After the blood-soaked silence of the coliseum finally faded behind them, Ash had no intention of letting even a single unnecessary day slip through his fingers. It was not impatience that drove him (he had centuries if he wanted them), but cold, practical calculation. He felt it would be better to remove the biggest headaches of the previous regime before his truly started.
An hour of flight across the Ashfall Plains carried them from barren red dust to a sky that grew steadily heavier, hotter, thick with the scent of scorched stone and distant brimstone. The closer they drew to the heart of Dravenholt, the more the land itself seemed to remember it had once been hell. Rivers of liquid fire snaked across the horizon, glowing arteries feeding the colossal silhouette that rose ahead.
Sanctum Primaris, the Crown of Living Fire, a city forged inside the throat of an extinct volcano whose black-glass crater walls rose so high they blotted out half the sky. Seven concentric moats of molten magma circled the capital like burning halos, each one wider and deeper than the last, their surfaces bubbling and spitting sparks that drifted upward in slow, lazy constellations before dying against the furnace wind.
Ash hovered at the edge of that burning corona, crimson-and-white cloak snapping behind him like a battle standard, while Thalion and Seris hung a few paces back, faces carved from the same unyielding stone yet betraying cracks only centuries of shared history could carve...
The heat here was oppressive enough to make the air itself shimmer, but the tension radiating from the two at his back had nothing to do with temperature. Ash had felt it building since the tunnel, had seen the way Seris's knuckles whitened whenever Dravenholt was mentioned, had watched Thalion's silver eyes darken with memories as he explained their history.
He had intended to ignore it and simply get the job done; however, it seemed the situation was a bit more complicated.
'Hm, maybe I should ask... I don't want any unfortunate events to unfold.' He thought before speaking aloud. He asked in calm tone, almost gentle, the way a surgeon asks where it hurts before he cuts.
"Tell me, is there anything I should know before.... this place becomes ours?"
Thalion's gaze flicked immediately to Seris, who stood rigid as if the magma below had frozen her boots to the sky. When the strategist spoke, his words were soft, careful, as if he were trying to avoid landmines.
"The General's brother… has been a guest of their deepest dungeon for the last one hundred and seven years."
The ash in the air answered before Seris did. It swirled into sudden, violent spirals around her, stirred by fury too old to be called anger anymore. "Those damned holy bastards!" The words tore out of her like shrapnel. "They preach righteousness only when it lets them chain someone and call it salvation!"
Ash's eyes narrowed, golden-pink rings catching the glow of distant lava. 'A living hostage. That complicates things indeed....'
He had come here planning to test a skill he had never unleashed at full scale, a skill that left very little behind except silence. A hostage however, it changed the geometry of annihilation.
For several long seconds he simply hung there, wind tugging at his hair, staring down at the seven burning rings as though he could already see every soul inside them laid bare.
Then the idea came,
"Thalion," he said without turning, "which paths are you seeing the most right now?" Seris eyes shifted to Thalion, whose mind was already calculating.... literally. His mind split into hundreds of different sections, each playing out possible events. In some he could death, retreat, a hard-fought win, or them coming to an agreement.
Behind him, Thalion's mind fractured into hundreds of silent futures. Death. Retreat. A war that lasted years. A diplomatic surrender that ended with all three of them in chains. In not one of them did Seris's brother walk free. The strategist's voice, when it came, was quieter than the magma's distant roar.
"Your Majesty… none of the futures are kind. Not unless you bring back the woman with... with those tails."
Ash paused, feeling the weight of that suggestion settle like cold iron in his chest. He had asked for futures not because he feared them, but because he had read enough novels to know the most dangerous thing a cultivator could ever become was predictable.
'If I want to stay a step ahead of everyone... no matter who they may be, I need to be the story no one can spoil..... one no one can predict.'
A slow, crooked smile spread across his face as the thought passed.
"Good. Then let's see how accurate those futures really are."
He closed his eyes and rewrote his own intent with the precision of a master calligrapher.
'This is only a peaceful visit.... A new king extending an olive branch. A chance to bury centuries of bad blood and start fresh....'
He could almost see the polite smiles, the cautious handshakes, the carefully worded treaties. The lie tasted sweet.
Then he blinked.
Time stuttered, fractured, and stopped.
His golden-pink eyes bled away to pure white, pupils and irises vanishing as the world froze solid around him. In that single, endless second, he fell forward through the next twenty-four hours like a stone through still water.
He saw himself walking politely through the cathedral gates, saw the trap they would spring, saw the three of them bound in sanctified chains while priests in white-and-gold robes smiled the smile of men who had finally caught the devil.
Twenty hours in a cell carved from obsidian and blessed bone, twenty hours to memorize every corridor, every guard rotation, every weakness in the dungeon that held Seris's brother.
When his eyes opened again, the world slammed back into motion. Barely a heartbeat had passed for Thalion and Seris.
"Well," Ash said with a lazy shrug that made both ancients stare, "it worked well enough."
He turned toward the eastern horizon where a single tower of molten rock stabbed the sky like an accusing finger, the infamous Onyx Crucible, Dravenholt's deepest and most holy prison.
'That part stays standing.' He thought.
With a roll of his shoulders, he summoned another scrap sword from his ring, plain steel, nicked and dull, the kind of blade a child might find in a trash heap. Seris watched him take a stance that looked suspiciously like an executioner's and finally lost her patience.
"Do you not have a single ranked artifact?" she demanded, voice edged with the first hints of genuine alarm.
Ash shook his head, smile widening. "I'll pick one up soon enough."
Seris opened her mouth to protest...they were still about five million kilometers out, far beyond any normal attack range, but the words died unborn.
Ash spoke the name of the skill like a prayer and a curse in the same breath.
|Lunar Apotheosis| -40% MP|
Ten billion mana vanished from his reserves in the space between one heartbeat and the next.
White lunar aura erupted from his skin in visible waves, cold and pure as moonlight on fresh snow. Phoenix rebirth flames followed, white and weightless, dancing across his shoulders and arms without heat. Finally came the star-flecked void, deep violet-black illusion mana that swallowed light and spat out tiny, glittering stars.
All three currents spiraled inward, pouring into the scrap sword until the cheap metal glowed with a light that hurt the soul to look at directly.
Ash's mana sense unfurled like a god opening its eyes.
Two and a half million kilometers in every direction bloomed open inside his mind: every prayer whispered in terror, every lie told behind cathedral doors, every innocent child branded at birth, every hypocrite who called torment salvation.
He saw the Iron Saint King on his obsidian throne. He saw the seven paladins sharpening their halberds. He saw Seris's brother chained in a cell that had forgotten the meaning of hope.
And he saw every single one of them look up at the exact same moment, faces draining of blood as they felt the weight of what was coming.
Ash's grin turned sharp enough to cut the sky itself.
"Too. Damn. Late..." He said softly, like a devil's whisper.
He swung.
A single horizontal slash, it was slow, almost casual.
From the edge of the scrap sword erupted a crescent of perfect lunar fire two and a half million kilometers wide, thin as silk, bright as the death of stars, the color the moon would wear if it ever decided to fall and never rise again.
Phantom phoenix flames danced along its inner curve while illusionary moons spun within its arc like countless millstones, each one reflecting a different face of the soon-to-be dead.
The crescent did not travel.
It simply ceased to be in Ash's hand… and chose, instead, to exist everywhere at once.
Above Sanctum Primaris, the Iron Saint King, nine hundred years old, S-rank powerhouse, a man who had never knelt to anything mortal, staggered out onto his cathedral balcony as though an invisible hand had seized him by the throat.
The molten cross branded into his chest cracked down the middle, weeping liquid gold that hissed and steamed against his skin. He looked up, and for the first time since his ascension, terror older than faith clawed its way up his spine.
"No…" The word came out small, broken, the sound a 'god' makes when it realizes it's not one after all.
Beside him, all seven paladins. legends in their own right, men and women who had burned entire cities for heresy, dropped to their knees as one, sanctified armor shattering like glass beneath a pressure, no holy artifact could withstand.
A thousand kilometers south, Queen Isolde of Veylthorne was sipping tea in her floating sky-garden when the crescent eclipsed her sun and turned the world the color of a funeral moon.
Fine porcelain slipped from nerveless fingers and shattered unheard. She rose slowly, crown tumbling from silver hair, because the moon hanging above her continents was smiling with Ash's smile.
In the far west, the Twin Emperors of the Golden Pagoda were locked in their daily spar when the sky turned corpse white. Both froze mid-clash, identical blades trembling in identical hands, identical faces draining of every drop of color as the exact same thought carved itself into both minds at once: We have been judged
Every king, queen, saint, and monster beneath that impossibly vast arc looked up at the exact same instant and saw the same thing: a perfect crescent of lunar fire and phantom moons descending with the gentle, inevitable grace of an executioner who had already sharpened the blade.
Ash lowered the now-empty sword, smile that was small, terrible, but utterly serene.
Then, with the patience of a god who had already won, he watched the crescent begin its fall.