The dungeon trembled with a guttural roar that shook dust from the stone ceiling. Kael stood at the center of the carnage, his blade dripping with blood so black it seemed to drink the faint torchlight. The floor was littered with broken bones and twisted carcasses, the stench of death clinging to the damp air.Yet it wasn’t the monsters that drew his attention it was the gate at the far end. Tall, cracked, and covered in ancient glyphs, it pulsed faintly like a dying heartbeat. Every instinct screamed that something beyond it wanted to be free.Elira clutched her staff, her pale face streaked with sweat. “Kael… if that thing breaks through, none of us will walk out alive.”Kael’s eyes, glowing faintly with the Void’s mark, narrowed. “Then we don’t wait for it to break through. We open it on our terms.”Varian snarled, his wolfen features twisted between rage and disbelief. “You’ve lost your mind. That gate was sealed by gods. You think your cursed system makes you their equal?”Kael’

The battlefield was silent for only a heartbeat. A silence so deep that it felt like the world itself was holding its breath, waiting for the next strike, the next scream, the next corpse to hit the blood drenched earth. Kael stood in the center of it all, drenched in gore, his blade trembling in his grip, but not from weakness no, from the sheer power vibrating through his veins. The Void System pulsed within him, each beat louder, darker, hungrier.He raised his eyes, burning with black fire, and met the gaze of the monster towering above the ruins. Its skin shimmered with the corruption of a thousand consumed souls, its body a writhing mass of bone and muscle and veins that glowed like molten rivers. The air itself warped around it, as if reality strained against its presence.The monster roared, and the sound split the night. Windows shattered in the ruins behind Kael. Trees snapped like twigs under the force of it. The ground split in jagged scars that stretched outward, glowing

The storm above roared like a wounded beast, thunder rolling across the heavens as lightning forked in jagged veins of silver. In the shattered chapel below, Kael stood still as stone, his breath ragged, the violet glow in his eyes burning brighter with every passing second.Darius’s blade was leveled at him, unwavering despite the tremor in his hand. “We can end this before it goes too far,” Darius growled. “Before he becomes something worse than the Dominion itself.”Elira immediately stepped between them, her steel flashing as she raised her sword. “If you strike him, you’ll strike me too.”“Move, Elira,” Darius snapped, his voice cracking. “You’ve seen what he is becoming! He’s not our ally anymore he’s their weapon!”Kael’s chest tightened. He wanted to speak, to deny Darius’s words, but the Void inside twisted with hunger, whispering truths he could not completely refute. His hands, still marked by black veins, trembled at his sides. Even now he could feel the urge to take to dr