The cold, sterile air of the Kagu command center was thick with a tension that was almost physical. Analysts, their faces pale and illuminated by the frantic glow of holographic displays, monitored cascading data streams that all screamed the same impossible truth. Officers from a dozen allied nations relayed clipped, professional orders, their voices tight with barely suppressed panic. On the central holographic display, the Aegis Luna, Earth's fragile, orbital tripwire, had gone from a calm, steady green to a screaming, system-wide crimson, before dissolving into a blizzard of static. Its signal vanished utterly.

They were here.

"All forces, final confirmation," Cecilia's voice, crisp and cold as steel, cut through the command center's rising panic. She stood not as Arthur's fiancée, but as the Crown Princess of the Slatemark Empire, a supreme commander in all but name, her Peak Radiant aura a tangible, stabilizing presence. "Global Command is green. Slatemark, Creighton, Kagu, and Avalon forces are in position at all designated pathways."

"Mount Hua Sect confirms readiness," Seraphina added from her own console, her voice as cold and clear as the ice she commanded. "Their interceptor formations are in place, awaiting the conduit."

Alastor, coordinating from the Creighton estate's war room, his face projected on a side screen, gave a grim, single nod. "All pathways are stable and shielded. Arthur, the moment you open the primary conduits, the invasion begins. Godspeed, all of you."

This was the plan, forged in the frantic, sleepless days since Arthur's discovery. It was not a desperate, last-minute defense of Earth's atmosphere. It was a pre-emptive, audacious, planet-wide counter-invasion. Arthur, with his new, terrifying, Divine-level mastery of space, had spent the last several days pouring his power into the creation of massive, stable spatial pathways—interdimensional highways leading from Earth's primary military staging grounds directly to the cold, silent dust of the Moon. This was not going to be a battle for Earth; it was going to be a battle on the Moon, a shield against the apocalypse.

Arthur looked at his team, his family, assembled in the Kagu courtyard, their forms tense, their power simmering. Nine Peak Radiants, the greatest concentration of mortal power in human history. Lucifer's crowns of light and shadow pulsed with a restless, impatient energy, his hands clenching and unclenching. Ren Kagu stood in perfect, meditative stillness, his eyes closed, his hands loose at his sides, yet he seemed the most dangerous of them all. Seraphina was a pillar of absolute zero, her aura a tangible cold. Rachel's eyes were already distant, her mind no doubt processing a thousand tactical variables. Cecilia and Reika stood side-by-side, one a pillar of imperial command, the other a perfect blade in its sheath. Rose and Luna were the quiet center, Rose's life-affirming presence a stark, defiant contrast to the coming miasma, Luna's golden eyes already looking… elsewhere, at the strands of imminent, chaotic fate. They were the tip of the spear.

"Alice, Tiamat," Arthur said, his voice quiet, addressing his mother and the imposing draconic projection who stood as their rearguard. "You have the watch. Hold the home front."

"Go," Alice said, her voice softer than usual, but firm as steel. "Do not fail."

Arthur turned to his team, his family. "With me."

He did not open a small seam. He asserted his divine will. A massive, shimmering tear in reality, twenty meters wide and perfectly stable, opened in the courtyard. It was not a black void, but a perfect, circular window. Through it, they could see the cold, silver-grey dust of the lunar surface, and hanging above it, like a breathtaking, vulnerable jewel, the blue-white marble of Earth.

They stepped through as one. The transition was instantaneous, the pressurized air and sound of the Kagu valley vanishing, replaced by the perfect, sterile, absolute silence of the vacuum. Their Peak Radiant and Divine auras instinctively flared, projecting the necessary shields of pressure and life-sustaining atmosphere around them, a tiny bubble of defiant life in the utter cold. They stood on the pockmarked, ancient dust of the Sea of Tranquility, the powdery regolith finer than any sand, settling around their boots.

And before them, blotting out the stars, filling their vision with a scene of geometric horror, hung the demon armada.

It was not a fleet in any human sense, a collection of metal and engines. It was a living, breathing swarm of nightmares. A thousand bio-mechanical ships, their hulls seemingly carved from the carapaces of colossal, diseased insects, pulsed with sickly purple and green lights. They wept a constant, oily film of raw miasma into the vacuum, a visible, cancerous taint against the pristine black of space. Myriad smaller vessels, the Radiant-rank "Dukes," swarmed like hornets around a dozen massive, fortress-like capital ships. The sheer scale of it was staggering, a cloud of abject darkness poised to descend.

Arthur's divine senses cut through the chaos, triaging the threat instantly. He felt the chaotic, violent static of the lesser ranks, the "Dukes," a rabble of individual Radiant-level powers. Above them, like heavy, solid anchors of pure malice, were the four Archdukes, their power focused, arrogant, blazing like black suns – two at High Radiant, two at Peak Radiant.

And at the very heart of the fleet, on the bridge of a flagship that seemed carved from a single piece of solidified night, he felt the two true threats. They were not points of light in his perception; they were voids, black holes that seemed to be drinking the surrounding reality. Their divine signatures were immense, terrifying. Wrath, a singularity of pure, mindless, catastrophic rage. Envy, a cold, infinitely deep well of conceptual want, insidious, analytical, and already… observing them. Cataloging them.

The demons had seen them. A ripple of chaotic energy passed through the fleet as it registered the impossible arrival of ten beings on the Moon's surface.

"Now," Arthur said, his voice resonating not just in his team's minds, but across the vast, stable spatial pathways he had created, a command sent to a waiting world.

As if a dam had broken, the space behind them tore open. From a dozen massive, stable portals, the armies of Earth began to pour forth. Sleek, obsidian Kagu void-ships, bristling with an energy Arthur had never seen before, surged into the black. From another portal, the Slatemark battle-leges emerged, thousands of mages in reinforced combat armor, riding intricate, glowing mana constructs. From a third, the polished, lethal forms of the Creighton estate's automated war-frames deployed in perfect, silent formations. And from the largest portals, the combined Radiant divisions of Avalon and the allied nations, a true tidal wave of human defiance, flooded onto the lunar surface in a planned, overwhelming, coordinated invasion.

The demon fleet, clearly stunned by this instantaneous, massive counter-deployment, reacted with chaotic, furious energy, their smaller vessels turning to meet the impossible charge.

"Nine," Arthur commanded, his voice a calm, sharp point of certainty in the rising din of the deploying army. "The army is yours. The Archdukes, the Dukes, the fleet itself—do not let a single one touch Earth. Show them what two years of training has forged. Show them what Peak Radiant truly means when it works as one."

He turned his gaze from the erupting, silent battle, and fixed it on the two divine signatures, separated from him by kilometers of vacuum and a wall of lesser demons. "Them," he said simply, "are mine."

He took a single step forward, his new divine power thrumming, his will focused. He intended to close the vast distance, to take the fight directly to their flagship, to end this before it could truly begin.

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