Within the darkened heart of the cathedral, buried behind crumbling stone and faded prayers, was a hidden room few remembered and fewer dared enter. It had once belonged to the shrine maiden, a place of quiet worship and whispered rites. But now, stripped of its former sanctity, the chamber served a different purpose—one born of necessity rather than devotion.
The air was still, heavy with centuries of incense smoke and the faint metallic scent of old blood. Stone walls, veined with cracks and lined with spiderwebs, hunched inward as if trying to keep secrets buried with the dead. Moonlight had no reach here. It was a place forgotten by time, tucked behind false altars and hollow statuary. A prison of silence. A sanctuary of last resort.
And within that chamber stood two Awakened—strikingly different in presence, and yet bound together by circumstance.
The first was a young woman, tall and radiant even in the gloom. She stood like a statue brought to life, her weight casually shifted to one leg, shoulders relaxed but ready—poised in the way only a seasoned Huntress could be. Her toga, elegant and practical, draped loosely around her, leaving her arms and legs bare to the chill of the air. That exposure did nothing to diminish her presence. In fact, it enhanced it—showcased the coiled strength in her limbs, the long muscle that flowed beneath sun-kissed skin.
Her light brown hair cascaded freely down her back and shoulders, messy but undeniably beautiful. Even in a place devoid of beauty, she brought some of it with her. The way she held her weapon, the way her fingers rested on the hilt—not gripping, but claiming—spoke of utter, effortless confidence. She was a force of nature. Bold, vibrant, and uncontainable.
Effie.
To other young Awakened—especially the girls who had only just begun to rise through the ranks—she was what they might one day hope to become. Strength without apology. A walking, breathing promise that survival didn't have to mean losing your shine.
The second figure standing across from her was... less imposing.
Smaller. Paler. A wisp of a boy wrapped in black fabric and quiet intention. Where Effie's presence blazed outward like a torch, his was inward—contained, tight, unreadable. His figure was thin, almost sickly, with skin so pale it caught what little light there was like porcelain. There was nothing dramatic about him, nothing flashy or overt. He did not look like a warrior. He didn't even look like someone who belonged here.
But his shadows told a different story.
They crept around his feet in restless eddies, curling up the walls like grasping fingers. Always moving. Always listening. They responded to his moods the way smoke responded to wind—shifting with his thoughts, rippling with intent. They were the only clue that he, too, was a Sleeper . And dangerous.
Sunless.
Where Effie radiated vitality and mischief, he carried silence and control like a cloak. And in that moment, while she prowled and stretched and practically vibrated with frustrated energy, he simply watched.
"Come on!" Effie groaned, dramatically slumping against a nearby pillar. Her voice, as usual, filled the room like sunlight through stained glass. "It's been four days! Can you just let me stretch my legs for a bit? I swear, I'm getting actual hives from standing still this long."
"It's been three days," Sunless replied without looking up. His tone was flat, factual, utterly unaffected by her performance.
She whirled on him with an exaggerated eye-roll. "Three, four—whatever! Close enough. You try being cooped up in a windowless crypt while a giant soul-sucking murder-knight paces the front hall!"
Her frustration wasn't without reason.
Outside the sanctuary, waiting like a sentinel forged from nightmare, was a Fallen Devil. A massive, hulking knight composed of tarnished armor and true darkness —a creature that radiated pressure and hunger, darkness woven into steel. It had claimed the cathedral's main entrance as its own, its mere presence turning the sacred into the profane.
Anyone with a pulse would want to flee that presence. And Effie, who was all pulse and fire, was going stir-crazy.
Sunless finally sighed and spoke again, the words dragging from him like someone reluctantly surrendering a well-guarded secret.
"Alright, alright. You big baby."
Effie instantly perked up, eyes gleaming with delight.
He added quickly, "You can come with me to Prince. But only to the soul-devouring tree. No side trips."
Effie clapped her hands. "Oh, finally! You do love me."
He ignored her theatrics, continuing with a mild warning tone. "There are thralls there. You'll have a chance to blow off steam. Just don't make too much noise. We're still in enemy territory."
Prince, the tree she spoke of—if one could even still call it a tree—was a monstrous organism of bark and black sap that had rooted itself into the fabric of the Dream. It devoured souls. Whispered in the minds of those too weak to resist. But more recently, it had enthralled a number of lesser Awakened beasts… creatures that had to be cleared out regardless.
Effie was practically bouncing in place now, twisting her upper body like a cat stretching after a long nap. "Gods, thank you. I was starting to dream about running. Actual dreams. With slow-motion grass fields and everything. It was disturbing."
Sunless gave her a long, quiet glance. "Sleeper don't dream, usually."
He was already thinking ahead.
The rigged tournament. His plan.
He had chosen his team with the precision of a surgeon: strengths balanced against weaknesses, personalities that wouldn't combust under pressure. The Nightmare Creatures they would face had been carefully selected—hand-picked from known threats, then weakened subtly through sabotage. He had personally crippled their limbs, dulled their senses, even interfered with their instincts through a particularly fiendish memory .
But even so… nothing in this world was absolute. Especially not here. In the Dream Realm, certainty was a lie whispered by the unprepared.
Better safe than sorry.
He was snapped out of his thoughts by the sing-song lilt of Effie's voice.
"Heeeyyyy, you up for another bet?" she drawled, leaning in his direction with the air of someone clearly scheming. "Once we get to your creepy soul tree, let's say… first one to get a kill wins a favor from the loser."
Sunless raised an eyebrow. "A favor?"
There was amusement in his tone now, barely concealed.
Effie grinned, cocking a hip and placing a hand dramatically over her heart. "Oh? Intrigued, are we? I figured you'd wimp out. But okay, let's say I win… I want a massage."
Her voice dipped slightly, just enough to tip her words into suggestive territory. She trailed her fingers lazily along the side of her thigh, making sure he got the full picture of her request.
"Full body," she added, fluttering her lashes with mock innocence. "Deep tissue."
Sunless stared at her, completely expressionless.
'God , she really is Bord'
Then finally said, "Your chances of winning are astronomically low."
"Ohhh?" Effie purred, swinging her hips as she sauntered toward the exit. "So you're saying there is a chance?"
He followed, shadows coiling around his feet as the door opened into the cold stone corridor beyond.
There were thralls to cull. A rigged fight to finalize. And a thousand threads that needed tying before his plan was ready to unfold.
But for now… he walked beside Effie.
'*'
Tessai stared across the sand-dusted arena, his gaze fixed upon the iron-barred monstrosity crouched within the cage. This would be the first match of the tournament—the opening spectacle. The first blood spilled, the first message sent. And it was his burden to carry that moment, to make it count.
The young general stood alone at the edge of the pit, tall and unmoving, his arms folded across his chest. The weight of anticipation settled across his shoulders like a mantle, heavy with expectations—his own, and those of the ones watching from the shadows above.
He would be the first of the generals to fight, to shed blood in the Dream's cruel theater. And it had to be perfect. The host was watching. He was watching. In this realm, spectacle mattered. Power meant nothing if it wasn't seen.
Tessai's fingers curled around the haft of his weapon.
[Crude Bite]—the brutal Nordic axe gifted to him by the midget —was as vicious as it was inelegant. it hummed with latent violence. Its blade was chipped and jagged, its edge bitten and reborn through fire. The weapon had no grace, only hate.
The cold came next.
It bled from Tessai's skin like mist rising off a glacier. A subtle ripple at first, then a steady deepening frost that rolled out in waves. Ice licked at the arena floor, crisping the dry sand, frosting over nearby stones. The moisture in the air fled before it. Tessai didn't activate his ability outright—he let it leak. Just enough for the cold to whisper: I am coming.
He exhaled, slow and controlled. The breath frosted in front of his face and vanished.
This wasn't just about winning. It never was. This was theater. This was diplomacy by blade. If he faltered, it would reflect not just on him, but on his people—on the fragile space they held in the waking world. And failure… failure here had a tendency to echo beyond itself .
His gaze drifted to the cage.
It wasn't a man that waited behind those bars. It wasn't even close.
It was a Fallen Beast. A warped echo of what once might have been human . One of the soul-corrupted horrors from the roots of Prince, the soul-devouring tree. The spores still clung to its skin, like sickly lichen pulsing with memory.
The cage itself was ancient, reinforced with thick iron slats etched in dense old sigils. Runes that pulsed dimly with crimson light under the bloody sky—flickering like heartbeats on the verge of death. The metal groaned occasionally, but not from any movement. It groaned because it feed from what it held.
The air around it was wrong—too still, too tense. The sort of stillness that didn't come from calm, but from dread.
And the thing… it crouched low, folded in a heap of inhuman limbs, yet even hunched, its hunched shoulders scraped the bars. Its form was elongated—grotesquely stretched—like something made by hands that didn't understand human proportion. There were too many joints. Too many bones. It moved like a broken marionette held together by spite and rot.
Its skin wasn't skin. It was a film of slick, tar-colored sludge that glistened with every breath. Like molten oil rippling over an understructure of muscle and bone. Each breath was a slow, wet undulation, like something drowning beneath itself.
Its legs were long, insect-thin, tapering to knife-like points instead of feet. They bent wrong. Jittered slightly, as though restraining an instinct to leap. The cage around it groaned—not from impact—but simply because the weight of its existence pressed against the world like a bruise.
Running up its arched back were dozens of wicked spines, glinting in the low light like acupuncture needles. But these weren't natural. Tessai recognized them—chitinous siphons, owned and embedded by Sunless. The needles were designed to drain the creature's essence, its vitality—slowly bleeding it dry.
Its head hung low, twisted forward on a too-long neck. There were no eyes—only a bloated, bone-white face split vertically down the center. A mouth, perhaps. Or something worse. Horns curled back from its temples, jagged and mismatched, like the antlers of a sick deer warped by radiation.
And beneath the slick, swollen surface of its torso… things moved. Not muscle. Not organs. Faces. Or what might have been faces—ghostly impressions pressing outward, mouths gaping in silence, eyes bulging and blinking only to vanish again beneath the flesh. Hands clawed at the inside of the beast's own skin, fingers smearing dark trails across the glistening surface.
It was silent.
No roars. No screams. Just the occasional creak of wet sinew, the unsettling slurp of flesh shifting inside flesh. A broken puppet, waiting for the music to begin.
Tessai didn't flinch.
He had seen monsters that laughed as they butchered whole camps. He had watched his comrades devoured by things that never bled, never died. He had carved his path through madness before.
But this one… this one lingered in the mind. The kind of horror that didn't fight with fury or hunger, but with inevitability.
He shifted his stance, flexing his grip around the haft of the axe. His voice was low, controlled.
"Open the cage."
His men stood just behind him, armored in full regalia. Every plate and strap was Ascended-rank. They bore weapons wrought from the bones of dead fallen, cloaks stitched with tendons as threads,steel sanctified in battle or forged from the carcasses of nightmare beasts. They were killers, honed to a singular edge. But they weren't here to fight.
They were here to butcher.
This was not a battle. This was a calculated execution, orchestrated for spectacle and for fear. The beast had already been wounded, its essence slowly drained, its instincts compromised. It was no longer a proper threat—at least in theory.
But Tessai had learned long ago that even rigged fights could spill real blood.
His men were silent, watching with the grim reverence of soldiers on the eve of war. No one spoke. There was nothing left to say.
The cage doors began to rise with a shriek of grinding iron.
'*'
Kai had performed in front of millions.
Stadiums that shivered with screams, oceans of lightsticks swaying like tides under a sky of artificial stars. Every show had been a high wire act between triumph and collapse. The wrong note, the wrong word, the wrong glance at the wrong time—and the entire illusion could shatter. He knew that pressure intimately. He had lived in it, breathed it, *thrived* in it.
And yet—here, now—he was nervous.
Nervous in a way he hadn't been since his debut. Not the charming butterflies before a performance, not the sweet thrill of anticipation that made his hands tremble and his heart flutter like stage lights waiting to rise. No. This was something colder. Heavier.
Dread.
He stood on the edge of a field that felt more like a stage than any he'd ever known, and yet the eyes watching him now were nothing like the adoring crowds of his past. They were ancient. Hungry. Indifferent.
And beside him—his companions. His anchors.
To his right was *Sunless*, ever unreadable, ever ten steps ahead. The mastermind behind their appearance here. The one who'd arranged the encounter, planned the timing, and—apparently—*fixed the performance*. Of course he had. Kai didn't know whether to laugh or worry about how casual Sunless made it all seem. There was something quietly terrifying about a friend who could manipulate something like this with the same effort most people spent planning a dinner.
To his left stood *Nephis*. Changing Star.
She had become a myth before his very eyes—a girl of fire and silence, with a sword that could carve gods and a soul that refused to yield. In the span of months, she had reshaped the stories whispered in the alleys of the Dark City. The flame-born prodigy of the Immortal Flame Clan. Her very name carried weight now. And beside her, Kai felt oddly… small.
But not alone.
He should have felt safe, shielded by two of the most powerful people he'd ever known. And yet, as he stared across the battlefield… the certainty wavered.
Because their opponent wasn't a rival idol or a bitter critic.
It was an *Awakened Devil.*
A creature that no Sleeper had any right to face and live.
Even kneeling in the dust, the dragon towered above them, a monument to extinction. Fifteen feet of hunger and hatred wrapped in plated flesh. Its presence was almost offensive—too real, too much. As if something from another era, another *reality*, had been dragged here against the world's better judgment.
The acupuncture needles still bristled from its neck and spine, inserted by Sunless's careful hand, draining essence and slowing reflex. The spores of the soul-devouring tree clung to its flanks, sapping vitality with every breath. *Even wounded*, it was a nightmare carved from war and hunger.
Its body was a mosaic of overlapping plates and scaled armor, each piece fitted like a butcher's smile—jagged, uneven, yet elegant in a savage way. Bronze and silver glinted under the haze of ambient heat, dulled by ash and old blood. It looked forged, not born. Sculpted by suffering. Every inch of its hide had been tested, burned, scarred—and hardened into something obscene.
Kai's hand rested lightly on the grip of *Lost Farewell*, the jade-hued bow slung across his back. A parting gift from his gloomy friend—a token of unspoken care and calculated violence. It was a beautiful weapon, exquisitely balanced. But as Kai studied the beast's ironclad hide, he couldn't help the quiet thought:
*This won't be enough.*
The dragon shifted.
Its movements were slow, deliberate, *aware*. Despite its size, there was no clumsiness. No staggering weight. It moved like a dancer—coiled power in every limb, every gesture laced with that eerie grace predators carried when they knew they didn't need to chase. Its massive shoulders rolled as it rose, ridged with horn-like spurs. Twitching wing-stubs jutted from its back—half-formed, skeletal things that trembled with restrained promise. One day, those wings would spread wide enough to cast whole cities in shadow.
Even now, grounded and incomplete, the creature *radiated* threat.
Its forelimbs ended in claws like curved blades, each talon capable of rending metal or bone with ease. The tips dragged faint lines into the ground as it flexed, idly gouging earth as though testing its grip. There was thought behind the movement. Precision. Like a maestro cracking his knuckles before conducting his final symphony.
The face was worse.
If it ever had anything human in its lineage, that resemblance had been buried beneath cruelty and time. The mouth was a terrible X-shaped fissure, jagged and glistening with irregular rows of thin, rotted teeth. It didn't open fully—just twitched and *grated*, gnashing sideways as if chewing through invisible chains. Above that pit, two eyes blazed like molten coin—ancient and analytical, fixed on Kai with something colder than hatred.
*Recognition*.
Its neck arched, serpentine and slick, long enough to coil mid-air, to strike from impossible angles. Just watching it shift sent a tremor down Kai's spine. The dragon didn't need to roar. It didn't need to posture.
It *knew* what it was.
It burned without flame. The heat came from within—a low, steady shimmer that warped the air, curling smoke from the beast's nostrils with every breath. Each movement was a metallic whisper of scale against scale, like an army drawing blades just out of sight. And even in its wounded state, the devil wasn't done. The needles slowed it, the spores ate away at it—but it wasn't dying.
It was *becoming*.
The wings would stretch. The talons would grow. The form would finish. One day soon, it would ascend into something far worse than a dragon.
Kai could feel it in his blood.
But even now, it was enough. More than enough.
It was death, paused mid-transformation.
And it watched.
Still. Silent.
And Kai, beneath the heat, beside the stars, beneath that gaze—he felt it. That awful, human feeling.
*Fear.*
He tightened his grip on the bow.
The performance had begun.