William mentally scoured every shelf of the Mystic Arts headquarters library he had visited, every ancient scroll and dusty record he had ever decoded. There had been nothing—not a single whisper of a monstrous origin for their power. "How is that possible? How could such a thing have happened?"
"The true, ancient story isn't widely known," she sighed, turning back to follow his path toward the inner sanctum. Her three shadow-bound servants trailed behind like silent statues.
"But from what I was taught, the monsters were intervening in the world long before we had a name for it. They were manipulating the fate of every living thing to suit their gains. They wanted something—something that could only be harvested at the cost of countless human lives. And so..."
"And so, a fight was inevitable," William guessed, his eyes narrowing. "We had to learn their secrets, their Mystic powers, just to have a chance at competing with them. Is that it?"
