The sensation of falling was entirely devoid of wind or sound.

When the pitch-black void snapped shut above Roxy, swallowing the sunlit spring grass and the frozen, terrified forms of her Warlord husbands, all physical laws of the Beastworld violently ceased to exist. There was no up, no down, no rushing air. It was a sensory deprivation tank on a cosmic scale.

Then, abruptly, her feet hit a surface.

It wasn’t stone or earth. It felt like standing on a sheet of impossibly dense, cold fog. Roxy stumbled, her knees hitting the dark, formless ground. Her heart was hammering a frantic, deafening rhythm against her ribs. She was still clutching the faded blue terrestrial diary in one hand and the dull, broken remnants of Fedor’s necklace in the other.

She gasped, her breath pluming in the freezing, stagnant air. She looked around, her brilliant green eyes wide with primal panic.

There were no stars. There were no walls. It was a realm of absolute, suffocating nothingness—the space between dimensions.

"I have to admit, I didn’t think the Fox would have enough juice left in his leftover soul to pull you out of the vault."

The voice did not boom from the heavens. It wasn’t a demonic, overlapping roar that shook the earth. It was a perfectly normal, moderately deep, entirely human male voice. It carried a distinct, cynical, terrestrial cadence that instantly made the hairs on the back of Roxy’s neck stand up.

Roxy scrambled to her feet, whipping around to face the darkness.

A figure stepped out of the absolute blackness.

Abaddon shoved his hands casually behind him, his red eyes dropping to the blue spiral notebook clutched tightly against Roxy’s chest. A slow, deeply bitter, and entirely arrogant smirk curved his lips.

"So, you read Lin’s diary," Abaddon said, his voice echoing flatly in the void. "You finally know the truth. The gods are just using you as a cosmic trash can or rather, my pleasure."

Roxy stared at him. Her entire body was violently trembling. The sheer, overwhelming power radiating from this seemingly ordinary man was suffocating. He controlled the code of this universe. He had frozen time. He had orchestrated Ren’s death with the flick of a wrist.

Abaddon tilted his head, waiting. He expected her to scream. He expected her to unleash a torrent of useless, magic in a fit of righteous fury. He expected her to beg for her life, or sob for her Warlords trapped on the surface. 𝙛𝒓𝓮𝒆𝔀𝒆𝙗𝓷𝒐𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝓶

And for a fraction of a second, Roxy wanted to do exactly that. The rage bubbling in her soul was apocalyptic.

But as her green eyes locked onto the cynical, exhausted smirk of her terrestrial predecessor, the Matriarch of the Vanguard shifted into a gear her Alpha Kings had never seen.

She realized she could not fight him. Zarek’s hellfire, Kaelen’s ice, Torian’s brute force—none of it mattered here. Abaddon was a god of code. If she fought him, he would simply delete her.

So, she had to use the only weapon that was entirely invisible to a cosmic scanner. She had to use her mind.

Roxy decided to play him completely, entirely into the palm of her hand.

Roxy’s trembling shoulders suddenly slumped. The fierce, unyielding light of the Matriarch violently extinguished from her eyes, replaced by a hollow, devastating emptiness. She let the blue diary slip from her fingers, the notebook landing silently on the dense fog beneath her feet.

She dropped to her knees.

She buried her face in her hands, her fingers tangling into her messy, dark curls. And then, she broke.

Roxy let out a ragged, agonizing sob that tore through the silent void. It wasn’t entirely fake—the exhaustion, the trauma of the collapsing vault, the loss of Ren, and the sheer terror of her pregnancy were all incredibly real. She just channeled every single drop of that authentic misery into a perfectly curated, Oscar-worthy performance of total defeat.

Abaddon’s smirk faltered slightly. His dark brows furrowed as he watched her shatter.

"They never leave me alone," Roxy sobbed, her voice muffled by her hands, trembling with absolute, pathetic exhaustion. "They never, ever leave me alone."

She lowered her hands, looking up at the Demon King with a tear-streaked, deeply broken expression.

"You think I want to fight you?" Roxy choked out, a bitter, hysterical laugh bubbling up from her chest. "You think I give a damn about saving this miserable system? I am a prisoner, Abaddon! I live in a golden cage surrounded by monsters who treat me like a piece of fragile glass."

She wrapped her arms around her stomach, rocking slightly on her knees, leaning entirely into the persona of a bitter, broken Earthling.

"Torian hovers over me until I can’t breathe. Kaelen watches my every move like I’m a tactical asset. Zarek acts like I’m a possession. I’m just a breeding mare for their Vanguard empire," Roxy spat, forcing a venom into her voice that made her own heart violently ache with guilt. "I am dragged across continents while pregnant, nearly crushed by falling mountains, all because the heavens need a vessel to clean up their mess!"

Abaddon took a slow step forward, his completely black eyes studying her intensely. He was searching for a lie, searching for the unyielding Matriarch who had commanded armies.

But Roxy gave him nothing but the shattered pieces of a burnt-out terrestrial woman.

"I read the diary," Roxy continued, swiping angrily at her tears. "I know what the gods want from me. They want me to hollow myself out. They want me to sacrifice my own soul, to sacrifice my own life, just to act as their antiviral software." She looked directly at him, her green eyes blazing with a perfectly manufactured, cynical rage that mirrored his own. "I won’t do it. I am so tired. I just want it to stop."

The silence in the void stretched out, heavy and thick.

Abaddon looked at the sobbing, pregnant woman on the floor. He looked at the discarded diary. He didn’t see a threat anymore. He didn’t see the fearless Queen of the Iron-Wood.

He saw himself. He saw the exact same bitter, exhausted, manipulated human he had been centuries ago when he first realized the system was rigged.

A dark, victorious satisfaction washed over the Demon King’s features. The massive, cosmic threat of the Vanguard Matriarch had been completely neutralized without him having to lift a finger. The heavens had pushed her too hard, and she had finally snapped.

"The system is a meat-grinder," Abaddon agreed, his voice softening into a dark, twisted camaraderie. "The gods demand everything and give nothing but cages. You are finally waking up, Earthling."

Roxy kept her head bowed, letting out another pathetic, shuddering sniffle. She nodded slowly, appearing entirely submissive, entirely broken.

But deep within the absolute, impenetrable core of her soul, Roxy made a decision. It was a cold, ruthless, and terrifyingly brilliant calculation. She didn’t let a single flicker of it reach her eyes. She locked the decision away in a mental vault so secure even a god couldn’t crack it.

She was going to burn his entire existence to ash. She was going to use his own arrogance to dismantle him piece by piece, and she was going to smile while she did it.

But not today. Today, she was the victim.

Abaddon stepped back, his hands returning to his leather jacket pockets. He had what he needed. He had a compromised anomaly inside the most heavily fortified Warlord stronghold on the continent. He didn’t need to kill her; she was going to tear the Vanguard down from the inside out just to escape her own exhaustion.

"I will give you time to catch your breath," Abaddon said smoothly, the void around him beginning to swirl and distort violently. The ambient temperature of the nothingness began to rise, signaling the impending release of the temporal stasis. "Go back to your golden cage. Play the devoted wife. Smile for the beasts."

Roxy slowly reached out, her trembling fingers grabbing the blue diary from the fog, pulling it securely against her chest like a protective shield. She didn’t look up.

"When you are ready to burn their system to the ground..." Abaddon’s form began to fade into the absolute darkness, his completely black eyes locked onto her trembling form. "...lower the Iron-Wood wards."

The void violently contracted, the sound of rushing wind returning in a deafening roar.

"I’ll be waiting for you, Roxann."