Leviathan had lost himself, just for a moment, swallowed by the bliss of his own masterwork, his attention turned inward to savor the feast of emotions rising from the city below.

And in that exact moment, that single unguarded heartbeat, Emperor Melvin had moved.

He had struck the Curse Bearer and, worse, carried it directly into the heart of Leviathan’s own army.

’Fucking cockroach.’

The curse tore through his mind as he split the fabric of reality and crossed the distance in a matter of heartbeats, the space shrieking apart around him as he moved.

But by then the damned Emperor had already plunged deep into the demon forces, and white flames were erupting from his body like a volcano finally breaking open, gushing forth in their immense and unrestrained fury, washing over everything around him in waves of scorching, annihilating light.

The forces caught in his path were scrambling. His soldiers, the idiots, were trying to close in on the Emperor rather than simply shooting him down, too frightened to launch attacks, too cautious to fire on him directly, terrified that a stray blow might strike the Curse Bearer and damage what the Demon King had gifted them.

They had forgotten, in their panic, that only physical attacks could so much as threaten it, and even then, the thing would survive.

It did not matter. Nothing was lost yet. He would handle it himself.

Then the world, as if personally offended by his confidence, moved against him.

The very instant he reached out to seize the damned human Emperor by the scruff of his neck and end this, Melvin exploded.

There was no other word for it. A blinding radiance erupted from the Emperor’s body like a living star collapsing inward and then releasing everything at once, white light so pure and so absolute that it swallowed all other color within an instant.

An entire kilometer of ground was engulfed in a single instant, a massive, immolating dome of pure white flame. The heatwave crashed downward with crushing force, tearing deep cracks through the earth that snaked outward in jagged lines across the plains, spreading in every direction before finally dying at the edge of the Aegis barrier.

Atop the walls of Nova, Hastan only registered what had happened after it was already done.

He stood with his breath held, as did every soldier around him, every pair of eyes fixed on the blinding dome of white still blazing across the plains, no one able to say with any certainty what had just transpired, what had become of their Emperor inside that light.

Whispers began to build within the city, quiet at first, uncertain, spreading from soldier to soldier like the first tremors before an earthquake.

Then the entire city shook for real.

The massive pulse cannons, grav cannons, and incinerator lances positioned throughout Nova roared to life all at once, the sound of them firing in unison hitting like a physical blow.

Hastan looked up without thinking and saw nearly seventy beams of energy tearing through the sky, each one as vast and dense as the floating warships themselves, some skimming low, just meters above the walls, others climbing high, blazing upward like stars torn loose from their places and sent hurtling downward.

He tracked their trajectories without meaning to, his eyes following the lines of light across the sky.

Two-thirds rained down upon the swelling mass of Devourer Beasts still pouring across the plains. The remaining third dove directly into the dome of immolating white flame, vanishing into its pure, consuming embrace without a trace.

’My Emperor.’ The words formed in Hastan’s mind but refused to leave his throat, his voice deserting him entirely as he stood there and began to understand, slowly and with great weight, what fate his Emperor had chosen for himself inside that burning light.

The Devourer Beasts caught beneath the descending barrage had no chance. Those struck directly were obliterated where they stood.

Those who managed to avoid the beams themselves met the shockwaves released on impact, forces powerful enough to shred their hideous bodies apart, viscera and gore painting the cracked earth across a vast stretch of the plains, the stench of it rising thick and immediate into the morning air.

"Soldiers of the White Flame," A voice called out across the city, calm and heavy with sorrow, pulling every fractured gaze back toward the sky. "Your Emperor has sacrificed himself to give you a chance at an honorable death. Are you going to waste it?"

There, suspended in midair above the city, stood Prince Wenrys, the fourth prince, one of the few members of the royal line who had survived both the Emperor’s purge of the traitors and the war that had consumed everything since.

His famed Blood Basilisk coiled around him, a gargantuan beast of dense muscle and dark scales, its monstrous size and visage alone enough to still the air around it.

’No,’ Hastan thought, and he was drawing breath to roar the answer aloud when a bestial, terror-filled shriek tore through the city and swallowed every other sound whole.

"KKRRIIIAAAAKKKKKKK"

And then, cutting through even that, a single word.

"Enough."

The word did not echo so much as it pressed, settling over the city like a physical weight, and for the first time in his life, Hastan understood that something could exist which was so vile, so fundamentally oppressive, that the body had no learned response to it.

The terror that flooded through him was not physical. It was not the sharp fear of blades or fire. It was not even the dread of death he had made his peace with. It was instinctual, something that bypassed thought entirely and seized him at a level he could not name.

The closest thing he had ever felt to it was during the legacy trial, when he had been required to walk willingly into a burning building six times to rescue a trapped family.

The memory of his skin blistering and the fat beneath it boiling still visited him in quiet moments, still woke him in the dark. That had been a pain that remade him.

But the horror he felt now was many times worse than that.

Every eye turned toward the source of that presence, drawn to it the way the eye is drawn to an approaching storm or an open flame, unable to look away even as every instinct screamed to do exactly that.

There, in the distance, rising slowly from the place where the white dome of flames had swallowed the demon army, was a creature of terrible visage.

Tentacles formed the lower half of its face, writhing slowly, its ghostly white skull studded with numerous eyes of varying sizes, black as onyx, burning with an unquenchable and ancient hatred.

In its left hand, it held a half-burned, charred thing.

No. Not a thing. A person.

What remained of Emperor Melvin.

In its right hand, it gripped a gargantuan creature that stretched fifty meters in its profane size, its tentacles a gory mass of flesh and teeth, fangs spread wide as though capable of stealing strength from reality itself simply by opening.

The demon forces around it had been devastated. Three of the six titans were nothing but burning ruins scattered across the charred and still-smoldering ground, the remaining three bearing grievous wounds that would have ended lesser war machines entirely.

"Melvin," the creature spoke, its tentacles moving with each syllable, its voice carrying across the ruined plains without effort. "You have truly surprised me. You have earned my envy."

It paused, and the word lingered with a weight that those who knew what Leviathan was understood to be did not consider a compliment.

"Let me show you what earning my envy gets you."

He did not need to speak the next words aloud, but he did anyway, slowly and clearly, ensuring every defender on those walls heard precisely what was about to happen.

"Make him your host, but don’t consume his mind."

The writhing nightmare in his right hand responded instantly. Its tentacles reached outward and took hold of the barely living Emperor, and the flesh moved with purpose, consuming the lower half of his body, dark veins like corrupted roots snaking rapidly across what remained of his upper torso, spreading beneath the skin with terrible speed.

The change was immediate.

Flesh knit itself closed only to twist and darken, turning the deep crimson-black of corrupted growth.

Emperor Melvin’s face contorted in agony, his expression breaking into something no human face should be capable of holding, and his burning white eyes, those eyes that had blazed with defiance and pride all morning, began to dim, the light in them fading slowly as the corruption swallowed it from the inside.

The city went silent.

Not the silence of held breath or gathered courage. The suffocating silence of horror, of watching the flame that had steadied them all morning be snuffed out before their eyes.

The small, fierce courage the Emperor’s defiance had kindled in their chests guttered and went dark alongside it.

Hastan wanted to roar. He wanted to draw his bow, loose every arrow he had, and let his soldiers pour fire and fury down upon the demons below until there was nothing left to pour. He wanted to give them something to aim their grief at.

Then the Emperor’s face snapped open.

A shriek tore from it, inhuman, raw, unrecognizable, a sound that had never come from any human throat before.

"MMMEMEAAAARRRRRRRRRR"

A slit split open from his belly to his chin, widening slowly, deliberately, as rows of crimson-white fangs pushed outward from both sides like the maw of a great beast unfolding itself, spreading wide and then lashing outward with tentacles of glistening, twisting flesh lined with the teeth of a dozen different horrors.

His arms swelled grotesquely, inhuman veins rising dark and thick across the skin, his hands elongating into nightmarish claws, each bearing a dozen curling fingers.

It was a sight of pure horror, of agony made flesh, of something beloved and noble being unmade in front of the people who had loved and followed it.

"Before," Leviathan said, his voice smooth and venomous as ever, "you were going to watch your city be turned to the service of my King." He let the pause breathe. "Now you will do it yourself."

Before any new word of defiance could be spoken, before any voice could find the will to rise, Leviathan released the nightmarish Curse Bearer and crossed the space between himself and the Aegis in an instant, stopping mere inches from its surface.

His dozens of eyes stared through it and into the city beyond, cold, patient, and deeply satisfied.

A heartbeat later, his clawed fingers drove into the Aegis.

The surrounding space twisted like wet parchment buckling beneath impossible pressure, reality itself straining around the force he was applying, and the great barrier, the gift of the saviors of the Malefis Domain, the shield that had held against everything thrown at it since dawn, began to yield.

Every defender watched with a held breath that never quite found its release.

Across the plains, the twisted amalgamation of Emperor and Curse Bearer moved steadily toward the city walls, the Devourer Beasts still gushing in an endless torrent from the tear in reality behind it, and the battered but unbroken demon forces advanced with bloodlust and vengeance burning in their eyes.

And then a new sound tore through reality.

A tearing, accompanied by the shattering of something vast, broke across the battlefield and crashed over the walls of Nova like a final wave, crushing the last threads of resistance held in the hearts of the city’s defenders, leaving nothing behind but the silence of the utterly undone.