"Asterion of the Stars."
The moment those words left the Pope's lips, a profound sense of confusion washed over Ares. It was the very first time he had ever heard that name. Even in his previous life—a long, blood-soaked life filled with war, political assassinations, and high-tier magic—he had never once uncovered a single rumor about the existence of an Eighth God.
This was entirely unmapped territory.
A torrent of questions flooded his calculating mind, his golden eyes narrowing as he stared at the pitch-black Chaos Cubes on the table.
Is it because of me? Did the early awakening of my primordial power trigger a massive butterfly effect? Ares thought frantically, his mind racing to piece the timeline together.
He knew for a fact that in his previous life, he hadn't unlocked the violent power of the Crimson Solar Eclipse until the very end of his journey, right as he had reached Ascendant Step 3: Centurion. But now, having awakened that terrifying mutation years earlier as a mere youth, the timeline was fracturing. The future he thought he knew was violently shifting onto another path entirely.
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Just hearing the name of the forgotten, heretical god seemed to drain the warmth from the Apex Sanctum. The air around the obsidian table grew suffocatingly heavy. It was an oppressive, crushing silence that weighed heavily on the shoulders of the most powerful men in the Empire, as if the ghosts of ancient history had just stepped into the room with them.
"Ah—I made a grave mistake. I never should have spoken his true name aloud," the Pope whispered hurriedly. The omnipresent, ethereal voice of the Church's leader was now trembling with undeniable fear.
"Why?" Tiberius demanded, the Patriarch's battle-hardened composure finally fracturing. "Why do you say that, Your Grace?"
"Because the moment you speak of him... he hears it," the Pope replied, his hood of absolute light violently flickering. "Everything spoken about him, no matter where you hide, is instantly known to him. That is what makes him so utterly terrifying."
The scene shifted. Not to the glittering palaces of the Zenith Peaks, nor to the grand capital of the Empire. It shifted somewhere far away—somewhere not even on the Earth itself.
Millions of miles above the planet, surrounded by a dead, silent sea of gray craters and a pitch-black, starless void, sat a man. He looked completely, unnervingly normal. He was resting casually on a jagged lunar rock, his chin propped on his hand as he gazed down at the glowing blue and green marble of the Holy Caelian Empire.
A faint, chilling smile crept across his face. Down there, amidst the clouds, someone had finally said his name.
Back in the throne room, the consequences were instantaneous.
The moment the Pope's warning faded, the violent, permanent thunderstorm that always raged above the Zenith Peaks abruptly stopped. The deafening thunder was silenced. The golden lightning vanished. The sky above the open-air amphitheater instantly turned a suffocating, unnatural pitch-black.
A collective chill ran through the blood of everyone at the obsidian table.
High above the mountain peaks, staring down through the darkness, two colossal eyes manifested in the sky. They were not made of light or flesh, but of absolute, devouring void. For a split second, the eyes locked directly onto the gathered leaders.
Then, the eyes collapsed inward. In their place, a tear in the fabric of reality tore open, forming a small, violently spinning black hole right above the city.
The crushing gravity of the Path of Jovis suddenly inverted. The black hole let out a deafening, cosmic groan, its gravitational singularity immediately trying to rip the oxygen, the Aethel, and the very stone of the Zenith Peaks directly into the void.
However, the Zenith Peaks were far from defenseless. The ambient Aethel saturated within the bedrock of Caelus City was monstrously dense. The moment the void attempted to consume the world, the ultimate runic defenses of House Invictus automatically triggered.
Massive, overlapping grids of golden Lingua Caelestium flared to life across the entire mountain range. The sheer, crushing gravity of the Path of Jovis surged upward from the platinum spires, violently clashing against the pull of the singularity. For a terrifying, breathless moment, the two absolute forces wrestled in the sky, tearing at the very fabric of space.
Unable to consume such an overwhelmingly dense concentration of divine magic from such a vast distance, the small black hole shuddered. With a final, echoing cosmic groan, it collapsed in on itself and dissipated completely into thin air.
The unnatural, suffocating darkness shattered. A second later, the familiar, violent thunderstorms of the Zenith Peaks rolled back over the open ceiling of the throne room, filling the Apex Sanctum with the comforting sound of heavy rain and thunder.
A collective, heavy sigh of relief washed over the gathered leaders. The oppressive, soul-crushing weight vanished, allowing Cassius, Ares, and the Pope to finally draw a full breath.
But there were no smiles. As they stared up at the churning storm clouds above the obsidian table, a chilling realization settled over the room. They had survived a mere glance from the Eighth God, but they all knew the terrifying truth—something ancient and catastrophic had just set its sights on the Empire, and their world was about to be plunged into unimaginable ruin.