The announcement arrived before the dark did.
It came to every fighter on the rim at the same moment, written across their vision in letters that carried the weight of the top six Empires behind them, and along the whole edge of the world, millions of eyes read the same words at once.
[The 3,041st World-Ending Event begins shortly.]
[All kingdoms of the Upper Layer are bound to the defense. The Upper Layer survives together, or it does not survive at all.]
That second line was not a flourish. Every veteran on the rim knew it as plain fact. The dark beyond the border did not come to raid or to test. It came, every month, to end the layer entirely, to swallow ten thousand kingdoms and everything they had ever built. The only reason the upper layer still existed was that every month, so far, the whole of it had fought as one thing and held.
Then the leaderboard opened.
