"There’s no trace of it going back to the void."

Staring at the monitor, one of the scientists spoke, a look of surprise and relief washing over him all at once.

The room held still.

A few seconds of pure silence.

Then it broke.

The eruption was immediate. Hugs and tears and voices overlapping, all of it born from years of trial and error, from loss that had compounded into something almost too heavy to carry. People were grabbing each other, some barely able to stand straight.

"This is good, this is good."

"Finally, those monsters can die."

"Ancestors, you will be avenged."

These people were the product of corruption’s constant encroachment.

They had lost family. Generations. Entire planets.

A lot of them had been relocated to worlds pulled into the divine kingdoms, never knowing where they were truly from. Raised on borrowed ground with borrowed histories, carrying grief they couldn’t even fully name.

To them, the destruction of corruption wasn’t ambition or strategy.

It was the greatest act of service possible.

And today?

Today was the biggest leap in that direction to date.

Nobody in that room was going to forget this moment.

,,,,,,,,,,,,,

"This is good, Enzo, come with me."

Victoria watched the room for a moment longer.

Her eyes moved across the celebrating faces, warm for just a second, then something shifted behind them and she turned.

She grabbed Enzo by the arm and pulled him away before the noise could swallow them both.

He didn’t resist.

They moved quickly down a side passage, the sound of celebration bleeding away behind them until it became something distant and muffled, then nothing at all.

Soon they entered a corridor filled with white light. The kind that stretched ahead but bled into darkness further down, like the light itself wasn’t sure what was waiting at the end.

Enzo glanced at the walls.

Then forward again.

Victoria didn’t slow down.

"In a ruin some thousand years ago, I found traces and depictions of a being made entirely from darkness."

She said it calmly.

No buildup. No hesitation.

"It appeared every time I searched for a treasure of the night."

The sound of their footsteps filled the pause between her words.

"At first, I thought it was just a depiction of the previous owner. Something the last person left behind, a mark of their presence."

She tilted her head slightly.

"But after the death of the battlebeast, I’m sure it was you....or what you were meant to become."

The words sat between them for a moment.

Victoria didn’t rush past them.

She had used treasures of the night before. Many times, across many years. But she had never felt the kind of pull they seemed to have with Enzo. The connection was different. Closer. Like the treasures recognized something in him that she couldn’t quite put into words.

Watching the Daemon die here had made it impossible to keep treating it as coincidence.

"This means you have a destiny tied to these treasures."

She exhaled.

"I always thought you were being drawn into these moments because of me. That you were just near my path, following the same current."

Her gaze moved to him briefly.

"But it seems that’s not the case."

Enzo frowned.

He had thought the same thing honestly. That it was proximity. That he just happened to be around when things shifted and the treasures were nearby because she was nearby.

Was it something else this whole time?

’Has it always been pulling me?’

"It’s because of the treasures of the night," Victoria continued. "You’re drawn to them. If tomorrow I no longer had one, you’d still appear wherever one exists. You wouldn’t be able to stop it."

She looked ahead.

"That’s not chance. That’s your destiny already moving."

Enzo said nothing.

He let that settle.

"I won’t pretend to know the full details, so I’ll take you to someone who might...." 𝙛𝒓𝓮𝙚𝔀𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝓵.𝙘𝒐𝒎

The corridor ended.

A bridge of light appeared in front of them, stretching upward into a space that had no clear ceiling. It was surrounded by lush vegetation that was there and not there at the same time, present and somehow absent, like it existed just slightly to the side of the world they were standing in. Leaves that caught light but cast no shadows. Flowers that moved without wind.

Enzo stared at it.

The bridge pulsed once, gently.

Like a breath.

Victoria stopped walking.

For a moment neither of them moved, both standing at the edge of where the corridor ended and whatever this was began.

Then Enzo’s eyes moved upward, tracing the line of the bridge to where it ended.

At the highest point of the bridge, sitting on a throne, a familiar figure looked down.

Looked down at Enzo specifically.

Not at Victoria.

Not at the corridor or the light or the impossible vegetation growing around the bridge.

At Enzo.

The figure’s gaze moved across him slowly, taking in the darkness that had settled over him now like a second layer, like something that had always been there and had only recently stopped hiding. It clung to his outline, soft but present, shifting at the edges.

The figure didn’t speak immediately.

Didn’t move.

Just watched from the height of the throne with an expression that was difficult to read from down here.

The vegetation rustled faintly even though there was no wind.

Then the voice came.

Grand. Filling every part of the space without effort or strain, the way deep water carries sound. It didn’t echo. It just existed everywhere at once, unhurried and certain.

"Hunter of the Night and slayer of the primordials, welcome to my humble abode."

The giant figure’s words settled across the bridge and the light and the strange half-present trees and flowers like a hand being placed flat on a table.

Final. Deliberate.

The air around the bridge shifted in response, something in the atmosphere adjusting to the weight of that voice the way a room adjusts when someone important walks into it.

Enzo didn’t move.

Didn’t speak.

Just stood at the edge of the light bridge with darkness wrapped around him and looked up at the figure on the throne, feeling something pull at the edges of his awareness. Not fear. Not quite.

Something older than that.

[Warning: You are in the presence of the Monarch of Life]