Two weeks left
The King of Hell did not smile. He sat like a monarch carved from cold stone, and his voice moved through the hall like smoke. "There is something I haven ´ t told you Archer. There is a ritual," he said, flat and final. "You will either hold the crown of hell, or the crown will unmake you oit of existence." That was all.
Archer left the Grand Canyon for the first time in months. There was a silence in his chest that had nothing to do with courage. The Godrend Aegis armor rested along his spine. The King's words were the only weapon that mattered now. It felt like a warning: you can die.
He took the warning and chose to answer it with action.
He did not wait for the ritual. He spent the first days of the first week of the two like a shadow across The United States of America. The King's Express shipments for Archer his training arrived in torn places between worlds, and each carriage left at least one Level-2 spawn behind. It were monsters tempered in the underworld, built to test. Archer became their judge.
Night one: an industrial yard outside a rusty city on the east coast of the US near Miami. The furnace-beast rose, a hulking thing whose skin flowed like molten metal. Workers ran and hid where they could. Archer waited above the wreckage. He was invisible to the panicked eyes below. He moved like a blade: a flash of flight, a light speed dash, and his swords sang.
He opened his first attack with his Nova Cross Severance. Two intersecting slashes of stellar light bent space, and molten veins on the beast's flank hardened and cracked. The Aetherial Bastion took the backlash, its hexagonal dome swallowing fire and returning it as cold mana to the suit. The beast responded with a void-maw, a hole that stole sound and light, tugging at his bones. The ground tried to swallow him.
Oblivion was born from need. On instinct Archer formed two small singularities at his blades' tips. Black mouths that chewed gravity and ate a sliver of time. He gave the attack a name on the spot, Event Horizon Sever. He slashed the monster ´ s thighs. The yard cracked. Seismographs far away registered a small moon-blink. People cheered at him; Archer did not listen and disappeared before they could see him.
He learned the lesson that night. Power erased things. Power left scars in the world that people remembered. That scar, not the applause that he gets, would be his true ledger.
Night two started: highways and salt flats where his targets for today. Three monsters with glass scales and razor claws spread across a desert exit. Archer used his Stellar Cyclone, spinning until the air itself became miniature blades and birthing small suns that hammered the pack. He let his Temporal Rewind Core stitch him up in an instant once when a claw nicked three of his ribs; time blinked back and the cut closed like it never happened.
He practiced restraint between kills. He tuned the Aegis armor himself to hold the black holes to coin-size, because otherwise it could destroy the whole earth if his power got out of control. So he made the pull precise instead of planetary. He used True Invisibility Cloak to slip past military patrols and watch how cities bent under monster raids. Vigilante work was more than killing the monsters; it was watching where people hid, where fires burned, where parents hid their children and learned them how to be quiet. He mapped those soft places in his head.
Archer only had victories. He had taught himself to aim the void small. In the first two night he had learned to make the stellar slashes bite without splitting continents. He had killed monsters across different states, from rusted yards to neon deserts, and each dead body left him with a new tally: how many yards of damage and how much of the world he could tear without losing himself.
Between fights he practiced in the Grand Canyon. He was testing his maneuvers until they fit like second skin. Nova Cross Severance became a motion of the wrist. Aetherial Bastion was his breath. It could eat elemental onslaughts and give him back fuel. True Invisibility its working hours had gone from 1 hour to 12 hours and he it let him study cities at midnight.
Temporal Rewind healed the worst of mistakes for a heartbeat. Archer never trusted it to be a cure. Stellar Cyclone shredded plated carapaces into burning rain. Finality Sever remained his last choice. It was the move that could end a fight in a clean line.
By the dawn of day three, fatigue had found him for the first time in years. His hands were blistered. His eyes were raw from too many suns. He flew low above a ruined station in the outskirts of Houston Texas and watched the sunrise spill over places he had touched.
He thought of the King's single sentence three days ago. There is a ritual. You can die. That thin warning had been the spark he had been waiting for. He had answered with nights of quick and brutal lessons.
Day three closed with him on a rooftop of an skyscraper, blades sheathed, Aegis quiet against his spine. He had become a measure the King could weigh. He was not unbreakable. He might still die in that ritual that the King has planned for him. But he had forged new edges. He invented a new attack in his suit that could erase whole bodies from the map. The Event Horizon Sever and the discipline to make it small enough not to swallow a city whole.
The King had told him only that there was a ritual and he might not survive. Archer had done the rest. He answered in blood and restraint.