Ethan went through them like a scythe through wheat.The Immortal Sickle didn't just cut—it opened wounds that didn't stop bleeding, pierced armor that shouldn't have been pierceable, and dropped Aberrations that should have taken a squad to bring down. The monsters didn't even try to fight back. They ran. Where they couldn't run, they died. The sickle moved in arcs, and each arc left a trail of severed limbs and crawling things that tried to drag themselves away before the bleeding out finished them.Li Yunsheng watched it from the gate. He'd seen a lot of things in a lot of wars. He hadn't seen monsters flee from a human like he was their predator. There was something biological about it—a hierarchy thing, a bloodline thing. Ethan wasn't just stronger. He was something they were built to fear.Michelle Liu stood behind him, her knees going weak. She'd trained for this her whole life. She'd been selected for the Capital Military Academy. Holy Healer, A-rank. She should have been cast

He stood there for a long time.He looked at the token in his hand. The character on it was traditional, the old form, stamped into the gold like it had been pressed there by a finger rather than a machine.Su.The old man's surname was Su.Ethan turned it over in his palm. He was an orphan. He'd grown up with no family name beyond the one the orphanage had given him, the one that matched a million other kids. He had no idea where he came from. He had no idea why the old man in the sky had singled him out, why he'd sealed Song for him, why he'd given him a token that apparently carried enough weight to make people move.He called out. The valley didn't answer. The old man had said his piece and left.Ethan put the token away.He looked at the lake. It was still again. Song was gone from it, dragged down to whatever bottom the golden chains had chosen. The water had that stillness that water has when something ancient is sitting under it.He needed to be stronger.This was the first ti

"Su Chen? You?"General Yunsheng Li stopped so hard his shadow stopped with him. The bloodied street between them was piled with Aberration corpses and the softer kind of dead that didn't get talked about on the evening broadcast. He looked past Ethan at the man in the City Lord's formal robes, who was trying very hard to look like he belonged where he was standing. "And what's your story?"Wei Duan swallowed. He was Jiangnan's City Lord, a man who commanded ten thousand city guards, and right now he looked like a clerk explaining a missing file. "When the horde reached the walls, I was on it at once. I meant to lead men out and help the Outer District evacuate. But the heads of the Gu family, the Lin family, the Meng family — they brought their own house guards straight into my mansion. They beat me down, locked me up, and took over. I couldn't move. I didn't dare."He paused. His jaw worked. "They only let me out a moment ago. Someone had broken into the Inner City. Killed the Gu pa

"That's all for Jiangnan for now." Yunsheng's voice was worn thin. "Military engineers are moving in. We'll head back to Imperial Martial. Let the reconstruction teams do their work."Privately, he approved of what Ethan had done. He wanted to be the kind of man who could walk into a street full of traitors and start cutting. He had spent his career weighing consequences instead. It made him tired.But it was already on every screen in the country. They had to go home and fix it.At Imperial Martial, Gordon Tang watched the replay in silence.Lianji Zhuge, beside him, couldn't hold it back. "Young blood. I haven't seen that kind of decisiveness in — what, twenty years? He doesn't hesitate. He doesn't negotiate. I like it.""Careful, Chief of Staff." Caiying Tao didn't look away from the screen. "If everyone did that, where would the Federation be? Those families were wrong, fine, but they were trying to survive. Who doesn't want to live? Our ancestors bled on the front for exactly thi

Tian Gu watched the clip three times.He didn't look at the burning streets. He didn't look at the crowds. He only saw the boy. Young. Thin. Wearing the colors of the Special Occupation Academy — those absurd, bright, rainbow uniforms the academy's director chose for his students as a joke. Tian Gu had laughed at them, once, from across a hundred battlefields. The colors had seemed ridiculous. A school that dressed its warriors like parrots.Now they were the only thing in his vision.He pulled up the rest of the feed. He pieced it together. The Gu family had locked the Inner City. The Outer District had burned. The boy was from the Outer District. He had walked in and killed Zhenhai, killed the other patriarchs, killed their guards, and killed the City Lord himself.By the time the last clip ended, the rage had stopped boiling. It had settled. It was colder now. It was patient.He sat on the edge of his cot and stared at the blank wall of his quarters for a long time. He thought abou