Shukan barely had time to register the movement before something lashed out.
A tendril—no, a limb—shot toward him, moving at impossible speed. Not attacking. Grabbing.
Jikan reacted instantly.
The world lurched as he sidestepped through time, appearing meters away in an instant. But it wasn't enough.
More limbs. More movement. More eyes.
They weren't just being watched anymore.
The King had recognized them.
And now, it was rejecting them.
Aetheron gritted his teeth, light crackling in his fingertips. "Okay, yeah, we're not talking our way out of this one."
Yurei didn't wait.
Her ice-arm flared violently, frost expanding in jagged arcs as she lunged—a spike of ice forming mid-air, slamming into the nearest reaching limb.
It froze solid.
Then shattered.
The King screamed.
It wasn't a sound. It was a pulse. A wave. A rejection of their very existence.
Chronos staggered, circuits flashing erratically. His calculations were falling apart—the laws of reality shifting too fast for even him to stabilize.
"This isn't just defense," he muttered. "This thing is rewriting itself to counter us."
Shukan's fists clenched. His heartbeat was too slow. Too controlled.
This was bad.
They had to move.
They had to get deeper.
His golden eye flickered.
"Madona said the truth is below."
"Go deeper."
But the King was blocking the way.
And Akira?
Akira was gone.
Shukan snapped his head up. "Where—"
Too late.
Aetheron saw it first.
The Trivia Knights were moving.
No weapons. No stances.
Just shifting, like broken puppets trying to remember how to stand.
Their armor flickered. Their movements weren't fast.
They were uncanny.
Aetheron swallowed hard. "...They're not attacking."
Yurei flexed her ice-arm, narrowing her crimson eyes. "Then what are they doing?"
Chronos was already scanning.
His golden circuits flared—calculating, analyzing, processing.
His voice was sharp.
"They're asking us questions."
Shukan's blood ran cold.
"What?"
Aetheron shifted, glancing at them. "They're not speaking."
Chronos' circuits pulsed brighter. "Not out loud."
Shukan turned toward them fully.
The Trivia Knights stood still.
Then—one took a slow, jerking step forward.
Its voice echoed—not as sound, but as thought.
"What happened to the man who never fell?"
Shukan's pulse spiked.
Because he didn't know the answer.
But the question felt real.
Another Knight moved.
"Where did the sky split first?"
Chronos stiffened. "That's… not possible."
Shukan's breath came sharper.
They weren't just being asked.
They were being tested.
And none of these questions belonged to them.
The ground lurched. The entire structure tilted, like something massive had shifted beneath them.
No—not beneath them.
Around them.
The King was fighting.
And the Void was winning.
Yurei landed lightly on the unsteady surface, her crimson eyes locking onto the Trivia Knights—still standing, still unmoving, their forms flickering like unstable data.
She narrowed her gaze.
"Where the hell did you come from?"
The words weren't directed at anyone in particular.
But the Knights reacted.
One of them twitched—not in acknowledgment, but like it was remembering something it had forgotten.
Then—
It answered.
"We were always here."
Yurei's stomach dropped.
The voice wasn't normal. It wasn't mechanical.
It was layered—like hundreds of voices speaking at once.
Shukan clenched his fists. "Bullshit."
Another Knight turned its head— the motion wrong, delayed, like it was catching up to itself.
"We were always meant to be here."
Chronos' circuits flared violently. "That's not possible."
Aetheron hovered just above the ground, wings flickering with unstable light. His voice was low.
"They weren't guarding the gate."
Yurei's ice-arm pulsed cold.
"Yeah. So where the hell were they?"
Silence.
Then—
The Trivia Knights stepped forward.
Slow. Unsteady. Like their bodies were still learning how to move.
The ground trembled again.
The King screamed.
Not in pain.
In denial.
Like it was trying to hold on.
Chronos exhaled sharply. "The Void is destabilizing this place."
Shukan's golden eye flickered—scanning, reading, understanding.
The King wasn't the only thing breaking down.
The Knights were affected too.
They were trying to hold onto something that wasn't there anymore.
Aetheron's wings flared as he realized it.
"They don't know where they came from."
Shukan exhaled sharply. Something was wrong.
Not just the King's fight against the Void. Not just the Trivia Knights acting like they were piecing themselves back together.
No—
Something else was here.
Something stronger.
Aetheron felt it first. His wings flickered, his glow dimmed for just a second. It wasn't exhaustion. It wasn't the instability of the battlefield.
It was pressure.
Chronos' circuits pulsed erratically. His golden eyes flickered between calculations, adjusting for an unknown factor.
Yurei clenched her ice-arm. The frost pulsing from her fingertips wasn't just reacting to the void's influence anymore.
It was reacting to a presence.
One of the Trivia Knights shifted.
Just slightly.
Just enough.
Yurei's gaze snapped toward it.
Nothing about it looked different. Same armor. Same stance. Same flickering instability as the others.
But something felt off.
Like it wasn't supposed to be here.
Like it wasn't bound by the same rules as the rest.
Like it was just pretending.
Shukan narrowed his eyes. His golden eye flared, scanning the energy signatures of the knights.
And that's when he felt it.
A pulse.
Not just any pulse.
A ripple of imposed existence.
Like a law forcing itself onto reality.
His stomach dropped.
"One of them isn't normal."
Chronos caught on immediately. His circuits burned bright as he refocused.
Aetheron's expression darkened. "You sure?"
Shukan's fists clenched. His voice was low.
"Yeah. I'm sure."
The knights remained still.
But one of them—
One of them was watching.
And when it moved—
When it took that single step forward—
Everything around them twisted.
Not from the Void. Not from the King.
From it.
A Domain Shunogai.
Hiding in plain sight.
The second it moved, the air rippled.
Not like energy displacement. Not like an attack.
Like something fundamental had just shifted.
The Trivia Knights froze. Their fragmented movements halted completely.
The walls of the underground expanded and shrank at the same time.
And then—
It spoke.
Or at least—it tried to.
Because what came out wasn't a voice.
It was too much.
It was every voice, every conversation, every whisper in history—all at once.
Words stacked, overlapped, collided. A thousand sentences spoken at the same time, in every language, in no language.
Yurei staggered. Her ice-arm pulsed wildly, reacting instinctively to something she couldn't even define.
Aetheron gritted his teeth. His glow flickered as his wings pulsed erratically. His brain was processing too many voices at once.
Chronos' circuits snapped. A golden flare rushed through his body, forcibly cutting off external influence. His calculations had never failed before.
They were failing now.
Shukan—
Shukan's golden eye burned.
Jikan cracked.
The flow of time around him fractured violently, trying to correct itself, trying to make sense of what it was hearing—
And failing.
The voice of the Domain Shunogai wasn't meant to be understood.
It was meant to break you.
Shukan ground his teeth, forcing his body to stay upright. He didn't know what the hell this thing was trying to say.
But if it was talking, then it was capable of thinking.
Which meant—
"You—" Shukan forced out, voice ragged. "You're trying to tell us something, aren't you?"
The voices overlapped harder.
The walls of the underground convulsed.
The Trivia Knights twitched.
And then—
For a split second—
The voices stopped.
The Domain Shunogai tilted its head.
And spoke again.
This time—only one voice came through.
"You are not aligned with the correct outcome."
Shukan's blood ran cold.
Chronos' golden veins burned.
Aetheron's glow dimmed.
Yurei's ice-arm froze solid.
Because that sentence?
That wasn't just a statement.
It was a correction.