The silence inside the generator room felt heavier than the gravity of Sovereign's Field.Clive Collins slowly rose from the filthy marble floor. His back was hunched, his entire bare body covered in dark blue and black bruises and scratches. The golden blood left behind by the radiation induced lysis dripped from his temple, mixing with the fresh red blood from the stones thrown by the citizens.Hektor and his Purist followers instinctively stepped back in unison. Their hands, clutching pieces of metal and stones, trembled violently. They had expected the devil to rise and slaughter them all after seeing Rina lying there covered in blood.Yet Clive's pitch black eyes held no killing intent whatsoever. They were completely dead."Are you all satisfied?" Clive's voice broke the silence. Dry, hoarse, and devoid of emotion."W We..." Hektor swallowed hard, the crowbar in his hand trembling. "We just want water... we just want Lumeria to stop burning our roofs...""Then live," Clive inter

Falling freely from outer space made no sound, at least not until you hit the atmosphere.Clive Collins plummeted downward at terminal velocity, his back facing the earth. Above him, the vast expanse of stars was gradually disappearing behind a sight that offered the only relief in the midst of this crushing defeat.The Sun-Eye orbital station was exploding.The impact from Clive's earlier Space-Tail attack, combined with the Sovereign's Decay poison that had quietly seeped into the station's landing platform during his battle with Ariel, had finally reached the main reactor.In the silence of the vacuum, the station's golden ring split apart. A massive fireball blossomed beyond the atmosphere, severing the flow of Benedict's Light that had been scorching the land below. The Earth's sky, which had briefly been illuminated by Lumeria's false dawn, slowly began to dim as the clouds reclaimed the darkness.The real eclipse had just begun."At least... that bastard's spotlight is finally

Those white marble boots stood spotless atop the blood-soaked mud. Not a single speck of dirt dared cling to their surface.Clive looked up, his breath coming in broken gasps. His filthy, blistered face stared at the blond man standing before him. It made no sense. Common sense screamed that he had destroyed the man's mechanical head in the throne room, and that the God-Engine had been split in two."H-How... how the hell did you..." Clive coughed, spitting black blood onto the ground.Benedict Archibald smiled. It was not the cynical smile of a victorious tyrant, but the gentle smile of a father watching his child fall off a bicycle."You thought destroying the God-Engine would kill me, Cassian?" Benedict's soft voice drifted through the silence of the Shadowfell Forest. "That massive machine was indeed my body, but my consciousness is the Light itself. When the orbital station The Sun-Eye exploded because of your actions, its main network transferred the remnants of my essence into

The cold wind of Drakon's Spine gradually faded as Clive Collins stepped through the massive melted steel gate of Sub-Terra Prime.He was no longer running as though time itself were chasing him. His right foot now produced a very different sound. It was no longer the tapping of a leather boot sole, but the scraping of metal scales and reptilian claws against the marble floor. His blackened silver dragon leg responded to every motor command from his brain with perfect precision, giving him balance sturdier than steel.Clive stopped behind the shadow of a ruined pillar. He pulled an old burlap cloak he had taken from the corpse of a refugee outside the gate and wrapped it tightly around his entire body, especially his right leg and head.Only a dark shadow remained beneath the hood. His half-scorched face, bone-white hair, and pair of pitch-black eyes were perfectly concealed. He lowered his posture, hunching his back like an old, sickly laborer.The Phantom of the Throne had died at t

Three days.Seventy-two hours had passed since Clive Collins watched Rina's unsteady figure disappear down the kitchen corridor, carrying a wooden bucket. For three days, the Exiled King had completely vanished into the shadows of his own city. He did not sleep in a bed. He did not eat human rations.He had become a rat again.Inside the main ventilation shaft of Sector Five, barely a meter wide, Clive crawled slowly through the pitch-black darkness. The air inside the narrow passage was stifling, thick with asbestos dust and the smell of old rust.He had tightly wrapped his scaled dragon right leg in layer after layer of wet burlap so that its metallic claws would not make even the slightest scraping sound against the ventilation duct."God, we've been crawling around like cockroaches looking for bread crumbs for three days," Lycus grumbled inside Clive's chest. The parasite sounded incredibly bored and frustrated. "My back hurts, Boss,