The opening lasted for less than the beat of a humming bird's wing.
Nero burst from the shroud of ash, his form dissolving into a streak of pure, ancient dawn. He channeled the entirety of his newly awakened First Stage supreme strength into the tip of his hand, aiming straight for the exposed spot beneath the angel's left wing. The strike carried no sound, no warning—only the lethal, blinding certainty of light piercing darkness.
Yet the false god did not even turn his head.
Before Nero's fingers could graze the pale plumage, the angel's aura flared with suffocating malice. He had sensed the boy the moment his shadow shifted.
Without breaking his upward focus, the angel's left hand shot out like striking lightning, catching Kala by the throat in the middle of her primordial descent. With a flick of his wrist, he spun and hurled the demon matriarch downward with terrifying, cataclysmic force.
"Out of my sight!"
Kala crashed directly into Scarlet as the fox matriarch surged forward. Foxfire and black demonic flames collided in midair, shattering Scarlet's balance and sending both women hurtling into the churned earth below in a storm of pulverized stone and celestial shockwaves.
In the same seamless, fluid motion, the angel's free hand rose to meet Nero.
CLANG!
The impact rang out like an iron hammer striking an anvil.
The ancient radiance Nero unleashed—a power capable of vaporizing boulders to ash—ground to a dead, shuddering halt against the angel's bare palm. The false god didn't flinch. His fingers merely closed around Nero's outstretched fist, catching the strike as effortlessly as a man catching a falling leaf.
The golden light shattered into drifting, useless sparks.
"Weak," the angel whispered, his pale face devoid of anything resembling effort. "Far too weak."
He tightened his grip, the sound of Nero's bones groaning under the immense, crushing weight of the Ninth Level of the Supreme Realm.
"No amount of weak ants can possibly think of defeating me," the false god sneered, looking into his son's defiant golden eyes with cold, unyielding mockery. "Can't you all see? I am merely playing with you. You stand no chance—in heaven or earth—to even injure me."
With a casual flick of his arm, he cast Nero aside like discarded refuse, sending the youth skidding across the cracked earth below.
The angel hovered suspended in the sky, his six pristine wings spreading wide until they seemed to blot out the horizon itself. He looked down upon the battered defenders, his voice carrying across the entire valley with resonant, chilling grandeur.
"Yet, as a reward for your futile efforts, I shall enlighten you all on your true situation." A cruel, mocking smile curved his lips. "This world is coming to an end. It was set in motion long before you, my pathetic spawn, ever drew your first breath."
He looked toward the northern expanse, his eyes glinting with twisted nostalgia.
"In truth, you would not even exist if it were not for that person refusing me back then. A fellow angel... cast out and exiled by my own hand. She refused to see my vision. She chose ignorance over divinity." He let out a low, mocking chuckle that shook the poisoned air. "Oh, my foolish Elyra... I wonder if you regret rejecting my vision now, rotting wherever you fell."
Below on the scorched earth, the world seemed to stop.
Elyra.
The name struck Emperor Darius like a physical blade through his chest.
His golden aura violently sputtered. The memory of the gentle woman who had pulled him from the frozen northern snow—the wife whose origin had haunted him for decades—roared to the forefront of his mind.
For one single, fatal second, Darius turned his head.
He looked up at the sky, his eyes wide with breathless disbelief.
"Darius, watch out!" Cornelius's roar tore through the cacophony of battle, but it came too late.
In that single heartbeat of distraction, the Mana Devourer Darius had been suppressing seized the opening. Its shifting grey mass surged forward with monstrous speed, dozens of barbed, translucent tendrils whipping toward the Emperor's unguarded heart like a cluster of javelins.
Darius had no time to raise his blade. No time to summon his imperial barrier.
"Your Majesty!"
A shadow threw itself across the Emperor's line of sight.
SQUELCH.
The sickening sound of punctured steel and tearing flesh cut through the wind.
Marcus slammed into Darius, shoving the sovereign forcefully to the side as the Devourer's barbed tendrils tore through the young officer's breastplate. Three thick, grey appendages drove straight through Marcus's chest and shoulder, lifting him clean off his feet.
"Marcus!" David screamed, his blade faltering as he tried to break away from Talon's side.
Marcus didn't fall. The tendrils held him suspended in the air, undulating with grotesque, pulsating light.
The abomination did not merely wound—it fed.
A pale, sickening glow began traveling along the length of the grey tendrils as they latched directly into Marcus's meridians. The young knight gasped, but no sound escaped his throat except a wet, ragged rattle. With agonizing slowness, his life, his cultivation, and his very soul were being siphoned away. The rich color drained from his skin, turning an ashen, hollow grey; his veins blackened beneath his flesh, withering like dried roots as the alien entity greedily consumed his mana.
Darius hit the ground and scrambled up, the horror of the scene smashing through his daze and snapping him violently back to reality.
"MARCUS!"
Darius lunged forward, his broadsword igniting with a desperate, furious blaze of imperial gold. But Marcus's head was already lolling forward, his golden eyes clouding over as the Devourer's central mass swelled with the stolen power of his life.
The surrounding Devourers shrieked in unison, their endless eyes swarming toward the broken imperial vanguard, while high above, the six-winged angel watched the slaughter unfold with a calm, indifferent smile.
Darius's broadsword struck like a falling sun.
Golden imperial mana detonated against the thick, rubbery hide of the central Devourer, the blinding arc carving deep into its gelatinous flank. Violet-grey ichor hissed as it splashed against the scorched earth, steaming with corrosive cold. But the creature did not recoil. It did not bleed as mortal beasts bled. Its amorphous mass simply rippled, the wound knitting shut with nauseating speed even as Darius cleaved through two of the barbed tendrils impaling his young knight.
Marcus gasped, his body jolting as the severed appendages tore free from his shoulder, but the central tendril remained lodged dead in his chest, buried straight into the spiritual core of his sternum.
"Hold on, Marcus!" Darius roared, his imperial composure completely shattered. He grabbed the severed stumps of the tendrils with his bare gauntlets, golden fire searing from his palms as he tried to burn the alien flesh away. "Look at me! That is an imperial command! Do not close your eyes!"
Marcus's lips parted, but only a thread of blackened blood spilled over his chin. His skin had lost all warmth, fading to the dull, translucent grey of a corpse left in winter ice. Beneath his cheeks, his veins throbbed black, withering like dry vines as the Devourer pulled his very life force through the tube of pulsating flesh. His fingers, trembling and pale, clawed weakly at Darius's arm, unable to find purchase.
"Your Majesty, get back!" Cornelius's voice boomed as the veteran general slammed his heavy staff into the earth, sending a shockwave of compressed wind that deflected a secondary swarm of tendrils lunging for Darius's exposed flank.
"David, John, maintain the perimeter!" Talon shouted, his black wind forming a vortex of razor-sharp gale crows that shredded the grasping limbs of a second beast trying to encircle them. "The moment its tendrils fully digest the host's core, the parasite will double its mass! Sever the anchor, or the boy is lost!"
David fought with tears stinging his eyes, his imperial blade a blur of silver-edged steel alongside Talon's gale. "Marcus! Hold on!"
High above the carnage, floating effortlessly upon the turbulent thermal winds, the six-winged angel looked down upon the desperate struggle with an expression of profound, amused boredom. The wind whipped his pristine white hair across his flawless face, his golden eyes glowing with cold celestial light as his wings beat in slow, hypnotic rhythm.
"How touching," the false god murmured, his voice cutting clean through the roaring tempest, resonating directly inside the skulls of every living soul on the battlefield. "The frantic scurrying of insects when one of their own is crushed beneath a boot. Still so blind. Still so pitifully ignorant of the cosmic order."
He raised a single, luminous hand toward the bleeding grey horizon, his fingers uncurling as if presenting a grand masterpiece to an ungrateful audience.
"Allow me to remove your lingering doubts," he said, the sheer weight of his Ninth Level Supreme Realm aura pressing down like an iron vault. "Since you are all destined to perish here in this desolate ditch, consider it a final mercy. A glimpse of enlightenment before the dark claims you."
He gestured lazily toward the shrieking, shifting horrors writhing across the ground.
"You look upon these creatures and see abominations. You call them invaders. You call them parasites." A low, melodious laugh spilled from his lips, sharp as broken glass. "How delightfully hypocritical mortal minds truly are. These mindless beasts are entirely in the right. They are not stealing your world's life—they are merely taking back what was stolen from them."
Below, Silva's wooden staff paused mid-swing as he parried a barbed lash alongside Cornelius. Beneath his mask, Silva's breath hitched.
What?
From the deepest recesses of Silva's soul, a suffocating, ancient chill stirred.
...Pandora?
"Listen to him, Silva," the Dragon of Darkness whispered, her ancient voice trembling with a grim, terrible resonance that vibrated through his very bones. "Listen well... he speaks no lies when it mocks the dying."
The angel's voice swelled, booming like rolling thunder across the cracked plains.
"Before this fragile realm you call Aurelia was ever pieced together, there was another world. An ancient, boundless expanse of pure mana. But creation is never born from nothingness; it demands sacrifice. To shape this world—to birth its skies, to fill its oceans, to ignite the souls of Kin and mortals alike—that prior world was shattered."
The false god smiled, a look of sublime cruelty in his golden gaze.
"Every breath of mana coursing through your meridians, every flame your sorcerers conjure, every drop of spiritual power in your veins was ripped from the womb of their destroyed reality. These creatures you despise are the remnants of that sacrificed world. They do not hunger out of malice; they seek the return of their own flesh. They are the rightful heirs of the power you so arrogantly claim as your birthright."
"Lies!" Prince George roared from the imperial line, his heavy broadsword cleaving through a Devourer's sensory node in a spray of black bile. "Senseless ravings of a madman!"
"Believe what comforts your tiny minds," the angel replied with icy disdain. "It changes nothing. And do not flatter yourselves into believing that surviving this skirmish would grant you salvation. These mindless beasts crawling through the dirt? They are nothing. The lowest of the low. The dregs and rotting husks left behind on the surface."
He pointed his index finger straight up into the endless sky—past the clouds, past the atmosphere, toward the fathomless expanse beyond.
"Beyond the veil of reality, in the infinite graveyard of their fallen universe—the Void—the true sovereigns remain. Horrors of unfathomable magnitude, beings that could swallow this entire continent whole and reduce your precious gods to cinders."
His voice dropped to a sinister, chilling purr.
"For ten thousand years, something has stood in their way. An unseen lock, an ancient, stubborn seal barring the Void's true masters from tearing their way into this world. I do not know what meddlesome entity forged that barrier, nor do I care. Because locks rust. Seals decay. And day by day, breath by breath, that barrier is cracking. Sooner rather than later, everything you know will crumble into dust, and the true Devourers will swallow Aurelia whole."
The revelation hung in the air like a poisoned shroud.
On the ground, Emperor Darius felt the coldness settle deep into his chest. The angel's earlier words slammed back into his thoughts with brutal clarity.
Elyra... she refused to see my vision... she chose exile...
Had Elyra known? Had she discovered the doomed fate of Aurelia before she fled to the northern snows? Was her exile an attempt to escape the inevitable apocalypse this false god was trying to hasten?
"Marcus, stay with me!"
With a deafening roar, Darius brought the blade down directly through the Devourer's primary core, severing the thick feeding tendril at its root.
SPLAT!
The creature shrieked, a soundless wail of psychic agony that rattled the stones beneath their boots, thrashing wildly as it collapsed backward into the grey dust.
Marcus fell forward, collapsing like a puppet with severed strings. Darius caught him against his armored chest, his knees slamming into the blood-soaked earth.
But the wound did not bleed normally. The flesh around Marcus's heart had withered to grey ash; his strenght was completely drained, his meridians hollowed out until not a single trace of life-force flickered within his veins.
Marcus's clouded eyes rolled toward the Emperor. His lips moved, forming no sound, hisfingers trembling one last time before falling limp against the cracked stone.
"Marcus!" David screamed, lunging forward, but Talon caught the young prince by the collar of his tunic, dragging him back as another pair of Devourers lunged into the opening.
"Do not break formation!" Talon hissed, his voice taut with grim desperation. "If you fall now, his sacrifice was for nothing!"
BOOM!
High above, the sky erupted in a cataclysm of crimson and void-black flame.
From the smoking crater where they had fallen, two figures ascended like twin comets of pure destruction.
Scarlet rose first, her crimson robes whipping around her slender frame. Behind her, five massive, magnificent tails of roaring foxfire unfurled across the heavens, each one burning with the terrifying heat of the Fifth Stage—the Supreme Realm. Her tessen fan was open, crackling with arcs of scarlet celestial lightning that tore the surrounding clouds to shreds.
Beside her, Kala's primordial fury reached its absolute zenith. Her demon tail woven of pure, abyssal darkness writhed behind her, blotting out the sun and turning the sky above into an ocean of pitch-black primordial flame. Her eyes blazed with crimson malice, her fangs bared in a snarl of undying hatred.
"You talk too much, you miserable wretch!" Kala shrieked, her voice shaking the valley as she and Scarlet closed the distance in a synchronized pincer of celestial flame and primordial abyss.
The six winged false god's cold smirk remained unbroken.
"Still squirming, worms?"
With a single beat of his six luminous wings, the angel met their dual assault head-on. The shockwave of their collision tore the tops off distant hills, stone and sky shattering in a terrifying display of Supreme Realm power that blinded the battlefield below.
And amidst the blinding flash of gods clashing in the heavens, a single shadow stirred in the ash below.
Nero pushed himself up from the dirt, wiping a smear of golden blood from the corner of his mouth. His First Stage Supreme aura condensed tightly around his body, light folding inward until he became an imperceptible blur once more. His radiant golden eyes looked upward, watching the violent, shifting currents of his father's wings, searching through the chaos for the single, impossible crack in the immortal's defense.
High above the world, far beyond the reach of the clouds, the fabric of the sky gave a deep, silent groan.
For the briefest fraction of an instant, the air turned freezing cold—as if something unfathomably vast, lurking in the blackness of the Void, had felt the barrier shudder, and turned its eyes toward the light of Aurelia.