The High Elves were a whirlwind of desperate violence. Following Elder Kilo's frantic commands, five mages funneled their mana into Tier 6 fire spells, turning the air into a shimmering furnace of emerald flame. Simultaneously, six assassins blurred into motion, their enchanted blades screaming as they hammered against the translucent barrier with every ounce of their monstrously augmented strength.
"Elder Kilo," Hermes began, his voice cutting through the roar of magic and the rhythmic clang of steel. "You are a man of your word, and a person with deep, ancient knowledge. But history is a river that eventually reaches the sea. It is time for your knowledge to be buried in the abyss."
Hermes let out a slow, tired sigh and flicked his fingers.
"What do you mean?" Kilo's left eyebrow shot up, his pride still refusing to acknowledge the shift in the air. "The fight is not... over yet!"
But as the words left his lips, Kilo's legs betrayed him. He collapsed to his knees, his muscles turning to lead. Around him, the eleven monstrous elves dropped like felled logs. Their sharpened ears twitched in agony, and their crow-like eyes bulged as they clawed at their throats, struggling to draw a single breath of the thinning, pressurized air.
Hermes walked forward. Each footstep echoed with a finality that made the Elder's heart stutter.
Reaching up, Hermes unlatched the mask. He revealed a face that was hauntingly youthful yet burdened by a cold maturity. His black hair fell over a pair of scarlet eyes that burned with the intensity of a blood moon hanging over a dying world.
He stepped past the eleven gasping warriors, ignored their pathetic attempts to grab his ankles, and stopped inches from the Elder. Kilo was trembling, trying to weave a defensive spell that flickered and died like a candle in a gale.
"No need to stand up, Elder. You've already lost," Hermes said, his gaze pinning Kilo to the floor.
"Nonsense... you're a cheater," Kilo spat, blood flecking his lips as he coughed. "A cheating child... lucky enough to have powerful companions."
Hermes's shoulders rose in a shrug. "But Elder, you're hurting your own argument. Having companions is no different from the eleven 'pets' you just pulled out of your shadow. We're both just using what we have."
"You're a brave... a brave child, Sir Aljen," Kilo wheezed, his dignity flickering one last time. He gripped his staff, using it as a crutch to force his shaking body upright. "I agree... but I wish you would... fight me properly."
"Stop fighting like you're the protagonist of a novel," Hermes sighed, looking down at the old man. "Accept the reality."
"I have a family... to protect!" Kilo roared, his voice cracking. "I have a promise... to two people who molded my will to live! I cannot let it end... not like this! AAAAAAGGH!"
A spark of raw, desperate magic ignited in Kilo's palm.
"A family man, huh?" Hermes's expression didn't soften. "The 'power of family' only works for the playable female leads, Elder. In this story, you're just an extra. And I really don't like to kill—"
Hermes delivered a sharp, efficient kick to Kilo's midsection. The Elder doubled over and skidded across the transparent floor, his blood splattering across his fine robes.
You're contradicting your own words, you bastard, Kilo thought, his vision swimming.
What a hassle, Hermes thought, exhaling. Why do they always keep fighting back?
As Kilo looked up at the silhouette of the young Don, a jagged shard of memory pierced through his mind. That kick, that cold, clinical arrogance... it felt like a ghost from another life. A feeling of hopeless familiarity washed over him, making his chest tighten with a phantom pain.
Flashback: Macedonia, 19 B.C.
A young man lay in a field of tall grass, staring at the endless blue of the Mediterranean sky. He was picturing the cosmos not as gods, but as a series of intricate gears—the thoughts of a burgeoning philosopher.
His name was Kilomostre. A Thousand Miles.
Born to peasants, he had no surname, but he had a mind that outpaced his brothers. Kilo lived for the weight of a scroll in his hands—history, algebra, physics. His brothers, recognizing his dogmatic brilliance, scraped together their copper to enroll him in the Academy.
Philosophy was the pinnacle of prestige. Kilo became an apprentice at the Disciples of Plato Academy in the heart of the capital. He transformed from a clumsy village boy into a mover and shaker—a man of discipline and self-possession. Within a year, he had earned the respect of the greatest minds in the city.
Then, the Ratican Empire arrived.
The imperial troops were a plague. They turned the great city into a smoldering wreck, pillaging until not a single sack of rice remained. The horror was systemic. Male soldiers took the women; the female imperial leaders took the surviving men. Young boys were collected like trophies, added to the reverse harems of the conquerors.
Kilo watched his peers suffer mental breakdowns, their sanity dissolving until they wished for nothing more than to serve their new masters for eternity.
Kilo and his three brothers—Arak, Wamo, and Damaso—managed to flee before the iron curtain fell. They escaped to the eastern country, settling in Sofia City, the capital of Salgaria. But the grief followed them. It was etched into their bones.
Two years later, Kilo couldn't take the silence anymore. "Enough," he told them. "We are going home."
The war had ended, and their homeland had been annexed. His brothers resisted at first, but Kilo's relentless logic wore them down. They returned, expecting a home, but found only ruins and ash.
The young Damaso knelt in the dirt, biting his lip to keep from screaming. Wamo covered his face, whispering apologies to the ghosts of soldiers. Arak wept like a broken child, promising to name his future familiars after the friends he couldn't save.
Only Kilo stood stiff. His eyes were dry, his heart turning to stone.
We cannot beat the Empire as we are, Kilo realized, staring at the rubble of his Academy. If we cannot destroy the monster, we must become its teeth.
He turned to his brothers, his voice devoid of emotion. "We are joining the enemy."
He had learned a bitter lesson: to defeat an enemy, one must first become their shadow. Neither Kilo nor his brothers could forgive the ash of their homeland, and that shared vengeance became the marrow in their bones.
He could still hear the chilling proclamation of his brother, Damaso, whose grief had fermented into a hatred for the very concept of humanity.
"God does not exist, Kilo. Only a supreme being from another world possesses the right to rule us," Damaso had declared, his eyes hollow. "Humans are addicted to war. And the women are to be blamed—those noblewomen who cheat and produce incompetent, soft offspring. Their weak wills are passed to their children like a plague. Humans are trash, and one day, we will burn them until only the purity of ash remains."
Driven by this nihilism, the brothers followed the trail of a secret cult. Damaso rose quickly within the ranks, eventually inviting his siblings to enlist in the First Root.
It was there Kilo met the "Supreme Being"—a man who claimed to be a human from a place called Earth. Through some unknown cultivation, he had attained the Evil God rank, and his intellect was vast, yet disturbingly alien. He spoke of "computers" designed to assist mankind and "status screens" that could quantify a soul.
Kilo, the philosopher, spent his nights theorizing. He suspected the leader possessed a "System" that allowed him to peer into the very stats of a person's existence. Yet, the leader himself was a bizarre contradiction; he acted like a spoiled, perverted brat, boasting of a life as a legendary lover in his former world. Kilo, however, sensed the hollow ring of his lies. Beneath the bravado, Kilo saw an amateur—an introverted boy with zero real experience with women, playing at being a god.
The leader promised they could oust the Empire, but only if they shed their fragile mortality. He introduced a mystical, glowing potion designed to transform them into a new race: The High Elves.
Kilo and his brothers accepted their fate voluntarily. As the liquid burned down his throat, Kilo's height surged, and his hair transformed into strands of spun gold, shimmering like the funeral crown of an Egyptian pharaoh.
The "God" of the Root tested the process on the female members first. The experiments were a success, though they bore a strange, unexplained side effect: the women began to undergo "miraculous" pregnancies with no identifiable fathers. These children became the first "Common Elves," a lower tier in the hierarchy of their new society.
"Congratulations, ladies and gentlemen," the leader announced to his kneeling subjects. "Welcome to the First Root."
For centuries, they lurked. Guided by their leader's "modern" insights, the organization expanded, the population of elves swelling in secret. But by Year 708 A.D., the air changed.
A powerful spirit user—a black-haired child soldier with eyes like a winter storm—appeared out of nowhere. He killed the "Evil God" without breaking a sweat. The leader's harem and devotees, bound by the soul-contracts they had signed, committed mass suicide in the wake of his death.
Damaso was elected the new leader of the First Root, and Kilo and his brothers became his involuntary cabinet. But Kilo was bored. He had no desire to spend eternity reviving a spoiled brat who used power only to dominate.
Using his old credentials as a philosopher's apprentice, he lied to his brothers, claiming he needed to infiltrate the capital's Academy to spy. In truth, he just wanted to escape the cult's suffocating atmosphere.
His path eventually led him to the Romue Grand Museum, where he hoped to catch the eye of a senator—a stepping stone to the palace. Instead, he drew the attention of a seventeen-year-old noble.
The boy had jet-black hair and amethyst eyes as sharp as a hunting wolf's. He wore cheap, unremarkable clothes, but his movements possessed the weight and grace of a forty-year-old savant.
Kilo initially felt he had been scammed. The boy had lied about being a senator's son to get Kilo to sign a "protection" contract on a piece of relic paper. Kilo, arrogant and hasty, signed without reading the final paragraph: the signee hereby forms an eternal allegiance with the teenager.
"Rest assured, it's not a scam. It's called protection, you see," the boy said, sliding a mask over his face. "Go to the palace. I've already informed my sister of your arrival. As long as you adhere to my command, you'll be fine, Sir Kilo."
"Wait! Who the hell are you?" Kilo demanded, grabbing the boy's shoulder in a rage.
"A talentless nobody, Sir Kilo," the boy responded with a dogmatic tone, walking away without a single backward glance.
Kilo was left reeling. How did the boy know his name? Despite the age gap, the teenager treated Kilo like a student. They spent hours exchanging quotes from obscure philosophers and playing a game the boy called Chess.
In the quiet of the palace gardens, Kilo found himself enjoying the matches. He had spent centuries following a "God" who was a child; now, he was bound to a child who spoke like an ancient, weary god.
Over the months, the cold iron of the contract melted into something Kilo hadn't felt in centuries: genuine loyalty. Their relationship evolved from a forced alliance to a cordial, and eventually, a deeply respectful bond.
But as their friendship deepened, the political air in the capital grew stagnant. The Senator's officials watched the young noble with mounting suspicion. Despite Kilo not being a pure Ratican—his golden hair and refined features marking him as an "outsider"—his master treated him with a blunt, refreshing respect.
"You're a far more competent courier than these bloated, corrupt senators," the boy would say, lounging in a velvet chair. "And you're certainly more 'normal' than my four Heavenly Knights. Those idiots are destined for greatness, but they haven't a single lick of common sense."
Kilo knew his master was, by all accounts, an ordinary human. He possessed no magic, no ancestral aura, yet his tactical mind was a labyrinth of shadows. He was special in a way that defied the laws of the Empire. Still, Kilo worried. Sometimes the boy would talk to the air as if answering an invisible voice, and Kilo wondered if his master had a screw loose. More baffling was how the boy survived hundreds of assassination attempts—always alone, always without a bodyguard, yet always walking away without a scratch.
Then there was the sister.
A girl of such ethereal beauty she was often mistaken for his fiancée. Kilo remained ambivalent about their blood relation; her personality was a storm of contradictions, and the way she doted on her brother bordered on the obsessive. Moreover, Kilo noticed a terrifying pattern: every noblewoman who tried to flirt with the young master ended up dead under "mysterious circumstances." He strongly suspected the sister was the silent architect of these tragedies.
Are human women of this era truly sane? Kilo often questioned, shivering in the library.
During his second month of service, the silence of the archives was broken by a presence that felt like a sunburst. The sister approached him, her face partially obscured by a platinum veil, leaving only her piercing amethyst eyes visible. Her white outfit sparkled like sunlight hitting the crest of an ocean wave.
She sat on the wooden chair next to him, her figure a masterpiece that would make a wolf out of any man. Despite the modesty of her blue crescent moon medallion, it couldn't fully hide the impressive curves of her bodice.
"Greetings, Mr. Kilo," she said, waving a hand with a playful grace.
"Greetings, Milady. May I help you?" Kilo asked, his heart hammering against his ribs.
"I need your cooperation. It's a bit complicated, but I want to introduce you to a servant of mine. Her name is Vesesa. I want you to date her," she said simply. Before Kilo could process the words, she reached into her cleavage and pulled out a tiny, intricate statue, handing it to him.
"Pardon?" Kilo blinked, his jaw nearly hitting the floor.
"Ara, it's difficult to explain, but she's healthy... for now," the lady said, tapping his shoulder as she stood. "We don't have much time left. Don't disappoint me, Sir Kilo. Date her. Her life will bring a positive ripple into your own. You'll understand eventually."
She walked away, her five ladies-in-waiting appearing like shadows to flank her. Kilo sat in a daze until a familiar hand tapped his shoulder, making him flinch.
"What are you staring at, Sir Kilo?" his master asked, peering over his shoulder.
"Master! You startled me. Your sister... she was just here. She gave me this and... told me to date someone." Kilo looked at the statue, his face a mask of worry. "Master, I have to ask... will someone truly accept me for who I am?"
The young noble peered at the statue. "Aaah, she's sexy. Wait... is she flat? Man, she's as flat as a chopping board. No offense to her! Hmmm... she looks familiar. Ah, Vesesa. So this is your fateful partner who will d—" He cut himself off, coughing into his hand. "No matter. Follow my sister's advice."
"But Master, is this right? I'm a servant. Ratican law forbids such unions between classes... and I'm not exactly a regular human," Kilo argued.
"Even if your body and status are 'different,' your heart and mind are human enough," the boy said, his tone turning surprisingly grounded. "Look, my sister is a saint. If she says blue is black, then blue is black. Cheer up. You're getting old—well, you look immortal, but you know what I mean. Find a suitable partner who is tactful and petite. Just remember: some girls are scary, so watch your back."
The boy pounded a fist lightly against Kilo's chest and walked away, leaving the High Elf to ponder the statue.
Following the advice, Kilo sought out Vesesa. He found not a terrifying monster, but a human servant whose warmth began to fill the hollow, cold vessel of his heart. He discovered that despite the years of cynicism and the transformation into a High Elf, he still possessed humanity. He grew so devoted that he nearly forgot his role as a spy for the Root.
But a new shadow loomed. Kilo discovered that Vesesa suffered from an incurable illness. Desperate, he turned to his master's labyrinthine library in Scily, scouring taboo books on alchemy. He wanted to find a way to bridge their genetic gap—to turn a human into an elf or vice versa.
In the deepest depths of the labyrinth, he once found a small, folded black box with strange, glowing scribbles. He saw the word "Microsoft" on its side, but he couldn't crack the password. The machine eventually hummed itself into a permanent silence, a useless relic of a forgotten past.
His desperation peaked as Vesesa's health declined. One evening, he pulled a vial from his robe—a potion marked with the sigil of the High Elves.
"Vesesa," Kilo whispered, his hand trembling. "Do you want to become something greater than a human?"
Vesesa looked at the glowing liquid and giggled weakly, her pale face lighting up with a faint smile. "You want to turn me into a High Elf? I don't know what that is, Kilo, but stop joking. Being human is the greatest gift God gave us, you know."
Kilo looked at the potion, then at her fading light, the weight of the "Saint's" prophecy pressing down on him like a mountain.
"I've discovered a medicine, Vesesa," Kilo said, his voice thick with a desperation that centuries of logic couldn't suppress. "It can extend your life far beyond the limits of a normal human. I'm not playing a trick on you. I'm trying to save you."
Vesesa looked at the glowing vial, then back at Kilo. The candlelight flickered in her waning eyes. "If you're serious, then I am touched, dear. Truly. If it is a medicine that simply gives me more time to wake up next to you, how could I say no? But..." She paused, her smile turning bittersweet. "If it is a medicine that changes what I am... if it means I stop being human, I have to decline."
Kilo flinched. She knows, he realized. She knows I'm not like her. She knows I'm trying to pull her into the eternal, cold twilight of the Elves.
"W-why?" Kilo stammered, the words catching in his throat. "Why do you cling so fiercely to being human?"
"Because," Vesesa whispered, reaching out to tuck a stray lock of his golden hair behind his ear, "I was born as a human. And I want to die as one."
"I don't understand," Kilo argued, his philosopher's mind racing to find a counter-point. "I don't think being human is a blessing. I've seen people sell their souls to demons for a few more years. I've seen them drink forbidden juices just to keep their skin from wrinkling. There are countless souls willing to sacrifice their entire world just for a second chance to be reborn as something—anything—powerful. And yet, you want to stay like this? Frail? Dying?"
Vesesa let out a soft, melodic laugh. "But I am not them, Kilo. Not all humans are cut from the same cloth. We have different mindsets, different dreams, and different ways of finding joy—whether it's through our faith, our politics, or just the way we watch the sunset. You wanted to be a philosopher because that's the vision you had for your soul. I know you're hiding who you really are because of the scars of your past... but Kilo, I want to meet the end in this form. Please. Understand this."
She placed a warm, trembling hand on his cheek. Kilo leaned into her touch, his eyes stinging. He finally gave in, a sad, simple smile breaking across his face.
"Vesesa... you will die. Turning you into an elf is the only logical choice," he insisted one last time, though the fire had left his voice.
She leaned forward, her lips brushing his cheek with the softness of a sea breeze. "At least this way, you will always remember that you fell in love with a human. Not a shadow of yourself."
"But your body will rot," Kilo sobbed, the weight of eight hundred years of loneliness finally crashing down on him. "I don't know how to live without you. To tell you the truth... I've been alone for so long. Eight hundred years, Vesesa. Single."
Vesesa laughed, a genuine, hearty sound that defied her illness. "Well, look on the bright side—at least you're no longer a virgin."
"Why you..." Kilo muttered, pressing his forehead against hers.
"Kilo, listen to me," Vesesa said, her tone suddenly sharpening. "Don't forget our time. And protect the young master. He is the one destined to fix this broken world. His sister's oracles say he will sweep away the corruption, end the hollow posturing of the feminist republic, and turn this land into a true democratic society. I know you hate what this country did to your home... but you're loyal to him, aren't you? Stick with him. Be his anchor."
"I will," Kilo promised, his voice cracking. "You don't have to worry about that."
"Hey," she simpered, her eyes dancing with mischief. "Have you heard the rumors? There's an election coming this March. Your master is one of the candidates. I suspect that sooner or later, he'll be the Emperor. And you? You'll probably end up as his Chancellor."
Kilo managed a small giggle. "Why do you say that? Everyone wants the throne, Vesesa. It's a bloodbath."
"One day, I'll be gone," she teased gently. "But I pray I stay long enough to see him lead. The peasants, the slaves, even the 'selves' love him. He says he doesn't want the crown, but I believe the people of the Ratican will force it onto his head."
Him? That boy? Kilo thought. He's a genius, sure, but he's a talentless nobody in the eyes of the high lords. No way.
Two days later, the results were announced. The streets erupted in a frenzy of joy that Kilo had never seen in all his centuries. His master—the mysterious, young boy—had been elected as the new leader, the Emperor of a new era.
Kilo stood in the middle of the palace courtyard, his jaw dropping out of shock.
Bruh, he thought, staring at the palace balcony. She was right.