[Path: The Path of Devouring Crowns - A journey of conquest and domination, where the goal is to claim crowns, whether they belong to kingdoms, empires, or entire worlds.
-The user needs to gain at least 50 new crowns each year, or their cultivation path will come to a halt.
Path-Granted Ability: "Maw of Empire"
A single crimson sigil that appears on his tongue when he opens his mouth in battle.
-Anything the sigil touches—be it blade, flesh, crown, skill, or talent—is instantly consumed and absorbed into his power.
-The more crowns he devours, the larger and hungrier the sigil becomes, and by the time it has claimed a thousand rulers, it can swallow entire armies in a single bite.
-Amass 200,000 'Crowns' before the next steps are revealed.]
Kale stood alone in the dim glow of his chambers, crimson letters of the Path burning themselves into his retinas like brands. The Path of Devouring Crowns. Fifty crowns a year or rot forever.
He opened his mouth just to feel it pulse, and the air itself seemed to recoil from the hunger written there. One month of evolution, one month of bones grinding into new shapes, and the world had finally handed him the key to devour it whole. A slow, reverent exhale left his lips, carrying the scent of blood that wasn't there yet.
He stepped into the war room, boots silent on obsidian, the air thick with incense and the copper tang of old blood. Queen Yonna stood before the scrying pool, back straight, her black and red streaked hair flowing. She did not turn when he approached, but the air around her chilled by several degrees, frost creeping along the edges of the pool.
Kale moved behind her, arms already rising to circle her waist. He never made it.
Yonna shifted, one fluid, lethal step sideways, and his hands closed on nothing but winter air sharp enough to cut. Her smile was small, polite, and colder than the void between stars.
"Control yourself, nephew," she said, voice soft as falling snow over graves. "We have a war to watch."...
Kale's smile didn't falter, but something ugly flickered behind his eyes.
The word nephew landed like a slap. No warmth... none of her usual flirtatious persona he was used to...
'She's been acting different since the first time I returned.... but why?' He thought as his fingers flexed, nails biting half-moons into his palms, but he let his arms drop.
Yonna flicked her wrist and the scrying pool ignited.
The image rippled into life as golden-black flames and white-blue lightning clashed tearing the sky apart.
----
Sylvara's smile was all teeth when Riven's twin blades kissed the air a finger's breadth from her throat. Lightning hissed against her skin, desperate, starving. She inhaled, slow and deliberate, then the golden-black fire roared up her body like a tide of molten gold devouring a storm.
"Pretty blades," she mocked, voice velvet and venom. "Do they cut as good as they glitter?"
FWHOOOOSH!
The flames exploded outward, swallowing every arc of lightning whole. Stolen electricity detonated inside her fire, birthing a corona of molten gold that punched straight through Riven's guard and flung him backward a hundred meters. Armor cracked like eggshell. Blood sprayed in a crimson fan.
Riven caught himself mid-air, laughing through shattered teeth. "Haha! Little bug is that all you got?"
He dove again... this time faster... and angrier, blades screaming as they carved burning runes in the sky. Sylvara met him with the whip. Ninety flaming serpents became nine hundred, each one larger, each one faster, each one tasting his lightning and growing fatter on it.
The first lash caught his cheek, flaying flesh to the bone; the second wrapped his left arm and burned through armor like paper.
"Come closer," Sylvara sang, eyes glowing like dying suns. "...Feel the heat that I carry!"
Riven laughed through broken teeth and kept coming, beautiful and suicidal.
The projection shifted.
CRACK!
Rhea's seventh step shattered the storm-glass slab. Dren's Thunder Deity fist (thirty meters of living storm) descended like the end of the world.
Rhea met it with the butt of her spear.
BOOOOOOOOM!
The lightning arm exploded into a million screaming shards that carved glowing canyons across her crimson plate and opened her cheek to the bone. Blood poured hot down her neck, but she grinned wider.
"Old man," she growled, voice raw with joy, "that tickled."
The she moved again.
She accelerated. Eighth step.... Ninth step... by the Tenth step she was inside his guard, spear spinning, momentum now a living battering ram. Dren roared, reformed a fist of pure thunder, and swung. She ducked under it, shoulder-checked his chest
BOOM!
The impact detonated his remaining mana into a shockwave that shredded both armors and painted the sky red with their mingled blood.
"Die already!" Dren thundered, voice cracking the heavens.
"Kill me then!" Rhea laughed and drove her spear through the storm.
The image bled to violet dusk.
Seyra drifted through her own shadow, violet-streaked hair floating like silk in deep water. Sasha's fog domain (once a perfect sphere of razor-sleet) now orbited Seyra like a tamed beast. Sasha lunged, blades of frozen mist screaming.
"You can't run forever," Sasha hissed, voice soft as grave dirt.
"Who said I'm running?" Seyra whispered back, stepping out of Sasha's own shadow. Two fingers pressed to the marshal's spine. Void Garden bloomed as black petals unfurled in silence. Every drop of moisture in Sasha's body flash-frozen into violet crystal that cracked her from the inside out.
crack-crack-CRACK!
Blood crystallized mid-fall.
Sasha spun, eyes wide with animal terror, and unleashed a blizzard that could bury mountains. Seyra opened her mouth (gentle, almost kind), and the blizzard vanished into the void, reappearing a heartbeat later as a spear of black ice that punched clean through Sasha's shoulder.
SHHHNK!
Sasha screamed, but the sound was swallowed whole.
Then the bells.
"Wrong one."
Lyrin's whisper crystallized Vale's eardrums. Blood poured from his ears in steaming rivers. Her tiny hand pressed to his chest, every bell in her hair ringing at once.
Ding-Dong-Ding-Dong-Ding
It was like a chord of pure death.
Vale's heart stuttered as his lightning body began flickering unstable.
He roared, seized her wrist, and discharged a million volts straight through her arm.
However, the moment he did that, Lyrin whispered a skill into activation.
|Echo of the Last Bell (A) | - 35% MP|
BZZZZZZZZZZZT!
Flesh charred black, bone gleamed white, but Lyrin only tilted her head and smiled wider, bells singing louder, and the lightning reversed flowing back into Vale's own heart. His eyes rolled white.
He dropped to one knee, coughing black smoke and blood that sizzled on the air.
"Well, this was fun....," Lyrin giggled, voice sweet as broken glass. "But it's time you die..."
Four separate skies bled, burned, and screamed.
Four women danced on the razor's edge of death with smiles that never reached their eyes.
----
Kale lounged on the throne now, one leg thrown over the armrest, fingers drumming a lazy rhythm.
"How long has this been going on?"
Yonna didn't look at him.
"First attack was launched three weeks ago. Your… women have been tangled with those four A-ranks for about half an hour."
"And their S-ranks still haven't moved?" Kale's voice carried lazy amusement.
"Why would they?" Yonna's tone was winter steel. "The troops dying down there are cannon fodder at best. You know that."
Kale rose, sigil flickering across his tongue as he smiled. "Then let's not make this war too long. I'll head to the battlefield myself. Contact my mother. Tell her to come here.... You two can watch from the pool. I plan to have that ranking within two months."
He was already walking out, boots ringing against obsidian like the first beats of a funeral march.
Yonna turned, confusion flickering across her face for the first time, then narrowing into something sharp and hungry.
'Two months.... By then...'
Her fingers curled against her palm, nails biting half-moons into flesh. She had been stuck at the Peak of A-rank for too many years. But now she had a lead on how to move forward.....
She watched the door close behind him and whispered to the empty air, "Heh, parasite."