

As they moved further away from the city, the greenery of the land slowly disappeared. The grass thinned, then vanished altogether, giving way to a grey, cracked earth that spread endlessly before them, its surface split into webs of deep fractures as though the ground itself had long since given up on holding together.

The clean sky was gone too. Dense clouds had swallowed it whole, hanging low and heavy overhead. But they carried no promise of rain. They looked more like colossal bodies of polluted smoke that had accumulated over a long time and simply never dispersed, blotting out whatever warmth the sun might have offered.

There were no trees, no plants, no animals. Nothing living at all. Only the skeletal remains of creatures most of them I could not recognise were scattered across the barren terrain, their bones bleached and half-buried in the cracked grey soil. Some of the skeletons were enormous, their ribcages rising like collapsed archways, their sheer size hinting at things I had no name for.

However, there were a few that I actually recognised. The smaller skeletons, barely half the size of a human, their backbones deeply bent and their skulls carrying unusually large eye sockets. The remains of goblins.

Moving further in, skeletons with large tusks began appearing as well, their frames several times larger than my own, unmistakably belonging to trolls. Scattered among them were the bones of beasts and creatures that sat somewhere between animal and monster, things that defied easy classification.

"They are all the remains of the monsters that appeared in the Dungeons back on earth," I realised, my eyes narrowing at the scattered remains.

These kinds of monsters had not belonged to earth, nor to Vyoman. This was the place they had actually come from. Their origin. The world on the other side of the gates.

"Were all the dungeon gates connected to this world? But why? Was the connection truly random, or was there a mastermind behind it all?"

The questions stacked in my mind one after another, each one pulling another in its wake before I could even begin to sit with the first.

What I was certain of was that I would find the answers somewhere within these memories. Ezekiel had been here for ten years. She had fought these creatures, walked this dead land, and survived. Whatever truth was buried in all of this, she had lived close enough to it to leave a trail.

I just had to keep watching.

After moving for a few hours, the flat barren terrain transformed into towering hills and deep, dark trenches. The hills were made of the same dark rock as everything else in this forsaken land, with no hint of greenery upon them, their jagged peaks jutting upward like broken teeth against the smothered sky.

"This place always gives me the creeps," a knight from the army muttered.

"Hah. How many times do we need to come here," another added.

"Don’t worry, this is the last time," said a third, with a warm smile.

He looked no different from his fellow knights at first glance. Ashen brown hair, hazelnut colored eyes and sun kissed, hardened skin that carried the quiet experience of countless battles.

"We have finally located the stronghold of Troll King Grendal," he revealed, his voice low but calm. "If the gods favor us, we will put an end to these monsters for good."

"Tch, you think we don’t already know that," the other knight clicked his tongue, the frustration plain on his face. He pushed forward a step and continued, his voice dropping to something harder and more honest. "Sure, this is the final raid. But who knows whose final raid it will truly be? Theirs or ours?"

"Did I just hear that correctly?" I gasped. "So Grendal also belonged to this world."

Ezekiel gave a brief glance towards the bickering knights before turning her gaze forward again.

"There is a deep cave a few metres ahead," she announced in a calm tone. "We will spend the night there and march again in the morning."

Perhaps because I was inside her memories, I could understand her thoughts with a clarity that felt almost intrusive. She had initially planned for the army to march straight to the stronghold, but seeing how low their morale had sunk, she decided to delay the clash by another night. She had already waited ten years for this moment. One more night would cost nothing.

Once this raid was over, she intended to demand the Queen grant her passage back to her world as her reward.

But Grendal had been alive and present at the Black Gate back on earth. That much I already knew. And knowing that, I had a fairly grim idea of how this raid was going to end.

Another hour passed. The sun had reached the horizon, painting the dark hills in a wash of deep gold as it offered its final light of the day.

"This is the place," Ezekiel announced, halting before a dark cave carved into the hillside beside the narrow path.

The knights moved quickly and efficiently, setting up lamps and tents inside the cave, the warm glow spreading across the rock walls in a faint, flickering light.

While the other soldiers began sinking into sleep after finishing dinner, Ezekiel remained on edge. An ominous feeling surged through her, keeping her restless.

Her blue eyes narrowed at the far darkness of the cave, the place from which she sensed the ominous presence emanating.

"The scouts have already scanned this area. Am I just imagining things?" She murmured as she moved slowly deeper into the cave, carrying a lantern in her hand.

Splash...splash...

She stepped on something thick and wet. Her eyes widened as she recognised the strong metallic scent.

It was the scent of human blood. She lowered the lantern toward the ground, finding a pool of crimson blood gathered there.

"You...more sharp...grrr...than I thought," a heavy voice rumbled through the cave as the giant face of Grendel, with his massive tusks, revealed itself before the dancing flames of the lantern.