Once the emperor fell, the rest were only leftovers pretending to be resistance.
The battlefield understood that before the monsters did.
Lucien and Seran did not waste the opening.
One Monster King tried to leap into the silver mist below.
Seran reflected the distance wrong and dropped it back into Lucien's reach.
Lucien touched the creature once.
Its strings shuddered.
Its anchoring clause collapsed.
Another tried to erupt with miasma before death.
Seran's rewritten reflection of Moltsage shed the very state of contamination around it and created an opening. Lucien stepped in through it, broke the lawful sequence sustaining the burst, and sent the beast into forced slumber instead.
He was not interested in wasting all of them as ash.
Monster Kings held less essence than a Monster Emperor, but there were still many left in this occupied world, and even lesser fuel had value if gathered in sufficient number.
So he adjusted.
