Abysia suddenly burst into loud, booming laughter. The sound rolled through the dark zone like a possessed thunderclap, so powerful that the clouds above them tore open. She leaped into the air with explosive momentum, soaring meters high while bright, blinding flashes of silver light erupted from her palms. The flashes exploded like cosmic fireworks against the firmament, ripping the purple clouds into shreds as the shadows on the ground danced wildly.
“PERFECT!!!” she thundered, her voice echoing like a reverberation of creation itself.
With a flawless, weightless landing, she touched down on the obsidian sand once more. In one fluid motion, she picked up the heavy silver tray and placed it resolutely onto the chunk of moon glass serving as a table. Jane and Nyx, driven by a burning curiosity and sudden adrenaline, reached out with their hands simultaneously to pull off the heavy cloche.
CLACK!
With a movement so swift the air snapped, Abysia struck their fingers hard. The shockwave of her tap made their arms vibrate all the way up to their shoulders.
“Keep off,” Abysia spoke with a warning look, whereupon her entire demeanor shifted in an instant. The light around her dimmed, and her voice dropped to a tone heavy with historic, bloody gravity. Her silver pupils locked onto the three girls.
“Listen carefully,” Abysia began, as the harsh storm around them suddenly seemed to subside to listen to her monologue. “In the very beginning, long before I myself was tricked and framed by the gentlemen up above, Origina, the great mother of the Moon Goddesses, ruled. She kept the Goddess Realm in absolute peace. But the Corrupted God brought the very first, irreversible sin into the world. He corrupted the very first soul: a powerful, ancient king. That Old King initiated a merciless, total war against everything that breathed. He claimed he wanted to improve humanity and elevate it to a higher level, without ever giving a clear reason for it. It was clear to everyone back then that the madman pursued a darker, grander purpose, but he never spoke it aloud.”
Abysia raised her hand and pointed a slow finger at Jane’s battered claws.
“When the Corrupted God had reached his absolute peak, his pinnacle of power back then, he began mutilating creation. He began crossing human cells with the brute instincts of wild animals. There, out of those cursed laboratories and bloody sacrifices, the very first Beast Humans emerged. They evolved into what you see around you today.”
Absolute silence fell over the zone. The girls did not even move, completely hypnotized by the words. Abysia suddenly looked straight at Nyx with a sharp, meaningful glare.
“BUT… my mother Origina always spoke of one specific race that managed to escape that horror back then. A race that wanted to help and protect the remaining, pure humans from the king’s madness. It was a unique bloodline, genetically fused with the unimaginable properties of the hydra polyp. They migrated en masse back then, toward a legendary, hidden place called Mu. But the Corrupted God tolerated no resistance. He unleashed his powers and sank the entire island of Mu into the deepest, darkest oceans of the old world. But the survivors did not let themselves be slaughtered; they constructed grotesque, giant Bastion ships and massive, armored wagons. As untamed nomads, they roamed across the continents to fortify the world against the creeping darkness.”
Abysia took a deep breath, her gaze hardening. “Their kind was hunted and persecuted mercilessly everywhere. I understand this is a lot for your small heads… BUT you must understand who they were. They ruled and brought peace to the normal world. While the rest of the world slept in fear, they awakened them and kept them sharp. After that bitter persecution, however, no one ever saw them again. People thought they had been wiped out. People wondered if they were even still alive…”
An icy, proud smile appeared on her lips.
“YES. They live. And Faustus is the living, walking proof of that.”
The girls’ eyes went wide. Jane unconsciously took a step back.
“The Bansadarius bloodline,” Abysia continued, her voice swelling with epic grandeur, “does not simply consist of regular Beast Humans. They carry the lost blood of the hydra polyp Beast Human within them. A biological anomaly that grants their cells the ability to divide at a terrifying pace, to regenerate, and to be virtually immortal against physical wear or fatal wounds. And as if that were not enough, his mother was a creature straight from the deepest, burning abysses of the underworld: a purebred Hellspawn, a Morstarning.”
Abysia stepped closer to the table, her eyes glowing in the darkness. “Faustus is one of those few escaped descendants. His father was the man subjected to the most gruesome, inhuman experiments, making Faustus the very first stable, first generation mix of these two extremes. As a young boy, he had to watch with his own eyes as his mother and father died brutally right in front of his face, slaughtered by the legions. Only his uncle barely survived back then.”
Her voice rose to an intensity that made the walls of moon glass quiver, her monologue reaching boiling point.
“At that exact moment, something snapped inside that boy. Covered in the warm blood of his own parents, in the most legendarily written way ever recorded in my mother’s secret archives, he slaughtered an entire, heavily armed legion of oppressors all by himself! His movements were a pure, terrifying choreography of death! Thanks to the hydra polyp cells, his energy split and recovered faster than the swords could cut him, while the Morstarning blood propelled him through the lines like a living natural disaster! In the midst of that slaughter, standing at the absolute summit of a giant mountain of corpses and severed limbs,”
Abysia remained motionless, her palms flat on the gleaming surface of the meteorite glass. Her silver pupils contracted into two razor-sharp slits as she looked at the three girls one by one. The harsh storm wind seemed to freeze at her command, causing the falling snowflakes to hang in the air like glass pins.
“Look at me,” Abysia spoke, her voice so soft it sounded more dangerous than her loudest shout. “You think you are sitting here drowning in your own weakness? You think the death of that golden lion was the end of the chessboard?”
She leaned forward slightly, casting the shadow of her divine form completely over the trio.
“Faustus is my personal double agent. I personally drove him into that burning abyss. And that flash you saw in the arena, right before the walls collapsed… that was his entrance. Silarias is safe. He is breathing. His soul is still standing.”
The effect of her words was as if gravity in the zone had spontaneously inverted. Jane’s breath caught with a raspy, shivering sound; her claws, which had been hanging limp in the sand a moment ago, clenched tightly into deep grooves in the obsidian. Lila let her head fall back, her lips trembling as she let out a choked, disbelieving sound.
With Nyx, something fundamental snapped. The icy, unyielding pride she wore like a shield across her chest shattered audibly. Her pitch-black hands clutched her own throat, her chest heaved violently up and down, and the very first glowing tears broke free. They trickled unstoppably down her cheeks, freezing into tiny silver pearls the moment they touched the freezing air. Silarias was still alive. The void had not torn him apart.
Abysia did not even give the silence a chance to land. Her monologue cut straight through the emotional wreckage, her voice swelling with deep, strategic triumph.
“I saw things go wrong up there,” Abysia continued, her gaze fixed tightly on the weeping Nyx. “I saw the walls of the Bastion starting to crack under the pressure of those corrupt dogs. And tell me… who else in god’s name was I supposed to send? Who knows the depths of that golden energy better? Who can protect him in that coma and guard his foundations other than his very own… COUSIN.”
COUSIN.
The word struck like a sonic boom. Its echo rolled tangibly over the moon glass, shattering the frozen snowflakes in the air into a thousand pieces. Jane, Lila, and Nyx snapped their heads up, their eyes wide open. The insane resemblance in the jawline, that untamed, tormented look in Faustus’s eyes, it was no coincidence. It was the bloodline. The unstoppable, ancient bloodline regrouping itself across the dimensions.
“The puzzle pieces are falling into place, aren’t they?” Abysia snapped with a theatrical, proud laugh. With an explosive sweep of her arm, she grabbed the heavy silver knob of the cloche. WOOSH!
She lifted the cloche with such brute force that a vacuum formed, blowing the black sand away in a circle. The heavy, medicinal scent of the herbal tea exploded into their faces, mingled with an aroma so intense, so warm, and so overwhelmingly sweet that their stomachs voiced a loud, painful protest in unison.
“Herewith, ladies…” Abysia spoke, pointing with a regal gesture to the tray where a golden brown, perfectly round pastry lay steaming in the cold. “This is a Mooncake. But make no mistake, this is no baker’s brew to quiet your hungry stomachs. This cake contains an extremely secret, divine ingredient from the deepest chambers of Origina’s palace. What that ingredient will do to your cells, I will explain to you in precise detail once this training is completely over and you have sorted things out out there under—”
She held her breath, her finger raised in warning. The three girls looked at each other with questioning, sweat smeared faces. Sorted out under what?
Abysia’s face darkened, the shadows beneath her eyes growing deeper and colder than ever before. “YES. Listen to what I am saying! After this training, in exactly one day, an unimaginable creature is coming for you. A prehistoric monster from the darkest eras of creation. The prince has sent a bloodthirsty Berserker after you, a living weapon bred specifically to grind your bones into dust! But this cake… the moment you eat this Mooncake, the secret ingredient acts as a divine catalyst. It dramatically strengthens and boosts your powers to an unimaginable degree! It repairs your physical cells in a fraction of a second, tears down the internal barriers that blocked your abilities, forces your spirit beast to its knees, and grants you the absolute, total control that you lack so desperately right now! It eliminates your violent electrical feedback, neutralizes your physical exhaustion, fuses your conflicting elements together, and ensures that you can do whatever you want with your forms in one single stroke! Is that damn well understood?! That is—”
Her deadly serious, epic warning was interrupted in the most brazen, brute manner.
The girls had tuned out the words about prehistoric monsters and berserkers halfway through her sentence. Driven by a primal, pure survival instinct and the insane scent of the pastry, the three lunged simultaneously onto the silver tray like a pack of starved wolves. There was no royal etiquette left, no fear of the goddess.
“Oh my god, is this hazelnut?! This is seriously good, oh!” Jane brought out with a stuffed mouth. Her fangs flashed as she tore off a giant piece of the cake, golden brown crumbs literally flying across her chin and scraped neck.
“Delicious! That texture… it just melts on your tongue!” Lila added, hiccuping. She had not even pulled the remains of her damaged dress into proper place, but was already chewing her second giant bite with thick, puffed cheeks, scraping the sweet sauce off the tray with her fingers.
Even Nyx, whose silver tears were still wet on her cheeks, showed no shame whatsoever. She stood feasting with large, hungry jaws, her gaze wild and focused on the dough as she worked down a massive chunk of cake, swallowing greedily to force the divine energy down her dry throat.
Abysia stood by and her mouth literally dropped open in pure, incredulous frustration. Her carefully constructed, dramatic speech had just been completely gnawed to bits by three gorging teenagers. Her forehead creased, the veins on her temples began to swell dangerously, and she clenched her fists so hard that silver lightning shot from her knuckles.
“I AM SAYING!!!” Abysia roared, her voice escalating into a furious, divine bellow that shattered the meteorite glass beneath the tray. “THAT A PREHISTORIC BERSERKER IS COMING TO CHOP YOUR HEADS OFF!!! THIS IS NOT A COZY PICNIC, THIS IS YOUR ONLY CHANCE TO TAME AND BOOST THAT CURSED POWER!!! DO YOU EVEN HEAR ME?!!!”
The words finally struck home, but the reaction was far grander and more violent than Abysia could have anticipated. The active substances and the boosted, ancient energy of the Mooncake reached their bloodstreams at that exact instant.
In a fraction of a second, the zone exploded into a visual spectacle of pure escalation. The three girls became completely, terrifyingly riled up.
Jane’s eyes snapped open, glowing with an intense, neon blue light that banished the shadows from the entire arena. Thick, crackling bolts of lightning shot out from her muscles with loud snapping force, striking across the obsidian sand. She slammed her massive, transformed claws together noisily, sending a shockwave of pure electricity that charred the remaining crumbs on the tray.
Lila’s pure white, exhausted face was swept away in an instant by a healthy, deep purple, battle ready glow. The ground beneath her feet split open with a loud cracking sound; meters-thick, thorny vines shot up from the depths like giant, possessed whips. They vibrated with terrifying, royal potential and smashed holes into the surrounding moon glass, filling the air with the scent of bursting greenery.
Nyx swallowed her last bite with a hard gulp. The moment the dough reached her stomach, a deep, pitch-black and silver void glow erupted from all her pores. Her liquid silver hair reached meters high into the air, dancing like living flames. The ice crown on her head began to grow exponentially with a terrifying, clear crackle, thick, razor-sharp glacial peaks forming around her temples as her gaze transformed into that of an absolute, merciless ruler of the night.
The fatigue was burned away in a single stroke. The fear was destroyed. With stuffed mouths, burning, glowing eyes, and their boosted, transformed powers exploding around them with a deafening noise, the three girls stood shoulder to shoulder. The lightning crackled, the vines hissed, and the void hummed terrifyingly loud. They looked toward the horizon, ready to welcome the prehistoric hell with open arms and show the entire world who they were. He found a Void Anting. The Gem bound itself directly to his mixed, tormented soul. And with that new, divine power, he unleashed the most legendary choreo that has ever defied the laws of physics! He flashed through dimensions simultaneously, tore space into a thousand blood-red pieces, and caused the remaining legions to implode in pure, hysterical panic before they could even visually register him!”
Abysia fell abruptly silent. The quiet that followed was deafening. Her hand now lay motionless on the heavy silver knob of the cloche, while the silver sand inside the hourglass kept falling without mercy.