The mere thought of Envy dying at Ruler’s hand sent a shiver down his spine, and Odin was sure he was not alone in what he was feeling.

The fear that had settled into him as he watched hope being pulled back into a world that had been drowning in despair was present in varying degrees across every guild leader in the chamber.

The shapes it took were different, the specific calculations behind it as individual as the people carrying them, but the root of it was the same.

Vlad did not serve a king the way Odin did, and neither did Aster, but they served the same purpose, and they understood the same stakes, and what they were watching had the same implications for all of them, regardless of the particular arrangements that had brought each of them to this room.

’Damn all of it.’ The curse moved through Odin’s mind with the quiet, contained force of something that had been building for a while and had finally found a form compact enough to be useful.

’It’s not as though I never considered this scenario.’ He had. He had run versions of it through his mind in the quiet hours, tracing paths through possible futures with the habitual thoroughness of someone who had learned early that the scenarios you failed to prepare for were the ones that found you.

In this battle also, he had considered the possibility of the Ruler surviving, or doing more than surviving. Still, he had simply not given enough weight to the version where he could kill a Sin General.

However, this just made the inevitable choice just far more consequential than he was hoping for it to be, and nothing else.

’Some will call me a traitor, others will call me power hungry. My reputation... no, my Guild reputation will take a great hit, and plans will need to be altered, but the end will not change,’ Odin thought, the words arriving with the particular flatness of something being acknowledged rather than felt.

’I will make sure the end stays as envisioned and promised,’ he let the thought complete itself without flinching from it. ’I will make sure the Eldravian Empire stands at the end of all this.’

Odin had grown up in an affluent family, and he was fourth in line to inherit his father’s business empire, so in truth, he was just a rich kid who would play a small part in his father’s business empire and live with that.

That had been his life before the selection, before he was selected to be cultivated for the Ancient world, before it was known to anyone what the game world truly represented.

Odin had performed fabulously, and he was now the first-ranked Guild leader, and as his reward, he had been promised a part in the future to come.

The future that few people knew existed, and fewer still would be permitted to enter, the opening of something vast and new that would make everything currently being fought over look like a minor disagreement.

He just had to hold his position. Play his part. Keep the pieces from moving in directions that disrupt the arrangement until the arrangement has run its course.

’Everything will be fine,’ he told himself, and drew a slow breath, and pressed his emotions back into the order he needed them to maintain.

The following minutes stretched with the particular elasticity of time under pressure, each one carrying more weight than the one before it, the feeds continuing their work on the assembled chamber with relentless patience.

It was not long before Grace was scrambling again.

"Ahm... Mm..." She cleared her throat, the sound carrying across the chamber with the quality of someone reaching for something that was not quite where she had left it. "Viewers... Ancients..."

The streams were already collapsing into fog as she spoke, the multiple feeds dissolving into the mist that the projection system used as its neutral state before a new image rose to replace them.

A single stream materialized from the settling fog, and what it showed needed no introduction to anyone who had been watching.

The white city. Nova. The capital that every player and viewer had known for years, its marble walls and rising palace as familiar as anything the Ancient World had produced, now carrying the evidence of everything that had happened within it across the length of this terrible morning.

The streets still rang with the sounds of ongoing battle, the roars and cries that were certainly louder than anything the city had ever heard, the tide of Devourer Beasts still being cut down by defenders whose expressions carried rage in equal measure to fear.

The eyes of the chamber moved to the city for a single second, but then they moved to the sky outside the walls.

A globe of darkness hung there, vast and slow, and as the feed found it and held it, the globe began to come apart, dissolving from its surface inward, layer by layer, darkness crumbling away with the patient inevitability of something that had held its shape for as long as it needed to and was now releasing it.

Behind the dissolving dark, a figure floated.

His hands were not empty.

In one, a head. In the other, a torso.

Both enormous and monstrous. The law that had shaped them into something to be envied had been removed, the idea of a perfect form that Leviathan had worn in life stripped away by his death, leaving behind only what had always been underneath it.

Still vast. Still carrying enough presence in its ruined state to steal the breath from anyone whose eyes found it.

The tear in reality from which the Devourer Beasts had been pouring since dawn was thin now, barely a line in the air where it had been a wound, the flow through it reduced to almost nothing.

The chamber was completely silent.

"He killed Envy." It was Odin who said it.

Not as a question. Not with the rising inflection of someone uncertain about what they were stating, but rather as a fact, delivered in the flat, drained tone of someone whose voice had been stripped of everything except the words themselves, the color having left his face in the same motion that the words left his mouth, the two departures happening simultaneously as though they were connected.

The others in the chamber, and the defenders still standing on the walls of Nova visible in the feed, and the two hundred million viewers watching from their screens, all shared the same suspended moment of collective refusal.

The logic of it was present and complete and entirely clear. Only two figures had entered the domain. Only one had come out. The vast serpentine amalgamation hanging in the sky above the plains was a terrible thing, and a Sin General was also a terrible thing.

It should have been obvious.

And yet the part of every mind that had watched Leviathan walk through Pulse cannon fire untouched, that had watched him dismantle the Aegis that had been gifted by the greatest power on the continent, that had watched him reduce an Emperor to something unspeakable, that part simply refused to accept the conclusion the evidence was pointing to.

That something could kill that.

That someone had, and the said someone was just a player, and not a Monarch of the Ancient World.

---

"Envy is dead." Alex’s voice was low, carrying none of the projection of someone addressing a crowd, and yet the words reached every corner of the city, moving through the chaos of ongoing battle the way certain truths moved through noise, not by volume but by weight.

"The only thing standing between you and life now is these Devourer Beasts. Kill them and live, or die trying. Because no more help will come from me."

Not a flicker of doubt moved through his eyes as the words left his mouth. Not a trace of apology or hesitation.

The cruelty of it, and it was cruel, was visible to anyone who understood what he was capable of, even now, even in the weakened state the domain battle had left him in.

With his law presence alone, he could have crushed the hundreds of thousands of beasts still moving through the city’s streets without raising his hand.

He could have ended it in minutes and let every surviving defender draw a breath that was not rationed against the next wave.

Alex would not.

The decision had been made long before this moment, and the weight of it was known to him completely, including what it would cost. Hundreds would die in the time it took the defenders to finish what remained.

Possibly thousands.

He knew this, and he stood with it, and he did not allow the knowing to move him from the position he had taken.

Because without him, they would all have died. Every last one of them. Not hundreds. Not thousands. The millions who had sheltered within Nova’s walls, the warriors and the children, the elderly and the wounded, every soul that had been present in this city when the Sin General’s army had arrived at its gates.

All of them, gone, consumed, and remade into something that would have turned and moved toward the next city and the one after that.

That was the truth he needed them to carry forward from this day. Not the memory of being saved. The memory of what it would cost not to be next time.

He understood enough of what was coming to know that this was only the beginning. War would consume all seven continents before the end, spreading with the particular completeness of something that had been building for a long time and had finally found the conditions it needed to become total.

Every city, every kingdom, every civilization would face its version of this morning, and in most of those moments, there would be no figure descending from the sky to turn the tide at the last second.

There would only be what was already there, the people standing on whatever wall remained, with whatever strength they had left, making the choice that people had made and the Emperor had made and every soldier on these walls had made before the battle even began.

If Alex helped them fight even this battle, they were capable of fighting themselves; he would be teaching them to look at the sky when the darkness came rather than at each other.

Hope would become a waiting posture rather than a fighting one. And the people who waited for salvation that never arrived would die in numbers that made the ones he was choosing to allow today look like a rounding error.

An example had to be set.

He was setting it.

And beneath all of it, beneath the calculation and the necessity and the cold clarity of a decision made in service of something larger than this city and this morning, lived the truth that he never lost sight of and never allowed to complicate what needed to be simple.

If he lost to Ahrimon, none of it mattered anyway.

The example he was setting today, the strength he was asking them to find in themselves, the war they would fight, and the ground they would hold and the world they would rebuild in the years between now and the end, all of it would be erased alongside everything else.

So they needed to learn to fight.

And he needed to win.

Those were the only two things that were true and would stay true until all this madness came to an end, for better or for worse.