"The Dark King sends his regards."

The voice was quiet. Almost forced, as if not in the habit of talking. The woman took her last breath as the words finished settling, and the figure bent down and drew the blade free in a single clean line of red.

The player’s feed disconnected. The screen went black for the span of a single breath, and then another feed rose to replace it.

Then another beside it. Then a third to the left. The chamber was filled in seconds.

Five streams materialized around the gathered guild leaders and Grace, each one drawn from a different location, each one showing a different city that had been taken and transformed into a stronghold by the demon forces.

Five places that had been lost, that the world had grieved and written off and accepted as gone.

In each of them, something was moving.

Five individuals, distinct in shape and method, but identical in nature, and more importantly, each one is a player.

They were running through those cities the way fire runs through dry wood, finding every demon and every heretic and every cult member that could be reached and ending them with the particular efficiency of people who had not come to make a point but to finish a task.

The streets that had been held for months were being unmade in minutes.

There was no one in those cities that they could not reach.

The chamber was completely silent.

Grace stood at the center of it and, for the third time in the span of an hour, found that the words she needed were simply not where she had left them.

Grace felt lost, her professional instincts pulling her forward even as the part of her that had been watching the Ancient World for years struggled to find a framework for what she was seeing.

"Let me describe what we are looking at," she said, more to herself than to her viewers, the usual measured cadence of her broadcast voice carrying a quality it had never carried before, the quality of someone thinking out loud because thinking privately was no longer sufficient.

"Across these five feeds, we have five individuals moving through five demon-held cities simultaneously." She gestured toward the nearest stream. "The only confirmed member of Shadow Oblivion among them is Ravyn, a known operative and a part of the event team, the only display of strength from the masters of the Malefis Domain."

Her eyes moved to the next feed, finding the figure she had been given information on through her earpiece. "The young woman in the black and red dress has been identified as Kyra, a person who acquired an SSS Rank legacy one year and three months ago." Grace paused. "Her legacy title reads Tamer of Void Beasts."

The chamber absorbed that in silence.

"The remaining three," Grace continued, "are unknown to me. Unknown to this network. Unknown, as far as I can determine, to any public record." She shook her head slightly, the gesture unplanned and entirely honest.

"I cannot tell you who they are, other than that they are players and possibly... no, certainly members of the Shadow Oblivian Organization," She let her gaze travel across all five feeds at once.

"They are accompanied by thirty-three NPCs of similarly unknown origins, likely Domain residents, at least two such individuals accompanying each player, distributed across all five locations." She drew a slow breath.

"Each of them is an Elemental Ruler. Their Ranks are not confirmed, but should not matter since the eighteen elemental Ruler is a great force, more than capable of erasing five cities, even if those cities in question belong to the demon armies."

She stopped. Then she said, quietly, almost to herself, "I genuinely do not know how to explain any of this."

It was the most honest thing she had said on the broadcast.

She turned to the panel, and for the first time since the show had begun, Grace looked at the gathered guild leaders not as adversaries to two-faced bastards, but as people who might actually know something she did not. 𝑓𝑟ℯ𝘦𝓌𝘦𝘣𝑛𝑜𝓋𝑒𝓁.𝑐ℴ𝓂

"I would very much appreciate any insight our guests can offer," she said. "Because I am running out of language for what I am seeing."

The guild leaders looked back at her. Several exchanged glances that carried entire conversations within them, the silent negotiation of people deciding in real time how much to reveal, how much to deflect, and how much they could claim ignorance of without it becoming obvious.

Odin spoke first, and his voice had shed some of its broadcast polish, replaced by something more carefully neutral.

"Madam Grace, the strength of Shadow Oblivion has always been a mystery. To you, and to us." He chose each word with the precision of someone navigating a path they could not fully see.

"What I can say is that even a child who has spent a week in the Ancient World understands how punishing progression becomes beyond the third Rank."

"To reach the Seventh Rank and beyond requires years under ideal conditions, extraordinary resources, and a degree of natural talent that borders on the mythical." He paused.

"To do it in the timeframe we are apparently looking at is not something I have a clear explanation for, if it somehow is even possible... which, by the looks of it, is."

"The Malefis Domain is a place of myth," he continued. "Its interior has never been fully mapped or understood by anyone outside it. As its Ruler, the Hidden One would command resources and artifacts that the rest of the world has no reference point for."

"That is the most honest answer I can give you." He smiled weakly and stopped.

Zeus leaned forward, his expression carrying the restless energy of someone who had been holding a thought back and had decided the moment had come to release it.

"There is another possibility worth considering," he said, his voice carrying its characteristic weight. "What we are seeing might not be entirely what it appears to be. The people on those feeds might not be who they seem." He let the implication sit for a moment.

"The Sin Champions themselves are proof that there are methods and artifacts capable of producing results that defy conventional explanation."

"Borrowed power. Amplified strength. Temporary elevation beyond one’s natural rank." He spread his hands. "I am not saying that is what this is. I am saying that before the world rewrites its understanding of what is possible, it is worth asking whether what we are watching is the whole truth."

"And then again," he added, leaning back, something in his expression suggesting that even he did not fully believe the alternative he had just offered, "who knows what the truth actually is."

The chamber settled into a silence that was different from the ones that had preceded it throughout the broadcast. Those silences had been the silences of people absorbing arguments, processing rhetoric, deciding what they believed.

This one was the silence of people who had encountered something that sat outside the boundaries of what they had believed was possible, and had not yet found the new boundaries to replace them.

Grace looked at the feeds. At the five figures moving through five fallen cities with the calm, methodical efficiency of people who had done this before and expected to do it again.

At the thirteen NPCs beside them who moved like calamities, the way a blade moves like a weapon, which is to say completely and without apology.

She looked at the guild leaders, who knew more than they were saying and less than they wished they did.

And then she looked at the camera, at millions of people sitting on the other side of it, and said the only thing that felt true.

"I think we are all going to need some time to understand what we are witnessing," She said, smiling earnestly for the first time in days, "But I am sure from today onward, the Ancient world will change."