Haru had always kept a firm hand with the three Demonic Artifacts he held—the Sorrow of Time, the Wings of Scarlet Ruin, and the Eye of the Abyss. All three were cunning by nature. The rule was simple: obey, or be obliterated. He had two top-level Supreme God Tier Artifacts. He could afford to mean that threat.
The Sorrow of Time's phantom kept talking. It had moved from praising Haru's strength to declaring him the rightful heir to the God King's Throne, the future master of the cosmos, the successor to the Throneveil Shrine. Haru had stopped listening to the compliments long ago.
His attention was fixed on the Blood Moon and the twelve shadows standing in the sea of blood beyond it. The Blood Moon itself hadn't changed, no mutation or distortions, which meant the Burning Legion hadn't moved yet. It didn't travel through the Devil's Gate anyway.
Their transit routes were the Demon Nests built inside the Blood Moon's core. Only when the Blood Moon mutated, was that the signal. Until then, the Abyss was still assembling.
And what it was assembling was worse than last time. According to Svetlana, Haru's future wife, the coming invasion included not just the Burning Legion but the Twelve Demon Armies, the personal legions of each Demon Monarch.
In the Ancient Era, those armies had never appeared. Their presence now meant that the Abyss was treating this as a total effort. Win the [God King's Throne] or don't come back.
There was also the Demon Emperor himself, a Pseudo God King with strength so vast that no God on the Endless Continent could currently match, with one exception: Obrys' trump card, the 'Prometheus Ark', which could threaten him.
Other comparable powers, the Dragon Pantheon or the Nature Pantheon, might carry hidden cards, but Haru assessed those as capable of making the Demon Emperor feel mild pressure at best. Suppression was a different matter.
There was one exception to this though. Celestia, who was already a peak Supreme Goddess and en-route to becoming a Pseudo God Queen. She would soon be re-mastering the God Monarch Tier Law she had originally comprehended in the Illusory Angel Realm. She'd done it before, she simply needed to reach that understanding again.
The [Eternal Monument], the unique special reward from the Dimensional Slayer Tournament, was already in her hands; its function was precisely to accelerate the comprehension of a God Monarch Tier Law. Once she crossed that threshold, her combat power would match or even exceed the Demon Emperor's.
She had cultivated for tens of millions of years in the Illusory Angel Realm and once commanded an entire illusory universe. Against this, the Demon Emperor's dominion over the Abyss and its conquered planets was simply a smaller scale of the same thing. She had more experience and wider dominion than Aschenkranz, both generated powerful bonuses, and both favored Celestia.
Haru's own path was longer. Among all his mastered law sources, the Abyss Law was closest to God Monarch Tier, strengthened every moment by three Demonic Artifacts and his two natal artifacts simultaneously, growing faster than any other law source he held. But even at that rate, reaching the God Monarch Tier was not imminent. Celestia would get there first.
He found he was completely relaxed about it. As a Peak Supreme God, he was already what he'd describe without exaggeration as invincible at that level. The top three Demon Monarchs, the First through Third, shared this level and even they were not his opponents.
When he eventually did reach Pseudo God Monarch Tier, the calculation shifted further in his favor: as an Emperor with a Lord Type Natal Artifact, he could mobilize the collective power of hundreds of millions of his empire's citizens, 200,000 True Gods, and his subordinate Supreme Gods.
Roughly half of everyone's strength would converge onto him at once. Combined with mastery over nearly 200 law sources, the origin of the Space-Time Law, and two top-level Natal Artifacts, his strength at that level would exceed even the Demon Emperor's.
Aschenkranz alone wasn't what was keeping him watchful. Him and the Demon Monarchs combined was a different problem, one he'd think about when the time came, but that would also likely get solved when the Supreme Gods in the Holy Grail get reincarnated and he assembles his own lineup of Supreme Gods—the Holy Lords.
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