Chapter : 1885
The silver chainmail fabric slid over her head and fell to the floor with a soft chi.
Lloyd braced himself. He expected to see a horror. He expected scales, or burning eyes, or the twisted visage of a creature corrupted by centuries of dark mana.
He did not expect the face of the woman who had edited his Nobel Prize acceptance speech.
He stared. His breath hitched in his throat, and for the first ti in years, the Major General, the Saint of the Coil, the Iron-Blooded Lord... simply vanished. In his place stood a man who was seeing a ghost.
The woman standing before him was breathtaking. Her skin was pale and flawless, glowing with an inner luminescence. Her eyes were deep, intelligent pools of violet. She looked human, achingly human, except for the two elegant, curving horns that rose from her temples like a crown of obsidian. She wasn't a beast. She was a dark goddess.
But to Lloyd, she was just Eun-ha.
"Eun-ha?" Lloyd whispered. The na felt foreign on his tongue, a relic from a dead world. "Song Eun-ha?"
The Devil Queen smiled. It was a sad, tired smile, but it was hers. "Hello, Evan. You’re late."
Lloyd stumbled back a step. His mind, usually a fortress of order, was collapsing. He grabbed his head, trying to reconcile the impossible data. "No. No, this... this is a trick. A ntal attack. Mammon? Is this Mammon?"
He looked frantically at Ben. "Ben! Do a scan! It’s an illusion. It has to be an illusion. She died. I buried her. This isn't real!"
Ben didn't move imdiately. His chanical eyes whirred as they locked onto the woman's face. He scanned her bone structure, her bio-rhythm, and the mana signature radiating from her.
Ben’s arrogance vanished. His arms dropped to his sides.
Lloyd stood before the woman he had once called his partner, his breath shallow and uneven. The shock of seeing her face was still vibrating through his core, but the soldier in him was already yielding to the man he used to be.
He didn't ask how she was here, and he didn't ask why—at least, not yet. Words felt too small for a mont that had taken two lifetis to arrive. He simply took a single, deliberate step across the black stone floor, closing the distance between the North’s greatest Lord and the Abyss’s most terrifying Prince.
He reached out, his hand crossing the invisible boundary that separated their current lives. When his fingers finally made contact with hers, the world didn't just stop—it shattered.
The cold, sterile air of the throne room was instantly replaced by a violent, psychic roar. It wasn't a spell or an attack; it was a resonance. It was a sudden, blinding synchronization of two souls that had been separated by the cold vacuum of death and the vast, impossible distance of dinsions.
When his fingers brushed against hers, it wasn't just a physical connection. It was like two live wires snapping together. A spark of violet energy jumped between them, shocking Lloyd’s system. It wasn’t painful, but it was intense—a sudden, violent synchronization of two souls that had been separated by death, ti, and dinsions.
The world dissolved.
The cold stone floor, the glowing crystals, and the dark water vanished into white noise. Lloyd felt a sensation of falling, not down, but back.
________________________________________
Earth. Seoul. The Beginning.
The sll hit him first. It wasn’t the sll of ozone or magic. It was the sll of stale coffee, burnt solder, and industrial grease. It was the sll of ambition and poverty.
Lloyd—no, KM Evan—blinked. He was standing in a small, cramped workshop. The walls were covered in pegboards loaded with tools that had been bought second-hand. The only light ca from a few flickering fluorescent strips overhead and the aggressive glow of three computer monitors on a cluttered desk. Rain was hamring against the corrugated tal roof, a relentless, rhythmic drumming that drowned out the noise of the city outside.
It was raining. It was always raining in his mories of the early days.
"It’s not going to work, Evan," a voice said from the chair in front of the monitors.
Chapter : 1886
Evan turned. Sitting there, hunched over a keyboard, was Song Eun-ha. She wasn’t a Devil Queen. She didn’t have horns or a gown made of starlight. She was wearing a baggy grey hoodie that was two sizes too big, with the sleeves rolled up to her elbows. Her black hair was tied up in a ssy bun held together by a pencil. She looked exhausted. There were dark circles under her eyes, and she was nursing a cup of instant noodles that had gone cold an hour ago.
She was beautiful.
"It has to work," Evan said, his voice rough with stress. He was holding a heavy tal actuator in his hands, his fingers stained with oil. "The investors are coming in two days. If the prototype doesn't walk, we lose the funding. We lose the lab. We lose the apartnt."
Eun-ha spun her chair around. She pushed her glasses up her nose and gave him that look—the look that said you are brilliant, but you are being dramatic.
"The hardware is fine, Evan," she said, pointing a chopstick at the tal leg standing in the center of the room. It was a crude thing, wires hanging out like exposed nerves. "You built a masterpiece. The hydraulics are perfect. The alloy is strong. But the brain? The brain is lagging. You are trying to route the signal through a standard processor. It’s too slow. The machine tries to take a step, gets confused by the gyroscope data, and falls over."
Evan sighed, running a greasy hand through his hair. He leaned against the workbench, feeling the cold tal bite into his back. "So what do we do? I can't build a better processor. We don't have the budget for military-grade chips. We’re barely paying for the electricity."
"No," Eun-ha said, a small, mischievous smile touching her lips. "We don't. But you have ."
She turned back to the screens. Her fingers flew across the keyboard, the chanical clicking of the keys filling the room.
"I’m rewriting the logic gate," she mumbled, her eyes reflecting the scrolling green text. "I’m not going to force the processor to work harder. I’m going to make the code smarter. I’m bypassing the safety protocols on the signal transfer. It’s risky. If I ss up a decimal point, the leg might kick a hole through the wall and kill us both."
Evan walked over and stood behind her, watching the cascade of data. He didn't understand the code the way she did—he was a nuts-and-bolts man—but he understood the elegance of it. She wasn't just typing; she was composing.
"And if you don't ss up?" Evan asked quietly.
"If I don't ss up," Eun-ha said softly, hitting the Enter key with a flourish, "then you get to be the man who invented the future."
She looked up at him. In that dingy, oil-stained garage, surrounded by half-eaten food and scattered blueprints, there was no magic. There were no spirits. There was just the two of them, fighting against the world with nothing but their brains and a refusal to quit.
"Trust , Evan," she said. "You build the body. I’ll give it a soul."
Evan smiled. He reached out and touched her shoulder. "I trust you. Always."
________________________________________
The mory swirled, dissolving into streaks of light. The struggle faded, replaced by triumph.
They were older now. They were standing on a stage in Stockholm. The lights were blinding, hot against his skin. The applause was a physical wave, deafening and endless. Evan was wearing a tuxedo that felt too tight across the shoulders. He was holding a heavy gold dal—the Nobel Prize.
But he wasn't looking at the audience. He wasn't looking at the King of Sweden. He was looking to the side of the stage, where Eun-ha stood in a simple black dress. She wasn't clapping. She was leaning against a curtain, checking her watch.
She caught his eye and winked. It was a secret signal, one only they understood. Wrap it up, Major General. The speech is boring, and I’m hungry.
Even in the mont of his greatest achievent, she was the anchor. The fa, the money, the accolades—it was all noise. She was the signal.
________________________________________
The scene shifted again. The golden light of the stage faded into the sterile blue of a hospital room.
The sll of grease and rain was gone, replaced by antiseptic and wilting flowers.
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