The ruined eastern plains were entirely consumed by the encroaching dark. The dead gray sky above remained shattered, the jagged fissures of absolute blackness bleeding an endless, suffocating void into the mortal world. The Fallen Monarch stood ten feet away from Luna Zephyros, his elegant, shifting shadows reaching outward like the hungry jaws of a primeval beast.

Luna knelt in the liquefied gray ash, completely pinned down by the insurmountable, overwhelming weight of the ancient god’s despair aura.

His stark white hair hung in limp, sweat-soaked strands across his pale face. Thick, glowing silver blood poured profusely from his left eye, his nose, and his ears, sizzling and smoking as it pooled in the dirt beneath his trembling hands. The Night Emperor’s chest heaved with ragged, agonizing gasps. Every single breath felt as though he were inhaling crushed glass. The massive, terrifying spike of gravity he had generated by opening the Second Seal of the Cosmic Lock had completely failed. The void had simply eaten his ultimate magic.

"You have fought well, mortal," the Fallen Monarch whispered. His melodic, impossibly quiet voice resonated inside Luna’s fracturing skull. The ancient god slowly raised a hand shrouded in obliterating, liquid darkness. "Now, close your heavy eyes. Let the void grant you peace."

Luna stared at the gray dirt. The obscuring supernova burning in his left eye vehemently flickered, threatening to extinguish. The cold, creeping numbness of despair began to seep into his veins, desperately trying to shut down his mortal heart.

He slowly turned his head, his vision swimming in a haze of pain and silver light.

Thirty yards behind him, Velanor Banner lay motionless. The young Zephyros earth mage was bleeding profusely from his mouth, his shattered ribs buckling under his heavy leather armor. A few feet away, Catherine Sylphyros collapsed on her back, her sleek white armor completely broken, her beautiful silver-blue eyes vacant and paralyzed by the terror of the void. Further back, ten thousand seasoned Solaris infantrymen wept silently in the dirt, their minds completely stripped of courage, waiting quietly for their inevitable execution.

A terrifying coldness flooded Luna’s chest. He remembered the absolute, quiet peace of the coma he had been trapped in months ago. He remembered the comforting, infinite dark that had tried to lull him to sleep. He had fought his way out of that abyss because he refused to leave his friends alone in a bleeding world. He absolutely refused to watch them die now.

Luna slowly turned his head back to face the towering, elegant shadow of the Fallen Monarch.

The arrogant, undeniably reckless smirk that had defined the Night Emperor slowly, painfully crawled back onto his blood-stained lips.

"I am not finished," Luna whispered vehemently. His voice was too weak, trembling with physical exhaustion, but it carried an unyielding core of pure defiance.

The Fallen Monarch paused, his hollow, void-like eyes narrowing infinitesimally.

Luna closed his normal right eye. He ignored the agonizing pain tearing his physical vessel apart. He turned his consciousness entirely inward, diving deep into the core of his own soul.

He stood before the massive, heavy golden chains that secured the infinite vastness of the universe behind the conceptual doors of his mind. He had already ripped the Second Seal wide open, allowing a terrifying flood of primordial mana to enter his brain. But the Second Seal was merely a candle in the face of an endless, ancient ocean of darkness.

To completely push back the void, a candle was useless. He needed to become a sun.

He stared at the third, thickest golden chain wrapped around his inner being.

He vividly remembered the stern, terrified warning of Librarian Jovian in the ruined ancient temple. "The First Lock bends reality. The Second Lock breaks the physical vessel. But the Third Lock, Luna... the Third Lock is the absolute death price. No mortal body can hold the infinite weight of the cosmos. If you open the Third Seal, your physical form will hemorrhage. You will disintegrate from the inside out."

Luna knew the price. He knew that reaching for the Third Seal was a guarantee of his own physical destruction. He was trading his own life to buy the Eastern Front a single, fleeting moment of victory.

"A fair trade," Luna thought, a fierce, reckless laugh echoing in his own mind.

Luna mentally reached out and grabbed the massive, heaviest golden chain. He didn’t hesitate. He didn’t flinch. He concentrated every single ounce of his remaining mortal willpower into his hands and vehemently, ruthlessly ripped the Third Seal wide open.

BOOM!!

The sound exploded inside Luna’s soul, a deafening, catastrophic detonation of reality itself.

An unimaginably ocean of raw infinite primordial mana expeditiously breached the gates of his mind. It did not merely pour into his nervous system; it crashed into his mortal vessel like a cosmic tsunami.

The physical reaction was horrific. Luna threw his head back and screamed. It was a tearing, agonizing scream of pure physical destruction.

His body began bleeding profusely. The delicate blood vessels across his entire body ruptured simultaneously. Thick, shining silver blood erupted from his pores. His pale skin began to vehemently crack and splinter, looking exactly like dry porcelain shattering under immense pressure. Brilliant, obscuring beams of silver starlight physically burst through the cracks in his flesh, illuminating his bones from the inside out.

The immense, impossible struggle of housing the infinite threatened to exact the death price instantly. His heart stuttered violently, desperately trying to pump cosmic fire instead of human blood. His internal organs began to liquefy under the sheer, devastating atmospheric pressure of the universe completely contained within his small, fragile chest.

The Fallen Monarch actually took a step backward, his elegant shadows recoiling from the sheer, terrifying intensity of the light completely erupting from the dying mortal boy.

"You are destroying yourself!" the ancient god commanded, his melodic voice finally betraying a sliver of genuine shock. "Mortal flesh cannot house the cosmos! You will disintegrate into dust!" 𝚏𝕣𝕖𝚎𝚠𝚎𝚋𝚗𝐨𝐯𝕖𝕝.𝕔𝐨𝕞

Luna could not hear the god. He was drowning in a tempest of pain. His consciousness began to rapidly fade, his mind fracturing into a billion microscopic pieces as the infinite mana eroded his human identity. The death price was demanding its toll. He was slipping away, melting into the white-hot expanse of the primordial stars.

Give up, the crushing weight of the cosmos whispered in his mind. You are only human. You are too small. Let the infinite consume you.

Luna floated in the blinding white void of his own mind, his body completely dissolving. But then, some stubborn thoughts anchored him. He saw Velanor’s bleeding smile. He saw Catherine’s cold, elegant resolve. He saw Kairos swinging a heavy iron sword in a dark basement until his hands bled, refusing to yield to the impossibility of the world.

Luna Zephyros was not just a human holding a borrowed power. He was not a fragile vessel destined to shatter. He was a prodigy. He was an anomaly. He was the boy born for the sky.

"I am the Night Emperor," Luna whispered into the infinite void of his mind.

He didn’t try to forcefully fight the infinite mana. He didn’t try to build walls to contain the cosmos. He embraced it, aligning his fractured mortal willpower with the catastrophic, crushing weight of the primordial stars.

Luna roughly opened both of his eyes. The silver blood pouring profusely from his cracked, porcelain-like skin instantly stopped falling to the dirt. The gravity surrounding him was so dense that the blood began to slowly, beautifully float upward, defying the laws of the physical world.

He stopped screaming. The tearing, agonizing destruction of his physical vessel was halted by the sheer, undeniable force of his prodigious willpower. He forced the death price into a stalemate. He was bleeding, cracking, but he refused to die.

Luna slowly, agonizingly forced his trembling legs to straighten. He stood up. The moment his boots stomped firmly into the bedrock, the Third Seal manifested in the physical world.

The blinding light burning in his left eye engulfed his entire body. Luna became a literal, walking celestial body. His flesh radiated a terrifying cosmic light that pushed back the pitch-black shadows of the Fallen Monarch.

The gravity magic radiating from his fragile frame spiked to an unimaginable level. It was no longer just heavy air or pressure. It was the true weight of a black hole.

CRACK!!

The ancient, indestructible continental bedrock of the Eastern Front groaned and sank. A massive, perfectly circular crater, a full mile wide, instantly formed around Luna. The gray ash vaporized into nothingness. The atmospheric pressure became so dense that the air turned into a shimmering, solid state.

The overwhelming despair aura of the Fallen Monarch, which had paralyzed ten thousand soldiers and crushed Velanor, and others, was instantly obliterated.

The heavy, suffocating blanket of the void was entirely ripped away. The Solaris infantrymen gasped loudly, collapsing forward into the dirt as the terrifying pressure vanished from their minds. Velanor and Catherine took sudden, massive breaths, their eyes widening in awe at the glowing, cracking boy standing in the center of the devastated plains.

The Fallen Monarch stood ten feet away. For the first time, the ancient god of the abyss was physically trapped. The living, liquid shadows wrapping the god’s midnight armor frantically tried to evolve, desperately attempting to eat the new cosmic pressure. But they could not. The Third Seal was absolute. The shadows began to tear and shred, forcefully ripped completely off the god’s armor by the overwhelming gravitational pull.

"What is this?" the Fallen Monarch whispered profusely, his smooth voice cracking under the sheer physical strain.

The ancient god tried to take a step backward, to retreat into the safety of the dark fissures hanging in the sky. He could not lift his armored boot. The gravity was so terrifying that it bent the ambient light around them. The Fallen Monarch’s midnight armor began to shriek, the indestructible void metal vehemently groaning and buckling inward under the impossible pressure.

"I told you," Luna’s voice echoed.

It sounded like the absolute vibration of the universe itself. The dual resonance was so heavy it shook the tectonic plates beneath the continent.

Luna raised his left hand, his skin shimmering with silver starlight, the cracks in his flesh weeping floating drops of silver blood. He pointed perfectly at the center of the Fallen Monarch’s chest.

"You do not get to consume my sky," Luna stated vehemently, his shimmering left eye darting onto the hollow voids of the god’s eyes.

The Fallen Monarch, the entity of infinite despair, was forced to his knees. The ancient god crashed harshly into the sunken bedrock, paralyzed, unable to move a single muscle under the absolute, crushing dominance of the Night Emperor.

Luna had successfully harnessed the Third Seal. He had forced his mortal vessel to endure the infinite. He stood supreme in the center of the eastern plains, the master of physical reality, but physical reality was no longer enough.

Luna looked entirely down at the kneeling god. He knew that crushing the physical armor would not completely kill an entity born of the void. To destroy the Fallen Monarch, he needed to erase the god’s existence. He needed to find the core of the shadows.

Luna slowly lowered his left hand, maintaining the catastrophic gravitational lock that kept the god pinned to the bedrock.

"You brought despair into my world," Luna whispered softly, his cracked, bleeding face completely devoid of mercy. "Let us see exactly what hides inside yours."

The Night Emperor completely ignored the agonizing, tearing pain in his own bleeding brain. He closed his normal right eye and vehemently pushed his immense, cosmic consciousness forward.

Luna didn’t just attack the Fallen Monarch’s physical body. He violently, ruthlessly thrusted directly into the ancient god’s mind, preparing to breach the darkest barriers of the Void Era to uncover the hidden truth of the ancient past.