"Honestly, that wasn’t the first time lady Victoria had lost a fight. Her neck has been split open, her heart pierced, and so many other things. But killing her has always been hard. Unless every part of her is destroyed, including her blood, she won’t die."

A beat passed.

"And even then, it won’t be true death."

Nibbleskin sat on Enzo’s shoulder as he said it, a look of quiet pride settled in his eyes like he was recounting something he’d personally witnessed and found impressive.

Enzo didn’t say anything. He just listened.

When Enzo had left the battlefield, Victoria faced the host of demons rushing at her and killed them one after the other. Most were ranked in the 800s among demons, lower tier by any serious measure, but she dispatched them regardless. Efficiently. Without wasting much.

However, it soon became painfully obvious that corruption wanted that planet at any cost.

The numbers didn’t stop. They kept coming, kept pressing, wave after wave of them, and eventually the ground she was holding got smaller and smaller. She had no choice but to force an evacuation. Everyone she could reach, everyone still breathing, pulled back.

"As for me?" Nibbleskin’s smirk carried a trace of frustration underneath it. "I made the ultimate sacrifice. I burned like a white hole in the sky and destroyed everything that came close to stopping the retreat."

He said it casually. Like it hadn’t cost him anything.

It had been a trying time.

"That’s very brave, mister Nibbleskin."

Raven’s voice was soft. Her hand moved slowly, fingers running through the fur along his back without thinking about it.

Nibbleskin’s smirk deepened.

"I know. I’m so great." He let her keep going for another second. "Anyway, I’ve been sleeping here ever since, trying to pick up the traces of my essence that scattered."

It had taken a long time.

Lady Victoria had come here over the ages to pay her respects at his grave. He had been aware of her each time, somewhere deep beneath the surface, too weak to surface, too scattered to speak. She hadn’t been back for hundreds of years though.

At some point she stopped coming.

He didn’t say that part out loud.

"You seem fine now though?" Enzo asked, looking at him.

He was. That was obvious. The energy radiating off him sat comfortably around the divine rank. If he had wanted to leave, he could have left a long time ago.

"Yes." Nibbleskin’s eyes shifted, drifting to the corner of the room. "I was waiting for you."

His gaze settled.

"Your friend is awake."

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

Minutes passed.

Leon came out of his room.

The energy hit first.

It rolled out ahead of him, gut-wrenching and heavy, the kind that pressed against the air in a room and made the walls feel closer. Everyone felt it at the same time without needing to look.

Tyrant.

Leon was now a holy weaver.

He stepped into the room and his eyes landed on Nibbleskin immediately.

"What in hell’s name is that?"

He hadn’t been part of their voyage. He’d been sent somewhere else entirely, something separate, something that hadn’t involved any of this. So he had no frame of reference. No context. All he saw was a divine-rank being sitting on Enzo’s shoulder like it owned the room, looking back at him with entirely too much interest.

The kind of interest that wasn’t friendly.

"Oh, he’s-"

"Call me Lord Devourer." Nibbleskin cut Enzo off without looking at him, eyes still fixed on Leon. "It’s more intimidating in the human tongue."

His voice was smooth. Calm. The look in his eyes was not calm at all. It was the look of something that had just spotted a very interesting toy and was already thinking about how long it could play with it before the toy broke.

Leon’s expression stayed blank.

Completely, impressively blank.

"Lord Devourer. That’s his name." Zeke laughed from somewhere to the side, and the sound of it broke something in the tension of the room, let a little air back in.

The energy came back too. The warmth of being in a room where everyone was still alive and accounted for. Zeke felt it settle over him and leaned into it. The events of the past voyage had been the most thrilling thing he had ever faced in his life, and seeing that no one important had died, he felt all the more thrilled about it. About all of it.

"Ahh."

Leon looked at the scene in front of him. Nibbleskin. Zeke laughing. Raven still stroking the cat. Enzo watching all of it with a tired kind of quiet.

"Ahh."

He didn’t add anything else.

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

Meanwhile.

Somewhere far off on the planet, a figure moved through a deserted wasteland alone.

His body was charred. Oil and fire had gotten into the skin and stayed there, blackening the surface in long uneven streaks that hadn’t faded. He walked anyway. One foot, then the other, steady and without hurry, moving toward the emperor’s castle in the distance.

Seven days.

It had taken him seven days to pull the ice lily from the clutches of the corruption swarm in Varo King World.

He hadn’t been on Varo King World when the original attacks happened, all those thousands of years ago. But he had been important enough, placed high enough, to see a portion of what went down. He had watched it from a distance and thought he understood the scale of it.

He hadn’t.

Seeing it with his own two eyes was different.

The devastation wasn’t just ruins and dead ground. It was layered. Centuries of rot pressed into the soil, into the air, into the shapes of things that used to be structures and were now something else entirely. And the beasts born from that devastation, the things that had grown in the absence of anything clean, were something else entirely too.

Horrifying wasn’t a strong enough word.

But he had the lily.

He kept walking.

The emperor’s castle sat at the edge of the horizon, dark and still, and he moved toward it the way someone moves toward the only thing left on a long road.

One foot. Then the other.

Seven days of that behind him.

He didn’t think about how many more were ahead.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​