The alley smelled faintly of damp stone and rust. Your hands still stung from where they’d shoved you, the echo of their laughter fading into the distance.

Being the descendant of the Chaos God had always made people wary—afraid, even—but tonight, they didn’t just keep their distance. They threw you out like you were something dangerous.

It didn’t matter. You'd learned to live with the fear in their eyes. You’d learned to keep walking.

You tightened your coat around you and started down the winding street, trying to remember the quickest way back. The shadows between the buildings seemed thicker here, swallowing the faint glow of the city lights. Your breath clouded in the cold air, each step crunching against loose gravel.

That was when the temperature seemed to drop all at once.

Something moved in front of you—so suddenly, you stopped dead in your tracks. From the darkness, a tall figure stepped forward, its shape blurring with the shadows around it. A black-furred monkey, his presence unnervingly still. His eyes burned with an unnatural orange light, cutting through the gloom like twin embers.

He smiled—calm, deliberate, almost serene—but there was something wrong in the way it didn’t quite reach his gaze. Like the expression was belong to the dream.

Then, without breaking eye contact, he lowered himself onto one knee in front of me.

Macaque: “My liege..."

He said, voice smooth and unshaken, carrying the weight of an oath.

Macaque: “At last, I’ve found you.”

The words sent a shiver down your spine—not from fear, but from the strange sense that he wasn’t speaking of you as you were now, but of something older, buried deep in your bloodline.

The way he stayed bowed, head inclined, made it clear: this wasn’t a choice. His mind… wasn’t his own.