Chapter 47 – The Weight of Kings
The battlefield inside the Sanctuary was no longer a place of honor or worship; it had become a ruin of screaming shadows, broken marble, and blood-soaked banners. The dark armies conjured by the Celtic Highs pressed in like waves, their hollow eyes and jagged armor gleaming with unnatural fire. Every strike of their weapons sang with the resonance of death itself. The rebels, though valiant, were breaking.
And at the heart of it all, Moro stood, his breath heavy, his body trembling, his eyes locked on the towering figures of the Highs.
Then came the sound.
A sound sharper than steel, crueler than thunder.
"KHRAAAGH!"
Hanks' cry echoed through the chamber as a jagged spear of condensed dark magic erupted through his side. The King of Shinya staggered, blood pouring from his lips, his once-proud form brought low. The Highs' combined aura was suffocating, their hands glowing with that dreadful black luminescence that bent the very air around them.
"HANKS!" Moro roared, his voice cracking with rage and grief. His friend, his ally, the man who had chosen rebellion against the chains of the council — impaled like prey.
The light in Moro's chest twisted. His aura surged, the Matrix within him burning, spiraling, feeding on his despair. His eyes blazed a ghostly blue, veins of radiant energy splitting across his skin. He fell into a berserk frenzy, every strike shaking the ground, tearing through the shadow-army like parchment.
But the Highs were not ordinary enemies.
Each step they took countered his fury, each hand raised nullified his strikes. His blows met walls of dark mystic energy that cracked but did not break. Their combined voice whispered through the chamber like the hiss of a thousand serpents.
> "The boy bears the flow… but the flow without balance collapses into ruin."
Moro was tossed across the broken floor, his berserk power undone as easily as a candle crushed beneath a boot. His back slammed against the fractured throne of kings, dust and blood choking his breath.
Kaya cried out, her body glowing with the sacred water spirit form, waves of crystalline torrents flooding outward to hold back the endless army. She spun like a dancer of rivers, her blade slicing through shadows, every movement elegant yet desperate. But though her water drowned dozens, the dark army reformed again, crawling up from the cracks of the Sanctuary like maggots from rot.
"Kaya!" Moro gasped, staggering up, his vision blurred. He could feel her struggle — she was burning herself, pouring all she had into keeping the rebels alive.
And then his eyes fell back to Hanks.
The King collapsed on one knee, blood dripping into the cracked stones, his hand pressing against the gaping wound. His breath was ragged, shallow, but his eyes burned — eyes that were not yet ready to close.
And then time… shifted.
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The Flashback
The battlefield blurred into another place, another time.
Hanks was a boy again, standing barefoot on cold marble, staring at the massive coffin draped in gold and black banners. King Lucius, his father, lay within. The great warrior-king, the ruler of Shinya, the man whose presence was once enough to silence whole courts, was now nothing but silence himself.
The councilors whispered around him.
"The boy is weak."
"He cannot carry Lucius' will."
"He will bend, like his mother bent."
But Hanks remembered the look in his father's eyes on that last night. Lucius' hand, heavy as iron, gripping his shoulder.
"Strength… is not given, my son," Lucius had said, his voice trembling, his armor stained from the war he could not win. "It is taken. It is chosen. One day… you will stand where I fell. And you must not bow, Hanks. Not to them. Not to anyone."
Then Lucius had coughed blood, and by dawn he was gone.
And Hanks, the boy who had watched his father's death, was forced into a crown forged from grief and chains. For years he obeyed the council, for years he bowed his head, shackled by duty. But now — now he remembered.
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Back to the Present
Hanks staggered upright. His vision was swimming, his wound burning with the venom of the Highs' magic, but he would not stay down. Not while Shinya still breathed.
"Lucius…" he muttered, clutching his side. "I am your son. I will not bow."
The Highs noticed him stir, their twisted gaze flickering like fire across the battlefield. They had assumed the King was finished. They were wrong.
"Moro," Hanks rasped, his voice heavy but steady, "you will not fight alone."
Moro turned, eyes wide. He wanted to scream at Hanks to stay down, to survive, but the look in the King's eyes silenced him. It was not foolishness. It was resolve.
The kind of resolve only a man born in chains could wield.
Hanks' aura exploded.
His body expanded, glowing with molten gold, muscles hardening into slabs of steel, his frame towering like a colossus. His injured arm pulsed with painful light, bones reknitting themselves as he unleashed the full might of his Colossum Power.
The Sanctuary shook. The shadows recoiled. Even the Highs tilted their heads, acknowledging the rise of a true King.
The rebels gasped from afar. Kaya's water form flickered, hope piercing through her exhaustion. Xerx, wounded yet still alive, felt the shift in the currents of magic. His old lips curved in the faintest of smiles.
"Hanks…" Moro whispered, eyes blazing with renewed fire.
The Highs raised their arms, chanting in tongues that twisted the air. Darkness surged in waves, pressing down on them like the weight of collapsing worlds.
But Hanks stepped forward, each footfall thunder, his wound bleeding yet his spirit unbroken.
"I am the son of Lucius," he bellowed. "And I will not bow!"
He and Moro charged together, their energies colliding, twin storms of blue and gold, slamming into the Highs with the force of gods defying fate itself.
The chamber became light and shadow, fire and water, hope and despair — all clashing in a symphony that would scar Shinya for generations.
And above it all, the rebels screamed and fought, Kaya's water spirits surging, Xerx weaving light into Moro's veins, and the Highs' dark laughter echoing across the broken Sanctuary like the sound of eternity itself.
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