Trinity’s team crossed into a new zone.

Something was wrong with the air. It pressed down on lungs, in a place where not even weeds dared to live. Above them, veins of lightning carved the black sky, crashing down in relentless intervals.

The ground beneath their boots was fractured, veins of abyss gaping below. The air reeked of ozone, scorched dirt, and static so thick it stung the throat. Breathing hurt.

“This place… doesn’t feel right,” Emilia muttered, scanning the empty wasteland. Her words drowned instantly under the crack of another thunderstrike bolt—divine steel tearing the heavens apart.

Trinity said nothing. Every step was deliberate, his focus cutting through the storm. Danger breathed somewhere in this void, coiled and waiting.

Then it struck.

A bolt slammed down in front of them, exploding in blinding white. Their shadows stretched, distorted, shredded by the glare. From within the thunder’s roar, a force bellowed—ancient, jagged, merciless.

Out of the light, it appeared.

The third Warden—the Eye of Thunder.

No stable form. Just a colossal sphere of crackling electricity shaped into a lidless eye, ringed by ten orbiting orbs of raw plasma. They spun in perfect gravitational lock, humming with an energy that made bone marrow quiver.

Trinity launched a wave of dark energy. Instead of harm, the Eye devoured it whole—its size swelling, arcs sparking harder, brighter, hungrier.

The ten orbs realigned, forming an ellipse around the core. A spear of celestial bolt forked from its heart and detonated down upon the squad.

Emilia rolled, twin pistols snapping fire into the storm. Her shot tore into one orb dead-center. But the energy didn’t scatter—it flowed, split, and bled seamlessly into the others. A second later, thunder lash whipped back in a feint, striking at Len from behind.

Len vanished in a blink—then reappeared at the Eye’s flank, daggers already drawn. An ice blade slashed forward… only to shatter from the inside out, fragments dissolving before they hit the ground.

They pressed harder. Emilia unleashed a full-auto barrage, muzzle flash strobing the dark. Len fanned a storm of phantom blades, hundreds piercing in a brutal cascade.

The Eye spun. Faster. Faster. Its orbit blurred into a ring of sheer defense, parrying every strike. Trinity raised his palm, conjuring a void shield to siphon the voltage—only to feel it betray him, each absorbed volt feeding the Warden instead.

“Magic just fuels it. Physical attacks heal it. What is this thing!?” Emilia hissed, slamming a new mag into place.

Then her attention caught Len again. And it wasn’t the same Len.

The hand gripping the dagger trembled. Their gaze burned—not with cold calculation, but something far darker. Rage. Hatred. Paranoia. A shadow of betrayal lingered in that stare.

Her pulse spiked.

The orbs shifted once more—this time, stacking in a perfect vertical line. They spun, vibrating at supersonic pitch, then ruptured into a single catastrophic wave.

An EMP pulse ripped outward, a stormfront of raw energy crashing down on the trio.

The war of thunder had only just begun.

And with it, the secrets between them… were about to explode.

Len’s family had once been one of Eden’s oldest strategist bloodlines—minds sharpened for war, the kind of lineage trusted to carry orders from the high council straight to the frontlines without a single crack in the chain. But the most dangerous truth was this: Len’s father was the liberal reformer who founded Legacynthium, the clandestine weapons research institute no one dared whisper within earshot of House Stromwood.

It was inevitable. Emilia’s family, champions of absolute control and rigid hierarchy, saw Len’s kin as enemies by birth. The feud had been carved into stone generations ago—and it never faded.

As a child, Emilia often sneaked into the hidden labs, tinkering with weapon prototypes she had no right to touch, even stealing schematics out of sheer mischief. Her own kin branded her ‘reckless,’ ‘unfit.’

Len, meanwhile, withdrew further inward. The pale-haired child wanted nothing to do with politics, vendettas, or family wars. No friends. No trust. Only family—that was all.

Until the day it happened.

The day catastrophe descended upon Eden’s inner city. Sirens wailed across the crystal spires, red alarms flooding the skies of the aristocrats. Too late. Far too late.

Shadows moved across the horizon. Kill-machines tore through the unthinkable—Eden’s invincible defense grid. The sound was no thunder; it was the low rumble of engines devouring the sky. Within minutes, the city that had stood as an eternal fortress collapsed into a killing ground.

A small child cowered in the sixth-floor chamber of the Strategium Hall. Smoke and fire clawed upward beyond the glass window, black veins crawling into the heavens.

“No matter what happens, don’t leave this room. Do you understand?” The mother’s words were still soft, even amidst the chaos. She carried a glow—the gentleness only a mother could bear.

The child nodded, throat constricted, fear strangling every breath.

She shut the door quietly, locking the air in place.

Moments later—explosions tore through the ground below. Screams mingled with the shriek of shifting gears, a metallic gnash echoing through the halls, teeth of a beast drunk on blood.

Compelled by dread, Len nudged the door open. Hallways once lit by the grace of crystal veins were now smeared with blood, shards, bodies torn apart and scattered—dry leaves in a nightmare storm.

A metallic shriek scraped against the floor.

It stood nearly two meters tall, built of rustless alloys, graphene-coated to swallow light. Its frame bent unnaturally with multi-jointed limbs—eight bladed tails forged of steel. They writhed with obscene grace, tips dripping crimson trails, the stench of iron sharp enough to choke.

The beast dissolved into the smoke, invisible until its red eyes flared alive—eight tails cracked the air and came whipping down.

Instinct snapped before thought. The child dove low, sliding beneath the machine’s belly, running until lungs nearly burst, feet pounding stone floors that shattered in detonations behind.

“Mother!” The cry tore from a raw throat.

She reappeared, blade in hand, the other reaching back.

“Fe—Len! Run!”

She never finished.

Another tail came screaming out of the void, piercing her abdomen clean through.

Blood gushed from her lips as the steel coil wrapped her body, dragging her skyward. Bones cracked. Her arms flailed, grasping for her child—the world trembling in her desperation, words drowned before they could leave.

Then came the sound. Short, sharp. The sound of tearing cloth.

Her head was gone. Ripped clean from her shoulders. Blood carved the air, spraying across the child’s face.

And then—silence.

The world collapsed in that instant. A heart ripped out, a life unmade.

The child wanted to run—but legs froze, nailed into stone. Wanted to scream—but the voice was locked inside bone. Wanted to cry—but there were never enough tears.

Everything went black. Len crumpled to the ground amidst the poison smoke, left only with a scar of death that even time would never dare touch.

From that day forward, every time Len drifted into darkness, the final image returned—the mother’s eyes, wide open, never closing. A gaze no one had saved.

And the one who came in that final second… was Trinity.

He had chosen to protect Emilia’s family first. Strategium data carried weight in the emergency plans. Len’s family did not.

Hatred became fuel, burning a child too fast, too soon. It pried open the core of sorcery within, and the darkness that filled the cracks became the perfect channel for Fergo to slip inside.

Len never forgot the smell of blood that night.

Never forgave.

It didn’t matter if they were called Eden’s greatest hero or a devil from another world—

Whoever let her die… would pay for every single drop of blood with their own.

The thunder’s roar pressed inside their chests. Amid the fractured stone plains lit violet by electrical arcs, Len stood frozen—feet trembling as the earth shivered under the compression of magic so dense it crushed every atom into raw electricity.

In their hand gleamed a dimensional ice dagger. Reflected on the blade was Trinity’s face—not the unshakable commander, but a man nearly collapsing, his barrier long gone, his body rattled by the backlash of magic pushed beyond all limits.

“Len…! What are you doing?!” Emilia cut through the storm with her words.

No answer. Only the grip tightening, stance locked on the man ahead. Not an enemy—something far more dangerous: an unsettled memory.

Voices layered in Len’s skull, a chorus of ghosts.

“Now. Just strike…”
“He won’t even see it coming. Where can he run?”
“Your mother will finally be free…”

Through the noise, the mother’s gaze surfaced—the way she’d looked in the final seconds of her life.

Len’s hand trembled. The dagger nearly slipped.

Then a skyfire bolt tore the heavens open. The blade plunged forward with it—aimed straight at Trinity, rage unbound.

CRACK!

The dagger exploded mid-strike, scattering into a storm of energy shards that skimmed past Trinity instead of piercing him.

Emilia’s whole being snapped wide. A heartbeat ago, Len had meant to kill him. What happened was the opposite—so impossible it froze her breath.

Len’s own face mirrored the confusion. Trapped in a maze of their own thoughts.

Why had they spared him? Or was it only that they wanted to kill him with their own hand? Not even Len had the answer.

But there was no time.

The Eye of Thunder ignited again. Its ten orbiting orbs spun faster—ten wheels of stormfire grinding the air.

And Trinity—legend that he was—slipped seamlessly into analysis mode.

A glyph flickered across his inner HUD: [LV. 90 — Sequential Analysis Active]. Graphs of the orbs’ energy chains hovered in his vision, numbers aligning with precision.

“Every strike we make—” Trinity growled, teeth bared “—it transfers energy to the next in sequence.” His brow narrowed, tracing the rhythm.

“Emilia. Len. Listen carefully. Hit them in this order.” His command was steel, striking hard and unyielding.

“Three… seven… two… nine… finish on five!”

Emilia spun, graceful as a ballerina with guns. Her cannon barked, gravity rounds bending mid-arc into the target.

[STATUS: Lightning Orb #3 Destroyed — Chain Broken]

Len dove from above, dagger flashing in a perfect cut, sharper than any computer-guided trajectory.

[STATUS: #7 Destroyed — Feedback Loop Disrupted]

One after another, the orbs fell—dominoes collapsing in rapid succession. Each burst screamed sharp through the sky as their chain-links shattered into sparks.

“Len, harpoon construct. Emilia, switch to piercing fire mode.”

No hesitation. No questions.

Len’s hands carved sigils in the air. From ice-dimension runes, a massive harpoon took shape, its head spinning with voltage’s own pulse. Emilia loaded it into the firing cradle, sliding the switch with surgical precision.

[Burst Mode — LV. 85]

“Fire!” Trinity’s shout split the storm apart.

The shot screamed. A beam tore through the heavens, slicing thunder into raw streaks, the energy shrieking like tortured souls. The harpoon drank it all—every volt channeled into its cracking frame.

[STATUS: Dimensional Ice Harpoon — Energy Intake 84% / Structure Fracturing]

Before it shattered, Trinity thrust out his hand. A black hole ripped open, gravity reversed, dragging the storm into its maw. Time itself bent as thunder collapsed inward—until silence, broken only by the fracture of air.

The Eye of Thunder writhed, its body of energy convulsing before detonating into a storm of shards that burned out midair. Only glowing remnants drifted down across the broken ground.

[STATUS: Thunder Warden Destroyed — Power Transferred]

Power roared through Trinity’s veins. Every capillary blazed, thunder echoing within his skull.

[LV UP: Trinity — Power Restored to Rank A+]

He stood, body drinking in lightning, transmuting it into his own abyssal core. Not the full force of old—but more than enough to take back what was stolen. His amber eyes gleamed—the predator reborn.

And Len…

Len felt the chance for vengeance vanish forever. Worse—the question echoing in their hollow chest:

Why had I let it slip through my fingers?