The crackle of the burning elite hall echoed like a death knell through the royal sectors. Standing alone amidst the smoldering ash of his entire administration, the King stared down at the mocking note, his majestic face violently twisting. His perfect, prime jawline clenched so hard a hairline fracture splintered through his back molars.
Every single chess piece he had meticulously positioned over centuries had been systematically turned into grease and cinders by a boy who wasn't even old enough to draft a standard treaty.
Down in the tactical cavern, Kairo, Leonhart, and General Gideon were watching the real-time structural collapse on the LED monitors, a collective sense of triumph filling the dark room.
"Kairo you monster you defeated them with a fake magic water when did you how did you do that," Gideon breathed, a grim smile finally breaking through his battle-worn features.
"Every single elite is dead their reason of their death is this new born kid Kairo and not only that they died by their own hands."
Outside, the chaotic, circus-level hunt reached its absolute peak. The arrogant capital villagers, driven by the systemic greed Kairo had planted in them, finally smashed through the secondary subterranean barriers. They flooded into the burning palace complex, their eyes wide with expectation—only to find nothing but crumbling stone, melted gold, and the charred remnants of the elite class.
The realization hit the crowd like a physical blow. The thousands of gathered citizens froze, staring at the ruins of the grand palace.
"Wait..." a rebel citizen whispered, his supernatural mana sparks violently flickering out. "There's nothing left. only treasure we can still loot it but. Nobles what happened to them why are they burned alive. We... we got completely fooled! there is no clone here which will grant us powers."
The King didn't care about the rioting peasants. The divine, golden aura pulsing across his shredded chest violently turned a sickening, deep crimson. He had tolerated Kairo's tactical movements because his cosmic entity had demanded a purification—but this wasn't a purification. This was total structural humiliation.
"SCARLET BLOOD!" the King roared, his voice fracturing the remaining marble pillars.
He didn't just walk. Activating a forbidden physical overdrive, a massive 10% speed and reflex boost violently surged through his muscular frame. He knew exactly where Kairo's movable cavern was resting; he had simply chosen to ignore the coordinate until now to satisfy his operational script.
With his jaw set and his eyes burning with an unhinged, apocalyptic rage, the King erupted into a dead sprint. For ten straight minutes, he moved like a localized hurricane through the capital streets, tearing up the cobblestones beneath his heels until he skidded to a violent halt directly in front of the rebel army's main staging ground.
He stood tall, a majestic, terrifying specimen of prime biological dominance, towering directly before Kairo, Leonhart, Gideon, and the remaining 1,000 elite rebel soldiers.
The surrounding citizens gasped, instantly backing away as the King's crimson pressure flattened the air currents.
Inside the security partition of the cavern, Kairo didn't hesitate. With a cold, analytical flick of his fingers, he triggered the remote network recall. Instantly, the supernatural mana crystals he had temporarily distributed to the villagers violently dissolved, their energy flowing right back into Kairo's primary reservoir. He had only amplified their metrics to use them as an expendable battering ram to breach the palace—now that the palace was ash, the leverage was gone.
The King looked out at his silent, powerless people, his chest heaving as his majestic aura flickered.
"Foolish... so completely foolish of me to allow this specific sequence to happen, I should have disband my new gods beliefs. All this is happening because of those foolish divine pages" the King muttered, his voice dropping into a chillingly calm, self-obsessed register.
"But look at me. I got my absolute beauty and my prime physical form back. Perhaps... perhaps their agonizing deaths were nothing more than the ultimate sacrifice required to cement my evolution. Even my wife is young now... though Well who cares about her she is dead I will marry other women."
The King raised his sharp, majestic eyes, locking them directly onto Kairo's bleeding form through the open hatch of the cavern.
"I have lost so much today. I am standing on the absolute brink of total structural destruction. If I hold onto my powers without resetting the baseline, my entire kingdom will die anyway. But from the raw intelligence data my network gathered before they burned... I finally figured out your true origin protocol. You aren't just a rogue strategist. You are the Prince... the son of Ariston."
Kairo leaned heavily against the console, hacking up another thick splatter of crimson blood onto his ruined white silk robes. He wiped his lip, letting out a dry, raspy chuckle. "Pretty clever... for an 900-year-old dinosaur."
The King tightened his fist, his low body-fat muscles rippling under the golden light. "Okay. Let's make a trade. Just get the hell out of my territory right now. I will act as though none of this ever happened. I don't want to fight an unmitigated war against Ariston's lineage. I just want you to pay the material cost and cover the total structural destruction you have caused to my capital."
Before Kairo could even process the parameters of the offer, Leonhart stepped cleanly in front of the cavern hatch, his heavy broadsword resting casually on his shoulder. His golden eyes were completely devoid of fear.
"No," Leonhart replied, his voice ringing out with an absolute, uncompromising steel. "We won't go back. Not a single inch. In this sequence, we either completely kill you or we die trying. You've already lost the macro-game anyway."
The real Kairo looked at the King, then at Leonhart, and finally let out a weary, brilliant smile. He raised his hand in a mocking wave toward the monarch.
"Sorry, Your Majesty... but I am out " Kairo rasped, his eyes flashing with a final, devastating bit of spite. "But thank you for the offer. I sincerely wish you all the absolute best... in hell."
The King's majestic face froze for a fraction of a second before his shoulders began to violently shake. He threw his head back, letting out a wild, manic laugh that rattled the very armor of the 1,000 soldiers standing against him.
"Oh... yes. Let's see who burns first."
A suffocating, absolute silence descended upon the battlefield. Standing tall before the fractured capital gates, every single man in the rebel vanguard braced their footing. General Gideon swallowed a thick knot of saliva, his throat tight, his grip slick against the hilt of his silver broadsword. And he wasn't alone. Behind him, the thousand elite soldiers—even though they held the raw advantage in numbers—felt an icy dread prickling their spines. The King's majestic, hyper-masculine prime aura was a physical weight, flattening the air currents around them.
Farther back, the civilian villagers watched from the alleys and ruined balconies. They held their crude weapons with white-knuckled intensity, ready to desperately strike the King if he turned his unholy gaze upon them next, but they were not foolish enough to blindly charge a monster of his caliber.
Minutes passed like agonizing centuries. Nobody breathed.
Then, breaking the stillness like a thunderclap, Kairo's voice tore from his bleeding chest.
"ATTACK!!!"
Leonhart, Gideon, and Kairo violently lunged forward in the front row. Even in his severely weakened, blood-slicked state, Kairo completely refused to retreat an inch from the front line. As the true son of Ariston, the ancient blood in his veins burned hot; just like his father before him, he waged this war with absolute bravery, fighting for the sake of true justice and the ultimate mandate of the heavens.
The three fighters moved in flawless, terrifying synchrony, their blades and magic weaving a continuous, interlocking net of steel aimed directly at the monarch.
But the King of Lust simply smiled maniacally. His majestic, sculpted face twisted with utter contempt as he casually spat onto the blood-stained cobblestones. With a fluid, almost mocking tilt of his broad shoulders, he didn't just dodge their synchronous strikes—he read their momentum perfectly and launched a devastating counter-offensive.
CLANG!
Kairo instantly forced his body into the pocket, acting as the primary tank of the vanguard to absorb the ungodly kinetic force of the King's bare-fisted strikes. The raw shockwaves rattled Kairo's internal organs, but he held the line. Suddenly, the King's hand flashed like lightning, a razor-thin crescent of golden mana cutting straight toward Leonhart's exposed neck.
Seeing the trajectory, Kairo threw his own body across the line of fire, sacrificing his entire left arm to intercept the blade. The limb was cleanly severed, but within a fraction of a second, Kairo's high-tier emerald healing magic violently erupted from the stump, knitting bone, muscle, and flesh back together in a grotesque, hyper-speed recovery.
Leonhart's eyes widened as he ducked beneath the follow-up swing, his mind racing back through his memories. No way... Kairo is forcing his system into total overdrive. This is that same volatile magic expansion skill. Even when he was just seven years old he told me about this skill back in the dark caves, he accidentally triggered it once and instantly went unconscious for days... But I can't blame him. We have to finish this right now, no matter the cost.
Meanwhile, Gideon was pushing his physical limits to the absolute brink, his sword a silver blur as he barely managed to match the King's terrifying 10% boosted speed and reflexes.
Gideon's teeth gritted so hard they bled. Yeah... this is a complete suicide mission. No wonder our elite regular soldiers are standing back in formation. My tactical layout was correct—the army must hold their ground until we are either completely defeated or on the very brink of death. Only then do they swarm. Right now, the archers have already notched their heavy arrows, tracking the King's blind spots, waiting for the exact micro-second we drop.
But the true spearhead of the offense was Leonhart.
Taking absolute, ruthless advantage of the opening created whenever Kairo threw his body forward to absorb the crushing damage, and utilizing the precise moments when Gideon forced the King to redirect his speed, Leonhart moved like a ghost. His golden eyes locked onto the King's shifting stance, calculating the absolute blind spots in the monarch's majestic golden aura.
SPLURT.
Leonhart's blade bit deep into the King's shredded oblique. He pivoted, executing a brutal, high-speed reverse slash that cleanly tore through the dark hair on the King's chest, leaving a massive, spraying crimson gash across that perfect, masculine torso.
The invincible monarch let out a sharp, ragged gasp as Leonhart systematically slayed his way through his prime flesh, the pristine golden aura finally beginning to flicker and bleed.
The King stumbled back three paces, his bare feet sliding across the blood-slicked stones. He looked down at his magnificent, shredded chest. The massive gash Leonhart had carved was pouring deep crimson blood down his perfect, low-fat abs. For the first time in centuries, the physical sensation of raw pain shattered his majestic composure.
"You... you absolute vermin!" the King roared, his voice dropping into an unearthly, layered frequency that sounded like a thousand voices screaming at once.
The golden aura around his masculine frame violently imploded, turning into a swirling vortex of pitch-black and deep violet mana. The hidden magic of his cosmic God was finally being pulled from the deep reservoirs of his soul.
"Divine Authority: The Weight of Sins!"
A massive, invisible gravitational wave slammed downward. The ground beneath Leonhart's feet instantly cratered, the crushing pressure fracturing his shins and forcing him down to one knee. The black mana coalesced into ethereal, multi-jointed arms erupting directly from the King's broad shoulders, snapping forward to completely crush Leonhart's skull while he was pinned.
Gideon saw the shifting mana frequencies instantly. This was the exact brink-of-death variable his tactical layout had accounted for.
"ARCHERS! RELEASE!" Gideon screamed, his voice tearing his vocal cords as he raised his silver broadsword.
THWACK-WHIRRRRR!
From the ridges and broken barricades, the thousand elite soldiers acted as a singular, disciplined machine. A massive, coordinated volley of specialized armor-piercing arrows violently tore through the sky, blotting out the sun like a black cloud. Every single tip was coated in anti-magical silver, tracked precisely to rain down upon the King's majestic blind spots.
The King's majestic eyes widened as the sky darkened above him. He was forced to redirect the dark divine arms away from Leonhart to manifest a chaotic, swirling kinetic shield overhead.
EXPLOSION.
Hundreds of arrows violently detonated against the unholy barrier, the sheer kinetic weight and anti-magic discharge forcing the 900-year-old monarch to exert massive amounts of his divine god-granted reserves just to hold the sky back.
"Leonhart, move!" Kairo coughed out, his emerald healing magic violently sparking around his newly regenerated left arm as he lunged forward to break the gravitational anchor.