Elijah's hands gestured wildly in the air between them, his voice rising with theatrical alarm. "So what you're saying is—like, me becoming Azaqor, that whole thing—I'd become *trapped* in the idea of being Azaqor itself? That the idea births some kind of spirit that'll feed on me to become its own independent being? That's what you're saying?"
Wonko's smoky form rippled with what might have been amusement. "Well, you can rephrase it like that."
"What about you then?" Elijah jabbed a finger toward the entity, taking exaggerated backward steps that were half dance, half retreat. His feet shuffled in quick succession as he pointed accusingly. "How am I supposed to be sure *you* aren't that idea itself, trying to trick me? So when I'm in your palms—under your control—you could possess me or something?" He threw his hands up. "Seriously, look at how creepy you look!"
The being before him was enough to make anyone's skin crawl. Wonko appeared as a humanoid shape crafted from shifting reddish-black smoke, semi-transparent and constantly in motion. Where a chest should be, there glowed an inverted spiral of concentric rings, trapped within a triangle marked with three closed eyes. Each eye wept dark, ink-like tears that dripped down and dissolved into the smoky substance of Wonko's form. Around the symbol, a six-fingered handprint flickered in and out of visibility like a phantom brand burned into existence itself.
The face was perhaps the most unsettling part—vaguely human, impossibly smooth, with features that seemed drawn rather than formed. It had an animated quality, like something pulled from an artist's fever dream, too expressive to be real yet too empty to be alive. Glowing eyes peered out from within the smoke, suggesting emotion without possessing genuine feeling. At the center of Wonko's chest, a visible void pulled at the light around it, a hungry emptiness that seemed to swallow reality itself. The entire figure stood wreathed in dim crimson illumination, its smoke body distorting the space around it in an ethereal, illusion-like effect.
Wonko scratched what passed for its head, the gesture oddly human despite everything. "Boy, you are more cheeky than I thought."
Elijah clutched at his own chest, stumbling backward with exaggerated terror, his eyes wide and his mouth open in mock horror. "I'm just trying to protect my little life from being taken by you!" He spun in a half-circle, one hand pressed dramatically to his forehead. "Look at you—some kind of parasitic imaginative being within my own field of subconsciousness! I should be *careful* not to trust you!"
Wonko's face shifted into an expression that clearly said *you've got a point there*. The entity remained silent, and the quiet stretched between them. Seconds became a minute. Then two. The stillness felt heavy, pregnant with unspoken truths.
Finally, Wonko spoke, its voice carrying a weight that hadn't been there before. "Boy, there is a reason why you were barely able to save yourself from that missy's hands, and it's because of *me*." The entity's form seemed to solidify slightly as it continued. "The original form of what you're seeing—or hallucinating me as—was intended to keep you in check by instilling fear and confusion toward your senses itself. It would force you into communicating with and taking in your Orrhion condensate, giving you a false sense of being in control of it. But really, it would be the one in control. You would be its puppet, directed to do tasks for it, increasing your power all the while."
Wonko's glowing eyes fixed on Elijah with uncomfortable intensity. "Think of the neural Orrhion chip in your brain as that thing's created vessel. The Orrhion condensate? That's its food. The more power you get, the stronger it grows. Before you know it, you'd be its snack, and all the strength you gained would be its own."
Elijah's dramatic posture faltered, genuine unease creeping into his expression. "How am I sure *you* aren't also that thing?"
Wonko paused, almost striking a pose, then answered with deliberate care. "It's because you and I—if I might say—share a blood connection through your mother's maternal side. Your grandmother."
Elijah's face twisted in confusion. "What?"
"Boy, your grandmother is a descendant of mine." Wonko's voice carried a note of pride. "Hence you should be privileged for that fact. If it wasn't for that, your past might have been more tragic. I doubt you would have escaped out of it alive."
"What the heck are you going on about?" Elijah's voice rose defensively. "I survived it by myself! I wasn't saved by anyone!"
Wonko's face shifted into something unmistakably sarcastic. "Are you sure about that? You have an Orrhion neural chip in your skull, of which you don't have any memory of its existence. Meaning there is a gap of time in your past you've forgotten about. Perhaps the past you *think* you know isn't truly the past at all."
"No. No, you're messing with me." Elijah shook his head violently.
"Think about this assassin secretive organization you think *you* created." Wonko leaned forward slightly, smoke curling more rapidly. "How is it that a thirteen-year-old brat, still wet behind the ears, can create such an entity?" The question hung in the air like a blade. "Boy, I'm going to be really honest with you. Initially, that parasitic thing was pure energy only. It was compounded to miniscule form and size and put in those neural chips by the force itself. Before the parasite could have fully integrated into your chip, I felt a blood resonance with you from a distant place."
Wonko's form began to shift as it spoke, the smoke writhing with greater purpose. "I took my own spirit, compounded it just like the parasite, and traversed myself into your chip where I battled the parasite and took on its form and identity. I've been doing it for almost a decade now, so as not to raise suspicions of my enemies and not put your life in danger. Think of the current chip as the residue left over from a virus, and I'm the antivirus within that residue. I could have destroyed the residue, but to protect your little life, I instead camouflaged myself as the virus—"
The transformation accelerated. The reddish-black smoke began to pale, brightening and solidifying. The shifting, uncertain form took on more defined contours. The smoke became something else entirely—still ethereal, still not quite solid, but undeniably *human* in shape.
An old man stood before Elijah now, though his form remained composed of smoke. His hair was silver-white, each strand glowing faintly like threads of living light caught in an unseen current. Where eyes should have been, there were instead luminous nerve-voids, spaces where Orrhion currents swirled in mesmerizing patterns. His skin bore no visible veins; instead, his entire body emanated a faint blue-white radiance, as if his anatomy had merged completely with pure energy.
The air itself changed. A pressure descended on the space, thick and suffocating. Elijah felt it immediately—an overwhelming might, the weight of a king's presence bearing down on him. His knees weakened. His breath caught. This wasn't fear exactly; it was recognition on a primal level. His body understood what his mind was still processing: he stood before royalty of a kind that transcended crowns and thrones.
The old man's voice, when it came, was different from Wonko's—deeper, weathered by centuries, carrying the timbre of someone who had commanded armies and toppled kingdoms. "During my time and reign, many revered and feared me. When an army of raiders tried to invade my home, I battled them with only my brute strength and will, supported by my own brothers."
The pressure in the air intensified as the old man continued, his luminous form seeming to grow more solid with each word. "When our king tried to silence me from fear of me becoming too strong to control, I personally marched to his castle, took out his guards, and beheaded him. I became the king." There was no pride in the statement, only matter-of-fact recounting. "When I became king, I took on my own conquest. I took over more lands and turned the kingdom into an empire."
The old man's form dimmed slightly, the glow fading as his tone shifted. "But I became ignorant. Though I was strongest, I was alone. Eventually, my carelessness led to the empire collapsing. When I thought I would die, the very heavens split open, and an opportunity was handed to me. It made me realize that empires, those are all mortal things that don't last—they are temporary."
His eyes, those swirling voids of energy, seemed to look through Elijah rather than at him. "I realized that imagination leads to one being one with the origin of creation. It leads to one being a creator, meaning I had to forge a path of manifesting my own conquest through my mind. So the heavens, as a teacher, taught me the way. I forged my own way based on how it taught me. From then onwards, I forged a powerful ability that led me to create an organization that wasn't of conquest, but of my mind being the conquest itself."
The air grew heavier still. Elijah found himself struggling to draw breath, his lungs working harder against an invisible weight. "That organization led to the hierarchy of the world being decided by myself and the organization. The conquest became the world itself through civil battles, the rise and fall of kingdoms, wars themselves, which kept me in control."
Suddenly, the atmosphere shifted violently. What had been pressure became something darker, more volatile. Rage. Pure, undiluted rage began to emanate from the old man's form. The blue-white glow took on red edges. The air itself seemed to vibrate with fury so intense it had become tangible.
Elijah gasped, his hands flying to his throat. He couldn't breathe. The rage in the air was strangling him, filling his lungs like water, drowning him in someone else's ancient anger. His vision began to tunnel, darkness creeping in at the edges.
"But alas, all of it was just a lie given unto me by them. I was their tool, by which they could control and enslave humanity. I wanted to correct it, but I failed. If it wasn't for that—"
The old man stopped abruptly, his glowing void-eyes focusing on Elijah's struggling form. The rage cut off as suddenly as a candle being snuffed. The pressure released. The air returned to normal.
Elijah collapsed to his knees, coughing violently, sucking in desperate gulps of air. His chest heaved. Tears streamed from his eyes from the strain of nearly suffocating.
"I apologize." The old man's voice was soft now, genuinely regretful. The blue-white glow of his form had returned to its previous calm state. "I lost myself in the memory."
Elijah remained on his knees, one hand pressed against the ground for support, the other still at his throat as his breathing slowly normalized. Between coughs, he managed to raise his head, looking up at the ethereal figure before him.
"I read somewhere," Elijah rasped, his voice rough and strained, "that in past centuries, an organization by the name of World Architects has been in the shadows, controlling the hierarchical system of the past aristocratic governments. And now maybe they're still overseeing the governments." He pulled himself to his feet slowly, unsteadily. "Is this World Architects—like, the organization you built?"
The old man shook his head, silver-white hair catching the strange light. "When I was in charge of my organization, it didn't go by that name." His luminous features twisted into something that might have been disgust. "It must be that scheming fellow who betrayed me that formed this World Architects or whatever it is."
The old man turned slightly, his smoke-form body shifting in ways that defied normal physics. "Boy, a great calamity will fall upon this world. These parasitic beings that will possess the other pieces—they will start to feed on other people in person. The more people are ignorant, it leads to cause and effect of the false becoming their reality, which they will forever be trapped by their limited, almost mortal lives."
His voice took on the quality of prophecy, grim and certain. "The more fear, envy, greed, sloth, lust, and anger continue to spread, they turn into energy itself that these evil parasites will feed on. This Orrhion condensate is a bubble ready to pop. Only the force and those beings that they are instructing—they are the ones that will benefit from it."
The old man's form seemed to grow more substantial as he spoke, as if the weight of his words demanded solidity. "In the past, it was rituals performed in secret by these puppets of the force which would bring sacrificed energy for the beings to feed on. Think of the human itself like them being energy itself, but these beings prefer the beastly energy which humans tend to radiate, for they were evolved from the same level of beastly energy."
"The agenda is that they want more power." The old man's voice hardened. "These beings are from other star systems. I suspect that many worlds and billions of lives were ruined by these entities. And now Earth, for the last five hundred years, has been their playground. To them, our lives are like toys. I think they got bored with us and their old ways of play. Now they want to finish us quickly so they can go to the next planetary world to play with."
The old man turned fully to face Elijah, and the young man found himself pinned by those luminous void-eyes. "Boy, the fate of the world is at stake here. Whether you like it or not, your duty as my only last breathing descendant is for you to train through my guidance and try to stop them before they reach a state where it would be too late to do anything."
The seriousness in the old man's tone was absolute. No trace of the earlier Wonko's playfulness remained. The worry etched into those impossibly smooth features was genuine, deep as oceans and old as mountains. This was not theatrics or manipulation. This was a warning from someone who had seen empires crumble, who had watched the machinations of beings beyond human comprehension, who carried the weight of countless failures.
Then the old man turned, presenting his back to Elijah. His silver-white hair caught the ethereal light, and his form seemed to flicker slightly at the edges, as if he was beginning to fade. "You haven't yet opened your neural Orrhion, so you still aren't in the Synaptic realm. That, I will leave for you to achieve on your own."
His voice carried across the space between them with quiet authority. "Remember: a calm self leads to one strengthening their body, emotions, and sensations. That is the only thing I can tell you." He paused, and when he spoke again, there was finality in the words. "Also, you aren't yet qualified to enter into that house. For now, ask about the Caltheron tournament. It will guide you to where you are destined to go."
The world began to distort. The edges of Elijah's vision blurred and warped, reality bending like heat waves rising from summer pavement. Colors bled into one another. Sounds stretched and compressed. The old man's form dissolved into mist, then into light, then into nothing at all.
Elijah blinked, and everything snapped back into sharp focus.
He was standing on a cracked sidewalk, facing a house that looked like it had been plucked from the 1940s and dropped carelessly into the present day. The structure sagged slightly, its wooden siding weathered to a tired gray. The windows were dark, some of the panes cracked or missing entirely, covered over with yellowed newspaper from the inside. The roof had several visible gaps where shingles had fallen away. A front porch leaned at a slight angle, its steps bowed in the middle from decades of footsteps. The yard was overgrown with weeds that had long since won their war against any cultivated grass that might once have grown there. An old chain-link fence, rusted and partially collapsed in places, marked the property boundary. Everything about the house spoke of abandonment and decay, of time's patient work.
Shimmen still stood beside him, but something was wrong.
Elijah looked down and found himself lying on his back on the cracked sidewalk. His perspective shifted dizzily—when had he fallen? Shimmen was there, but so were others. Several people crowded around him, their faces etched with concern.
Two paramedics knelt beside him, one pressing fingers against his neck checking for a pulse, the other holding his wrist, timing his heartbeat against a watch. Their uniforms were crisp and professional, but their expressions were worried.
"Heart rate's elevated but steady," one of them said.
"Pupils responsive," the other confirmed, shining a small light into Elijah's eyes.
People on the street had stopped to stare. A small crowd had gathered at a respectful distance, murmuring among themselves, craning their necks to see what was happening. A woman held her phone up, clearly having called for help. An older man with a dog kept his pet back on a tight leash, watching with furrowed brow.
Elijah's hand shot out suddenly, his fingers wrapping around Shimmen's wrist. The old man—the *real* old man, not the ethereal figure he'd just been speaking to—had ruffles around his waist from his rumpled clothing, his weathered face registering surprise at the sudden contact.
"What is the Caltheron tournament?" Elijah's voice came out rough, urgent.
Shimmen's expression underwent a remarkable transformation. Surprise gave way to something else entirely—suspicion, yes, but also something uglier. His eyes narrowed. His mouth pursed. He stared down at Elijah with a look that was equal parts astonished and deeply disturbed, as if the young man had just spoken a name that should have been forgotten, a secret that was never meant to be uttered aloud in the waking world.
The question hung in the air between them, heavy with implications neither of them yet fully understood, while the paramedics continued their examination and the crowd continued to whisper and the old house from the 1940s stood silent witness to it all.