The morning sun hung bright and high over the bustling concrete jungle of the city. The calendar on Max's encrypted smartphone clearly read that it was the year 2055, yet a casual observer walking down the paved sidewalks would never have guessed that three decades had passed since the mid-2020s.
There were no flying cars streaking through the clouds, no massive holographic billboards projecting neon advertisements into the sky, and no chrome-plated cyborgs walking the streets. The world had simply… stagnated. The architecture remained a familiar blend of steel, glass, and concrete. The vehicles rolling down the asphalt roads still ran on standard tires, their designs barely shifted from the sleek sedans and heavy SUVs of the 2026 era. People still stared down at their rectangular glass smartphones, still wore standard denim jeans and cotton jackets, and still rushed to mundane office jobs. It was 2055, but the world looked, felt, and breathed exactly like the year 2026.
For Max, this mundane aesthetic was a profound comfort. After spending exactly 30,000 grueling lifetimes in a heavily magical, medieval-style fantasy world as Sylan the Dark Lord, he deeply appreciated the static, unchanging normality of his original Earth.
It was the day after their intense, emotional drive, and Max and Bellatrix found themselves returning to the quaint, old-fashioned bakery nestled between two massive commercial buildings.
Unlike their previous visit, where they had inadvertently dressed in high-end, expensive attire that made them look like intimidating, nouveau-riche elites, today they had opted for absolute, comfortable casual wear.
Max was wearing a simple, well-fitted black overcoat draped over a plain dark t-shirt. Resting on the bridge of his nose was a pair of faded, grey-tinted sunglasses that perfectly hid the sharp, predatory intensity of his amber eyes. Walking beside him, Bellatrix looked breathtakingly beautiful in her simplicity. She wore a light, flowing summer dress, her golden blonde hair falling freely over her shoulders. They didn't look like a legendary underworld assassin and a genius chemical weapon manufacturer; they simply looked like a normal, incredibly attractive young couple enjoying a quiet morning date in the city.
As Max reached out and pushed the heavy glass door of the bakery open, the familiar chime of the brass bell echoed through the establishment.
"Good morning, Sir and Miss!" a warm, raspy voice called out immediately.
From behind the wooden counter, the elderly owner of the bakery practically beamed. The moment his cloudy eyes recognized them, his weathered face lit up with a brilliant, overwhelming joy. He wiped his flour-dusted hands on his white apron, his posture radiating absolute gratitude.
Max offered a polite, respectful nod of his head, while Bellatrix beamed brightly, her gray eyes crinkling at the corners.
"Good morning to you too," Bellatrix and Max greeted him back in unison, their voices blending in a comfortable harmony.
The elderly owner didn't just point them to an open table; he personally hurried out from behind the counter to lead them. He guided them past the large front windows and toward a secluded, highly desirable booth tucked away in the quietest, most comfortable corner of the bakery. It was the best seat in the house.
Max and Bellatrix slid into the plush booth, sitting across from each other. Max looked up at the owner, his brow furrowing in mild confusion. He reached up and slightly lowered his faded grey glasses, his amber eyes looking at the empty table.
"Ahh, as I remember, I didn't actually call ahead to reserve any seats today," Max stated, his voice calm but inquisitive. "But anyways, thank you for the accommodation."
The elderly owner violently waved his wrinkled hands in the air, a deep, reverent smile etched into his features. He shook his head side to side, dismissing Max's polite confusion entirely.
"Please, sir, think absolutely nothing of it," the owner replied, his voice thick with emotion. "Consider this perfectly reserved booth as just a minuscule way for me to properly thank you for everything you have done for me. Let me take care of you, as a way to say thanks."
Max slowly nodded his head, leaning back against the wooden chair. He crossed his arms over his broad chest, his expression softening slightly.
"The only thing I gave you to help fund your wife's surgery was five hundred thousand dollars," Max pointed out quietly, keeping his voice low so the other morning patrons wouldn't overhear the massive sum of money being discussed. "And honestly, I don't even think that's truly enough, considering how heavily inflated our economy is right now in 2055. Medical bills can spiral completely out of control in the blink of an eye."
To a legendary hitman who possessed hundreds of millions of dollars scattered across untraceable offshore accounts, half a million dollars was literally pocket change. He viewed money purely as a tactical resource, something to be used and discarded.
But the owner vigorously shook his head side to side. Tears immediately sprang to the corners of his cloudy eyes, tears of absolute salvation.
"Sir, maybe to a man of your profound means, five hundred thousand dollars might not seem like enough," the owner said, his voice trembling as he pressed his hands together over his apron. "But for me... and for my beloved wife who is fighting for her life in the hospital... it is everything. We don't have any extended families to lean on. We don't have wealthy friends or anyone else to rely on in this cold city. You have absolutely no idea how incredibly glad and deeply thankful my wife is."
The owner took a shaky breath, wiping a tear from his cheek.
"We asked for help before. We begged banks, we begged charities, but no one helped us. And when we had finally given up all hope, you came and helped us without any conditions, sir. So please, let me take care of both of you today as a way to say thanks."
Max sat perfectly still, listening to the old man's heartbreaking confession. He understood now. It wasn't about the numeric value of the money; it was about the timing. He had provided a miracle when they were standing at the edge of the abyss.
'I see,' Max thought inwardly. 'For them, having no family and no support network... that money was literally the difference between life and death.'
Max offered a warm, genuine smile. "I see, I understand. And thanks. Please, take care of both of us today."
Bellatrix, who had been listening quietly to the exchange, felt her heart swell with profound affection for the scarred, dangerous man sitting across from her. She looked up at the weeping owner and offered him a brilliant, comforting smile.
"Danke, Sir, und bitte kümmern Sie sich gut um uns," (Thank you sir, and please take care of us well) Bellatrix said smoothly, her native German rolling beautifully off her tongue. .
The owner, recognizing the language, nodded his head deeply, offering them both one final bow of profound gratitude before handing them the leather-bound menus and stepping away to give them privacy.
Max, still wearing his black coat and faded grey glasses, looked across the rustic wooden table at Bellatrix. She looked so perfectly normal, so vibrant and full of life. It felt surreal that this was already their second official date.
"Hmm, so I'ma just order the exact same ones I ordered yesterday. Max, how about you?" Bellatrix asked, scanning the menu even though she already knew what she wanted.
Max adjusted his glasses, leaning forward slightly. "I will order the same ones too, since I really can't get over the taste of the coffee here. And also, how good those dark chocolate bars are."
Bellatrix clapped her hands together lightly, her gray eyes sparkling.
"Yeah! Those authentic German chocolate bars are really tasty here!" Bellatrix cheered happily. "I should definitely bring my Auntie Irmela next time we visit this place! She loves dark chocolate."
"Sure. That sounds like a great idea," Max agreed smoothly.
However, hearing the name of her aunt acted like a spark in Max's highly analytical brain. He leaned back in his chair, tapping his index finger against the wooden table in a slow, rhythmic motion. A lingering question that had been bothering him since many days ago finally rose to the surface of his thoughts.
"Hey, Bell…" Max started, his voice dropping into a slightly more curious, serious tone.
"Hmm?" Bellatrix tilted her head, placing the menu down on the table. "What is it?"
"I want to ask you something personal, if you don't mind," Max said, his amber eyes studying her face carefully. "Why does your aunt have blue eyes and brown eyes—a severe case of heterochromia—while you only have solid gray eyes? I mean, I don't want to offend your aunt or you, but I'm just deeply curious why it seems both of you don't resemble each other at all genetically, despite being blood relatives."
Bellatrix blinked, surprised by the specific, scientific nature of the question. She didn't look offended; rather, her brilliant chemist mind immediately engaged with the genetic puzzle.
"Ahh, that…" Bellatrix mused, reaching up to twirl a strand of her golden blonde hair around her finger. "Honestly, I don't really know the exact genetic sequence for it either. Because my mother has solid gray eyes and jet-black hair, which is the exact same hair color as my aunt's. Meanwhile, I inherited my blonde hair directly from my dad's side of the family."
She paused, looking up at the ceiling as she sifted through her childhood memories.
"Even I was incredibly confused about it before. When I was a little kid, I actually thought my Auntie Irmela was my mom's half-sibling because they looked so different in the eyes. But my mom firmly told me that she is her full sibling, a pure-blooded sister."
Bellatrix suddenly snapped her fingers, her gray eyes widening as a specific memory clicked into place.
"Ahh! Now I remember!" Bellatrix said, leaning across the table excitedly. "When I was really young, I directly asked Auntie why she had mismatched eyes. She told me that she inherited that specific trait from her mother, which would be my grandmother from my maternal side."
Bellatrix let out a soft, slightly dismissive laugh, waving her hand in the air.
"And she also told me this wild story before. She said that her blood, my mom's blood, and my blood are all secretly 'blessed' by my grandma, since my grandma was supposedly someone very special. As I remember, she used words like 'magical lineage' or something dramatic like that. But honestly, I just completely ignored it. I mean, I'm a chemist. I am a woman of science. I simply don't believe in fairy tales or special blessings like that without any hard, peer-reviewed scientific evidence."
Max listened to her explanation with absolute, unbroken intensity. He didn't laugh. He didn't dismiss her grandmother's story as a fairy tale.
Instead, he slowly nodded his head, keeping his facial expression completely neutral.
"I see. That is a very interesting family history. Thanks for answering my question, Bell," Max said politely.
"You're welcome!" Bellatrix beamed, entirely unaware of the massive, tectonic shift happening inside Max's mind.
Just then, the elderly owner returned with a silver tray carrying their steaming coffee, slices of rich cake, and the German chocolate bars. Bellatrix immediately turned her attention to the food, happily thanking the owner in fluent German and striking up a brief, cheerful conversation with the old man about his baking techniques.
While Bellatrix was distracted, joyfully chatting away in a foreign language, Max sat perfectly still. His amber eyes stared down at the dark, swirling surface of his black coffee, but his mind was racing at a million miles an hour.
'I need to have a serious talk with Irmela soon,' Max thought inwardly, a cold chill running down his spine. 'Yesterday, when Bellatrix was looking at me in her in this bakery… I felt something incredibly familiar radiating from her. It was faint. It was buried deep under her human aura, but it was there.'
Max possessed senses that were honed not just by years of physical combat, but by exactly 30,000 lifetimes of wielding world-ending dark magic. Even though he was back on Earth, and his magical core was gone, his soul still recognized the subtle, invisible vibrations of the supernatural.
'Even though what I felt was incredibly weak, I am almost certain Bellatrix has the dormant blood of a witch flowing through her veins,' Max analyzed inwardly, gripping his ceramic coffee mug tightly.
'It seems she is a direct descendant of them. And her Auntie Irmela… with her mismatched blue and brown eyes… she might be a fully awakened witch after all. As I vividly remember reading in my dad's locked journal when I was a teenager, true witches often possess striking blue eyes, or in rare cases, a severe heterochromia mutation just like the one Irmela has.'
Max took a slow, deep breath, the scent of the bakery fading away as a dark, violent memory from his past life as a hitman violently forced its way to the forefront of his consciousness.
He had always known that this mundane Earth, despite its lack of flying dragons and holy empires, hid terrifying secrets in its deepest shadows.
'I already met a witch before,' Max thought, his amber eyes narrowing behind his faded glasses. 'When I was still actively working in the criminal underworld, before I transmigrated to that game, before I became the Dark Lord… I encountered the supernatural right here on Earth.'
He remembered the specific night with crystal clarity. He was twenty-five years old, at the absolute peak of his lethal career as the Reaper. He had tracked a high-profile cartel target to a massive, abandoned warehouse district on the edge of the city. Rain was pouring down in heavy, freezing sheets, washing the blood from his combat knife.
He had just eliminated his target when a figure stepped out from the deep shadows of the alleyway.
It was a woman. She was wearing a ragged, dark cloak that seemed to absorb the rain. But what Max remembered most were her eyes. When she looked up at him under the flickering light of a broken streetlamp, she possessed a terrifying, supernatural gaze. Her left eye was a piercing, icy blue, and her right eye was a glowing, demonic crimson red.
He remembered gripping his suppressed handgun, preparing to eliminate the witness. But before he could even raise his weapon, the woman had spoken, her voice echoing directly inside his mind without her lips ever moving.
"To think I would see a vampire here in this filthy city," the witch had said, her telepathic voice dripping with ancient amusement. "And worse… to see a quarter-vampire walking among the human trash."
Max, in his memory, had widened his amber eyes in pure, unadulterated shock. His legendary composure had shattered completely.
"Ho—how did you know I'm a vampire?!" the younger Max had demanded, stepping back and raising his gun. "Especially that I'm a quarter one?! Who the hell are you?!"
The witch had only smiled, a chilling, knowing smirk that revealed unnaturally sharp teeth.
"So many questions, and how impatient you are, descendant of Dracula," the witch had replied, the rain seeming to bend around her cloak.
The younger Max had felt a cold sweat break out on his neck. "Wh—what?"
"I won't answer anything for you today," the witch had continued, stepping backward into the shadows. "But this is the only warning I can give to you, descendant of Dracula. Beware of the person who utters these specific words: 'Kill, Destroy, Devour all Civilizations."
The witch's glowing eyes had burned into his very soul.
"If you ever hear someone say those words… or if you uncover who that person truly is… run. Run and do not look back."
And then, as a clap of thunder shook the warehouse, the witch had simply vanished into thin air. No smoke, no sound. She was just gone, leaving Max standing alone in the freezing rain, grappling with the terrifying reality that monsters were real, and that he was one of them.
Sitting in the warm, bright bakery in the year 2055, Max tightened his grip on his coffee mug, the memory fading back into the dark vault of his mind.
In truth, Max Theo Hoffman carried a massive, incredibly dark secret. A secret he hadn't even shared with the Information Maester.
Max was a quarter-vampire.
His physical strength, his terrifying reaction speed, his ability to heal from bullet wounds in days instead of weeks, and his amber eyes that could see perfectly in pitch-black darkness—these were not the results of simple human training. They were the genetic gifts of a dark bloodline.
His father, the man known in the shadows as the Top 10 World's Worst Killer, was a half-vampire. And his grandfather, a man his father had deeply, violently hated and eventually fled from, was a pure-blooded vampire. According to the hidden, blood-stained journal Max had found hidden under the floorboards of his childhood home after his parents were murdered, his grandfather was a direct, true descendant of the legendary Dracula lineage.
Even though the journal only contained fragmented details about his father's violent past and his grandfather's ancient cruelty, reading it as a grieving teenager had completely shattered Max's worldview. He had figured out early in his life that vampires, werewolves, and witches absolutely existed in this world, hiding in plain sight, pulling the strings of the criminal underworld and manipulating the course of human history.
This world was not magical in the overt, flamboyant way that the realm of Sylan had been. There were no fireballs or floating castles. But the ancient darkness was here, creeping in the alleys and boardroom of Earth.
'Sigh,' Max inwardly groaned, taking a slow sip of his black coffee. 'Even though it's already the year 2055, the era of advanced smartphones and global internet, I really didn't think vampires and witches still operated so actively. Let alone sitting across from a woman who might be the descendant of one.'
His mind naturally drifted to the elusive serial killer, the green-eyed ghost who was currently hunting him.
'Could the Gild Killer be a supernatural being?' Max analyzed tactically. 'A werewolf? A rogue vampire hunting my bloodline? Or maybe… is the killer the exact person that the blue-and-crimson-eyed witch warned me about all those years ago? The one who wants to devour all civilization?'
The sheer weight of the impending danger, the tangled web of his vampire lineage, the looming threat of his destined assassination in exactly one year, and the sudden realization that his beautiful, dorky date might be a latent witch, threatened to overwhelm him completely.
He felt a massive headache building right behind his amber eyes.
Suddenly, a soft hand waved back and forth right in front of his face.
"Max? Hello? Earth to Max! Are you alright?" Bellatrix asked, her voice laced with genuine concern.
Max blinked rapidly, his intense, dark thoughts scattering like dust in the wind. He snapped his focus back to the present reality. He looked across the rustic wooden table. Bellatrix was leaning forward, her gray eyes staring at him with deep worry, a half-eaten piece of chocolate cake sitting on her plate.
He looked at her soft blonde hair, her beautiful dress, and the way the morning sunlight caught the dust motes dancing around her.
He realized what he was doing. He was ruining a perfectly good morning by drowning in the blood and shadows of his past. He was on his second date with a woman who genuinely cared for him. He needed to be here, in the present.
Max took a deep, steadying breath. He let go of the dark theories, the vampire lineage, and the supernatural threats. He forced a bright, reassuring smile onto his face.
"Yeah! Yeah, I'm perfectly alright, Bell," Max replied smoothly, his voice regaining its warm, confident timbre. "I was just remembering something... an important detail from my past, if I say so myself."
Bellatrix studied his face for a second, her lie-detector intuition humming quietly, but seeing his genuine smile, she decided to let it go. She didn't want to push him if he was remembering something painful.
"Ohh, alright then," Bellatrix nodded happily, leaning back into her plush seat. "Let's just eat before the coffee gets cold. Shall we?"
Max nodded his head, his smile reaching his amber eyes. "Let's."
For the next several minutes, a comfortable, warm silence fell over their secluded booth. The only sounds were the gentle clinking of silverware against ceramic plates and the distant, muffled chatter of the other bakery patrons.
Max sipped his coffee, watching Bellatrix over the rim of his mug.
She was entirely focused on her dessert. She picked up a square of the authentic German dark chocolate, popped it into her mouth, and closed her eyes in pure, unadulterated bliss. She hummed a happy, highly satisfied sound, her shoulders doing a tiny, cute shimmy of delight as she chewed the rich treat.
Watching her be so unabashedly happy over something so simple, Max felt a profound, alien warmth bloom in the center of his chest. It was a feeling of domestic peace that he hadn't experienced since he was a small child playing on the floor while his parents watched.
He completely forgot about being a quarter-vampire. He forgot about being a legendary hitman. He forgot about the 30,000 agonizing regressions in a magical hell.
In this exact moment, he was just Max Theo Hoffman, a man looking at a woman he was rapidly falling in love with.
'Let's just enjoy this date,' Max inwardly said to himself, a soft, fond smile gracing his lips. 'I don't want to ruin this peaceful morning with my dark paranoia, especially since my cute Bell seems to be enjoying her food so much.'
He lowered his coffee mug to the table. He couldn't resist the urge anymore. She looked too cute.
Without warning, Max reached his large, calloused hand across the small wooden table. He extended his fingers and firmly, playfully pinched her soft, pale cheek.
"OW-WWW!!!" Bellatrix screamed, her eyes snapping open in shock.
She nearly dropped her fork, her hands flying up to swat his large hand away from her face. She glared at him, a massive, highly exaggerated pout forming on her lips as she rubbed her stinging cheek.
"What was that for, you big jerk?!" Bellatrix whined, her gray eyes flashing with playful indignation.
Max leaned back in his wooden chair, crossing his arms over his chest. He looked at her furious, pouting face, and he couldn't hold it back anymore.
He threw his head back and let out a loud, rich, echoing sound of pure joy.
"Hahahahahaha!"
His genuine laughter filled their quiet corner of the bakery, startling a few nearby patrons, but Max didn't care. The sun was shining in the year 2055, the coffee was hot, and for the first time in a very, very long time, the Reaper was truly happy.