The room faded.

Not gradually—there was no gentle transition—but abruptly, as if someone had closed a door on reality itself. The wide windows overlooking Carac, the warm mana lamps, the quiet luxury of the suite… all of it dissolved into nothing.

Selendra closed her eyes.

Absolute concentration.

The only thing that remained was sensation.

Blood.

She felt it first as rhythm. The steady, accelerating pulse beneath her lips. Trafalgar's heartbeat, strong and controlled, thudding against her senses with unnatural clarity. Each beat echoed louder than the last, filling the void where the world used to be.

Thump.

Thump.

Thump.

From Trafalgar's side, there was nothing to do but watch. He stood still, eyes fixed on her, body tense but unmoving. He could feel the pull at his wrist—the steady draw of blood leaving his body—but more than that, he could hear it. The rush in his ears. The way his own heartbeat seemed to dominate the silence.

That was all that existed now.

For Selendra, the blood reached her tongue.

And she froze.

This wasn't human blood.

Not really.

It carried weight—density far beyond what it should have had. It was thick with mana, layered, compressed, as if countless things had been folded into a single stream. Ancient. Pressurized. Alive in a way that made her instincts recoil and lean forward at the same time.

It didn't taste vampiric.

It didn't taste human.

It tasted like something she had never consumed before.

Rich.

Exquisite.

Her breath hitched despite herself.

'What… are you?' the thought surfaced unbidden, immediately drowned out as the Blood Oracle skill activated in full.

The blood became symbols.

No—layers.

Information didn't arrive as words or images at first, but as impressions stacked on top of each other. Echoes. Shadows of meaning. Things that felt like memories but weren't. Scenes that carried the weight of the past, the immediacy of the present, and the instability of futures that hadn't happened yet.

Blurred images surfaced.

A battlefield that might have been yesterday—or centuries from now.

Flashes of movement. Fire. Collapse. Screams without sound.

Figures that existed only as silhouettes, half-formed and wrong.

The more blood she consumed, the sharper it became.

And then—

Resistance.

Selendra stiffened.

Something pushed back.

Like an eye opening.

Cold awareness brushed against her perception, sudden and unmistakable. The sensation wasn't hostile—but it was deliberate. As if whatever lay beyond the visions had noticed her gaze and calmly returned it.

Her breath caught.

'This isn't supposed to happen.'

The flow of information surged violently.

The layered echoes shattered.

The vision collapsed inward—

—and Selendra was no longer watching.

She fell.

Not through darkness, but into an image that did not belong to her.

She was inside it now.

Selendra was dropped—ripped from the last anchor of herself and cast into a place where she did not belong.

She had no body.

No breath.

No sense of weight.

There was no self to inhabit—only sight.

The world burned.

Not with red or orange flame, but with blue fire—deep, unnatural, licking through shattered stone and twisted metal. It crawled along the ground like a living thing, coiling around ruins and corpses alike. The air shimmered, heavy with residual mana, drifting like ash after a spellstorm too vast to fully dissipate.

Bodies were everywhere.

Human. Beastkin. Elves.

Monsters lay among them—great broken forms, some barely recognizable. And worse still, shapes that defied clean definition. Void creatures. Things with wrong angles and torn silhouettes, their remains leaking darkness instead of blood.

There was no order to it.

This was not a battlefield in the middle of conflict.

This was the after.

After screams. After resistance. After hope had been ground down into the dirt and burned.

Selendra could not hear sound, yet the silence itself felt deafening.

Then she saw him.

A single figure stood at the center of the devastation, his back turned to her.

She could not see his face—could not turn her gaze no matter how she tried. The perspective was fixed, enforced. She was seeing through someone else.

The man wore black armor—polished, intact in its form even if marked by battle. It wasn't cracked or crude. It was designed to impose. To dominate the space around it. Every plate reflected the blue flames with a cold, mirror-like sheen.

A helmet covered his head completely. No visor, no opening that would allow her to glimpse his expression. Whoever he was, his face was not meant to be seen—by her, or by anyone.

Resting against his shoulder was a black sword, its surface swallowing light—except for the dark blue glow pulsing faintly along its edge. Flames of the same unnatural color burned around him, licking at broken stone, corpses, shattered weapons.

Around him lay bodies—humans, elves, beastkin, monsters, void creatures. No formation. No sides. No distinction. Death without preference.

And yet…

He did not look triumphant. He did not look defeated.

He simply stood there.

As if this outcome had always been unavoidable.

The vision shattered.

It broke apart like glass struck by a hammer, blue fire snuffed out in an instant as darkness swallowed everything whole.

Selendra was ripped back into her body.

Her eyes flew open as she stumbled forward, grip loosening on Trafalgar's wrist. Her balance failed her for a split second, heels scraping softly against the floor as she caught herself on the edge of the table.

Her throat burned.

The taste—thick, iron-heavy, wrong—surged upward before she could suppress it.

Selendra turned sharply and coughed.

Blood splattered across the floor in dark crimson drops. A few flecks stained Trafalgar's sleeve before sliding down the fabric. More followed uncontrolled.

She gasped, one hand braced against the table, the other trembling as she wiped her lips with the back of her hand. Her breathing was uneven now, shallow and strained, as if she'd surfaced from deep water too quickly.

"…Sorry," she said quietly.

There was no embarrassment in her voice. No attempt to hide it.

Only honesty.

She straightened slowly, swallowing hard, crimson eyes unfocused for a moment before settling back on Trafalgar. Whatever she had seen hadn't left her untouched. The usual composure—the controlled curiosity—was fractured.

"That wasn't… normal," Selendra admitted, voice low.

She drew in a breath, steadying herself.

"I'll tell you exactly what I saw," she continued. "Nothing more. Nothing less."

Her gaze didn't leave his.

"A battlefield," she said. "After everything was already over. No formations or banners. Just… bodies. Everywhere. Humans. Elves. Beastkin. Monsters. Things that didn't belong to this world." Her jaw tightened slightly. "Void creatures, too."

She paused, as if choosing her next words with care.

"There was fire. Blue fire. It was not natural by any means. It burned without spreading… like it was clinging to the aftermath itself."

Selendra closed her eyes briefly, then reopened them.

"At the center stood a man in black armor. Polished. Intact. Designed to dominate." Her voice lowered further. "He wore a helmet. I couldn't see his face. I wasn't meant to."

Her eyes flicked to Trafalgar, just for a moment.

"He rested a black sword on his shoulder. It glowed faintly—dark blue.'

Silence followed.

"I don't know when this happens," Selendra said finally. "I don't know who those dead are. I don't know who he was."

She met his gaze fully now.

"But the vision revolved around you, so it was possible that the man I saw was you."

Selendra fell silent.

Trafalgar didn't speak either.

Both of them understood the same thing.

This was fate, a possibility of one of the outcomes.

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