NikkiNXT
*In Ashvale Village, the rules have no explanations - only consequences.*
Cover your windows before sunset. Never look at what walks the street when the bell rings twice. Leave your offering, untouched, until morning. Nobody remembers why. Everybody still obeys.
Duke Vento doesn't care about any of that. He's spent his whole life as the strongest thing in Ashvale - strong enough to level a room, fast enough to outrun consequences, and angry enough that most of the village crosses the street rather than meet his eyes. He doesn't know why he's like this. He's never had to ask.
Until a masked stranger walks into his life and beats him at his own game - with power that isn't just strength, but something else entirely. *Kendra energy.* A power Duke has apparently been using his whole life without knowing it existed.
Now the Kendra Guardians - a team hunting a darker force spreading through villages like Ashvale - say they need him. That he might be connected to disappearances, to a corruption they call *dark energy*, to something far bigger than one violent kid in one small town.
But Ashvale has its own secrets. Its rules exist for a reason nobody living remembers - and whatever answers Duke, in his rage and his strength, has spent his whole life running from, might already be the same thing that's been quietly taking children from behind uncovered windows for generations.
Some monsters knock the door down.
Ashvale's monster just waits for someone to open it.