The broken wooden monkey stared at me with its cracked glass eyes from the middle of the small footprints.

It wasn’t just a toy that had fallen carelessly; it was a clear declaration, an encoded message from this cursed place telling me that I was no longer the hunter who sets the rules—I had become nothing more than a pawn walking across a board whose edges I could not see.

Slowly, and with caution no less than that of someone walking barefoot through an active minefield, I lifted my gaze from the dusty wooden floor and looked at the wooden door directly to my right.

The door where the child’s footprints ended.

I tightened my grip on the handle of the "Forgotten Blade" in my right hand until my knuckles turned white, and slowly extended my left hand to push the decayed door.

Creeeeak...

The door opened slowly, revealing a narrow, suffocating, dark room that contained nothing but a rusty iron bed without a mattress, and a window covered with wooden planks that blocked out any light.

There was no fanged monster lurking in the corners, nor any magical trap set to explode. 𝚏𝐫𝚎𝗲𝕨𝐞𝐛𝕟𝚘𝐯𝚎𝗹.𝕔𝐨𝗺

Instead, there was a small, pitiful heap trembling violently in the far corner of the dark room, wedged between the cold wall and the bed frame.

It was her. The little mouse. The thief who had stolen from me in the market.

But she wasn’t the same insolent, defiant girl who had dared to bargain with me and spit on my expensive shoe.

Every trace of defiance and boldness had vanished from her features, and the shell of street-hardened cruelty she once pretended to have had shattered.

She was just a normal child... a child terrified to her very core.

She hugged her knees tightly to her chest, digging her mud-stained nails into her thin arms hard enough to scratch her skin.

Her messy black hair clung to her face with cold sweat.

Her wide black eyes overflowed with tears.

Human tears—salty, real, and warm—pouring down in streams, washing trails through the dirt and grime on her pale cheeks.

She sobbed audibly, mucus mixing with her tears in a scene that embodied human weakness at its most extreme.

I took a single step into the room and lowered my blade slightly. "Little gi—"

She didn’t look at me.

She didn’t even blink to see who had entered the room.

Her eyes were fixed wide open, staring toward the open door... staring directly at the dark corridor behind me.

Her frail body convulsed in a horrifying spasm, as if an electric current had struck her spine. She raised a trembling little finger, pointing toward the empty space behind me, and whispered in a hoarse, childlike voice filled with pure terror:

"The monster... the white monster... it’s there! It came to eat me! Please... please don’t let it eat me!"

She knew nothing of cosmic entities, nor of seals, nor of the black throne that had appeared in my dream.

To her simple, childlike mind, whatever stood outside was just a "monster" from nightmares come to devour her.

But to me... the instinctive alarm system in my mind didn’t see a monster.

It saw an inevitable catastrophe.

The moment the child spoke those words, the world around me changed.

It wasn’t a gradual change—it was like a massive glass ceiling collapsing over my head.

My senses, honed repeatedly to survive the hell of "Elysium," the Eitra pathways within my body, and every living cell in my veins began screaming in one unified voice: death. Certain death, here.

The cold that had been gnawing at my bones vanished suddenly, replaced by a suffocating atmospheric pressure, as if the planet’s gravity had multiplied dozens of times in a single second.

My vision began to distort and flicker like a malfunctioning radar screen, unable to process the sheer volume of energy present.

The rotten wood of the house began to groan and crack violently and continuously, as if the entire structure were screaming in pain under the weight of a presence that did not belong to the laws of physics—something that should not exist in this dimension.

From the cracks in the walls and floors, a dark red fog—heavy and toxic—began to seep into the corridor, swallowing what little oxygen remained.

I turned slowly, as if moving through thick liquid, refusing to believe what my senses were detecting.

At the end of the impossible corridor, where absolute darkness had reigned moments ago... he appeared.

A young man... or at least, that was the physical form he had taken to walk among humans and deceive the laws of dimensions.

He looked to be in his mid-twenties, slender, standing with an arrogance that radiated absolute authority. His dark black hair drifted slowly in the toxic winds and red mist.

He wore an elegant, precisely tailored black combat suit, giving him a terrifying appearance—like a guest who had come to witness the end of a world.

He took one step forward.

There was no sound to his step.

Instead, the moment his polished shoe touched the wooden floor of the corridor, the wood beneath it instantly turned into black ash, scattered by unseen winds.

He wasn’t destroying the place with force... he was erasing matter simply by coming into contact with it.

His skin was pale like the marble of forgotten graves, flawless to a cruel degree, and his face was sculpted with precision—a blend of cold beauty and merciless death.

But the true horror lay in his eyes: absolute blackness, with no white or pupil—two voids that reflected no light. Looking into them felt like staring into a black hole that devoured both mind and soul.

My tactical mind, cold and calculated like a precise machine, began running survival calculations.

I compared the aura emanating from him to the strongest entities I had ever faced. Was he as powerful as "Ilarios"? No... this entity was stronger.

Was he as skilled as the "Voliders"? This entity didn’t need skill—his mere existence was an attack.

My mind stopped providing me with any survival probabilities.

Chance of victory in a direct confrontation? Zero percent.

Chance of landing a successful strike with the Forgotten Blade? Zero percent.

This entity cannot be fought.

This entity is something you run from—into other dimensions—while praying to the higher beings that it does not follow you.