Ash stood in the center of the blood-soaked sand, scrap sword resting lazily against his shoulder, waiting.
Five minutes crawled by in perfect, suffocating silence. Not a cough, not a whisper, not even the wind dared disturb the coliseum. Darius and Lysara remained frozen like statues carved from ash and terror, eyes fixed on nothing. Ash tilted his borrowed head, genuinely curious, then glanced back at his two companions.
"Thalion, what's up with everyone?" he asked in Alaric's rough drawl, as casual as if he'd just finished a light spar instead of painting the arena with ninety-eight lives in four seconds.
Thalion blinked once, slow, like a man waking from a nightmare he hadn't realized he was in.
"Your Majesty…" His voice came out faintly hoarse. "Perhaps the display was… a touch excessive."
"Eh?" Ash looked around at the red mud, the scattered limbs, the perfect circles of corpses, and felt exactly nothing.
'Hmm, now that I think about it.... I didn't feel a thing when I erased the old royal family either…'
A quiet realization settled in his chest like cold iron.
'I guess I'm truly not merely human anymore.... in more ways than I realized initially.' As he thought of this for a moment...
He shrugged, the thought already filed away and forgotten.
High above, the announcer finally found his voice, though it cracked like thin ice.
A snap of trembling fingers and a colossal illusory map bloomed over the arena, borders shifting in real time as ninety percent of Thalor bled crimson and merged into Velora's white-and-red. Before Velora was 100,000km and now it was a staggering 262,000km.
In just four seconds Ash increased their territory by more than 100,000km.
Just absurd....
"The highlighted territories are now legally Velora's by ancient wager law. Treasury assets have been transferred."
Then a ring arced through the air. Ash caught it one-handed, he sent a thread of mana inside, and his eyes glittered at the mountains of mana stones waiting within.
He looked up at King Thalor, who was as pale as a corpse behind the barrier, then flashed Alaric's drunken grin.
"Nice doing business with you."
After saying those words, he turned and walked away, Thalion and Seris falling in behind him like shadows. The tunnel swallowed them, cool and dark and mercifully quiet.
Seris spoke first, voice stripped of its usual bite.
"So… what now?"
Ash stretched and spoke with a smile while rolling his shoulders. "Expansion, my dear General. It's time to grow up big and strong."
He glanced at Thalion. "Which kingdoms were Velora's favorite headaches before I showed up?"
Thalion's answer came calm and immediate, as though he'd been waiting centuries to say it aloud.
"Two in particular... longtime rivals... to the North-east border: Lyrion. Ice-blooded royals who've raided our northern passes every winter for four hundred years. One hundred and eighty years ago they crushed us in the Frostbite War. They still fly our frozen, tattered banner from their palace gates as a trophy."
A pause. The temperature in the tunnel seemed to drop another five degrees.
"And due south, across the Ashfall Plains: Dravenholt. Ruled by their Iron Saint King, seven paladins, and with crimson-cross banners.... For three centuries they've burned our border cities on holy days because we gave sanctuary to the survivors of their Red Monastery purge."
Seris's gauntlet creaked. Leather groaned like old wood under frost. Her jaw locked; the pulse at her temple beat hard enough to see. Three centuries of hate compressed into one clenched fist she didn't bother hiding anymore.
Ash caught every micro-movement, eyes sharp behind Alaric's mask, but he asked nothing.
Thalion finished softly, "They've been our neighbors and our nightmares long before any of us drew breath in this era."
Ash whistled a lazy tune; hands laced behind his head.
"Noted. First stop: Dravenholt."
Seris actually stumbled half a step.
"What?!"
"Going now? That's suicide! Dravenholt is nearly double our size even with Thalor added! Not just that, their king is S-rank, their seven paladins are late A-rank at minimum—"
Ash kept walking, whistling louder, and let the Perfect Disguise melt away mid-stride. Midnight hair spilled down his back mixed with white streaks, devilish features returned, his crimson-and-white cloak adjusted, settling over leaner, more compact shoulders.
He looked relaxed, almost bored.
Seris's warnings bounced off him like rain on steel.
'Kill them all and raise them as subjects?' he wondered idly.
'Or just walk in, take the crown, and be home for dinner? Decisions, decisions…'
Behind him, Seris stared at his back and realized, with a chill that had nothing to do with Lyrion's ice, that the monster she now followed wasn't planning a war.
He was planning a just short pitstop ...