Deep in the mountains, hidden inside an unassuming sheet of rock, two figures stood exchanging glances.

No words.

Just silence and the occasional look that carried everything words would have said anyway.

The war had been far more intense than they expected.

That was the part that sat wrong. They weren’t just divine beings. They were Daemons. The gap between what they were and what these defenders should have been capable of was supposed to be fixed. Measurable. Something you could plan around.

Instead they were hiding in a rock.

’It’s that bitch. She’s been planning this for a while.’

The thought moved through both of them at the same time, Victoria’s face surfacing in their minds with the particular clarity that came from someone who had made themselves impossible to forget. 𝓯𝙧𝙚𝒆𝙬𝙚𝒃𝙣𝙤𝒗𝓮𝓵.𝙘𝙤𝙢

At the start they had been willing to pull back and resurface, fall back, let the armies absorb pressure, then reappear when the moment was right to push. Standard. Sensible.

But she was flying around constantly, appearing at every gap, attacking at every given chance without any apparent concern for what it cost her. There was no window she wasn’t watching. No absence she wasn’t ready to fill.

They had no choice.

Full hiding. No movement. No signals.

"Don’t worry."

One of them finally spoke, voice low.

"The army’s third wave just landed. Soon they won’t be able to hold on. Even with her flying around."

The other said nothing.

Looked at the rock wall.

The logic was sound. It had to be. They repeated it to themselves quietly and tried to let it settle into something that felt like certainty.

Neither of them noticed the gaze.

It was there and not there at the same time, passing over them like light through water. Not a presence they could locate. Not something they could point to and name.

But it was on them.

,,,,,,,,,,,,,

"Haaaaa!!"

Enzo pulled in a heavy breath of air and snapped his eyes open.

He looked around for a moment, reorienting, the information from the void vision still settling into coherent shape behind his eyes.

Then he smiled.

"I know where they are."

Victoria was already watching him.

Her eyes went wide, the smile spreading before she had decided to smile, immediate and certain.

She didn’t ask how.

She already understood the shape of it. The evolution of night vision into void vision had changed what Enzo could reach. He could now probe into the nature of beings connected to the void, read what they tried to keep hidden, find what they thought distance and rock and silence would protect.

Daemons. Divine beings. Human gods.

All of it opened.

She was already moving before he finished the thought.

Victoria blasted toward the rock formation, covering the distance at a speed that left no time for what was inside it to prepare. She raised her sword.

—slash

The shell split apart, the rock face peeling open and falling away in pieces, revealing the two figures inside before they had fully processed what was happening.

Before they could react.

Before they could blink, or run, or bring anything to bear.

Two more Daemons had died.

,,,,,,,,,,,,,

On the fifth day the war raged on, but the higher operations had reached a different conclusion.

"Cheers!!"

Dark King Cassius raised his cup inside the castle hall, his voice carrying over the small gathering of men and generals he had pulled together. The room was lit warm, the sound of celebration contained and deliberate, a banquet scaled to the moment.

They had won.

Six out of nine Daemons killed.

Such a feat had never been achieved. Not in any account anyone in the room could point to. Cassius didn’t have the context to feel the full weight of that, no experience with Daemons before this campaign, no reference point to measure it against.

He only knew the number.

Six.

To something like corruption, spread across the breadth of the universe, six Daemons didn’t sound like a number that should shake anything. It was a small subtraction from something vast.

But to everyone else it was a leap far beyond what had been considered possible.

This did not mean the work was done.

"The remaining three are the most powerful in the group." Kig stood on the walls outside the forest, eyes fixed on the distant tree line, voice level. "Wave and Counter are both high-god level. Fire Daemon sits at Lady Victoria’s strength."

He said it to no one in particular and everyone at once.

Cassius didn’t know this was the most sensitive point of the entire campaign. He saw the surface. He saw six dead and a banquet that felt earned.

What was becoming painfully obvious to everyone else around him was that he had held this castle not because he had a plan. Not because of strategy or foresight or anything that could be replicated.

He had held it because he was too egotistical to fully believe he could lose.

And he was, by a significant margin, the most powerful human present.

So it had worked.

"To our victory."

Kig raised his cup on the wall and drank alone, eyes still on the tree line.

.

.

.

.

At the back of it all Victoria stood with her arms crossed.

She wasn’t watching the banquet.

She was watching the vast horde of corrupted beasts still pressing at the edges of the perimeter, the ocean of them unchanged by everything that had happened inside these walls, patient in the way things are patient when they have no ability to feel impatience.

"Your two days will come to an end any moment now, huh?"

She spoke without looking at Enzo directly, her voice warm in a way that didn’t match the battlefield in front of her.

"Shame."

Enzo had told her the objective. Hold this place for seven days. When the seventh day came he would disappear naturally, leaving with the treasures of the night. That was the shape of it.

Which meant the remaining three Daemons would not be permanently killed.

Not this time.

She had known that for a while now.

It was disappointing. She had come here with the expectation of finishing something and would be leaving it unfinished instead.

But there was the other side of it too.

At least one more person she cared about would be safe.

She stood next to him on the wall with the warm smile still on her face and watched the horde move in the distance, and didn’t say anything else.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​h