General Kael felt the change before he saw it. The forest, which had felt like a mundane, if dangerous, woodland for weeks, suddenly held its breath. The very air grew thick, heavy with a pressure that made the hairs on his soldiers' arms stand up. The light dimmed, as if a great, unseen cloud had passed before the sun.
"Hold the line!" he commanded, his own unease sharp in his throat. "We are close. Whatever beast guards this lair, it knows we are coming."
Then, from the path ahead, two figures in dark cloaks and monstrous masks—Malleus and Noctua—retreated into view, moving with frantic haste. They were not fleeing; they were getting out of the way.
And then, the King emerged.
The soldiers of the Hegemony saw a man walk out of the dark fortress. He wore no helmet. His face was pale, his expression eerily calm, but his eyes... his eyes were black holes filled with a swirling constellation of silver light. He held no weapon. He simply walked towards them, his steps silent and measured.
"Archers!" the lead centurion roared, sensing the immense danger. "Nock! Draw! Loose!"
A hundred arrows arced through the air, a steel rain meant to pin a god to the earth.
They never reached him. Halfway to their target, the arrows froze in mid-air, hung suspended as if caught in thick, invisible honey. Then, with a flick of Elias's gaze, they reversed direction, flying back at twice their original speed. They struck the archer line with perfect, lethal precision, each arrow finding its owner's throat. A hundred men fell without a sound.
The legion faltered, a gasp of collective shock rippling through the ranks.
General Kael drew his sword, its polished surface reflecting the strange, dim light. "Shield wall! Advance! It is one man! He bleeds like any other!"
The front ranks locked their shields, a moving wall of iron and discipline, and began to advance, the ground trembling under their synchronized steps.
Elias stopped walking. He raised a single, empty hand.
He spoke, his voice not loud, but carrying across the entire clearing, resonating in the very bones of every soldier. "You stand on consecrated ground, Hegemony. This is a graveyard. And in my kingdom, the dead do not rest."
He clenched his fist.
And the battlefield erupted.
From the earth beneath the soldiers' feet, skeletal hands, then arms, then entire bodies, clawed their way out. But they were not the slow, shambling zombies of Valerius's defeat. They were the bones of every creature—Prowler, stag, goblin, and man—that had fallen in this forest since Elias's arrival. And they were clad not in rotting flesh, but in plates of black, jagged stone he ripped from the mountain itself with his Geist-Binder power. It was an army of earth and bone, rising from their own graves.
They fell upon the shield wall, not with strategy, but with the boundless fury of a natural disaster. The disciplined lines of the Hegemony shattered into a hundred desperate, individual struggles for survival.
But this was only a distraction.
Elias's true attack was far more personal, far more cruel. He focused on the soldiers themselves, on the iron they wore. The armor they believed was their salvation. He used the full, perfected might of his rust-plague. He did not need a Seed this time. He did not need a slow contagion. He was here, his power absolute.
He reached out his will and commanded their iron to betray them.
A soldier raising his sword found it crumbling into red dust in his hand. A centurion's breastplate groaned and sagged, its straps snapping, leaving him exposed. Helmets seized up, trapping their wearers in blind, suffocating cages of rust. The legion's armor, their very identity, began to devour them, seizing their limbs, pinning them in place, crushing them under their own weight. Men screamed as their gauntlets fused shut around their hands, their greaves locking their legs and bringing them crashing to the ground.
The army wasn't being defeated. It was being consumed by its own strength.
General Kael could only watch in abject horror. His men were being killed by their own swords, strangled by their own helmets. The stone-and-bone golems were not even the primary threat; they were merely janitors, picking off the soldiers who were incapacitated by their own dissolving equipment.
He saw the Ashen King walking calmly through the slaughter, untouched, his eyes glowing with cold, cosmic fire. He was not a general commanding a battle. He was a wrathful god, unmaking a creation he found displeasing.
Kael, his own ornate armor beginning to flake and rust, knew this was the end. In a final act of defiant courage, he charged, roaring, at the source of it all.
He got within ten feet before Elias raised his hand again. The general's armor seized him completely, freezing him in place like a statue, his sword arm raised for a strike he would never complete.
The battle, a term that felt woefully inadequate, was over. What was left of the legion was a field of paralyzed, weeping men trapped in coffins of their own rusting iron, being methodically dispatched by the Warden's earth-golems.
Elias walked until he stood directly before the frozen General Kael. The two leaders, the representatives of order and of balance, stood face to face.
Elias looked at the man, his head tilting. The cold, divine rage receded just enough for a sliver of the old, logical Elias to surface, the man who needed to understand the data. The ruin of Sunstone, the death of Elara—it was all so… inefficient. So illogical. He did not understand the sheer, wasteful malice of it.
"Why?" The word rasped from Elias's throat, raw and hoarse, a sound of genuine, pained confusion. He took a step closer, his stellar eyes burning into the General's.
"Why?" The question was louder now, edged with the pain of his shattered soul.
He leaned in, his voice a low growl of anguish and disbelief. "Why?" He gestured to the ruins of Sunstone, visible in the distance. "They were no threat. A village of families. Why?"
One final time, he screamed the word, a raw, ragged sound of a man who had lost his only anchor to the world. "WHYYYYYY?!"
General Kael, trapped and facing his doom, mustered his last ounce of Hegemony pride and spit a mouthful of bloody saliva that sizzled and evaporated inches from Elias's face.
"Because you are a demon," Kael sneered. "A blight. And you do not cleanse a blight by sparing the infected earth it grows in. You salt it. You burn it all away."
Elias stared. His expression, which had been a mask of tortured confusion, suddenly went utterly, terrifyingly calm. The pinpricks of light in his eyes stabilized, no longer swirling with grief, but coalescing into two points of cold, hard, absolute judgment.
"I see," he said, his voice dropping to a whisper that was colder than any grave. He had given them every chance. He had been measured. He had been defensive. He had shown restraint. And their answer was to salt the earth. To murder a child's hope. Because of what they thought he was.
"Benevolence was a tactic," Elias said softly, speaking more to himself than to the General. "A tool to maintain a balance I thought was worth preserving." He looked at Kael, and for the first time, a faint, mirthless smile touched his lips. It was the scariest thing the General had ever seen.
"But not anymore."
Elias placed a single finger on the General's rusted breastplate. He didn't use force. He didn't use rust. He used the knowledge stolen from the Celestial Shard. He understood gravity. He understood mass.
He pressed, and the iron of the General's armor, along with the man inside it, collapsed inward, crushed into a single, dense, screaming point of matter no larger than a fist, which then fell to the ground with a dull thud.
Elias looked down at the insignificant lump of compressed humanity and metal. Then he closed his eyes, and a single telepathic command, cold as the void between stars, shot out to the five silver rings.
'The war has changed. Come home.'