When Koda stepped down, he did not fall into obscurity.
Neither did Clara, Emmet, Ravin, or Ty.
The five of them—bound by more than blood, more than loyalty—became something different.
Something more.
They stayed close to the new Senate, yes—but not as rulers.
Not as tyrants in waiting.
They watched.
They advised.
They kept their blades sharp, their eyes sharper.
They became known quietly, respectfully, across the rising nation by a single name:
The Hand.
Each of them served a different finger of the Hand.
Koda—the mind and unseen blade. The true keeper of order behind the scenes.
Clara—the scout and wind that moved the unseen currents. Clara's interest in creating life lead to her authority in agriculture.
Emmet—the river that carved stone in the silence of history. Emmet's deep interest in recording the worlds history kept him busy.
Ravin—the shield raised when others faltered. His interest in tactics, and security brought him to be a leading authority in military strategy.
Ty—the fire that could ignite a spark—let his imagination run wild with the creation of the nation. Houses, roads, weapons - all of it.
They guided the Senate with whispers and gentle corrections.
Never commands.
Never edicts.
The system had to breathe on its own.
And for a time—it worked.
The city-state thrived.
New laws were passed.
Trade routes reopened.
Other settlements were pulled into the fold not by conquest, but by the simple, irresistible weight of stability and hope.
It was not perfect.
But it was alive.
That's when Koda began to dream again.
Not of thrones.
Not of crowns.
But of the crack that had taken everything from him.
The Scar.
The wound in the earth near Red Pine—the place where it had all begun.
It had not been closed.
Only contained.
Other, smaller dungeons had been cleared, collapsed, or sealed over the years.
But that first Scar—the vast, yawning chasm—remained.
Untouched.
Unhealed.
A wound too deep to scab.
Koda could feel it pulling at the edge of his mind.
A call he could no longer ignore.
And when he spoke of it to the others—Clara, Emmet, Ravin, Ty—they did not hesitate.
They had lost families to it.
Homes to it.
Pieces of themselves they could never reclaim.
They owed it a debt.
And it was time to pay.
They made preparations.
Quietly.
No grand declarations.
No parades.
The city-state would survive without them for a while.
The Senate had strength now, leaders capable of carrying the torch.
The world had to stand on its own legs.
And if it could not?
Then it deserved to fall.
They stood together at the lip of the great Scar, nearly a decade after Koda had first been dragged into its abyss as a boy.
The earth still shuddered faintly under their boots.
The mist still coiled like living smoke.
But they were not the same.
Not anymore.
They carried with them the will of a thousand battles, a hundred hard-won victories.
Koda drew his blade—black as a forgotten moon—and saluted the broken sky.
Together, they leapt into the dark.
This dungeon was nothing like the Scar they had conquered before.
It twisted.
Bent.
Defied logic.
Walls moved.
Corridors looped endlessly.
Rooms bled into one another, dimensions stacking in ways that left them dizzy and staggering.
At times, they fought not monsters but themselves—visions twisted by the Will of the Dead God that had rooted itself deep within the dungeon's core.
They battled for weeks.
Or was it months?
Time was slippery here.
Slower.
Hungrier.
They cut their way through endless horrors—legions of the dead, beasts stitched from nightmare, echoes of broken worlds.
They grew.
Koda's shadows thickened, growing denser, sharper, more insistent.
Clara's arrows split the air with blinding speed, riding the slipstreams of magic.
Emmet moved rivers of crushing pressure through the ground, snapping bones like twigs.
Ravin became a living fortress, earth and stone answering his will with the slow inevitability of mountains.
Ty's flames roared high enough to burn through space itself, fusing metal, stone, and monster alike into useless slag.
They adapted.
They survived.
And at last—
They found it.
The Core.
It was not like the core they had claimed before.
This was something older.
Something unsettling.
The Core of the Scar wasn't a glowing stone or a swirling pool of energy.
It was a heart.
A great, black, shriveled heart—beating with the sluggish rhythm of a world dying and being reborn in endless cycles of despair.
It pulsed once.
And Koda understood.
The Will of the Dead God.
The remnant consciousness of a deity that had fallen not in battle, but into madness.
It had clung to the world by sheer hatred, bleeding into the cracks left behind by the Fall,
nurturing the monsters that destroyed cities, worlds, hope.
And now—it recognized them.
Welcomed them.
Offered itself not in malice, but in grim, weary surrender.
Take me.
Finish it.
Koda did not hesitate.
He drove his blade into the Core.
Shadow flared, not black but pure, blinding white, as the heart cracked and shuddered.
The explosion of energy that followed was beyond anything he had known.
It tore through his body, his soul, every memory of pain and hope and anger he had ever carried.
And it rebuilt him.
When the light faded—
They stood in silence.
Changed.
No longer mortal.
No longer bound by the frailties of flesh.
They were divine now—at least in part.
Not gods.
Not yet.
But closer than any human had dared to climb in an age long forgotten.
They returned.
Or tried to.
The Scar ejected them—spewing them out onto the broken earth like the bones of a swallowed meal.
They staggered to their feet, dazed, blinking against the midday sun.
The air smelled different.
Cleaner.
Older.
The trees were taller.
The mountains sharper.
And the city—Red Pine, or what had once been Red Pine—was gone.
In its place sprawled a massive metropolis, its walls gleaming with materials Koda did not
recognize, its spires piercing the sky.
Flags of unfamiliar design snapped in the wind.
A hundred years had passed.
A century.
Gone.
They had entered the dungeon as legends.
They returned as relics.
And whatever world they had left behind—
Was not the one they had saved.