"I accept," Dante said, meeting the Goddess's galactic eyes. "Now begin."

Liora looked at him for a long moment. Her expression was complicated. Sad. Proud. Sorry.

"Very well," she said softly. "You have chosen knowledge over power. Understanding over strength. I will honor that choice."

Dante thought 'I just chose it in amusement, and I was bored too of thinking what to ask next. Lets see how this goes.'

She raised her hand. The endless white space around them began to shift. Stars appeared in the void. Galaxies. Entire universes spinning slowly around them.

"To understand your truth," she began, "you must first understand the nature of reality itself."

Dante watched silently. Listening. Learning.

"There is not one world, Dante. There are many. Countless worlds scattered across the multiverse, each one unique. Each one alive in its own way."

The stars around them brightened. He could see them now—worlds. Planets. Some green with life. Some dead and gray. Some burning. Some frozen.

"Each world has its own guardian," Liora continued. "A god bound to that reality. We are the foundation. The protectors. We maintain the balance. We keep our worlds alive which are separated from one another by a distance no mortal can imagine."

One of the planets glowed brighter than the others. Dante recognized it somehow like Earth but different. Green forests. Blue oceans. Cities of white stone.

"This is Zerawell," she said. "My world. The world you are about to enter. I am its guardian. Its god. Its protector."

Dante nodded slowly. Understanding so far.

Then her expression darkened.

"But your world..." She gestured, and another planet appeared. This one looked different. Familiar. Skyscrapers. Cars. Technology instead of magic.

Earth.

"Your world does not fit the pattern," she said quietly. "It is an anomaly."

Dante's eyes narrowed. "What do you mean?"

"Your world has no guardian," Liora said. "No god watching over it. No divine foundation keeping it stable."

She paused, then added carefully: "And it is not alone."

More planets appeared around them. Dozens. Hundreds. All of them dark. Lifeless. Or barely surviving.

"Hundreds of worlds exist like yours," she explained. "Godless. Abandoned. Worlds that suffered the cruelest fate imaginable."

"What happened to them?" Dante asked. His voice was calm, but inside, something cold was settling in his chest.

"They were betrayed," Liora said simply. "By the very gods they worshipped."

The image changed. One of the dark planets came closer. Dante could see it had once been beautiful. Green. Alive. But now it was dying. Crumbling.

"Every world has a core," Liora explained. "The world core is the heart of reality itself. It is the source of all life. All breath. All magic. The mana that flows through everything—it comes from the core."

She looked at him directly. "Your world had a core once. So did all those other godless worlds. But their gods... devoured them."

Dante went very still.

"Devoured?" he repeated slowly.

"Yes." Her voice was heavy with old sorrow. "The gods they trusted, the gods they prayed to, the gods who were supposed to protect them... consumed their world cores. Took all the power for themselves. And left their worlds to die."

Dante's mind was racing. Processing. "Why?"

"That is what we do not fully understand," Liora admitted. "Some gods became bored. Some became corrupted. Some wanted more power. Dominance. Fun, perhaps. We do not know the reason. We only know what they did."

She gestured, and the images around them shifted again. Showing gods—massive, terrible beings—reaching down and tearing the hearts from their own worlds.

"When a god consumes their world core, they are stripped of most of their power. They lose their title. Their domain. They become what we call Fallen Gods. No longer divine. No longer bound by the rules that govern us."

"And then?" Dante asked.

"Then they are free," Liora said bitterly. "Free to roam. Free to enter other worlds. Free to hide among mortals. We remaining gods cannot detect them easily. And if we try to interfere directly—if we break the rules to stop them—we risk becoming Fallen ourselves."

She looked tired suddenly. Ancient.

"So the Fallen roam freely across the multiverse," she said. "Moving between worlds. Hiding in our domains. We cannot stop them. Cannot fight them. Not without destroying ourselves."

Dante was silent. Absorbing all of this. The scale of it. The implications.

His world had been murdered. Not by war. Not by disaster. But by the very god it had worshipped. Consumed. Devoured. Left to die slowly.

And his people—everyone he'd ever known in his previous life—had been living on a corpse world. Struggling to survive on scraps of what had once been abundant. Evolving weaker. Losing magic. Forgetting what they'd once had.

All because their god had gotten bored. Or greedy. Or simply stopped caring.

The cruelty of it was almost beautiful in its simplicity.

"But you found a solution," he said quietly. It wasn't a question.

Liora nodded. "We did. Or we thought we did."

She waved her hand again. The scene changed. Showed a single soul—translucent, glowing—drifting through empty space.

"When people from our worlds die, their souls return to us," she explained. "For judgment. For rebirth. For purposes I cannot explain."

"But when people from godless worlds die..." The glowing soul drifted aimlessly, lost. "Their souls have nowhere to go. No god to return to. They simply... wander. Lost in the void between realities."

"Until one day, one such soul reached us."

The wandering soul touched one of the bright worlds. Was pulled inside.

"It gave us an idea," Liora said. "If we cannot interfere in our own worlds directly... if we cannot fight the Fallen ourselves... then perhaps someone else could."

Her galaxy eyes looked at Dante with something like guilt.

"Foreign entities," she said. "Souls from godless worlds. Anomalies not bound by our world's rules. People who could be... used."

The word hung in the air like a blade.

Used.

"The very first soul that reached us," Liora continued, "we took it. All of us gods together. We made it strong. Made it invincible with our combined divine power. We sent it to hunt the Fallen."

The glowing soul in the vision became bright. Powerful. A warrior of light.

"He succeeded," she said. "He killed two Fallen Gods in five years. Saved countless lives. For years, he was everything we hoped he would be. A true hero."

She paused. Her expression darkened.

"But the power we gave him... it corrupted him. Changed him. Made him into something worse than what we were fighting against. He started small. Taking control of a village. Then a city. Then a kingdom. He declared himself emperor. God-king. He ruled with absolute power and absolute cruelty."

"He became a tyrant. A monster. The very world we sent him to save... he nearly destroyed it completely."

The bright soul in the vision turned dark. Twisted. Evil.

"So we sent another soul," Liora said. "A woman this time. We made her even stronger. Gave her more power. She killed the first champion. Corrected our mistake. Saved the world from his tyranny."

The second soul appeared. Brighter than the first.

"But she too fell," Liora said quietly. "The power. The worship. The adoration of the people she saved. It went to her head. Within a decade, she was no better than him. Different methods, perhaps. Kinder at first. But still a tyrant in the end."

"So we sent a third. Then a fourth. The cycle repeated again and again. Each time we hoped it would be different. Each time we were wrong."

More souls appeared. Each one bright. Each one turning dark eventually.

"Until we realized the problem," Liora said quietly. "The issue was not the souls we chose. It was the power we gave them. Absolute power. Absolute freedom. It corrupted them all."

She looked at Dante directly now.

"So we changed our approach," she said. "We decided we needed more than just powerful warriors. We needed control."

The vision shifted. Showed a massive arena. The trial grounds.

"We created the Trial System," Liora explained. "A way to test foreign souls before giving them power. A way to shape them. Mold them. Break them down and rebuild them according to our needs."

Dante's jaw tightened. He said nothing.

"The trials test many things," she continued. "Strength. Will. Survival instinct. But most importantly, they test friendship. Loyalty. Sacrifice and near death experience--the feeling to be the weak."

"We show the souls what near-death feels like. What struggle is. What it means to depend on others. To protect others. To lose others."

Her voice became colder. More clinical.

"Most betray each other. Most fail. But the few who succeed—the ones who survive together, who protect each other, who genuinely care—those are the ones we choose."

"Not because they're powerful," she said. "But because they're controllable. Their bonds make them predictable. Their kindness makes them manageable. They become weapons that believe they're heroes."

She looked at him with something that might have been pity.

"We choose kind souls, Dante. Compassionate souls. Souls like yours. Because kind people are easy to manipulate. Easy to control. Easy to aim at our enemies and watch them charge forward, believing they're doing good."

The truth settled on him like ice water.

"And so the new system began," Liora said. "The trials. The summoning. Implemented simultaneously across every god's domain. All of us working together to create an army of controlled heroes. The soul that reached us were rare and we needed more so we interfered in the domain we can with our divinity we..."

There was guilt in her voice. "We bought or snatched you all from your lives."

"The cycle has continued ever since," she finished. "And that cycle has led us to this moment. To you, standing here. A hero forged in our crucible. Shaped by our design. Ready to serve our purpose."

She fell silent.

The images around them faded. The stars dimmed. They were alone again in the endless white space.

Dante stood there quietly. His face was calm. Unreadable.

Inside, his mind was moving at lightning speed. Processing. Calculating.

He understood now. Understood everything.

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