Grace and the entire room remained suspended in stunned silence as one after another, new figures stepped out of the darkness above Nova and took their positions.

The status windows that flickered into existence above each of them read as question marks across every display, which was itself a statement, but the reason for the silence was not the unknown power.

It was what the Architect was doing.

Architect was not an unknown to the people in that chamber. The major guilds had either dealt with him directly or gathered enough intelligence from Shadow Oblivion’s known members to build a working picture of who he was and where he stood.

His performance during the Mythical Island event had given the world a baseline. A strong player, and exceptional, even. By the most generous estimates of those who had watched him closely, a Fifth Rank individual, possibly a Sixth if something extraordinary had occurred during the last year.

Powerful, but not world-stage powerful. Not this.

The man standing above Nova was not the Architect they had constructed in their intelligence reports.

He was holding an entire horde of Devourer Beasts frozen in place. Not slowing them, not pushing them back, not creating obstacles for them to navigate around.

Frozen.

Every creature that had been tearing through the city seconds ago stood locked in place as though time had reached into them specifically and simply stopped.

And simultaneously, calmly, as though the two tasks required no more concentration than breathing, he had announced his intention to seal the tear in reality from which hundreds of new monstrosities were still gushing with every passing second.

A tear that the Emperor of the White Flame Empire, a man who had held an entire city together through sheer will and power, had not been able to close.

The faces of the guild leaders around the chamber grew progressively grimmer as the feed continued. They had more context than the general audience for where power of this magnitude came from, what it required, and what it meant in terms of where someone stood on the scale of the world.

However, that context was not comforting them. It was making the silence heavier.

Then the familiar face of Pyrael emerged from the fading darkness, another core member of Shadow Oblivion, stepping into position beside the others with the unhurried ease of someone arriving at a planned meeting rather than a battlefield.

Behind her came two figures that no database recognized, their statuses blank, their expressions carrying the particular calm of individuals for whom the carnage surrounding them was simply the texture of a normal day.

The Architect moved through it all like a veteran who had stopped needing to think about the basics of command.

Orders went out in measured, precise sequences. Pairs of figures were directed outward in each direction the demon armies had fractured toward, sent to silence the deserters hunting the evacuees.

What remained behind was the sound of defenders cutting through the frozen Devourer Beasts and the robed figure of the Architect himself, drifting with unhurried purpose toward the tear in reality that continued to yawn wider with every passing second.

The questions that had been forming in the chamber, the instinct to reach for doubt, to measure what was being claimed against what seemed possible, hung unspoken in the air.

Nobody quite found the moment to voice them. Because before any of those questions could be asked, let alone answered, the space directly in front of the gathered guild leaders collapsed.

The projection tore itself apart and rebuilt in seconds.

What rose in its place was wrong in a way that registered before the mind had finished processing the details.

It had been a city once. The Ice Kingdom’s city of Tuver, recognizable to anyone who had spent time in that region of the Ancient World, was a populous and prosperous place that had fallen months ago to the forces of the Sin Champion of Lust.

What it had become since then was something that defied the vocabulary of conquest.

The buildings still stood. The streets were still there. There were no ruins, no burned districts, no battle-scarred walls bearing the evidence of a siege.

The city looked, from a distance, almost intact. However, it was not, as pink light bathed every surface, pulsing slowly like something breathing, casting the streets in a haze that moved and shifted with a life of its own.

A thick pinkish fog coiled through the alleyways in lazy, searching tendrils, wrapping around the bodies that filled every open space, every street corner, every surface wide enough to hold a person.

And there were bodies everywhere.

Demons and humans lay together without distinction, without shame, without any awareness of where they were or what surrounded them.

Some were unconscious, slack and hollow, having passed so far beyond indulgence that nothing remained of them but the physical fact of their presence.

They moved through the streets and against the walls and across the open ground with the blind, consuming urgency of people who had forgotten everything except the immediate, the now, the wanting that the fog fed and the light sustained, and the city itself seemed to breathe into them with every moment they remained within its boundaries.

The sounds that rose from those streets were not screams or cries, but moans and screams of pleasure, as lust ran rampant and undisturbed.

This was what the Sin Champion of Lust had built from Tuver’s bones. Not a fortress. Not a garrison. A hub.

A gravity well of appetite and addiction that drew the willing and the broken and the corrupt from across the region, criminals and heretics and cult members and demons, all of them arriving for what was offered and many of them never leaving once the fog had found them.

The camera belonged to a player. The feed was personal, shaky, narrated under the breath with the running commentary of someone who had stumbled onto something they recognized immediately as content.

The player was moving through the crowd toward the governor’s residence at the city’s center, pushing through the gathered bodies with single-minded focus, muttering about virality with each step, until he broke through to the front of a group that had assembled at the base of the palace grounds.

On the icy ground below the vast open balcony lay a female figure, naked in a pool of her own blood. A long dagger pierced her chest. Her neck had been cut clean. She was gargling on her own blood with the particular, terrible patience of someone in the last seconds of something that could not be undone.

The player’s camera found her face, muttering how amazing she looked, staring at her body, which was blurred for Grace and the rest for many seconds, only breaking his reverie once he saw a figure step closer to the dying Sin champion.

Tall. Black carapace armor clinging close to the body, a dark cloak obscuring most of it. The face that made the player step back without deciding to.

A skull mask of bone white, carved or grown or simply worn into that shape, covered the hooded face entirely. Dark hollow eyes stared out from within it with the depth of something alien and wrong.

"The Dark King sends his regards."