Leviathan watched as his masterwork unfolded before him.

Nova. The capital of the human continent. The greatest, strongest, most beautiful city humanity had built in the last century, home to its most powerful warriors, its proudest soldiers, the very heart of the White Flame Empire.

And now it was crumbling into misery and helplessness before his eyes, its defenders stripped of everything that had made them formidable only minutes ago.

He had not lied, not about any of it. He would take the Emperor’s head before the day was done.

The entire population was destined to be turned, every last soul remade into Devourer Beasts, a revelation of terrible significance in itself, proof that no human was beyond the reach of his King’s curse, that the infection consuming the world had no ceiling and no exception.

And the reason for all of it, the grand purpose behind the misery he was orchestrating, was to serve as a welcome gift to the Domain Ruler upon his return from the Ancestral Realm.

Leviathan had been given his orders clearly enough. Unleash the curse and paint the Domain Ruler as the enemy, the figure whose presence had allowed this to happen.

Make the humans suffer so that every surviving soul on every continent would look at the so-called saviors with fresh eyes, bitter eyes.

And with the example of the traitorous Elves standing free of the curse, untouched, thriving under the banner of the Eldravian Empire, the idea of bending the knee to the Demon King’s forces would spread like wildfire through the fractured, desperate peoples of the world.

But Leviathan had never been told to do it the way he had done it. By every reasonable measure, by every instruction given to him, Nova should have been a festering cradle of newborn Devourer Beasts since before dawn.

Simple. Efficient. Done.

Instead, he had given the humans a warning, allowing two-thirds of the city to escape into the dark.

He had then constructed the illusion of resistance, letting them believe, genuinely believe, that they had a fighting chance, that their stand meant something, that their courage and their formations and their great Aegis might be enough to earn them a glorious death worth remembering.

He had deliberately fed their pride, let that false hope take root and grow tall and strong within them.

Only then had he begun to take it apart.

Piece by piece, he had torn their noble image down, crushed their courage methodically, shredded their resolve thread by thread, and finally subjugated their minds and their souls not through force, but through truth, which was so much crueler than any weapon.

He had done all of this for one reason.

To be the instrument of change.

To feed on the immolating shift in emotion, from a courage so pure and blazing that even a being of his magnitude could genuinely envy it, and drag it down into something worthless, meaningless, and soul-crushing.

To hold both states in his hands at once and feel the distance between them.

And now that the curtain had been drawn back, now that the full picture was revealed and the perfect performance had reached its conclusion, Leviathan could not help but tremble.

His eyes shook. His composure, so immaculate for the entire duration of the morning, trembled at its edges as the vast storm of emotions rising from the city below crashed over him. It built and built, climbing toward the sky in all its profane, magnificent glory.

As its architect, he felt every ounce of that change. His command over the laws of the world allowed him to do more than witness the shift from glorious defiance to soul-crushing helplessness.

He tasted it.

He felt it move through him, and with every wave, he grew stronger, fed by it the way the parasite on the Aegis was fed by the shield’s own energy.

But the strength was almost beside the point. He barely cared about the benefit.

What he cared about was the feeling itself.

The taste of it was more exquisite than any fine dish ever laid before him, more intoxicating than any treasure pulled from the deep, more satisfying than any victory over a stronger opponent he had burned with envy and finally brought low.

It was a pleasure beyond his ability to name precisely, a delight so complete and so consuming that a part of him wished it could simply never end.

He wished his brothers and sisters could understand what he felt in this moment. He wished they could see it, truly see it, and be envious of him for having it when they did not.

It would have been the finest thing in the world to be envied for this.

------

Hastan felt the life draining from his body.

Just imagining what Leviathan had described made his entire being shudder, the thought so inconceivable that his mind kept sliding away from it, refusing to let it take full shape.

He tried to reason his way out of it, desperately, clinging to the logic like a man clinging to a rope over open water.

’He must be lying.’ The thought came fast and urgent. Surely they were not so helpless as to be toyed with so completely by a Demon General.

Surely Leviathan was simply trying to trick them into dropping the Aegis, goading them into surrendering their greatest advantage so his army could pour through and butcher them all without the parasite needing to do its work.

The fact that no account of any human falling to the Devourer’s curse had ever been recorded seemed to support this. It had to support this.

But then his eyes found the parasite again. The tendrils now stretched for dozens of meters across the surface of the Aegis, spreading wider and growing thicker with every passing second.

And his Emperor, the man who had spoken with such fire and certainty all morning, had gone completely silent.

That silence said more than any denial could have.

’Nmairis.’ The name arrived without warning, and with it came a terror unlike anything the battlefield had placed in him.

’No. No, NO, NOOOO, NO.’ The thought repeated itself in an endless, agonized loop as tears began to run freely down his face. The sheer image of his wife, his unborn child, being twisted and hollowed and remade into one of those heinous Devourer creatures tore through his mind as a blade dragged slowly through flesh.

The agony was unimaginable. The helplessness was soul-crushing. He did not know what to do, could not form a single coherent thought, could not find any ground to stand on.

He was still drowning in it when the roaring of soldiers around him dragged him back to the surface.

"THEY ARE MOVING!"

"THE DEMON ARMY IS GOING AFTER OUR FAMILIES!"

"SOMEONE PLEASE, STOP THEM!"

Hastan snapped back to reality as if a man struck him across the face. Before he could even look over the wall at the demon army, movement closer to him caught his eye.

A soldier a few feet away drew the knife from his belt and drove it into his own throat.

He was young. Early twenties, the age of marriage, the age when life should have been just beginning. He crumpled where he stood, gurgling as blood spilled dark and fast between his fingers, and within seconds, he was still.

Dead. Not by any enemy blade or claw, but by his own hand, driven there by what Leviathan had placed inside his mind.

The taboo, once broken, spread like the curse they all feared.

Dozens followed. Along the walls, soldiers fell not to demon weapons but to themselves, and those spread throughout the city’s interior fared only worse.

The sound of it, the sudden, terrible silence where voices had been, was in some ways more horrifying than the screaming.

For one long, hollow moment, the thought flickered at the edge of Hastan’s mind as well. A dark doorway standing open, offering release from the weight burning him alive.

And then the thought extended further, past himself, to Nmairis. To do the same for her and spare her from what was coming. 𝕗𝐫𝐞𝕖𝕨𝐞𝗯𝚗𝕠𝘃𝐞𝚕.𝐜𝗼𝚖

The image jolted through him like a lightning strike. It shattered everything. Burned the fog away in an instant and left behind something clean and furious and absolute.

Because that thought, that unbearable thought, was not his. It was the enemy’s work. It was Leviathan’s hand reaching inside him and trying to use his love as a weapon against the people he loved.

The moment he recognized it for what it was, rage replaced every other thing inside him. He turned his gaze toward the demon army. His teeth ground together so hard that the metallic taste of blood filled his jaw.

"LONG LIVE THE WHITE FLAME!"

The roar tore out of him at full volume, raw and ragged, pain flaring through his throat as he pushed past what his body wanted to give.

"LONG LIVE THE FLAME OF PURITY!"

"LONG LIVE THE EMPIRE!"

He drew his bow as he roared, an arrow of white flame forming between his fingers, and loosed it into the enemy mass, repeating the oath he had sworn the day he became a soldier of the White Flame Empire, letting the words fill the space where despair had been.

Then a sound cut through everything.

"DEATH TO THE DEMONS!"

The roar was enormous. Larger than any single voice had a right to be, heavier in weight, too distinct, too recognizable to be ignored or mistaken for anyone else. It belonged to the Emperor, and every ear in Nova knew it instantly.

But no speech followed. No carefully chosen words, no attempt to reason the panic away or rebuild morale through rhetoric. The soldiers who looked up, expecting all of that, found something else entirely.

Emperor Melvin’s figure tore through the skies of Nova like a comet, setting the air itself ablaze in pure white flame, a streak of burning brilliance crossing the city from the palace spire to the Aegis in the span of a single heartbeat.

Before anyone could process what they were seeing, before even Leviathan could fathom it, the Emperor crashed into the parasitic creature with his full force and wrenched it free of the barrier.

He did not stop there. Carrying the writhing, squirming mass with him through sheer momentum and unyielding strength, he drove it outward, away from the walls, away from the city, hurtling toward the vast, stretching demon army spread across the distant plains, carrying the parasite like a torch thrown into dry wood.

A moment of complete stillness followed.

Even Leviathan stood frozen, his face wiped blank, that immaculate composure stripped away in an instant, leaving something raw and unguarded in its place, something that had not been visible once during the entire morning.

And then it broke.

An inhuman sound tore through reality, not a voice so much as a force, fury given physical form, the air around Leviathan rippling and warping visibly as the sound left him, reality itself recoiling from his rage.

"MELVINNNNN!"