"The power of the Archangel is quite something. Against armies like these, mixed in strength and unprepared, just one salvo is enough to push their losses beyond what they can bear."

High above, the endless curtain of night woven from the Lady of the Night's power began to fade. The vast rift Wang Yu had torn open in the heavens was slowly being mended by the world's own resistance, sealing away the divine power that had poured through. As the wound between realms closed, the devastation left by the Archangel's bombardment was laid bare.

At the center of what had once been the Losman army's encampment yawned a crater of impossible depth. Rivers of molten rock flowed through its heart, the stone having been transmuted into lava by the sheer heat. The soldiers caught within the blast radius had been shredded into nothingness, flesh, armor, and soul completely vaporized.

Those farther out were hardly better off: their armor was ruptured, their bodies maimed, their spirits shattered by the shockwave. Struck first by the unraveling power of the Lady and then by the Archangel's fully charged bombardment, Losman's expeditionary force was annihilated.

The few who survived no longer had the will to fight. Such absolute disparity in power bred a terror no command could suppress. Casting aside weapons and banners alike, they fled the field, stumbling across the border in blind panic.

Let them flee, Wang Yu thought. They would carry word of Aleisterre's newfound might to every corner of the continent. The message had been delivered, the warning made.

"A shame, though," he muttered, crouching on a nearby ridge, chin resting on his hand. "The Archangel's uses are still limited. The material for its warheads isn't renewable. Not even the Skyborne City can mass-produce it. And substitutes just don't pack the same punch."

From beside him came Avia's voice, quiet and alert. "Wang Yu, I'm sensing fluctuations in the void nearby. Someone's watching us."

He narrowed his eyes, glancing up at the coordinates she marked atop the Perfect Fractal lens. Whoever it was lay beyond the reach of the Chariot's domain—so far, in fact, that he hadn't sensed them at all.

Avia's detection relied on her wizardry, which was magnified a hundredfold by the Chariot's power coursing through her. Her perception through the Perfect Fractal lens had become almost frightening in precision.

"That thing... could it be Roland's living fortress, the one that slipped away?"

The Chariot's power couldn't reach it, but that was no obstacle. At his request, Avia tore open a rift in the void, and Wang Yu thrust his head through. He used the almost absurd eyesight of his legendary body to peer into the boundless void. And there it was: distant, hidden by some cloaking field, drifting through the void like a leviathan in deep water—the same fortress whose "room" he had once blasted off.

Before he could act, however, it vanished again, melting back into the endless void faster than thought. 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝕨𝕖𝗯𝚗𝚘𝕧𝕖𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝕞

"It's gone," Avia murmured. "What could it be planning?"

Roland's creations seemed to be as unfathomable as the legend himself.

"Who knows?" Wang Yu shrugged. "Next time, let's have the Lady of the Night try intercepting it. We might learn something."

He brushed the matter aside. Whatever the fortress was scheming, it wasn't worth chasing—not yet.

"Anyway, it's Charles's move now," he said, stretching. "Aleisterre's fangs are bared at last. The other kingdoms will think twice before invading again.

"This kind of baseless aggression won't sit well with commoners or their own soldiers. Our intelligence network's in place. The reports will start coming in soon enough."

Avia nodded as she began to weave a Gate of Phases, her tone calm and calculating. "And since the unrest from these ancient ruins has spread across the continent, Aleisterre's display and the might of the allied dragons will draw the attention of the other intelligent races. Dealing with these ruins is everyone's problem now."

Her prediction proved true. The shockwaves from the four-kingdom assault on Aleisterre swept through the continent with stunning speed. Beyond the sudden rise of Aleisterre's power, nothing caused greater stir than the return of dragons to the mortal world.

Within days, the Nightblade agents of the Isolated Fang, the clandestine infiltration branch of the organization, had already relayed intelligence from every neighboring kingdom through the Prayer Network to Charles's desk.

In Losman's capital, the agents scarcely needed to eavesdrop. The streets themselves hummed with rumors. Everyone was talking about the disaster that had struck their army.

A sudden curtain of night had engulfed the sky, and only a handful of survivors had survived to tell the tale. An entire host was gone in an instant. The tale was met with dread and disbelief.

Leaning casually against a lamppost of glowing mana stones, a Nightblade operative unfolded an emergency-print newspaper, pretending to read while listening to two workshop workers chatting nearby.

"Why'd the kingdom attack Aleisterre out of nowhere? There wasn't a whisper about war before this. We've never even had real trouble with them," one man said, baffled.

Except for the news about Selwyn and Aleisterre's conflict early on, he couldn't recall hearing much about Aleisterre at all.

"You're asking the wrong question," replied his friend, lowering his voice. "It's not just us. Visconti and Sarybin both marched on Aleisterre too."

His friend clearly knew more.

"What? All at once? What could Aleisterre have done to anger so many kingdoms—some kind of void god ritual?"

"Doubt it. Void cults have caused incidents before, but never like this. At worst, you'd purge them yourself. Who'd invade another kingdom to do so? Maybe it's because Aleisterre wiped out Selwyn and was eyeing us, too?"

He exhaled, shaking his head.

"Who knows. I just hope it ends soon. Whatever those nobles are plotting, it's the rest of us who'll pay for it."

They finished the equivalent of cigarettes in this world, flicked the stubs into the gutter, and went their separate ways.

The Nightblade agent, still leaning against the lamppost, folded the newspaper neatly, every word of their conversation already transcribed and ready to send straight to Charles.

Reports from four kingdoms converged upon Charles through the Prayer Network. Most were little more than the idle conjectures and gossip of ordinary folk about the sudden invasions of Aleisterre—messy, trivial, and apparently meaningless. Yet this was precisely what Charles needed.

"Commoners hold no ill will toward Aleisterre. They don't even understand why their kings sent troops. It seems the impetus came from the nobility," Charles observed as he and the devil One sifted through the threads of conversation.

The theories ran the gamut from rites to summon unholy gods, preemptive strikes, and even the ridiculous claim that five kingdoms had coordinated the assault merely as a field exercise—which made Charles's jaw twitch.

That such wildly divergent rumors existed proved that the populace was ignorant about it all. The "they" these citizens muttered about, sources from whom they had learned the truth, were in fact Nightblade operatives.

The Nightblades had spread news of what had actually happened to observe the reaction of the kingdoms. By doing so, the intelligence network would naturally achieve its aim: ordinary people opposed baseless war. Charles wanted to see whether the rulers would press on in the face of popular dissent.

"What? Winterhold's alright, isn't it?!"

A sudden message from Edward set his heart racing. He hastened to confirm the situation.

"Not a problem, thanks to the Lady of the Night," Edward replied. "She detected a tide of void energy and a tremor from the ancient ruins beneath the St. Anna Snowfields. She warned us in time, and the dragons intervened. We're all right, but—"

His words cut off. Instead, a picture flashed across Charles's view.

The great St. Anna Mountains, an ancient bastion of the North, now lay half-collapsed. One side of the mountains bore jagged, monstrous blast-scarred wounds.

Between the ruined snowfields and Winterhold, the snow had been upheaved and swept away, the ground split and heaved in twisting fractures. Even the relentless blizzard had stilled. For a moment, Charles did not recognize the place as the snowfields of the North at all.

Edward's first message had been terse. The ancient ruins beneath the St. Anna Mountains had self-detonated in catastrophic destruction, burying whatever secrets they had once contained beneath an apocalyptic blast.

But that wasn't the worst of it. Had the Lady of the Night not given warning, and had the dragons not come, Edward might never have lived long enough to send that message.

"Damn it. That was the one lead we had."

Charles' temper flared. He had planned to investigate those ruins himself. He sighed.

"All we can hope now is that other intelligent races recover information from the ruins that surfaced in their lands..." he murmured.

Back in the orcish realm, Barsaka frowned. "Destroying an anchor outright? Are you sure?"

He watched the white-haired youth, glowing like a living constellation of void energy, calmly sever the anchor's link to the Void. One of the planned anchors had been shattered and erased by the young man's last surge.

"It's fine. We had two backup nodes from the beginning, didn't we?" the youth replied carelessly.

That answer was too glib for Barsaka.

"Those were spares, not meant to be discarded so readily. Tell me why."

"Alright, then. From the start, things didn't go according to plan. The two kingdoms of Aleisterre and Selwyn have diverged from predictions. They're severely off course. There had to have been something that triggered the anomaly. Cutting off a limb now avoids that aberration and lets us glimpse what lies beyond this node."

"I'd have made the same choice," Barsaka said after a moment's thought. "The dragons are not part of the plan."

"No," the youth replied. "You miss the point. The dragons aren't truly important. Their might is one-sided, like hollow shells without souls. Unless they take the next step forward, they cannot derail our plan.

"The issue lies to the east of Aleisterre," the youth answered, eyes bright with a certainty Barsaka could feel even without full understanding. "You and I both sensed that genuine divine descent. It's unbelievable. It should have been absolutely impossible."