2026-02-10 13:47:03The scent of sulfur mingled with the metallic tang of blood thickening in the air. The sky of Aethelgard, once a symbol of purity, was now torn apart by jagged rifts of deep purple—the manifestation of The Great Void summoned by the black army. Below, the capital was no longer a place of refuge; it was a slaughterhouse.
"Hold the line! Do not let the Shadow Walkers touch the inner gate!"
The voice was hoarse, coming from a guard commander who had lost his left arm. However, the command was futile. From atop the ramparts, Ignatius Valerist could see thousands of the city’s inhabitants being slaughtered like cattle. The silver-armored guards fell one by one, their bodies exploding as they were struck by decay curses from the air.
Ignatius stood on the highest balcony of the Altar Tower, his hands trembling. It was not out of fear, but from holding back the weight of mana that was nearly exploding the circuits within his body.
"You cannot do this alone, Ignatius."
A soft yet firm voice sounded behind him. Ignatius turned. There stood Seraphina Ashcroft. Her face was deathly pale, her white mage robes soiled with the dust of ruins, yet her eyes remained bright with an unshakable resolve. Surrounding Seraphina, the last six protector mages from the Ashcroft Order sat in a circle, chanting a synchronization spell.
"Seraphina... go below. Take the children through the secret tunnel," Ignatius commanded in a low tone.
"No." Seraphina stepped forward, her hands forming a seal of light in the air. "The duty of the Ashcroft Order is to be the shield for the Archmage. If you fall, this world is truly finished. I will hold them here, even if I must drain every last drop of my life."
In the distance, a massive explosion shattered the main gate. A figure in black armor radiating absolute darkness flew through the air, landing atop a giant mechanical dragon made of metal and tortured souls.
Zoltan Draken.
"IGNATIUS! COME OUT OF YOUR NEST!" Zoltan’s roar shook the entire tower. "Watch your women die! Watch your people crawl and beg me for mercy!"
Zoltan raised his Soul Eater blade. Instantly, thousands of shadow arrows launched toward the tower where Ignatius and Seraphina stood.
"Now!" Seraphina shouted.
Seraphina and the six guards released their power all at once. A massive dome of light—The Aegis of Ashcroft—stretched out to envelop the tower. The shadow arrows slammed into the dome with the sound of a thousand cannons exploding simultaneously.
Seraphina staggered, blood beginning to flow from her nose. This protective spell consumed the user's lifespan as fuel. One by one, the mages behind her collapsed, their bodies disintegrating into dust of light, unable to withstand the energy feedback from Zoltan’s assault.
"Another one!" Zoltan laughed maniacally, striking his blade repeatedly against the cracking dome. "Come on, Seraphina! How many more lives will you burn for this loser?"
Finally, only Seraphina remained, standing alone against the pressure from Zoltan, who was only inches away behind the thinning layer of light.
"Ignatius..." Seraphina turned for a moment, a faint smile on her face which had begun to wrinkle as her age was forcibly siphoned by the spell. "Remember me... in the next life."
"NO! SERAPHINA!"
At that exact moment, the dome of light shattered into pieces. Zoltan’s blade lunged forward, tearing through Seraphina’s chest and piercing her heart. The woman's body was thrown toward Ignatius, her warm blood splattering across the Archmage’s face.
Ignatius caught Seraphina’s frail body. His eyes, once a clear blue, instantly turned pitch black with terrifying flashes of purple. The sorrow vanished, replaced by an irrational fury. He knelt, dipping his fingers into the blood flowing from his own chest—blood that slowly began to glow with a sickening purple hue.
Ignatius drew forbidden Rune symbols on the floor with impossible speed, while his lips chanted verses that did not originate from any language of this world. The air around them suddenly went still. Time seemed to stop. Gravity vanished, causing the ruins of buildings to float upward.
"You want my power, Zoltan? You shall have it. But not in this world."
Ignatius stared at Zoltan, who had landed on the balcony with a smirk of victory. Ignatius's voice was now layered, as if thousands of entities were speaking through his mouth at once.
"Ichor Astralis... The Thirteenth Apocrypha: UNSEAL!"
Zoltan’s eyes widened. His body trembled violently as his primal instincts screamed that something was wrong. "What... what are you calling? That is not white magic!"
"You always sought power out there, Zoltan. But you never knew that the Thirteenth Sky God never ascended to heaven. He was buried within the Valerist bloodline as a curse. Ichor Astralis is not mere blood... it is the destruction code that will erase you from history."
A massive surge of purple energy exploded from Ignatius’s heart. It was not an explosion of fire, but an explosion of space and time. The light swallowed Zoltan as he tried to flee, disintegrated his mechanical dragon into atomic dust, and leveled all of Aethelgard in seconds.
"ABSOLUTE ERASE."
The world became a void of white. The space around the tower folded into a single point in Ignatius’s chest, pulling all matter into an unstable vortex of time. Within that vortex of destruction, Ignatius saw the image of Seraphina’s shattered soul, carried by the same dimensional current as he was. He tried to reach for it, but his consciousness began to tear apart.
"500 years..." Ignatius murmured in the midst of the void. "Wait for me there... I will find you, and I will kill anyone who touches you."
And in a single flash of blinding light, the history of Aethelgard ended. The soul of Ignatius, now bound to the Ichor of the Thirteenth Sky God, hurtled through the dark corridors of time, seeking a vessel lowly enough to hide his existence from the eyes of the enemies who might also have survived.
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10
The black OIS sedan cut through the rain-slicked streets of the Upper District like a scalpel through silk. Inside, the cabin was a vacuum of silence, insulated from the neon chaos of Oakhaven by layers of lead and soundproofing. The air smelled of expensive leather and the sharp, clinical scent of a military-grade air purifier.Michael sat in the back seat, his hands resting motionless on his knees. To a casual observer, he looked like a corpse in a suit; his skin was a deathly gray, and the faint purple veins on his neck were still pulsing with the residual heat of the Third Circuit. Across from him sat Major Kincaid, a man who looked like he had been carved out of granite. Kincaid didn't have glowing cybernetics or visible ports—he was a "Natural," a rarity in a world that preferred titanium to bone."You're lucky the OIS needs a ghost, Dorian," Kincaid said, his voice a low, rhythmic growl over the hum of the engine. "If it were up to the Draken family, you’d be a red smear on the
9
The bunker was silent, save for the hum of the lead-shielded walls struggling to deflect the city's heavy electronic smog. Michael sat on the floor, his back against the cold metal, staring at his trembling hands. The name Zoltan was a jagged glass shard in his mind. It didn't matter if it was the same man or a descendant; the bloodline of the betrayer was still ruling the world he had once tried to protect."Michael?"Lyra’s voice was small. She was huddled on a crate, her medical student uniform torn and stained. She looked at him with a mixture of hope and terror that made his Heart Circuit ache."They're coming for us, aren't they?" she asked."They're coming for what they think you are," Michael replied, his voice a low rasp.Before she could answer, the room’s air filtration unit groaned. The fans slowed, and a red light on the console began to pulse."Silas!" Michael shouted.Silas Graves stumbled into the room, his face pale beneath the grime of the slums. "It's started. They'
8
The holographic feed in Cassian’s office flickered with the image of Lyra’s face. The label "Biological Asset" felt like a cold blade pressing against the back of Michael’s neck. Beside her image was a crest—a golden dragon coiled around a sun.Michael’s new heart gave a violent, painful thrum.It wasn't a medical anomaly. It was a resonance. For a split second, a flash of memory that wasn't his own—a memory of a silver-armored sky turning black—seared through his mind. He didn't know the name of the man who owned that crest in this world, but his soul remembered the scent of the blood on the blade that had carried it."The Draken Estate," Cassian muttered, his mechanical jaw clicking. "You’ve stepped into a giant’s shadow, boy. To the Ivory Tower, you’re a thief. To the Drakens, you’re a fly in the ointment. They don't just want her back; they want to know who helped her run."Michael forced the tremor in his hand to stop. "Why do they want her, Cassian? She’s just a student.""The D
7
Michael awoke to the sound of dripping water and the hum of a malfunctioning air purifier. It was a rhythmic, annoying sound that felt like someone was tapping a rhythmic needle against his skull.He didn't move. He didn't even open his eyes. Instead, he performed a silent audit of his internal systems.Heart Circuit: Stable. Synchronization: 0.002%. Energy reserves: Depleted.His body felt like it had been put through a trash compactor. The biological reconstruction had held, but the price of his escape was a systemic exhaustion that made his muscles feel as heavy as lead. Every breath he took tasted of ozone and cheap synthetic grease."You're finally awake," a voice whispered.Michael opened his eyes. He wasn't in a cell, but he wasn't free either. He was lying on a makeshift cot in a room that looked like a graveyard for dead electronics. Bundles of fiber-optic cables hung from the ceiling like weeping willows, and the only light came from a cracked holographic terminal in the cor
6
The humming of the medical equipment didn't just stop; it died with a choked metallic rasp.Michael stood in the absolute dark, the silence of the corridor pressing against his eardrums like deep water. The Mana Pulse hadn't been a blast of light; it was a vacuum, an invisible scythe that had ripped the digital soul out of every device in a fifty-meter radius. Emergency strobes, biometric locks, even the tactical HUDs of the guards—all rendered into useless scrap in a single heartbeat.A few feet away, Kaelen Reign let out a sound that wasn't quite a scream. It was the grunt of a man who had suddenly become a prisoner inside his own skin. His exoskeleton armor, a multi-million credit marvel of Oakhaven technology, had become a tomb. Without power, the hydraulic joints locked, pinning Kaelen’s limbs in a rigid, frozen stance. His mechanical eye, once a glowing red threat, was now just a dull piece of glass staring at nothing.Michael didn't wait for them to adjust. He didn't have a spe
5
The emergency lights in the underground corridor flickered red, reflecting off the damp concrete walls. Michael walked past the bodies of the two wardens without looking back. In his hand, he twirled the electric baton he had seized, feeling the remnants of static charge tingling against his palm."You’re crazy, kid! You actually made it out!" Silas shouted from within his cell. The sound of keys rattling against the concrete floor followed.Michael paused for a moment, his back to Silas’s iron bars. "Use the keys quickly if you don't want to be fried when full security protocol activates.""Wait! Where are you going? The elevator doors at the end are locked automatically!""I don't need an elevator," Michael replied shortly.He wasn't lying. Michael could feel the electrical current in the corridor walls as if they were giant veins. His new heart beat heavily, demanding more intake. That punch earlier had been effective, but his mana circuits were still starving.Michael pressed his
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