The remaining seven Pillars, along with the warriors they'd brought in tow, exited the banquet hall in an orderly but urgent fashion, forming up in the courtyard just beyond its ornate doors. The air outside was thick with tension, the kind that sat just beneath the skin, unnoticed by the civilians still inside, but impossible to ignore for those familiar with battle. The cold, dry breeze did nothing to settle nerves, it merely carried the scent of something worse on the wind.

King Theodore approached Lazarus in his usual slow, deliberate way, his tone calm but edged with faint impatience. "The connection is still intact, I assume? Don't tell me we'll have to march all the way to the outskirts."

Lazarus, hands folded behind his back, gave a quiet nod. "It's there. They didn't sever the link. Which, frankly, makes it even more obvious this entire thing is a trap."

There was something in his voice, measured, restrained, but undeniably accusatory. He didn't need to say more. Olivia wasn't the only one who had figured out what the king was doing.

Theodore closed the distance between them, resting a hand on Lazarus' shoulder with a friendly familiarity that somehow made the gesture feel heavier than a blow. "It all has a purpose, Sir Lazarus. Every action taken is part of a larger sequence. That's why I'd prefer if you focused on your role and left the rest to me."

He gave the shoulder a few light pats and turned away, already striding back toward the front line of warriors assembling around him.

Lazarus let out a soft, inaudible sigh, and without a word raised his hand and began to inscribe a rune in the air. To say he began implied a process of effort and time, but for Lazarus, something of this level was beneath him. The rune, a large circular teleportation glyph designed to fit dozens, was completed in less than a heartbeat, its lines etched with such precision that it seemed the world had simply been waiting for it to appear.

The soldiers didn't receive a warning. There was no count, no grand flourish. One second they stood beneath the morning sun, the next, they were somewhere else entirely.

Their surroundings shifted in a blink, the warmth of open air replaced by the damp stillness of a long-abandoned structure. The scent of mildew and dust lingered thick in the darkness, as if the very walls had forgotten what it was to breathe.

"We're here," King Theodore announced flatly, his voice echoing slightly in the cavernous space. "Listen carefully: our main objective is to reduce their numbers. Don't prioritize glory or targets of rank, numbers take precedence. Clear?"

He moved toward the doorway at the far end of the room, the floor creaking faintly beneath his boots. As he passed Lazarus, he leaned in and spoke just under his breath.

"Couldn't the arrival point have been somewhere less miserable?"

Lazarus didn't so much as glance at him. "This is the highest mana concentration in the area. Stability matters more than aesthetics."

Theodore let out a quiet grunt. "Just an idle thought," he muttered, and reached for the door.

He paused for the briefest moment, glancing back at the six Pillars who remained. Their expressions were neutral, but he knew each of them well enough to see past the surface. None were friends. None were people he would entrust his back to. This generation, their generation, had produced more monsters than heroes, and he was no exception to that rule.

He opened the door, and light spilled inside, sharp and harsh, illuminating the chamber's age-worn stone. What lay beyond was chaos.

Outside was the remains of a once-proud research facility, a massive dome of reflective, rune-inscribed metal, half-collapsed under its own weight. Arcs of unstable magic flickered and snapped across its surface, the runes flaring to life at random before fading just as quickly. Flames danced along the base of the structure, licking at steel and stone alike, and the ground just ahead of them was slick with blood and strewn with remains, limbs, shattered bones, and the unmistakable viscera of a battlefield.

King Theodore didn't need to bark any orders; the moment the doors creaked open, the warriors of Eterna surged out like a flood unbound. Some vanished in flashes of teleportation, reappearing deep within the battlefield, while others simply ran so swiftly and with such force it seemed like they too had disappeared, their figures reduced to streaks of colour across the field. What followed was not chaos, but a precision strike wrapped in brute aggression, an overwhelming show of power honed through decades of training and war.

Lazarus approached from behind, already lifting a hand inscribed with the faint shimmer of an unfinished rune. "Shall I take command of the field?" he asked calmly, though his fingers were twitching in anticipation, the spell nearly cast without needing his voice to anchor it.

Theodore did not look at him. His eyes were scanning the far horizon, a faint breeze lifting the ends of his cloak. "Not yet. We wait until one of them shows themselves."

He said it evenly, but there was a shift in his tone, just enough to draw Lazarus' attention toward the west. Both men turned at the same time, and for a moment the air grew still.

"Bishop," Theodore murmured, as if confirming something already suspected. He took a step forward, then another, already beginning to move toward the pressure he felt blooming on that side of the battlefield. "Blood Demon won't appear. Intelligence says he's engaged elsewhere. That leaves three more."

Lazarus, ever the cautious one, raised a brow. "You're certain? It could be the Witch."

Theodore replied, though he didn't stop walking. Prepare for Plague instead."

Lazarus didn't argue, but even as he spoke he was already at work, his hands moved in fluid gestures, tracing a web of runes in the air with practiced ease. Dozens of symbols sparked into being, then launched themselves in different directions, each one vanishing a heartbeat later as they embedded themselves into the invisible lattice of the battlefield, prepared for whatever might come.

Just then, a group of Whisper fighters, reckless and furious, made a rush for the two of them. They were fast, disciplined even, and clearly desperate to eliminate the command core. But Theodore didn't even glance their way.

He merely raised a hand.

A single rune burst into existence before him, and then, without hesitation, it fractured, splitting like glass into hundreds of shards. Each shard was a new rune, smaller, more refined, glowing with an intensity that made the air itself crackle.

The runes expanded outward in a perfect sphere, enclosing both him and Lazarus in a luminous dome. For one moment it was silent, almost tranquil, then each rune pulsed once with golden light and turned into a ray of searing energy.

They fired all at once.

The beams moved at the speed of light, far too fast for any human or mage to comprehend, let alone avoid. Those charging forward were torn apart instantly, their bodies reduced to ash and blackened craters before they even realized what had happened.

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"The Witch," Theodore said again, more to himself than to Lazarus, "doesn't like to participate in battles like this. Too messy."

Lazarus chuckled as he started floating into the air, more runes already coalescing around his feet like stepping stones of light. "Yes, you'd know that better than anyone."

"I'll kill her if I have to," Theodore muttered, almost under his breath. "Don't think I won't."

The two men split directions, Lazarus rising into the sky, surrounded by his shimmering arsenal of spells, and Theodore walking calmly toward the west, toward the presence that radiated like a sickness in the distance.

Meanwhile, the main force of Eterna surged through the outer courtyards of the research facility, cutting down any opposition with ruthless efficiency. The enemy though numerous and fiercely determined was being overwhelmed. It was not simply a matter of power or preparation, though those played their part; it was the presence of the seven Pillars, each one a living embodiment of some unstoppable, godlike force.

To the average soldier of Eterna, the Pillars did not resemble people anymore. They were events, storms wrapped in flesh, earthquakes disguised in bone and muscle. When they moved, the landscape changed. When they fought, it was not a duel it was a collapse of everything in their path.

Victory, it seemed, was inevitable.

But those who had lived long enough knew better than to think such a thing could come easily, especially not when Whisper still had five monsters unaccounted for.

Starting with King Theodore, he stood at the heart of the battlefield encircled by a constellation of golden orbs, each one drifting gently away from him before erupting into a dozen radiant beams that lanced across the chaos with a precision and lethality that belied the immense complexity behind the magic.

The beams struck where they were needed most, where the enemy pressed too hard or Eterna's warriors faltered, intervening with perfect timing, as if fate itself had aligned to protect the king's soldiers. More than a few fighters found themselves spared from certain death by a sudden blaze of golden light, saved in the last instant by a force they could barely comprehend.

Bathed in that celestial glow, radiating calm even in the midst of destruction, King Theodore looked not like a warrior, but like a god draped in divine benevolence, untouchable, composed, and omniscient, his presence alone a balm and a beacon to the troops scattered across the field.

Tricia, by contrast, seemed to have crawled up from the deepest depths of a battlefield nightmare. Drenched in blood, cloaked in entrails and gore, she wielded her massive flail like an executioner's hammer, and every swing painted the ground in fresh carnage.

The flail's head was a blur of motion, pulverizing armour and bone with the ease of a butcher's cleaver, and even the chain that linked it to her arm cut through flesh and steel alike, snapping and slicing with cruel precision. Though her veil obscured her expression, her voice rose clear above the screams, the occasional shriek of laughter, bright and chilling, a sound so unnerving that it caused entire groups of enemies to stagger, collapse, or turn and flee.

Where Theodore embodied grace and mercy, Tricia was unfiltered wrath, an avatar of destruction who wore death like a second skin.

Audrey, ever the contradiction, had somehow established a table in the middle of the battlefield, complete with a parasol to shade her from the sun, and was seated as though attending a quiet garden luncheon.

She sipped her tea in measured intervals, flipping through the pages of a leather-bound book, unbothered by the violence surrounding her. It might have seemed absurd, laughable even, until one noticed the concentric rings of corpses surrounding her perch, their bodies arranged in silent testament to the fatal mistake of underestimating her. None approached now.

Lazarus required no theatrics. Wherever he moved, death followed in silence. He didn't raise a blade or utter incantations aloud; he simply passed through space, and those left in his wake dropped, lifeless and untouched, as though the soul had been plucked from their bodies.

A scholar before a warrior, Lazarus had earned his title for pioneering time runes, an entire branch of magic that none besides him had ever truly mastered. What he did now was disturbingly simple, he would pause time in a chosen area, slaughter every enemy within it, and then resume its flow. No one saw it happen, not even those closest. The world merely blinked, and then the bodies fell.

Rudius made no attempt to hide his presence. He was a walking disaster, a spinning vortex of flame and ruin. Fire twisted around him like a cyclone made of living magma, hungrily pulling in anything that wandered too close.

Once inside the vortex, enemies were either consumed by fire or shredded by the debris and shrapnel it had accumulated: metal, bone, even limbs. He strode forward leisurely, his arms crossed behind his back as if strolling through a summer breeze, while the storm around him reduced everything to ash.

Hovering above that inferno was Desmond, entirely unbothered by the heat or the chaos. He wasn't participating, at least not in the traditional sense. His focus was entirely academic. Floating just outside the reach of the flames, he scribbled notes in a floating book, occasionally asking Rudius about the rune structure sustaining the vortex, analysing the shape, flow, and properties of the firestorm as though it were a thesis experiment and not an apocalyptic spell. If the others were fighting a war, Desmond was attending a lecture, and that suited him just fine.

Then there was Jeremiah. Where others overwhelmed with power, Jeremiah moved with precision, silent, lethal, composed. His armour, heavy and regal, moved as if weightless, not once disturbing the fluid grace of his strikes. His blade danced from one enemy to the next, its crimson sheen deepening with each cut, yet his armour remained pristine, untouched by blood or dirt.

He glided across the battlefield like a shadow, always appearing just where he was needed, disappearing just as swiftly. One moment he was cutting through a squadron to the east, the next he was dismantling an enemy flanking force to the north, his movements too swift to track, his presence more felt than seen.

To the Whisper soldiers, he was a phantom with a blood-soaked blade, death made elegant, precise, and unrelenting.

It was in the midst of that controlled chaos, amid firestorms, divine beams, dancing blades and unseen deaths that the world itself seemed to pause, swallowed by a sudden and unnatural darkness that blotted out the sun.

A shadow, vast and dense, rolled across the battlefield like a great blanket pulled taut across the land, prompting every single one of the Seven Pillars to halt mid-motion and raise their eyes to the sky in unison. Even Audrey, previously content beneath her parasol with a cup of tea in hand, rose from her chair with her usual poise abandoned, her expression twisted in something approaching genuine alarm.

Above them, descending with silent menace, was a boulder, not a stone, not a chunk of broken earth, but a monolithic slab of rock so massive that it mirrored the shape and scale of the entire facility they stood in, its weight and width enough to erase the battlefield in a single, crushing blow. And yet, the sheer size of the object was not what shook them to their cores. It was the questions that followed, how had none of them sensed it until this very moment?

How had something of that magnitude slipped past the perceptions of seven of the most powerful beings in Eterna? Their senses were near-absolute, their awareness honed through centuries of war and magic, and yet the rock had approached unnoticed until it cast its heavy shadow over them all.

And then, as if a dam had burst open, the presence that followed hit them like a tidal wave.

A mass of mana surged outward from the sky above, dense and oppressive, filling every inch of space around them until even King Theodore, whose magic was revered as the highest within Eterna, felt himself dwarfed in its presence. It was not just large, it was suffocating, a pressure so immense it seemed to press down on their bones, warping their very concept of scale and strength. This wasn't a trick or illusion; it was real, and it was overwhelming.

Lazarus was the first to act, flying up into the sky with a speed that cracked the air behind him. A single rune burst to life in his palm, its intricate symbols folding and expanding in a fractal bloom before shooting forward. It struck the falling boulder with a heavy, radiant pulse, freezing the monolith in place high above the battlefield. The stone hovered now, unmoving, its shadow still cast over them like a lingering omen.

"I told you to be concerned about her, you arrogant—" Lazarus began, then bit back the final word, tightening his jaw before it could escape.

But King Theodore barely heard him. His eyes were fixed on the figure now slowly drifting into view, descending just below the stone's edge like a wraith unveiling herself. A woman floated there with a presence that bent the very atmosphere. Her crimson dress flowed around her as if stirred by an invisible tide, its edges curling at her ankles as if reluctant to touch the air itself.

She was beautiful in a way that made the word feel inadequate, a sculpted elegance marred only slightly by a single scar that ran down her cheek. Her smile, gentle and bright, stretched across her face with the ease of someone entirely unconcerned with the destruction she hovered above.

The Witch of Whisper had arrived.

A Rank Zero combatant. One of the five strongest whisper had.

And for the first time in many years, King Theodore felt something close to dread begin to take root. It wasn't just her sudden appearance in a battlefield like this, it was the magnitude of the power radiating from her, a presence so vast that even his finely-honed instincts couldn't help but recoil. He had fought her before. He had faced her and emerged victorious. But what he felt now was different. This wasn't the same opponent.

"When…" he whispered, almost to himself, "when did she become this strong?"

Because it wasn't just that she had reached his level.

It was that she had exceeded it, by a terrifying margin.

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