[Location: Morningstar Manor, New York]
Morning ca fast, faster than my sha could recover from Grayfia witnessing collapse like a wet noodle the night before.
I tried. Believe , I tried. I told myself a thousand reasons, excuses, elegant argunts that would’ve made a lawyer blush, but all of them crumbled under the crushing weight of truth.
It wasn’t my fault.
It was the bed.
Yes, the damned bed.
You’d think that after spending 1,022 years in stasis—basically entombed in demonic Tupperware—I’d be grateful for an actual place to sleep. Wrong. This "bed" wasn’t a bed. It was an eldritch conspiracy disguised as furniture.
The mattress didn’t cradle you. No, it devoured you, sucked you into its black hole of fluff until you questioned your very identity. The sheets? They clung like silk cobwebs spun by obsessive arachnid housewives. I swear I could hear the faint laughter of so ancient demon tailor every ti I tried to kick them off.
"Seven Satans damn this cursed furniture," I growled, twisting onto my side. The pillows shifted under like plotting spirits, conspiring to smother in comfort until I confessed sins I hadn’t even committed yet.
My pride, already fractured from last night’s display, snapped a little further.
Still, I hauled myself upright, hair a disaster, body aching in ways only immortal bloodlines could manage.
Right. The plan.
Originally, I’d intended to take the Dungeon Key out for a test drive. But after actually checking my stats again this morning? Yeah. My stats scread "fragile." They weren’t whispering. They weren’t hinting. They were outside the manor, holding a neon sign with flashing lights, screaming:
"WARNING: GLASS CANNON INCOMING. PLEASE THROW ROCKS."
So, brilliant strategist that I am, I shifted tactics.
New plan: Daily Quests.
Three free stat points a day, every day. That’s twenty-one points a week. In a month, I’d be less of a malnourished demon noodle and closer to a respectable danger noodle.
And all I had to do? Obey the glorified cosmic task manager secretly lodged in my soul.
But today’s daily quest has been completed by since last night at 12 AM—
Knock~ Knock~
"Master, are you decent?"
A playful lilt colored Grayfia’s voice, so out of character that my spine stiffened. This was the Silver-Haired Queen of Annihilation we were talking about, the woman whose very sighs once froze battalions of demonic knights in place. And now she was knocking on my door like a mischievous maid straight out of so decadent romance novel.
I glanced at the mirror across the room. What looked back was a disaster: hair that resembled a crow’s nest abandoned midwinter, a nightshirt wrinkled into demonic hieroglyphics, and an aura that scread "cursed bachelor who’s lost an argunt with gravity."
So yes. Decent was... negotiable.
"One mont," I croaked, trying to flatten my hair into sothing less "warlord of static electricity" and more "fallen prince rising with dignity."
The door cracked open anyway.
Of course.
Grayfia stepped in with the grace of a snowstorm—silent, inevitable, and carrying a tray of sothing that slled like both fresh bread and refined danger. Steam curled from a silver pot, trailing tendrils like living spirits eager to invade my nostrils.
"Breakfast," she announced, tone clipped, as though this was a battlefield declaration. She set the tray upon a side table, the clink of porcelain unnervingly precise.
I eyed it like a suspicious artifact. "You didn’t... enchant it, did you?"
Her crimson eyes flicked toward , impassive. "If I wished you dead, Master, I wouldn’t waste eggs and toast to do it."
A fair point. Dark humor aside, I couldn’t help but feel that anything she cooked had a fifty-fifty chance of either being divine sustenance or an alchemical weapon disguised as food. That’s the problem with loyal maids who could casually exterminate villages—they don’t quite understand moderation.
I dragged myself over, collapsed into a chair, and tried to rember how to act like soone with control over their own household.
"Right," I muttered, pulling the tray closer with all the commanding authority of a starving hyena. "Breakfast. Excellent strategic choice. Truly, you know how to break a man’s defenses."
Grayfia tilted her head, the faintest flicker of amusent breaking her perfect ice-mask. "Master exaggerates. You have not eaten in over a thousand years. Even a mortal could predict your priorities."
"Yeah, well," I said, stabbing a piece of toast like it had wronged in a past life, "mortals also invented the treadmill. Can’t trust them."
The food was... good. No, not good—exceptionally, unnervingly good. Each bite tasted like it had been prepared not just with skill, but with the sort of obsessive attention that suggested Grayfia had dissected every possible breakfast variant across dinsions, tested them on bound demonic subjects, and perfected this particular combination over centuries.
Which was very likely exactly what she had done.
I tried not to think about that as I chewed.
The silence between us wasn’t uncomfortable. It was dangerous. That kind of silence where one wrong word could flip the entire table into a battlefield.
So naturally, I broke it.
"You... stayed awake all night again, didn’t you?"
Her crimson gaze flicked toward , sharp as a guillotine blade. "My rest is irrelevant. Your safety is not."
"Grayfia." I set the toast down, leaned forward, and steepled my fingers like I was about to deliver a TED talk on obsessive demon maids. "You realise this house is covered in so many wards that even Jehovah would have to knock politely, right?"
She didn’t blink. "And if He did, Master, I would answer in your stead."
I blinked. "Wow. Okay. Remind to never get on your bad side when the actual apocalypse rolls around."
Her lips curved, just slightly. Not quite a smile, but sothing dangerously close.
"Then are you ready?"
"For what?"
I swear, the temperature dropped. Not "open window in December" cold. Not "forgot your jacket" cold. No, this was Grayfia-level cold. The kind of chill that seeped into your marrow, whispered sweet nothings to your survival instincts, and reminded you that yes, you were still very much breakable.
I swallowed, my tongue sticking to the roof of my mouth. "Ready... for what exactly?"
Her crimson eyes locked on , unblinking, asuring like a surgeon preparing for the first incision. "Your training."
Shit.
Damn that bed.
If I’d just gotten up when I first woke, instead of wrestling eldritch blankets for dominance, I could have slipped out with the Dungeon Key and gone for my private murder crawl. But no. Now the Silver-Haired Queen of Annihilation was staring at like a math teacher who knew I hadn’t done the howork.
"Training?" I croaked, my voice betraying with the tremble of a guilty man. "Define training."
Grayfia’s answer was imdiate, rciless."You are weak."
Ouch. No preamble. No cushioning. Just those three words, delivered like a guillotine blade.
She stepped closer. The click of her heels echoed in the study’s silence, each step a countdown to my impending humiliation. "If you remain weak, Master, you will die. Worse—others will die protecting you. That is not acceptable."
A lump the size of a boulder lodged itself in my throat. "Well, that’s a little—harsh, don’t you think?"
Her crimson eyes narrowed. "It is reality. And I will not allow you to treat it lightly."
See, here’s the problem: she wasn’t wrong. My stats were pathetic. My body was pathetic. My will was stubborn, yes, but you can’t parry fireballs with sarcasm. And yet, so small, desperate part of wanted to stall. To delay.
Because if Grayfia knew how fragile I truly was, she might just lock in the manor like a precious heirloom behind glass.
I couldn’t let that happen.
"Fine," I said at last, dragging the word out like a man volunteering for his own execution. "What’s on the agenda? Push-ups? Swordplay? Reading motivational posters until I vomit?"
Grayfia didn’t blink. "We will begin with survival drills."
Uh-oh.
...
The Morningstar Manor wasn’t just a house. It was practically a fortress disguised as gothic architecture. Grayfia led through its labyrinthine halls until we stepped out into a courtyard that hadn’t seen sunlight in a millennium.
Black stone walls rose high around us, their surfaces etched with runes that pulsed faintly in the morning light. The ground was scorched in places, scarred in others, as though entire armies had once clashed here.
I swallowed. Loudly.
"Bit overkill for morning stretches, don’t you think?"
Grayfia ignored . With a flick of her wrist, she conjured a wall of ice that erupted from the ground, stretching twenty feet high before tapering into jagged spikes. She turned to , expression cool as ever.
"You will break through."
I stared. Then stared so more. Then looked back at her, half-expecting her to say she was joking.
She wasn’t joking.
"Break through," I repeated slowly, like maybe the words would change aning if I gave them ti. "As in, physically? With this?" I held up my arm, flexed pathetically, and imdiately regretted it when my bicep looked more like a malnourished chicken wing.
"Yes," she said simply.
"Grayfia, I have the upper-body strength of a slightly ambitious librarian."
"Then you will improve."
And that was that.
I charged the ice wall.
Correction: I jogged awkwardly toward the ice wall while flailing my fists like a drunk raccoon. My knuckles connected. The wall did not move. My bones, however, strongly considered filing for divorce.
"Ghhh—!" I staggered back, clutching my hand as pain shot up my arm. "Yup. Definitely broke sothing. Shattered knuckle. Cursed lineage. Please bury in a shallow grave."
Grayfia’s voice was calm, utterly unsympathetic. "Again."
"No, no, I don’t think you’re hearing . I said broken. As in—"
"Again."
There was no arguing. There never was with her.
So I hit the wall again. And again. And again. Each strike sent shocks through my fragile fra, reducing to a wheezing ss on the blackened ground. Blood welled across my knuckles. My vision blurred.
At so point, I collapsed, gasping, sweat soaking my shirt. The wall stood pristine, mocking with crystalline indifference.
"Pathetic," Grayfia said.
Normally, that would’ve crushed . But sothing strange happened.
A thin mbrane of black mist rose from my left arm. I imdiately recognised it— Armant Haki.
Then with renewed fury—no, desperation—I slamd my fist forward again.
This ti, sothing answered.
The thin, inky mist that crawled over my knuckles wasn’t re shadow. It clung, hardened, wrapped itself around bone and flesh until it felt like I was wearing the gauntlet of so forgotten warlord. My strike cracked against the ice wall with a sharp crunch. Tiny fractures spiderwebbed across its surface.
It wasn’t much. Barely a scratch, really. But it was enough to make Grayfia’s eyes narrow, just slightly, like she’d seen a flicker of sothing she hadn’t expected.
I, anwhile, was busy trying not to vomit from the pain.
***
Stone , I can take it!
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