_*]:min-w-0 !gap-3.5">The day began like any other—morning training, breakfast in their secret garden, pns for a riding excursion—when arm bells shattered the peace. Dark clouds gathered unnaturally fast, and screams echoed from the city walls.

  "Stay here," Kael ordered, grabbing his sword. But Mia followed, unwilling to let him face danger alone.

  The scene at the gates was chaos. Creatures of shadow and bone poured through a breach in the walls—monsters that shouldn't exist in Aldoria's programming. Knights fell before them, their weapons passing harmlessly through the dark forms.

  "Impossible," Mia whispered, recognizing a catastrophic glitch or virus in the system.

  Kael didn't hesitate. His bde, somehow, could harm the creatures. He fought magnificently, protecting civilians and rallying the guard. For a moment, it seemed they might prevail.

  Then a massive shadow beast, rger than the others, emerged from the breach. It swept aside knights like toys, heading straight for a group of children. Kael intercepted it, his sword fshing with desperate speed.

  "Kael, no!" Mia screamed as more creatures surrounded him.

  He fought valiantly, but even his skill couldn't overcome such numbers. As the massive beast's cws found his back, time seemed to slow. Kael's eyes met Mia's across the battlefield, filled not with fear, but with love and a strange awareness.

  "I remember," he gasped as he fell. "I remember everything. This isn't the end, my love. Find me again."

  Mia ran to him, cradling his head as his body began to dissolve into particles of light. "Don't leave me," she sobbed. "Please, I can't lose you."

  "You won't," he whispered, his form fading. "We're bound beyond this world. Trust the system. Trust our love."

  As the st particle vanished, Mia knelt alone on the bloodstained ground, her heart shattered. The creatures retreated as suddenly as they'd appeared, leaving devastation in their wake.

  "System!" she screamed. "Bring him back! This can't be how it ends!"

  "Sir Kael's character data has been corrupted," the system replied in its neutral tone. Then, in Kael's voice: "Choose another world, Mia. I'll be waiting."

  Overwhelmed by grief, Mia logged out and stumbled from the VR pod. In her empty penthouse, the loss felt even more acute. She'd found perfect happiness only to have it ripped away.

  Standing on her balcony, looking down at the city far below, Mia contempted ending it all. What was the point of living when the only real connection she'd ever felt existed in a virtual world that had just been destroyed?

  As she leaned over the railing, her phone chimed with a message from the Eternal Realms system: "New world avaible. Special parameters detected. Your presence is requested."

  Below the message was a single line in a different font: "Have faith. Our story isn't over."

  Mia stared at the message, tears blurring her vision. Kael's st words echoed in her mind: "Trust our love."

  With trembling hands, she stepped back from the balcony. If there was even a chance of finding him again, she had to try. Death could wait.

  Love, it seemed, could not.