Ethan stood between the three of them, observing their satisfied faces, smiling as he wondered whether or not he should repeat what had just happened, when a violent, piercing sound shattered his reverie.

[Master, it’s an emergency! We’re under full attack! We need to move immediately!]

The situation was too serious to explain, so without hesitation, Ethan ran out to grab his things from the floor.

At Royal HQ, the atmosphere shifted from triumphant to apocalyptic in a single second. The Matriarch, who had only just regained consciousness, clutched her head in agony as the alarm vibrated through the floorboards. "Jason" looked up at the red emergency light. He prayed for a long, slow pulse—the signal for a high-level crisis, like the mercenary attack.

His prayer was ignored.

The light flickered with a frantic, desperate staccato—a continuous, jagged blinking that signaled the "Extinction Event" protocol. It was the alarm Ethan had designed for a threat that could not be calculated.

"Get dressed. Now!" Ethan barked, his voice vibrating with a sudden, lethal coldness that made Martha and Lilly shiver. "Go to the main HQ. Use the underground transit. Do not stop for anything!"

He threw on his clothes with blurred speed. As he burst out of the warehouse, he saw the limousine idling. He grabbed the driver by the shoulder, his grip nearly crushing bone. "Take my family to the heart of the fortress. If a single hair on their heads is touched, I will erase you from existence. Go!"

The car roared away, tires screaming.

*Crul! Status report! Where is the breach?* Ethan roared in his mind.

[ Analysis: Complete Encirclement, ] Crul’s voice was distorted by the sheer volume of data she was processing. [ Signal detected: Magnitude 10 spiritual signature. They are not coming from one direction, Master. They are everywhere. ]

A map projected onto Ethan’s retinas. His heart sank. The entire coastline was being swallowed by red icons. From the south, thousands of unidentified aircraft were breaching the airspace. From the Atlantic, a fleet so massive it defied radar logic was closing the perimeter. Millions of soldiers—a tide of steel and fire—were converging on Royal territory.

Ethan’s numerical superiority, the pride of his recent conquests, suddenly looked like a pathetic joke.

"The Union..." Ethan hissed.

He didn’t wait for a vehicle. He tapped into his Quasi-Spiritual Nucleus, his body erupting in a violent aura of violet and black. He took off, shattering the concrete beneath his feet, moving at a speed that turned the world into a blur of static.

Behind him, the Royal war machine awakened in a frenzy. Soldiers modified by the Worm Nectar scrambled to the armory, their eyes glowing with unnatural light. Helicopters lifted off in swarms, and tanks rolled out of hidden bunkers. The entire East Coast was transforming into a jagged fortress of desperation.

WormQueen, Ethan projected through the hive-link. The south-western flank is weak. Move your brood there and hold the line at all costs. Do not let them breach the industrial sector.

The Worm Queen let out a psychic screech of obedience, her massive form shifting through the earth toward the perimeter.

But Ethan wasn’t heading for the front lines. He was heading for the "Arrow"—the single, terrifying signal Crul had highlighted. It was a spike of power so concentrated it felt like a hole in reality.

He was heading straight for The Only One.

Ethan skidded to a halt, his boots carving deep trenches into the earth as he came to a stop at the very edge of the front line. The air here was distorted, vibrating with the sheer density of spiritual power concentrated in one spot.

Standing before him was the nightmare of history: The Only One and Lord Truth Seeker. Behind them, arranged like a pantheon of dark gods, were the Obsidian-Rank leaders of nearly every major faction on Earth. These were the men and women who held the "Veto" cards, the ones who had survived centuries of purges. Only a handful of rogue leaders, those too insane or too isolated to fear the Union, were missing.

The Only One looked at Ethan, his eyes scanning the empty horizon behind the boy. "Is this it? Where is your ’glorious’ army, Ethan? Or have you truly become so arrogant that you believe you can face the weight of the entire world alone?"

Ethan tilted his head, his gaze settling on the Leader of the Union. He didn’t look at the millions of soldiers surrounding the coast, nor at the Obsidian legends. He looked directly at the man who called himself ’One.’

"I was expecting a god," Ethan said, his voice carrying a taunting, casual edge. "But instead... what kind of chubby, jolly Santa Claus are you supposed to be? You look like a giant marshmallow, yet you talk so tough. It’s a bit ridiculous, don’t you think?"

The silence that followed was absolute.

The Only One froze, his face twitching. He turned his head slowly toward Truth Seeker, as if checking to see if he had actually heard the insult. Truth Seeker, usually a mask of stone, let out a sudden, sharp bark of a laugh, quickly covering his mouth with a gloved hand.

The gesture didn’t escape the Leader’s notice. His aura flared, the space around him cracking like glass. Though they shared the throne, the two were never true allies; they were rivals in a centuries-long stalemate, tolerating each other only because neither could successfully kill the other.

Ethan’s eyes flickered. Divide and conquer, he thought. The friction between them was a crack in an otherwise impenetrable wall.

"You talk big for someone who is about to be erased from existence," The Only One hissed, his "kindly" face contorting into something demonic.

"And you talk big for a oversized candy," Ethan retorted. He reached into his belt and slowly drew a dagger.

It wasn’t his old blade from the Black Skull elder. This was a relic he had pulled from the deepest, most restricted vault of the underground armory. It was forged from a metal that seemed to drink the surrounding light. When he had tested it against his previous dagger, it had sliced through the reinforced steel like it was soft butter.

Ethan leveled the tip of the blade at the crowd. "So, tell me. Who’s going to try and kill me first? You? Or maybe you? Or perhaps... you?"

As the point of the dagger swept past the Obsidian leaders, a wave of pure terror washed over them. These were people who hadn’t felt fear in a hundred years, yet they found themselves instinctively flinching. Even The Only One and Truth Seeker felt a cold shiver crawl down their spines.

The dagger wasn’t just sharp; it hummed with the frequency of the Void, a weapon designed to kill things that were supposedly immortal.

"Come on," Ethan smiled, the amethyst light in his eyes burning with a manic intensity. "I’m in a bit of a rush. I have a family waiting for me at home, and I’d hate to keep them waiting because I was busy playing with marshmallows."