Alucard moved like a phantom through Noctis Regnum, his aura sealed tight, senses honed to every flicker of mana. The city sparkled with serene beauty—but he had ruled too long, seen too much, to be fooled by polished masks.
He wandered not as a king returned, but as a ghost of a world that should no longer exist.
Yet it did.
That was the first inconsistency gnawing at his thoughts.
He was summoned to this world—he shouldn't know this city. And yet he did. The names. The architecture.
The memories are etched into the obsidian streets.
And more disturbing still: the city remembered him. Mana signatures reacted to his presence.
Old seals still recognized his touch.
How?
Something was wrong with the weave of reality itself.
He hunted answers as a shadow through alleys, hidden halls of arcane learning, and circles of cloaked scholars who murmured secrets in languages older than most bloodlines. His goal was clear: understand the thing he fought—the Outerborn—and, more critically, its connection to Demon Queen Elysia.
The Midnight Spire towered ever above, pulsing with that same steady, alien rhythm.
A beacon of power. A warning.
A question mark written in obsidian.
But not every voice echoed devotion.
"Do not speak her name so freely," hissed a hunched demon warlock, buried beneath the old library in a crypt that predated most noble lineages.
Alucard stepped forward, arms crossed.
"I don't speak to defile her. I want to understand what she's aligned herself with."
The warlock's one milky eye shimmered.
"Then you've seen it. One of the horrors."
"I've fought one. Killed it."
The warlock tensed.
"Then you've already paid part of the price."
He rolled out a map—an old one, inked by hand, its borders faded.
Yet new ink scarred it: villages that had vanished, entire regions distorted or erased.
"They appear without pattern," the old demon muttered. "Mountains, ruins, cities. Here for moments. Always violent. Then gone. Like dreams made of teeth."
"And every time," Alucard said, "Elysia's reach strengthens."
The warlock flinched. "She calls it the Alignment. She says our world brushes the edge of the Veil—that beyond it lies a truer reality. She claims the gods were blind... that only she sees clearly now."
Alucard's voice was cold. "That's not clarity. That's contamination."
The warlock leaned in. "Then tell me this, stranger. If you were summoned to this world... how do you know it so well? How do the seals still respond to your blood?"
Alucard said nothing, but his silence spoke volumes.
"There's more at play," the old demon whispered. "Old timelines, overwritten. Worlds colliding. Other worlds are bleeding into this one. Something is rewriting the script."
Alucard felt it then—the echo. Not memory. Not illusion. A convergence. The world he once ruled was not just gone—it was being grafted onto this one, like a second skin beneath the surface.
"Who would have that kind of power?" he asked quietly.
The warlock's voice was barely audible.
"Not a god. Something older. Something hungry."
That possibility clung to Alucard like a shroud as he left the crypt.
Everything was converging.
Elysia. The monsters. The bleed between worlds. His return wasn't a coincidence—it was a consequence.
Over the next few days, he watched the city with a different lens.
He saw it more clearly now.
Not just the prosperity, but the inconsistencies.
The fractures.
The slums had become arcane academies.
The guards studied diplomacy alongside war.
The nobles served rather than ruled.
On the surface, this was paradise.
But then there were the other things.
When a child's laughter halted mid-breath after a pulse of mana surged through a square.
When a woman's shadow lagged behind her step.
When a streetlamp whispered words in reverse—words Alucard knew from ancient texts, long lost in his world.
He understood now: reality was fraying.
Not only because of Elysia's power but also because two timelines were colliding.
His old world was bleeding into the new.
He remembered this city because, in some version of reality, it had always been his. The world hadn't erased him. It was reassembling itself around him.
And if Elysia was the catalyst-or—worse, a pawn—then this wasn't a battle for thrones or legacies.
It was a battle for continuity itself.
At dawn, Alucard left the city behind and climbed the obsidian ridge overlooking it. There, half-buried in stone, lay the ancient seal of the demon kings.
His seal.
Still intact.
Still resonating.
He placed a hand on the weathered glyph.
"This isn't just about stopping her," he said. "This is about stopping whatever's behind her."
His voice was low, steady.
"This is about stopping a god that rewrites worlds."
And in the silence, the stone whispered back.