When Leo stepped out of the Underworld, he didn't remain in the physical world for more than a heartbeat as he went straight into his domain.
He needed to see every change before making his next move.
The moment he settled onto his throne, mana rushed through him in overwhelming waves. It flowed along every path connected to his domain, thicker and heavier than before. He felt the shadow path clearly now, linked to him like a new limb. But he lacked the experience to use it properly. For now, it only fed him raw mana, swelling his reserves far beyond what he had been used to.
He leaned back slightly and extended his awareness.
His domain stretched vast and deep around him. Every corner responded to his will. Every boundary felt solid and familiar. He could sense the structure of it as if he sat at the center of a living organism.
Then he felt it. A gaze.
It came from outside the domain.
It didn't push or probe. It simply looked down at him from a height he couldn't measure. The presence behind it felt ancient, distant, and far beyond anything he had encountered before.
Sweat formed on his forehead as he tried to trace it, to understand what kind of being could look into his domain from the outside.
Before he could grasp it, the gaze vanished.
Leo exhaled slowly. "What the hell was that?"
Only after his heartbeat calmed did he notice the faint, constant noise in his mind.
Voices.
Prayers echoed across his domain in a low, overlapping murmur. The sound came from everywhere at once, showing him that the number of his believers had grown.
Among them, one familiar voice stood out.
Leo focused on it.
The surface of the mirror beside his throne rippled, and Briva's image appeared. A second later, the reflection widened, and the view expanded into multiple scenes.
The battlefields came into sight.
…
In the northern reaches of the Kingdom of Light, Timon's overwhelming strength forced Iason into a constant retreat.
Iason hurled vial after vial, each filled with a different mixture, ice, acid, corrosive mist, binding foam, but Timon cut through every one with his shadow wrapped blade. The vials shattered before they could fully activate, their contents swallowed by the darkness coiling around his sword.
As the distance between them shrank, Iason's choices narrowed. The variety of vials in his hands gave way to a single type. Explosive mixtures.
He threw them one after another. Each vial detonated with enough force to level entire sections of a city. Firestorms and shockwaves rolled across the battlefield, tearing the ground below them apart and sending debris flying in every direction.
Timon did not slow. He carved through the explosions themselves. Shadows spiraled around him like a shield, parting the fire and force as he advanced step by step, closing the gap with steady, unstoppable pressure.
After slicing through two more blasts, he finally reached Iason. His sword rose high and came down in a clean, brutal arc.
The blade cut Iason from shoulder to waist.
Iason's mouth opened in shock, but his body blurred and faded before it could fall. In his place hung a single vial filled with glowing blue liquid.
It exploded instantly.
The blast swallowed the area in a sphere of fire and pressure so vast it could have erased a large city. The air screamed as the shockwave expanded outward, devouring everything in its path.
From a distant corner of the battlefield, Iason watched with a satisfied smile.
But the explosion never finished spreading. At its center, a spiral of shadow formed. It twisted like a vortex, and the flames, smoke, and force of the blast began to bend inward. The fire folded into the darkness, sucked back as if the explosion had never existed.
Timon emerged from the collapsing inferno, unharmed.
"You really can't fight without tricks, can you?" he said.
Then he vanished. Less than a second later, he appeared directly in front of Iason.
His sword was already buried deep in Iason's chest.
…
Hellen kept her eyes on the fading beam from her summon, studying how Aerwyna reacted to every shift in the battlefield. After a short moment, she raised her arm with quiet certainty.
"She can see one minute into the future," Hellen said. "So I created an attack that lasts longer than one minute."
At her signal, the crows changed course. The massive flock tilted in the air as one body and rushed toward Aerwyna. The Lóng's beam faded, leaving the sky to the storm of wings and detonations.
The first wave of crows reached Aerwyna and exploded. Then the second. Then the third. The blasts overlapped until the air around her became a continuous chain of explosions. Smoke, feathers, fire, and shockwaves layered over one another without pause. There was no gap, no moment of stillness for her to react to.
Aerwyna raised her hands and formed a defense in front of her face and chest. Explosions hammered into it from every direction. The ground beneath her cracked. The air shook. The sound alone drowned out everything else on the battlefield.
But after several seconds, her posture shifted.
She lowered her arms. The explosions tore into her directly. Burns spread across her skin. Blood traced lines down her forearms. Her clothes charred at the edges. Still, she stood upright, whispering something under her breath with calm focus.
A pulse rolled out from her body. It moved silently but with absolute force. Every explosion froze in place and vanished. The crows disappeared as if erased from reality. In the space they had filled, soft flower petals drifted downward, replacing chaos with eerie calm.
Petals covered the air, the ground, and the space where destruction had raged a second earlier.
In the center of it all stood Aerwyna.
Sweat ran down her face. Her hair hung loose and disordered over her shoulders. A crooked, angry smile spread across her lips as she breathed heavily through her nose.
"I thought she could only alter the future of things close to her," Hellen said, a hint of disappointment and fear in her voice.
At that moment, a distant explosion shook the battlefield from the far side of the field.
All three of them turned toward the sound. What they saw made them freeze in surprise.
…
Timon glanced down to where his sword should have pierced flesh.
The blade's tip had vanished into a thin gap in space, as if the air itself had opened and swallowed it. In the same instant, another sword pushed out from his own chest.
He reacted on instinct. Timon ripped his blade free and spun in a full circle, his shadow wrapped sword cutting through the air around him.
"Nikolaus!" he shouted.
The man behind the attack flickered out of sight and reappeared a short distance away. Nikolaus Graf stood calmly, his posture relaxed as if he hadn't just tried to impale Timon through space itself.
"Is that how you greet a friend after all this time?" Nikolaus asked.
A grin spread across Iason's face. "You didn't really think illusions were my only trick, did you?"
He pulled out another vial. The liquid inside it swirled with colors he had never used before, shifting between shades that didn't seem to belong together.
"Now," Timon said, "shall we finish this?"
In that moment a sound echoed across the battlefield.
Ding. Ding. Ding.
The chime of bells rolled through the air, clear and deep, cutting through the noise of destruction like a calm note in a storm.
At the same moment, Luciana, Nikolaus, and Aerwyna all froze.
Luciana's lips curved into a faint smile as worry spread across Nikolaus's face.
"That's not good," Nikolaus muttered.
"What is that?" Iason asked.
Nikolaus glanced around as if searching for something that wasn't visible yet. "That sound means the Creator is coming."
"The Creator? A god?" Iason said, this time really surprised.
Aerwyna clenched her teeth. The one who had defeated her before was approaching.
…
Arthur searched for a weakness while the giant loomed over him, its upper body still half formed from shadow and void.
Then it began to change.
From beneath its waist, bones pushed outward. Long white shapes forced their way through the darkness as if something inside the creature had decided to take proper form. A spine extended downward, vertebrae locking together one by one.
Bones did not simply appear, they assembled.
Muscle followed. Thick strands of red fiber wrapped around the bones, tightening and layering over each other. Tendons stretched and pulled into place. The structure grew heavier, denser, more solid with every passing second.
Then skin crawled over the muscle like a living sheet, pale at first before dark veins of void spread across it. Shadow seeped through the surface and clung to the figure, coating it like a second hide.
Within moments, a complete body stood before Arthur.
A massive humanoid skeleton, now covered in flesh, wrapped in void and shadow, towering over him with empty eye sockets that burned faintly from within.
Arthur gritted his teeth. Was there really no other choice but to use that sword?
Even if he did, he wasn't sure he would have the strength left to defeat Thomas after bringing down this monster.
The air felt heavier. The ground trembled under the giant's weight as it took a single step forward.
And then…
Ding.
Ding.
…
Far in the north, near the border of the Shadowland, Iralian tore free from the last restraints holding her down.
Branches snapped and scattered as if they had never been more than dry twigs. Roots ripped out of the earth. Stone cracked and rolled away. Wind howled past her as she rose back into the air, untouched and unrestrained.
Her aura pressed outward in heavy waves, thicker than before. The air around her distorted, bending under the density of her power.
Her gaze moved slowly from one opponent to the next, Osvald, Alexia, Paul and stopped on Bernal.
Mana began to pour from her body in visible streams. It didn't flare or spark. It flowed, steady and immense, like an ocean spilling into the world. The pressure of it forced dust, debris, and loose stone to slide away from her in widening circles.
Behind her, ten small spheres formed. Each one was pure void, darker than shadow, blacker than night. They arranged themselves in a perfect ring, orbiting slowly at her back.
Alexia reacted at once. She thrust her hand forward.
High above, three gigantic chunks of stone that had hovered in the sky like fragments of a broken mountain tilted and began to descend. They moved with crushing weight, slow but unstoppable, like falling meteors aimed directly at Iralian.
Iralian didn't move.
Three of the void spheres behind her drifted forward to meet the incoming stones.
Each orb touched one of the falling masses.
On contact, the spheres expanded instantly. They didn't explode, they unfolded into large, hollow globes of absolute darkness. The stones didn't shatter or crack.
It vanished.
Each chunk disappeared completely inside the expanded void, leaving behind nothing but empty air where thousands of tons of rock had been a moment before.
Bernal acted next. At his command, black lightning tore down from the storm above and rushed toward Iralian in thick, blinding streams. The bolts converged on her from multiple angles, fast enough to split the air apart.
Another void orb drifted forward from behind her.
It expanded in silence. The lightning didn't scatter or explode. It bent inward and vanished into the hollow darkness, swallowed without a trace.
Seeing both attacks fail, Paul launched himself forward. He crossed the distance in a single leap, his fist wrapped in dense mana that distorted the air around it.
For the first time since rising again, Iralian moved with clear intent.
She lifted one hand. A void sphere slid into her palm and spread over it, coating her fingers and wrist in a layer of abyssal darkness.
Paul's punch crashed into the back of that hand.
The impact boomed across the battlefield, but instead of pushing through, his force met something that did not yield. Iralian applied a small twist of her wrist.
That was enough. Paul's body snapped sideways and shot away like a rag doll. He slammed into the ground far behind them. The collision erupted in a massive explosion of dirt and shattered stone.
"Paul! Are you alive?" Bernal shouted.
A pulse of mana surged from the impact site. Dust blew outward as Paul stood up inside the cloud and brushed debris from his shoulders.
"I'm fine," he called back. "Just a scratch."
But it wasn't a scratch.
A large section of flesh above his arm had been torn away, exposing the muscles beneath. Blood ran freely down his side.
Bernal's expression tightened. "He's S rank and his arm was fully reinforced with mana, and she still cut through it with ease. She's getting more dangerous."
Before anyone could respond, a sound rolled across the battlefield.
Ding. Ding. Ding.