"The wheel turns… we die… we are reborn… we suffer… we learn… all before life returns, in ways you won't imagine."
Ash murmured some nonsense he heard back on Earth, but he spoke with the refined cadence of a court poet reciting to a silent hall, his voice soft as velvet and warm as candlelight, utterly at odds with the pale, continent-wide crescent now descending like the gentle blade of an executioner who had all the time in the world.
A small, satisfied smile curved his lips while the lunar fire drifted downward, vast enough to eclipse five kingdoms and the wastelands between, bright enough to turn midday into moonless night. Behind him, Seris and Thalion stood frozen in the furnace wind, staring at the man they had followed as though the last veil of humanity had finally slipped from his face and revealed something older, colder, and infinitely more beautiful than any devil.
Thalion felt ice crawl down his spine despite the magma glow painting the clouds beneath them crimson and gold. The strategist, who had lived nearly six centuries and mapped futures the way other men mapped roads, could find no calculation, no precedent, no word adequate for what he was witnessing.
'He speaks such words... with such elegance.... verses written for the dying and the grieving... while turning five sovereign nations into ash and scripture in the same breath.... He is no king, no conqueror; he is a walking apocalypse wearing the skin of a smiling young man.'
The thought lodged in his throat like a splinter of glass; he swallowed hard, the motion audible in the sudden hush, and dared a glance at Seris.
She stood rigid, crimson cloak lashing around her like a battle standard caught in a storm no one else could feel, eyes wide and unblinking, pupils blown wide with something that lived on the knife-edge between terror and reverence.
The woman who had commanded armies through blood-soaked centuries was drinking in the impossible spectacle with the helpless fascination of a moth watching the flame that would consume it. Her lips parted, but no sound came; only the faintest tremor in the hand that had once held a sword against gods.
Down below, the world screamed and scrambled and broke.
In Sanctum Primaris, cathedral bells forged from the bones of martyred saints tolled themselves to fragments, bronze and marrow cracking under the weight of a sky that had forgotten mercy. The Iron Saint King staggered onto his obsidian balcony, nine hundred years of righteous fury draining from his face as molten gold poured from the fractured cross branded into his chest like tears from a dying sun.
His seven paladins slammed their halberds into the cathedral stone in perfect, desperate synchrony, sanctified mana surging upward in a radiant dome of white-gold light that shattered into a million glittering shards the instant the crescent's edge kissed it, the backlash hurling the holy warriors to their knees in sprays of their own molten blood.
To the south, Queen Isolde of Veylthorne hurled every ancestral treasure her bloodline had hoarded, only for them to melt into rivers of liquid starlight before they cleared the palace towers, dripping like molten tears onto marble that had never known heat until this moment.
In the distant west, the Twin Emperors of the Golden Pagoda stood atop their jade pagoda, hands clasped, souls fused into a single colossal humanlike figure of living emerald that roared into the sky, punching outward with enough force to level mountains.
The force behind the punch cause space to tremble violently.... and then the lunar light touched it once, gently, almost kindly, and the colossal figure melted into pale green sand that rained across the pagoda roofs like funeral dust.
Everywhere the crescent passed, existence simply surrendered.
Cities, armies, ancient forests older than language, rivers that had carried trade and war for millennia; all flash-frozen into flawless white ash shaped like perfect illusionary moons that bloomed across the landscape in endless overlapping rings, a garden of annihilation written in the ashes of the living.
The ash did not scatter. It hung suspended in the exact shapes of the lives it had stolen, a child's outstretched hand, a soldier's final salute, a king's last defiant roar, motionless for one heartbeat, two, three, as though even the wind itself feared to disturb the eulogy.
Then the phoenix flames came.
White fire, silent and cold as moonlight on fresh snow, swept outward in perfect concentric circles that rippled across the ruined masses like the breath of a god exhaling after a long, patient wait.
Where the flames touched, ash became flesh again; lungs drew breath, hearts stuttered and steadied, eyes opened with the same luminous silver glow burning in every single one of them, from the lowliest branded child in the cathedral slums to the Iron Saint King himself, still on his knees in a puddle of his own molten gold.
Five hundred and fifty million reborn souls turned as one toward the distant figure floating above the Ashfall Plains, the man who had ended their world and begun it anew in the span of a single lazy sword swing.
And knelt.
The sound of that many knees striking the ground rolled across the continent like a second, deeper thunder, a tide of submission that shook the earth harder than any spell ever could.
Crowns rose from bowed heads as though lifted by invisible hands blackened obsidian circlets molten at the edges, jade crowns carved with ancestral symbols, star-iron tiaras that had once bound the wills of nations, bone-and-ruby diadems still warm with the blood of saints.
They drifted upward in a glittering river of surrendered sovereignty, catching the pale lunar light as they soared across the ruined landscape until they hovered before Ash like offerings laid at the feet of a god who had never asked to be worshipped, only obeyed.
He extended one lazy hand, palm open, and the crowns slipped into his spatial ring one by one with soft, obedient chimes, each one vanishing with the quiet finality of a door closing on an era.
Ash closed the ring with a faint, satisfied click, the smile on his face serene, almost nostalgic, as though he had simply come home to collect things that had always carried his name.
Far below, five hundred and fifty million reborn souls remained on their knees beneath a sky that had forgotten how to hold any color but surrender, silver eyes fixed on the distant silhouette of their only god, waiting in perfect silence for the first word of the new world.
[550 million loyal subordinates gained.]
[+17,600 EL]
[+5,000 EL – feat bonus]
[Current EL: Peak A-rank (35,532.5)]
[Forge Path to ascend to S-rank.]
Ash's voice drifted across the continent, soft as a lullaby, yet every soul heard it clear as cathedral bells inside their skulls. "Go about your lives as you always have. I will call when the time is right."
He wasn't surprised by the paltry sum. When he had forged Lunar Apotheosis in the Haven, he had tried to make it as broken as possible, but the laws of the world itself had pushed back, capping the harvest at a hard 0.0032 EL per soul for the crime of daring to kill and resurrect in the same breath.
The rest came from multipliers and the sheer, insane scale of the feat. It was enough. More than enough.
He turned to his two still-dumbstruck companions, the scrap sword already crumbling to dust in his hand.
"How was the show?"
Seris's answer came out a whisper, reverent and cracked. "Beautiful…"
Thalion's voice shook harder. "S-scary, Your Majesty."
Ash just chuckled, low and warm, and tilted his head toward the one structure still standing untouched beneath the ruined sky the towering dungeon of molten rock and sanctified chains that pierced the heavens like an accusation.
"Well then," he said lightly, already drifting toward it, "your brother's waiting. Let's go say hello."
Seris's breath caught. She had been certain (absolutely certain) that everything, innocent and guilty alike, had burned. Yet the one place that should have burned brightest stood pristine, untouched, a single island of black glass and holy wards in a sea of white ash and kneeling faithful.
She stared at Ash's back, crimson cloak fluttering behind him like a banner of conquest and mercy both, and something in her chest shifted irrevocably.
[Seris Kaelthar's Affection: 95%]
Ash felt the change like warm wine in his veins and smiled to himself, slow and wicked.
'Not yet, sweet General. You'll have to earn the right to serve this lustful bastard~.'
He thought.