The situation in the Mystic Woods flipped in the blink of an eye. Caelus, who had just been hunted by a pack of top-tier fighters, completely turned the tables. Now, he was the one chasing down a squad of Arch Lords, butchering them with reckless abandon.

"The ancient parchments foretold of judgment shackles carved by the Divine Sigil of magic! When the incantation sounds, all heretics shall be judged in its chorus!"

"Lightning that tears through all things, heed my call! With my power, I shall shatter the darkness before me!"

It was an absolutely savage spectacle.

To Pallas, his older brother’s current form was permanently burned into his memory. Caelus had manifested the ultimate battle form of a Stoneheart Titan: four heads and eight arms.

Two of his arms wielded twin blades, leading the charge. Another pair of hands gathered violently fluctuating magic, manifesting as black hole-like spheres of lightning and fire. These spheres pulsed, rapidly expanding and contracting as they unleashed devastating elemental AoE attacks. 𝙛𝒓𝒆𝙚𝒘𝒆𝓫𝙣𝓸𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝒄𝒐𝓶

A third pair of arms held jewel-encrusted staves, continuously buffing himself with auxiliary magic.

But the most terrifying detail was his final two hands. They clutched a pair of mysterious golden scrolls that oozed a dense demigod aura.

Is this my brother’s true strength? Pallas swallowed hard. He had heard his mother and daddy talk about how strong Caelus was. He knew his brother was a monster, but he never realized he was this absurd.

"Your Highness... is the First Prince fighting Arch Lords?" the Gnoll Wepwawet asked, staring at the sky. He had never witnessed anything like this. "Is he fighting... eight? Eight Arch Lords? Is this real?"

Wepwawet sounded unsure. He couldn’t gauge the exact power of the figures in the sky, but he still couldn’t believe his own eyes.

Pallas ignored the Gnoll. He kept his eyes locked on the sky, hyper-focused on Caelus. His brother was overwhelmingly powerful; words failed to describe the scene unfolding above. It felt surreal. Yet, beneath the disbelief, a thread of worry tugged at Pallas. Caelus was still his flesh and blood. Even from this distance, he could feel the powerful resonance of their shared bloodline.

"Look at how weak you are! You can’t even hack a single guy to death. Did you skip breakfast? Or did you miss your bottle of milk?" High above, one of Caelus’s extra heads berated another, its voice dripping with mocking disdain. "You’re just as useless as Pallas! Absolute garbage!"

ROAR! While arguing with himself, Caelus unleashed a guttural bellow—the signature war cry of the Stoneheart Titan Race. The sonic shockwave staggered every enemy in earshot. The luckier ones were momentarily stunned; the unlucky ones had their souls instantly scattered.

"See that? That’s how you control the field!"

"Kill them!"

"Kill them all!"

Up in the clouds, the sudden outburst left the eight Arch Lords reeling. Two of the weaker ones were blasted into red mist on the spot. After that devastating strike, the aerial dogfight devolved into an absolute bloodbath.

Higher up, hidden beyond the clouds, stood five demigod phantoms.

"Brother, your kid is something else. He’s got your old flair!" Leonidas noted. The demigods watched Caelus’s rampage with blatant admiration.

"Heh. I might have overestimated the local demigods of this world," Leonidas scoffed, his face twisting into a sneer. "Their juniors are getting slaughtered by a kid, and they still haven’t shown their faces."

Logically, in a place like the Verdant Cloud Realm, Caelus shouldn’t have been able to run amok like this. The moment he caused a major scene, a local demigod should have stepped in to swat him down.

"It’s not that they don’t want to step in. It’s that they don’t dare," Orion answered. He pointed a finger straight up.

Unbeknownst to everyone below, a massive spatial rift was silently tearing open at the apex of the sky, growing wider by the second.

"Is that..." Leonidas didn’t need to finish the sentence. Any idiot could tell this was the Commander’s handiwork.

"If I can pick up on it, the local demigods definitely noticed it too," Orion continued. "They were born and raised in this world. They understand its rules far better than we do."

Orion was immensely powerful, easily outstripping his Bros present. His comprehension of worldly rules was on a completely different level.

"From what I know, native demigods are hyper-sensitive to the rules of their home turf. Some even fuse their own domains directly into the world itself," Deputy Commander Edward added. As a Tier-2 demigod, his grasp of these cosmic nuances far exceeded Leonidas or Alexander. "When the fundamental rules shift, they’re the first to sense the anomaly."

"So you’re saying they sensed the spatial rift the Commander made?" Alexander finally spoke up, furrowing his brow. This contradicted their earlier assumptions.

"No, they aren’t strong enough for that," Orion shook his head. He paused for a moment before explaining. "The Commander’s methods are flawless. When he first opened the rift, the local demigods didn’t detect a thing. They’re sensing it now because the Commander has already launched his attack."

Orion looked down at the earth, his gaze piercing through to the hidden demigods cowering deep underground, at the bottom of the ocean, and within the void.

"If they couldn’t feel a blade pressed against their throats, they never would have ascended to become a demigod in the first place."

Even as Orion spoke, the spatial rift high above violently pulsed. It tore wider, expanding like the maw of a colossal beast. To the countless mortals of the Verdant Cloud Realm, it looked as if the gods had fallen and the apocalypse had arrived.

"The... the sky is cracking!" It was Sylvie, the little fawn who had now taken on human form. She clung to Pallas’s arm, her small face pale with terror.

"It’s not cracking. The firmament was severed," a cold, arrogant voice corrected her.

It was Caelus. His battle had ended, and he had come to check on his younger brother. Caelus knew exactly what the rift meant: his master had made his move. With his master stepping in, Caelus’s little warm-up was officially over. As for the Arch Lords he had been hunting, they were currently fleeing back to their strongholds in a blind panic.

"Young Brother, don’t blink. The next part is going to be beautiful."

Having reverted to his normal state, Caelus patted Pallas on the shoulder, kindly reminding him not to miss the show. He then pulled out two enchanted fruits, tossed one to Pallas, and took a massive bite out of his own, his eyes locked on the rift.

A breeze drifted by, rustling Sylvie’s hair.

"Here it comes," Caelus murmured, practically buzzing with anticipation.

The scene playing out across the heavens was horrifyingly beautiful. The pitch-black chasm bisected the sky, leaving one half a pristine azure and the other a sickly, ashen gray.

Pop. A sound that both existed and didn’t echoed in the minds of every living creature. It sounded like a drop of water, or shattering glass, or a bubble pierced by a needle.

The moment the sound hit, a shimmering, silver fish leaped from the abyss of the rift. It seemed ecstatic, thrashing as if it had just cleared a celestial gate to return to the open ocean. The fish paused in midair, as if acquiring a target, before whipping its tail and diving toward the earth like a falling star.

Following in its wake, more silver fish erupted from the void. Hundreds. Thousands. Growing larger by the second.

"What are those?"

"Fish? Merfolk? Are two realms colliding?"

Deep below, ancient experts analyzed the anomaly, trying to make sense of the chaos. But reality was far more sinister than their wildest guesses.

Up in the clouds, Orion stared at the silver swarm diving into the Verdant Cloud Realm. His brow knitted tighter and tighter. Finally, he let out a long sigh. In the face of the Commander’s power, he felt utterly outclassed.

"What the hell is that?" Leonidas asked. "Did the Commander just crash another world into the Verdant Cloud Realm?" Out of all the Bros, he was the only one completely lost.

Alexander had slipped into an instant state of martial epiphany the second the first fish breached. Deputy Commander Edward stood perfectly still, having clearly seen this brand of carnage before.

"Those are blade-fish," Orion corrected him. These weren’t actual living creatures. They were physical manifestations of the Commander’s blade.

The blade’s edge was the fish. The momentum was the fish. The killing intent was the fish. Wherever the school swam, absolute destruction followed.

At first, the hidden demigods of the Verdant Cloud Realm couldn’t grasp the true nature of the silver swarm either. But when the blade-fish rained down—plunging into the Mystic Woods, the Red Sea, the Withered Plains, Mount Oread, and Moonlight City—everything they touched was erased. Complete annihilation.

"Dammit! This is the extermination will of a supreme being!"

A few of the older, wiser demigods finally caught on. This wasn’t a natural disaster. A godlike entity had arrived to wipe them from the map.

In a flash, five native demigods surged from the earth. Acting on pure instinct, they launched a synchronized assault on the massive rift, hoping to seal it and sever the attack.

But it wasn’t a spatial rift. Not really. It was a singular sword strike that Commander Thresh had buried into the fabric of this world a long time ago.

The combined attack of the five demigods only provoked a response. Five colossal leviathans breached the edge of the chasm. They moved like ancient predators starved for eons, finally locking onto a meal.

As the leviathans swam down, mountains crumbled and the earth shattered. A terrifying roar—half-whale, half-dragon—echoed across the entirety of the Verdant Cloud Realm.