Nox's desperate sobs echoed in the vast, silent crater. The pain of the unhealing scar was nothing compared to the shattering of her purpose. Vengeance had been the foundation of her existence, and now it was crumbling to dust, leaving only the hollow, weeping child from the wasteland.
Then, a voice slithered into her mind, cold, familiar, and absolute. It was a sound that had once been her salvation and was now her damnation.
"What a pitiful display, Nox."
Orion's voice was not a comfort; it was a whip. Nox flinched, her sobs ceasing instantly, replaced by a terror far deeper than any Kenta had inspired.
"Did you truly believe I would grant a creature of such flawed lineage true freedom? You were always a tool. A beautifully crafted, two-faced weapon. And now, it is time you were wielded."
"No... my lord, please..." she whispered, her voice a broken thread.
"The Night Authority you wield so clumsily was never yours. It was always mine, a leash disguised as a gift. All those stolen Authorities you mimic? They are pale reflections. The Nighshinthal were always doomed to be mimics, never the real thing. The former Emperor, in his terror, killed your family not because they were a threat, but because they were a reminder—a failed, pathetic echo of the one clan he truly feared: the Naein."
Each word was a precise, surgical cut, severing her history, her identity, her very reason for being.
"You could never reach the level of one who has truly stolen from gods. Not through mimicry. That path belongs to only one—the one who conquered the divine through battle alone... the Ruler of Heavenly Flames."
The title hung in her mind, a name she knew only in whispers, a being of legend even among the Emperors.
"But you? You have outlived your usefulness as an individual. Now, you will serve as my vessel."
"ORION, NO—!" Her scream was cut off, not by sound, but by force.
A power vaster than any she had ever known flooded her broken body from a dimension away. It was not healing. It was rewriting. Her flesh and bones contorted, cracking and reshaping against her will. The gray scar on her chest flared with agony as new tissue, dark and twisted, grew around it, sealing it beneath a layer of pulsating shadow. Wings of pure darkness, vast and tattered like a fallen angel's, erupted from her back. Her features were swallowed by a mask of solidified shadow, from which her single, starlit eye—now glowing with a captive, tormented light—was the only visible feature. The tears she shed moments before now traced glowing, acidic paths down the dark mask.
Where the cunning and seductive Devil Nox had been, now stood a Controlled Beast—a terrifying, Phoenix-like entity of pure shadow and despair, its every movement directly orchestrated by the Shadow Emperor.
---
High in the royal castle, Princess Alessia stood on her balcony, her hands gripping the cold marble railing. The air had grown heavy, charged with a malice that made her fairy-bloodline shiver. Then, it happened.
A blast of dark nebula erupted from the direction of the city's foundations, a wave of pure anti-energy that turned the sky the color of a fresh bruise. The very light of the sun seemed to be swallowed.
"SHIELD THE CAPITAL!" Alessia's voice, amplified by her lineage and her desperation, rang out across the battlements. "ALL MAGES, TO THE GRAND BARRIER! NOW!"
Below, the capital's defenders scrambled. A massive, hexagonal barrier of golden light erupted over the city, woven from the combined mana of a thousand arcanists. The dark nebula crashed against it. The sound was not of an impact, but of reality groaning. Cracks, like spiderwebs of dying light, spread across the golden dome. Mages screamed, collapsing from the feedback, but the barrier held—for now.
As the nebula dissipated, the blackened sky remained. And then, a portal tore open—a rip in the fabric of the world, bleeding void. From it emerged the transformed Nox, a silent, winged omen of ruin. And behind her, pouring out in a seemingly endless tide, came an army of 10,000 S-rank Shadow Demons, their forms shifting and predatory, their collective aura a suffocating miasma that promised the end of all things.
The true invasion had begun.