"The hell happened to me?" His chest wouldn’t stop pounding against his ribs. That experience had been too vivid, too heavy, too real to be dismissed as a simple nightmare.

"What is this thing?" He tried to shake off the black mist, but it clung to his palm like superglue, slowly spreading over his fingers and crawling across the back of his hand. "Piss off!" He tried again and again, even using his void magic to attack it, but the black mist stood firm like an impenetrable wall, refusing to break, scatter, or leave his body.

Eventually, it stopped at his wrist, wrapping around his hand like a glove and fusing against his skin.

"It’s exactly the same thing that wrapped around me in that dream... What is this thing? At least I can still use my void magic through it, but... I don’t like this. It gives me an odd premonition..." Max continued to mutter to himself as he examined the strange new feature on his body, if he could even call it that.

The door to his room burst open, and Marcus flew inside, his body bloodied and covered in bruises. He crashed against the ground, rolled several times, and stopped right in front of Max.

"King..." He tried to speak, but his eyes were already growing heavy, and his body gave out before he could say anything more.

Before Max could even react, another figure walked into his room while holding Rosalia by her hair, dragging her bloody body along the floor before throwing her down face first.

The moment Max saw her, his heart grew eerily cold. A rage he had never felt before began to boil in his blood, but it was not the kind that made him shout. It was cold, dark, and suffocating, like something inside him had gone silent before the storm. He lifted his eyes to meet the silver eyes of a young man with a cheeky smile on his face.

"So, this is the great King Maximus of what you call this joke of a place? Voidstar? A child would have come up with a better name." He chuckled as he looked down at Max.

"You come to my place uninvited." Max stood up, his feet slightly betraying him as his head was still spinning from being tipsy. "You beat up my people. You beat up my loved one..." He gathered himself, and with each breath, the aura in the room grew colder.

"This slut? Pfft, after I take your head to my father, I might bring her home to warm my bed. She’s quite fierce, you know? Tried to freeze me to death when I killed that kid." He laughed, not noticing how cold Max was becoming. "Light! Light! Come back to us, Light! Pfft—?"

Max stopped moving for a moment.

The invader’s whole body suddenly shivered. Warning signals screamed at him from every direction as he barely managed to dodge a black wave slashing past his neckline. One second too late, and his head would have rolled.

Crimson pulses boomed around him as he backed off, but he didn’t have even a single breath to relax. A hand wrapped in black mist reached for his throat at a speed impossible to react to. Max grabbed him and slammed him through the wall, shattering it apart as both of them burst into the outside world.

Countless confused eyes snapped upward as their new king transformed into his hybrid dragon form, holding someone by the throat before throwing him like a ragdoll toward the nearby volcano.

The intruder tore across the sky like a crimson shooting star, flying fast before crashing into the volcanic rocks with a terrifying explosion. The world around Max froze and grew dark. He could not see anything else but the man walking out from the lava spilling between the shattered stones. His crimson armor gleamed beneath the sun, the lava warping around him without touching his body, slowly dripping down as if some invisible layer kept even molten rock away from him.

The young man smirked, his medium-length white hair slicked back, while the black strands decorating the ends danced in the scorching air.

"Finally, a worthy opponent." He squatted slightly, and then, without any warning at all, shot into the air like a crimson missile. He was so fast that Max barely had time to react.

A crimson hammer manifested above him, as huge and thick as a castle pillar. It smashed into Max’s body with deafening booms tearing through the sky behind it.

PAH! PAH! PAH!

Max’s entire body wrapped in void armor as he attempted to block it. But the hammer crashed down on him from above with brutal force, sending him flying toward the ground like a shooting star.

The impact shattered several of his bones. That kind of power was not something he had been prepared to face so suddenly. He still didn’t understand why this person had invaded his home, harmed his people, and chosen to target him. But now, Max no longer needed to understand.

He only needed to kill him.

Max rose from the ground, slowly lifting his gaze toward the crashing hammer in the sky. Rage built deeper and deeper inside him, drowning out reason, pain, and everything else. Then, something snapped.

The black mist wrapped around his right hand began to seep into his void blade, turning the edge so black it seemed to swallow light. Max slashed at the air, pouring as much mana as his body could endure into that one attack.

In that moment, something catastrophic unfolded.

The entire sky seemed to turn dark. A black crescent moon wave tore upward and met the giant hammer, slicing through it like a hot knife through butter.

Blood splashed as the young man’s wrist was severed, and his body crashed toward Max with crimson dust raining from the shattered hammer like burning embers. 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝚠𝚎𝚋𝗻𝗼𝕧𝗲𝐥.𝚌𝚘𝐦

His throat met Max’s powerful grip, and a pair of fully black eyes, as if dyed in ink, stared straight into his soul. For the first time, fear crawled onto the young man’s face. It was something he had never tasted before. Something a prince raised above others was never prepared to feel.

"Death... is a fortune I’ll never allow you to experience..." Max muttered, his voice coming out like metal scraping against metal.