Mallory Ravencrest. Current patriarch of the Ravencrest family, and Baron of Ravenhold.

He was one of the oldest living elites of the human race, a man who had spent nearly a century searching for ways to reach the Overlord ranks, to extend his own life and increase his strength and status, all in the vain hope of restoring the Ravencrest name to its former glory.

He never succeeded. And in his pursuit, he had created problems that came back to find him when he least expected it.

Luna was one of those problems.

"You..." Mallory said through clenched teeth, the memory of his youngest daughter, Luna’s mother, surfacing behind his eyes. "I always knew I should have killed that ungrateful woman."

Mallory had fathered many children. Not out of any desire for a large family, but because he had been searching for suitable subjects for his experiments. Many of them had not survived the process. Others had lived through it only to be eliminated by him personally afterward.

Luna’s mother had been one such case, a failed experiment marked for disposal, who had managed to escape thanks to a guard who chose to betray him.

Luna had learned all of this some time ago, after arriving in the city and beginning her quiet investigation. Following Emily’s death, she had stopped trusting people easily, so she had kept a low profile and gathered information in silence. Eventually she uncovered an incident from years past that, upon closer examination, turned out to be directly tied to her mother.

She dug deeper, and before long she found an isolated property belonging to Mallory, his private experimentation facility.

There, she learned the truth behind his experiments. Mallory had obtained a source of void energy and had been using it in his experiments, damaging his own body in the process and taking the lives of numerous people, family members and outsiders alike.

The rage that followed was beyond anything she could contain. She leveled the facility in her fury, which alerted Mallory. The confrontation that followed was fierce, and ended with her defeat.

She managed to escape. But she had no intention of abandoning her revenge. So she came back. And today, she would finally reduce this cursed place to nothing.

When she heard his words, Luna’s expression didn’t shift.

"Are those your last words?" she said, the void energy in her blade growing denser with each passing second. "Don’t expect a painless end."

Mallory felt it, that pressure, and something cold moved through him. It pushed him toward panic, but the rage of the moment was stronger, and it overrode everything else.

"That power..." he said, a thin edge of madness beginning to surface behind his eyes. "It was never yours to begin with. It should have been mine. Only mine. Because of that ungrateful woman, I ended up like this."

His voice climbed as he continued.

"But it doesn’t matter now. You’re here. I can fix this, you’ve matured that power for me. It’s time I took it back."

The moment the words left him, something changed.

The spear in his hand began to glow. The surface of the shaft shifted, taking on the texture of serpent scales, and then the weapon seemed to come alive. Its tip reshaped itself into the head of a snake, which rose, coiled, and struck, sinking its fangs into Mallory’s right eye.

The sight made the few people still conscious below recoil in horror.

Luna’s eyes narrowed slightly.

Mallory, who had just taken what should have been a devastating blow, didn’t seem to register pain. If anything, he looked pleased.

The area around the bite began to turn violet. Dark veins spread outward from it in every direction.

Soon, the spear started crumbling apart until it became ash that scattered into the wind, but Mallory remained.

Different now.

His hair had turned white and moved freely in the air around him. His skin had taken on a violet hue with a faint reptilian texture beneath the surface. His right eye, rather than being destroyed, it had transformed into a green-violet eye with a thin needle-like pupil at its center.

And then his aura detonated, surging to the peak of A-rank in an instant, and pressing further still.

"I had hoped to avoid using this method," Mallory said, his voice now deeper, no longer entirely human. "But you forced my hand. I had to burn the last drop of our ancestral bloodline."

He let that settle.

"Do you know what we Ravencrests truly are, girl?"

"We are descendants of the Aurora Couatl."

He paused, letting the weight of those words fill the space between them.

"A being that has not walked this world in millennia. A dragon, lord of the skies, whose mere presence was enough to make even the most powerful Overlords tremble. In the past, our ancestors who carried its pure blood could unleash power equal to that of an Overlord without ever reaching that rank themselves. Many did reach it. Some climbed all the way to Paragon."

The green-violet eye gleamed with an unnatural light as he continued.

"But the blood diluted over time. Generation after generation, that strength thinned until it nearly vanished entirely. By the time I was born, almost nothing remained. A cruel joke. An insult to everything this family should have been."

His expression twisted into something caught between fury and madness.

He had spent decades searching for a way to recover what had been lost. And he found one. By refining the blood of the family’s descendants, concentrating it, purifying it, extracting it drop by drop. Luna’s mother had been among the most promising subjects. Her blood was purer than the others, closer to the source.

She was exactly what he had been trying to obtain, but something went wrong at the end and she too was labeled a failure. Yet who would have thought that what he considered a failed experiment had actually been a success? By the time he realized it, she had already fled beyond his reach.

Watching her flee and disappear had been a blow he hadn’t recovered from easily.

His gaze dropped to Luna, and something visceral moved through it.

"After your mother escaped, I lost hope of reaching that level of purity again. No matter what I tried, I couldn’t replicate it." He tilted his head slightly. "And then you appeared." 𝒻𝘳𝘦𝘦𝘸ℯ𝒷𝘯𝘰𝑣ℯ𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝘮

A low, broken sound came from him, something that had once been a laugh.

"Who would have thought the daughter of my most valuable subject would deliver herself to me."