Karl sat in the silence of his cell, his back pressed against the cold wall, the restraints glowing faintly around his wrists. The hum of the suppression field was steady, a low vibration that settled into his bones. He stared at nothing.
The ship was alive, always humming, always moving, but inside here time didn’t matter. It was just him and the weight of memory.
He let his head tilt back against the steel, eyes half-lidded, and for the first time in a long while, he let himself drift back.
The monster realm’s heart. A sprawl of stone and fire, towers carved from black rock that reached into the clouds, banners rippling with the symbol of his bloodline. At its center, the citadel. Home. Prison.
His father sat on the throne there. The Dragon King.
Karl remembered the first time he felt it—the sheer force of that presence. The king didn’t even need to roar. Just walking into the same chamber was enough to make the weak collapse. He was Alpha Rank, the kind of being that didn’t just rule by crown but by nature. Even the strongest generals bowed their heads when he entered.
And Karl was his son.
Born into a line of power that stretched back further than memory, he should have been a star. But he wasn’t. He was the crack in the bloodline.
His younger brother—born only a handful of years after him—was everything their father wanted. Strong. Gifted. By the time he was a child, his aura was sharp enough to cut stone. By the time Karl hit C Rank, his brother was already SSS, worshipped like a prince of gods.
Karl remembered the way the king looked at him. Not disappointment. Not sadness. Just disgust. As if Karl had shamed his very blood.
"Pathetic," the king had spat one night in the throne chamber, his aura pressing down like a storm. "An insect under my roof."
The words burned even now.
Not just exiled. Stripped of everything. His name whispered in mockery. His father had turned all the realm’s resources to his younger brother, declaring him heir. Guards dragged Karl from the palace like a criminal.
But that wasn’t what broke him.
Karl had wandered. Weak, nameless, no one caring to follow. It was in that wandering he found them—a family, nothing royal, nothing powerful, just people. Monsters with their own scars, their own struggles. They didn’t care that he was a failure. They took him in. Gave him food, gave him a place. Gave him something he never had in the citadel—warmth.
Years passed, and for the first time Karl knew what it meant to laugh without weight on his back. He trained, hunted with them, lived beside them.
A girl from that family. Stronger than him, braver than him, but she never treated him as lesser. She saw him. Truly saw him. And for a man who had only ever been treated as a shadow, that was enough to set his heart on fire.
He fell in love. Quietly at first. Then fully. She returned it, and for a while, Karl believed he had won. Not the throne, not the kingdom, not his father’s pride. But something better.
Then his brother came.
The prince of their bloodline, now blazing like a god, set his eyes on the same girl. And when the heir of the Dragon King wanted something, no one stopped him.
Karl remembered the day it happened—the sound of fire ripping through the sky, the smell of ash in the air. His brother had come to their village. Smiling. Commanding. Demanding. And when the family resisted, when the girl’s father stood in his way, his brother killed him with a flick of his hand.
One by one, her family fell. The fields burned. The laughter that had once filled that home was silenced under the crack of bone and the roar of fire.
Karl fought. He tried. He stood in front of her, screaming for his brother to stop. But against a monster who already towered at SSS, his strikes were meaningless. His claws broke on his brother’s hide. His flames sputtered in the shadow of his brother’s storm.
In the end, his brother didn’t even bother killing him. He just left him broken, thrown to the dirt, forced to watch as everything Karl had built was erased. And when the girl was dragged away, her scream was the last sound he heard before darkness took him.
When he woke, he was alone. The home gone. The fields gone. Everyone gone.
That was when he broke.
Not when his father cast him out. Not when his throne was stripped. But when she was taken. When the family he loved was slaughtered like cattle while he could do nothing.
Karl wanted to end it all. There was no throne to chase, no revenge he could win. Against his brother, he was an insect, just as his father said. He thought of ending himself in the dirt, letting the realm consume his body and forget he had ever lived.
But the realm wasn’t done with him.
The gates had opened.
One of them—those spirals of twisted energy that had begun appearing at the edges of the world—shimmered in front of him one night. And Karl, broken, beaten, ready to be nothing, stepped through.
The air had changed. The sky was different. The world smelled wrong.
A new prison. A new battlefield.
And that was where his story twisted, where the boy cast aside by his father, betrayed by his brother, robbed of his love, became something else.
Karl blinked, the memory fading, the cold hum of the Sanctum’s cell pulling him back to the present.
He smirked faintly, though it held no humor. Just bitterness.
"Revenge," he murmured under his breath. "That’s all I have left."
The restraints pulsed faintly in response, like the ship itself was listening.
Karl leaned his head back against the wall, eyes closing. The faces of his father, his brother, and the girl flickered across his thoughts.
The king’s disgust. His brother’s grin. Her scream.
He swallowed once, sharp.
"If I can’t kill him," he whispered, "I’ll kill them all."
And Karl let himself fall silent again, waiting for the day Lucian opened his door.