Vaeliyan looked at Gleck, then at Grace. Grace lifted both hands in a helpless shrug, her expression tight and uncertain. She had no idea what was happening, and that alone made Vaeliyan’s unease spike.Gleck turned his full attention back to Vaeliyan, studying him with open curiosity, as if this were a simple assessment rather than a threat. “How good are you at handling pain?”
Vaeliyan took a step back despite himself, boots scraping softly against the floor. “I do not feel comfortable right now,” he said, keeping his voice level through effort rather than confidence.
“Oh, do not worry, my dearest Vaeliyan,” Gleck replied pleasantly. His tone was warm, almost reassuring, which only made it worse. “If I truly wanted to hurt you, you would already be dead.”
That did not help.
Vaeliyan’s shoulders stayed tense. Every instinct he had told him to leave, but the weight of Gleck’s presence made even the thought feel pointless.
“I am asking,” Gleck continued, unfazed, “because what I am about to give you is a substance that will forcibly raise your level by introducing experiences directly into you.”
Vaeliyan swallowed, his throat suddenly dry.
“These experiences are compressed,” Gleck went on, pacing slowly. “Condensed into something your nanites will be forced to process. It is inelegant, brutal, and effective.”
Vaeliyan felt his pulse thudding in his ears.
“This should push you past the normal cap,” Gleck said, almost conversationally, “even if your soul is not ready to advance. You will land somewhere around level sixty, give or take a margin of error.”
Grace’s eyes widened. Her breath caught for a moment before she forced herself to remain still.
“There are side effects,” Gleck added casually. “Extreme pain for roughly a week. Not discomfort. Pain. The kind that teaches you new definitions.”
Vaeliyan’s jaw tightened.
“And there will be nightmares,” Gleck continued. “Vivid ones. Relentless ones. Your mind will replay the experiences until it believes they belong to you.” He waved a hand dismissively. “Those can be avoided by simply not sleeping. It works quite well for me.”
Grace stared at Gleck as if she wanted to argue, but no words came.
Gleck stopped in front of Vaeliyan and smiled, his eyes bright with genuine interest rather than malice. “Think of it as accelerated becoming. Unpleasant, yes, but efficient.”
He laughed.
“Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha.”
Gleck’s smile faded into something flatter and more deliberate. “I do warn you that doing this will cost you time. A great deal of it. You will lose weeks, perhaps more. However,” he continued, glancing briefly at Grace, “I am aware, as Grace has informed me, that you need to speak with a friend of ours. To do that, you must be at level sixty.”
He met Vaeliyan’s eyes without blinking. “You should understand that you have no choice. The moment you walked into this domain, you were already under my control. This is not a threat. It is simply a fact. You are Legion. You understand that some things are done without permission because they must be.”
Gleck inclined his head slightly. “I regret that you have no choice, but that is the reality of the situation.”
“Now, please,” Grace said sharply. “Yuri, you are being mean.”
She stepped forward, placing herself between them just enough to matter. “If he wishes to leave, he can. Or I will tell our son that his father is not allowed to see him.”
Gleck turned to her, genuinely puzzled. “Do you understand that he does not truly wish to see me? That is not a threat.”
“That is incorrect,” Grace said immediately. “You forget your meetings with him. He has been asking to see you since several of his friends died. He wanted to know how you were doing. He wanted to make sure you were all right. You have not spoken to him.”
Gleck hesitated.
“I think,” Grace said quietly, “that I am upset.”
“Oh,” Gleck said, the edge leaving his voice at once. “I am truly sorry, my dear.”
As Gleck turned fully toward her, something clicked for Vaeliyan. He had not realized it before, but it was obvious now. Their familiarity, the way Grace spoke to him without fear, and the way Gleck softened only for her all pointed to the same conclusion. They had something between them, something that went beyond proximity or convenience.
And Yuri, Gleck’s son, was her son as well.
That meant whatever they were to each other; it was not simple.
Vaeliyan pushed the thought aside. It did not matter.
What mattered was that he was about to gain a significant number of levels, and pain had never been a problem for him. If Gleck had told him he could chug some horrific bullshit and jump straight to level one hundred, he would have done it right now without a second thought.
Something occurred to Vaeliyan, and it hit him like a kick to the chest.
He had not felt anything from Warren. Not a thought, not an echo, not even the faint, ever-present background awareness that had always existed between them. The realization came late, and the delay made it worse. It meant his mind had been filling in the silence without noticing it, pretending everything was fine.
That should not have been possible.
His mind was supposed to function across both bodies. Even when one took precedence, the other was never truly absent. There was always a thread. A presence. A constant sense of continuity that told him he was still whole, even when split.
Here, there was nothing.
In this place, he felt singular. Isolated inside himself in a way he had never experienced before. It felt like losing a limb and only realizing it when he tried to move.
Panic crept in, slow and poisonous, crawling up his spine and settling behind his eyes. “Fuck,” he muttered under his breath.
He tried to switch.
It was a terrible idea, and he knew it even as he did it, but instinct overrode reason. Panic did that. He reached for the familiar internal shift, the pull between identities, the Veil responding to intent the way it always had.
Nothing happened.
“Fuck,” Vaeliyan breathed.
He tried again, harder this time, pushing past caution, forcing the motion the way he would force a damaged limb to move.
Nothing.
Vaeliyan’s breath caught, sharp and shallow.
“Warren is not responding,” he said. The words came out harsher than he intended, edged with something close to fear. “I cannot hear him. I cannot feel him. I cannot talk to him.”
Grace looked at him, confusion flashing across her face as she searched his expression for context she clearly did not have. “What do you mean?”
Gleck turned his head slightly, studying Vaeliyan as if this were a curious malfunction. “What is this about talking to a Warren? There are no rabbits here.”
“No,” Vaeliyan snapped, then forced himself to slow before the edge in his voice cut too deep. “The man in the yellow jacket. That is Warren. That is me.” He dragged a hand through his hair, fingers catching as frustration bled into his voice. “I can become him. I can change into him because he is the real me. This form is something I use. Something I wear.”
He swallowed hard, his mouth suddenly dry.
“And right now,” he continued, “I cannot switch back. It will not let me. I can only exist like this.”
The weight of that truth settled fully then, pressing down on his chest until it was hard to breathe.
“It is not even letting me change into my real form,” Vaeliyan said more quietly. “I cannot hear what is happening on the other side, and I did not even realize it at first.”
His thoughts began to race, spiraling faster the longer the silence stretched.
“Why the fuck am I separate right now?” he demanded, more to himself than to either of them. “That is not how my class works. That is not how my skills work. That’s not how the Veil works. I am supposed to be able to change whenever I want. I am supposed to be able to let both forms exist when necessary.”
This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.
His hands curled into fists, nails biting into his palms.
“I left Warren because I thought he was safe,” Vaeliyan said. “He was with four headmasters. I thought that was enough.”
His voice cracked despite his effort to control it, the sound sharp and ugly.
“And now I cannot protect him,” he went on. “I cannot protect myself. I cannot protect my wife or my friends or anyone around me.”
The words began to tumble over each other, urgency stacking on top of fear.
“This is wrong,” he said. “This is fucking wrong. This is not how it is supposed to be. I should be able to be myself. I should be able to defend us.”
His breathing grew uneven, chest rising too fast, too shallow.
“I am losing my fucking shit,” Vaeliyan said.
Grace walked over to Vaeliyan and grabbed him by the face, fingers digging into his cheeks as she forced him to look directly at her.
“Vaeliyan,” she said firmly. Her voice cut through the noise in his head, sharp and anchored. “You need to calm down. Whatever is happening, we will figure it out.”
Her grip did not loosen. If anything, it steadied, thumbs pressing just enough to remind him that she was real, here, and not part of whatever was tearing him apart. “Yuri is a genius. You know that. Maybe it is the distance. We are on the other side of the world. That alone could be interfering with whatever connection you are trying to maintain.”
Vaeliyan tried to breathe, tried to latch onto her certainty, but the panic still crawled under his skin.
Gleck cleared his throat, the sound small but perfectly timed. “I believe it is my disruption array,” he said mildly, as if this were a minor technical inconvenience rather than a fundamental violation. “It actually makes quite a bit of sense. If this Veil of yours is bound to your chip, then you are bound to this location. My array does not allow System communication without my explicit permission.”
He tilted his head, eyes unfocusing slightly as he thought it through aloud. “It will be possible to override it. Eventually. But it will take longer than simply having you return to your other body. I may consider adjusting it in the future, should you visit again.”
The way he said made it clear how little choice that implied.
Styll slipped out of a pocket in Vaeliyan’s armor and climbed up onto his shoulder, claws careful against the plating. She leaned close to his face, eyes serious in a way that made her words land harder than comfort ever should.
“It gonna be okay Warns,” Styll said carefully. “Mujin real strong. Others real strong toos. Wen be okays. Grix slippy slippys. Nothing ever catches hers.”
Her small body pressed against his neck, solid and warm.
Then Bastard sent an image, projected directly into Vaeliyan’s mind without words. It was meant to be reassuring, and in its own way, it was. It showed all of them curled together in a loose pile, limbs tangled, breathing slow and even. Safe. Whole. Asleep.
Vaeliyan clung to that image like a lifeline, holding it in place as the edges of his vision trembled.
Gleck stepped past him as the room shifted subtly, the air thickening. A new presence entered, tall and precise, shaped like a well-manicured butler whose posture suggested obedience without warmth.
“Man Corpse,” Gleck said. “I see you have brought the item I ordered.”
The figure inclined its head with mechanical grace. “Sir, this is my functional form for interacting with you directly. I am the same intelligence you refer to as House Ghost. Please do not differentiate between these forms. If I possessed a life, it is something I would actively seek to end. I hate it here.”
“Good,” Gleck said flatly. “I do not like you either.”
He reached out and took what the figure offered without ceremony. It looked like a syringe filled with thick, black liquid that pulsed slowly, as if it were breathing. The substance clung to the glass, resisting gravity, alive in a way that made Vaeliyan’s instincts scream.
“All right,” Gleck said. “Here we go.”
He jammed the needle directly into Vaeliyan’s neck without warning and depressed the plunger in one smooth, practiced motion.
Vaeliyan screamed.
Fire tore through him instantly, the sensation sharp and overwhelming, like Natah flooding his veins all at once. It felt as though his body were melting from the inside out, heat and pressure ripping through muscle and bone. This time, his skin began to slough away around the injection site, flesh breaking down under the strain, pain eclipsing thought.
Grace recoiled, horror flashing across her face. “Yuri, did you really have to do that?”
“I thought we were finished with the emotional preamble,” Gleck replied coolly. “And did we not agree that he did not actually have a choice?”
Their voices blurred together as Vaeliyan’s vision darkened. The room stretched and narrowed, sound warping into distant echoes as the last thing he felt was the fire consuming him from the inside.
Before his mind could fully slip into the abyss where Mondenkind lay waiting, his awareness was pulled into the ring on his finger as the Emperor’s will responded to him directly. He had finally gained enough levels to speak to the Emperor again.
The voice of the Emperor spoke, filling the space without sound. There was no direction to it and no source Vaeliyan could turn toward, only pressure settling into his mind like a weight he could not shrug off or push away. It was not painful, but it was absolute, the kind of presence that made resistance feel childish.
“It has been some time since we last spoke.”
“Yeah,” Vaeliyan said. “It has.” His head was still ringing from the transition, thoughts sliding against each other wrong, like gears that had not been meant to mesh. The anger, at least, was clean. Sharp. Easy to hold onto. “I kept trying to talk to you. Over and over. You refused.”
The Emperor did not deny it. The silence that followed stretched, deliberate and measured, and somehow heavier than any justification would have been. Vaeliyan felt it settle around him, not as punishment, but as acknowledgment.
“Imujin said I would have to do another trial the next time I saw you,” Vaeliyan went on, jaw set. “So I am guessing this is it.”
“Yes,” the Emperor said. “You are now strong enough. Or you will be, once you allocate your statistics.”
Vaeliyan let out a slow breath through his nose, grounding himself by force. Even here, even now, there were steps that had to be followed. There was always structure, even in places that pretended to be beyond it.
“You may also wish to evolve your class,” the Emperor continued, voice steady and unhurried. “Choose your upgrades carefully. Prepare yourself properly. This will be a fight.”
Vaeliyan’s jaw tightened at that. He had expected it, but expectation did nothing to dull the edge of it.
“And it will be to the death,” the Emperor said. “You will have to try to kill me if you succeed. Do not misunderstand my meaning. I will not be destroyed. Only the version of me you face here will die. We will speak again afterward.”
The pressure eased slightly, just enough for Vaeliyan to notice that it had been there at all. The absence of it felt like standing after carrying a heavy load for too long.
“I leave you now to prepare.”
“Wait,” Vaeliyan said immediately. “There is something I need to know.”
The presence paused. It did not vanish or withdraw, but remained held in place and attentive, as though patience were another resource the Emperor had in abundance.
“What happens if I upgrade my class here?” Vaeliyan asked. “I am not Warren right now. I am always supposed to do that through him first.”
The Emperor regarded him in silence long enough for Vaeliyan to feel exposed beneath it, as though layers were being peeled back and evaluated without comment.
“Try,” the Emperor said at last. “I can feel the connection through the ring. It exists in both forms.”
Vaeliyan frowned, the answer raising more questions than it resolved. “How?”
“I have noticed it as well,” the Emperor replied. “I am not certain of the full mechanism. The ring is living wood. You are the true version. That other body may be a copy, but the ring exists on the finger of your copy as well.”
Vaeliyan’s thoughts slowed as the implications lined up in sequence. The idea settled uneasily, not wrong, but not comforting either.
“That creates a link,” the Emperor said. “And you are currently inside the ring.”
Vaeliyan swallowed, the sensation echoing strangely in a place without a body. The concept of location felt abstract here, yet binding all the same.
“So, if I do this here,” he said carefully, testing the thought as he spoke it, “it might carry over.”
“There may be a chance,” the Emperor agreed, “for you to take on your true self and complete your evolution properly before we fight.”
The presence pressed in one last time, heavier now, its intent unmistakable, no longer explanatory but declarative.
“I wish for you to be the one to defeat me,” the Emperor said. “But understand this clearly. You would not be the first to fail.”
Vaeliyan gripped the edges of the Veil and hauled on them, trying to peel the boundary back far enough to become Warren in this moment. He pulled again and again, harder each time, forcing intent into the motion until it felt like his thoughts were scraping against stone.
Nothing happened.
He changed tactics and pushed outward, searching for the link between the two rings, the one on his finger and the one on his other self. He followed instinct, memory, and habit, tracing pathways that should have answered.
Again nothing.
Vaeliyan dropped to his knees. The movement happened before he could choose it, and his breath came too fast as his mind tried to catch up.
Then he felt it.
Something tore into the space beside him.
A section of the space vanished with a violent tearing sound, as if something had bitten into reality and pulled away a mouthful. The missing piece did open cleanly or form a shape that made any real sense. It was irregular and jagged, its edges uneven, as though the space itself had been devoured rather than parted.
Vaeliyan’s body reacted before his thoughts could organize. His knees bent, and his head lowered. The motion was not chosen. It happened because something in him recognized that standing upright was no longer correct.
Pressure filled the space around him. It did not crush him or weigh him down. It fixed him in place and made movement feel irrelevant rather than impossible.
He did not look up.
The missing section of space resisted focus. His eyes slid away from it each time he tried to understand its shape, because there was no surface to look at, only absence where something should have been.
The tear remained for a single breath.
Then it closed violently. The air snapped back into place, and the pressure vanished at once, leaving the space raw and unstable for a moment before the world resumed as it had been.
The weight lifted, and the moment snapped back into motion. Memory rushed into him all at once returning with a harsh immediacy.
Vaeliyan remained inside the ring.
Something had reached outward.
Something had been fighting to exist.
He reached for it and drew it in, forcing it to anchor.
This time, it became real.
And so did he.
Warren struggled to make sense of what stood in front of him. For the first time in his life, a clear thought surfaced and refused to be ignored. This was not a fight he knew how to win. A confrontation was inevitable, and the certainty of it pressed down on him harder than fear ever had.
The creature held the sentinel in one hand, lifting it with careless ease as it tilted its head sideways, studying him. Warren had glimpsed it before at the edges of his perception, flashes that slid away whenever he tried to focus. Now it stood fully present, yet his eyes still fought to slip past it, as if his vision itself wanted to reject what it was seeing.
Around him, everyone else remained frozen. Wren stood rigid, her body locked in place, along with the rest of them. They did not blink. They did not breathe differently. Time seemed to belong to the creature alone.
It looked at Warren and spoke, its voice curling like smoke through the air. “What are you?”
The sound did not behave like language. It carried rhythm, cadence, something closer to a song than speech.
“How do you resist my song?” the creature asked. “Boy, man, human, something else. What are you?”
Warren held his ground.
The creature stepped closer, and its form resolved more clearly. It was humanoid, its skin a deep, dark purple-red that swallowed the light around it. Four horns crowned its head, two curving upward and two thrusting forward. Its face carried an unsettling simplicity, stripped of excess, with eyes that seemed capable of piercing straight through thought and memory. Down the center of its forehead ran a vertical slit, positioned where another eye might open.
Its voice felt familiar to Warren, though not in words. The cadence echoed like remembered verses, something he had heard before without understanding.
It wore little. A loincloth hung from its waist, fashioned from hair-like fibers and studded with fragments that looked disturbingly like bone.
“You hear me,” the creature said. “You understand me.”
Its gaze sharpened. “This was not what I expected. You should not be able to see me. You should not be able to move in my presence.”
The creature leaned back, reassessing him. “You are not human. I will not end you as I will end them.”
It gestured vaguely toward the frozen figures behind Warren.
“Go,” it said. “Leave this place while you still can, before I decide otherwise.”