The tide sang faintly beyond the crystalline walls. Kaelion sat on the edge of their bed, his obsidian cloak loosened at the shoulders. Arisa stood before him, silent, her hands lightly folded beneath her stomach. For a long while, neither spoke. The only sound between them was the calm rhythm of their shared breath.
She stepped forward.
Kaelion looked up, his eyes softened from their usual storm-forged sharpness. Without a word, he reached out and pulled her into his lap. Arms wrapped around her waist. Her head rested against his shoulder.
Kaelion: (quietly) You're shaking.
Arisa: (murmuring) It's not fear.
She pulled back just enough to meet his eyes. Then she took his hand and guided it to her stomach. There was no aura, no magic spark. Just warmth. A pulse. A promise.
Arisa: I'm pregnant.
For a moment, Kaelion said nothing. His hand stayed there, fingers still. His eyes stared—not in confusion, not in disbelief—but in quiet awe, as if some ancient current had just changed course deep beneath his chest.
Kaelion: ...A child.
Arisa: Our child.
Kaelion lowered his head and pressed his forehead to hers, the rough tide of his breath catching. One hand gripped her tighter—not out of fear of losing her, but to anchor himself in this fragile, perfect truth.
Kaelion: Then the seas have truly given me everything.
Arisa smiled and leaned into his chest, the warmth of his hand still resting gently over her stomach. But her fingers gripped his robe tighter now. As if she could feel it. That tension in the air. That shift in equilibrium.
Arisa: ...You're leaving, aren't you?
Kaelion didn't answer at first.
The eye on his forehead opened again, without urgency, without flare. Just inevitability. It began rotating in slow, cosmic spirals, drawing threads of celestial insight and far-seeing perception into his mind.
Kaelion: The world has tilted.
He blinked once—no, his third eye blinked. And with it, the entire cosmos uncoiled like a scroll across his vision.
He saw it.
Dark, bloodied and broken, clinging to the last threads of survival. Astaroth and Sukojo tearing through reality, their battle more than violence—it was unmaking. Spheres of law and order imploded. Domains blinked in and out of logic. One blow could vaporize a supercluster. One glare could shatter timelines.
Kaelion: If I do not intervene... they will unravel the Verse.
He turned toward her now. His eyes were calm, but heavy.
Kaelion: You know what they are. What they were. But now they've grown beyond containment. If their battle continues ungoverned... the Core Realms will collapse. Cause and effect will separate. Even birth and death will forget each other.
Arisa: (voice trembling) So that's it?
She gripped his hand. Harder this time.
Arisa: I just got you back. We just started again. And now you're going to disappear into the stars like you always do?
Her voice cracked on the last word.
Kaelion leaned in, kissed her forehead, then lowered his hand to her stomach again.
Kaelion: I will not leave you. Not truly. But if I stay... everything else burns.
Arisa: ...So save them?
Kaelion: No.
He looked out the window, where the sea had already begun to rise unnaturally—as if sensing its sovereign's call.
Kaelion: I will silence them.
He stepped away. The moment he passed the threshold, the waves rose in worship. A spiral gate of black water and glowing current opened before him, bending across space and dimension.
And then—he was gone.
—
Far above the battlefield.
Astaroth slammed Sukojo through a bend in dimension, causing mountains in four mirrored realities to crumble simultaneously. Sukojo responded with a backhand that shattered the visible spectrum, turning the skies pale grey.
They were demons. They were devils. They were inevitability fighting inevitability.
Until—
Everything. Froze.
It began as a silence.
Then the silence became pressure.
Then the pressure became fear.
Sukojo and Astaroth—both in mid-movement—stopped. Their instincts screamed. Their hearts, ancient and cruel, skipped in unison.
The sky itself cracked open.
Water did not fall.
It hovered.
Bowed.
Kaelion emerged.
No aura. No flourish. Just presence.
His eyes—two azure oceans and a third of turning galaxies—watched them with something colder than wrath and heavier than judgment.
Neither Sukojo nor Astaroth dared move.
Not because they chose not to.
Because they couldn't.
They were ants. And the tide had come.
Kaelion: (calmly) Stand down.
The words echoed across the Verse like a celestial commandment. The air itself folded beneath them. Yet—
Sukojo moved.
His body blurred—no, it glitched, slipping through afterimages and domain skips, dashing toward Astaroth with a fist pulled back, blazing with a sphere of raw destructive magic. For a moment, his presence outshone the battlefield again. The devil still had fight left. He never listened. He never bowed.
But then—
CRACK.
In the time it took for Sukojo to take his second step, he was already in the ground.
Face down.
Buried.
A crater spiderwebbed under his skull as Kaelion stood atop him—his right foot planted casually against the back of Sukojo's head, pinning him in place like discarded meat.
Not fast.
Not flashy.
It just happened.
Kaelion's gaze remained forward. His foot didn't tremble. His weight hadn't even fully shifted. He hadn't so much as looked at Sukojo while burying him into bedrock.
The battlefield—the entire layer of it—began to split at the seams.
Astaroth didn't speak.
Didn't flinch.
Didn't even dare breathe the wrong way.
Kaelion's two regular eyes stared ahead, unreadable, but calm. The third eye—the god-sight—remained sealed, unseen, unneeded. This wasn't surveillance. This was justice. Physical. Personal. Embodied.
The power of balance incarnate.
Kaelion: (without turning) This is not your moment. Either of you.
He applied slight pressure with his boot, and the stone beneath Sukojo's face cracked even deeper. Not just the surface, but the world-core itself, as if reality was submitting on Sukojo's behalf.
The sky dimmed.
The stars turned red.
Across eleven realms—known and unknown—oceans stopped. Galaxies slowed. One after another, primordial creatures of extinction bent their heads to the east, sensing the arrival of the Sea's Emperor in judgment. Entire dimensions flickered as if holding their breath, unsure whether existence would be allowed to continue past this moment.
The pressure wasn't magic.
It was law.
Kaelion's presence became weight—not metaphorical, but measurable. Atoms compressed. Gravity folded inward. Winds reversed. Fire forgot how to burn. Even the aura around Astaroth dimmed, faltered, confused—uncertain whether to defend or flee.
Astaroth could do nothing but observe.
He, who stood equal with Sukojo in power.
He, who needed no gods.
Now simply watched, still, silent, calculating.
Because this—this wasn't a fight.
This was Kaelion Draegor, the Emperor of Seas, First of the Six True Emperors, reminding the Verse what a true apex looked like.
Kaelion: (quietly) Your ego has outgrown your control, Devourer. You are not feared because you are powerful.
Kaelion leaned forward slightly.
Kaelion: You are feared because I've allowed it.
Underneath his foot, Sukojo's right arm twitched—but not from defiance. From instinct. From shock. His body couldn't even register how he was being held down. His magic, sealed. His aura, flattened. His will, silenced.
He could kill gods.
But this?
This was something else.
Kaelion: You were forged in chaos. I was forged before it.
He finally raised his foot—and in that instant, Sukojo coughed black blood. Not from injury, but correction. The Universe was rewriting his place beneath Kaelion. His title. His legend. Everything that once roared around him now hung like dust.
Kaelion turned his gaze toward the sky. His tone remained flat, without anger or cruelty.
Kaelion: I give you both one order.
He raised his hand slowly. The clouds split in a perfect ring, opening to a cosmic sea far above—glowing blue, endless, sacred. Waves of stardust poured down in a spiral.
Kaelion: Leave this battlefield.
The moment the words were spoken, entire layers of physics collapsed.
Space curled at the edges like burning paper. Time distorted—thousands of alternate futures blinked into existence, each one showing the outcome if Astaroth or Sukojo refused. In all of them, they died. In some, they were erased. In others, they were rewritten into lesser beings. Not metaphor. Not illusion. The World Engine—the ancient metaphysical latticework that held the Verse together—began preparing for their deletion.
The stars dimmed again, but this time they weren't afraid.
They were bowing.
Astaroth staggered one step backward—not out of fear, but because the ground rejected him. His infernal aura flared instinctively, pushing against the pressure, but the moment it touched Kaelion's ambient field, it was cleansed. Not dispelled. Purified. His hellfire inverted into white silence. His Infernal Eyes technique blinked once... then dimmed.
Astaroth: (thinking) My technique... my dominion... it no longer applies here.
He looked down at his own hands. They were shaking.
Sukojo rose to one knee, but his shadows didn't follow. His Dominion didn't snap back. His war aura, his madness, his killing instinct—all of it was tangled in Kaelion's presence like a moth caught in an ocean's current. The Devourer of All, the Eternal Disaster... kneeling. Recalibrating his own existence.
And above them, Kaelion extended a single finger.
From that fingertip, a ripple expanded—not outward, but downward, deep into the folds of the Multiverse.
Ten thousand ancient monsters, sealed beneath the layers of time and causality, opened their eyes for the first time in eons... and closed them again, recognizing the signature. The tide that drowned them once. They would not rise now.
Across the Death Empire, Zyke paused mid-training. His blade stopped mid-swing.
Zyke: The First True Emperor...
In the Tower of Memory, Sojo lifted his head from meditation, eyes narrowing.
Sojo: Is he furious?
Scene switches back to Kaelion.
Kaelion: (calmly) You have no jurisdiction here.
He stepped forward.
One step and the concept of battlefield erased itself.
It stopped existing.
Astaroth's wings folded down, smothered.
Sukojo's madness flickered like a candle in rain.
For the first time in recorded history, they were equal in fear.
Not to each other.
To him.
Astaroth clenched his teeth.
Sukojo stood still.
Kaelion: (quietly, without hate) Now go.
Kaelion: Or drown.
The silence that followed was not peace. It was verdict.
No resistance came. Not from Astaroth. Not from Sukojo. Even the wind dared not whisper across the ruptured field, lest it be mistaken for defiance.
Kaelion's gaze remained fixed forward. His eyes—those twin oceans—no longer needed to glint with fury or warning. The judgment had been passed. There would be no appeal. The only mercy left was that his sword remained sheathed, still somewhere beyond perception, resting in the depths of the cosmic sea.
Then, with two fingers raised, his thumb shifted
He clicked.
No thunder followed.
No sound at all. Not even the breath of wind dared accompany the act. The world had no words for what occurred.
The Verse inverted.
Not metaphorically.
Literally.
The fractured realm folded in on itself, and then unraveled backwards through time—but not in any way a mind could process. It wasn't a rewind. It was a restitution. A rewriting of causality so complete that destruction no longer counted as history.
A ripple, crystalline and curved, expanded outward in all directions—beneath the soil, above the stars, between layers of magic and meaning. It passed through planets, nebulae, and forgotten time-locked dimensions. In its wake, ruin erased itself.
A mountain range split in five separate layers across three realities folded back into singular stone, seamless. The dead oceans, vaporized by Sukojo's previous domain scream, returned in fluid arcs, pouring gently back into the seabeds like rain remembering where it belonged. Coral reefs sparked with life again, billions of microscopic organisms flickering back into existence, unaware they had ever been annihilated.
Entire continents that had tilted out of sync with their gravitational core snapped back into axis with a whisper—no quake, no tremor. The tectonic soul of the world obeyed Kaelion's correction.
In the upper stratosphere, stars that had begun collapsing from Astaroth's hellfire stilled, reversed, and resumed their quiet burning. The systems they governed—tides, orbitals, magic seasons—shuddered once, recalibrated, and then settled.
And farther still, in the seams between planes, timelines that had been sheared apart folded closed. Entire moments of obliteration—children consumed in a flash, cities turned to shadow, lovers atomized mid-embrace—those tragedies unraveled. The pain was unremembered. The loss was reversed before it could stain the collective memory of the world.
It took less than one-tenth of a quarter of a nanosecond for everything to return the way it was.
The air settled.
And from the silence, Sukojo turned.
His gaze landed on Dark.
He didn't say anything at first. Just stared. One hand resting lazily on his hip, the other hanging, fingers twitching slightly. A gust of wind curled behind his back, dragging long strands of his ragged cloak across the stone. The shadows near him refused to move.
He took a step forward. Then another.
The cracked ground beneath him didn't crunch or shift, it yielded.
Sukojo stopped a few feet away from Dark's unconscious body. His eyes lowered. He tilted his head, and an expression slid over his face that didn't quite match anything known.
Not pity. Not annoyance. Something like—
Disappointment.
Sukojo: Tsk. Tsk.
He clicked his tongue and gave a faint shake of his head. Then slowly, as if addressing a child who broke his favorite toy, he muttered—
Sukojo: And here I was hoping you'd rise again with a second head, maybe horns. Perhaps a crown of shadows in each hand. But no. Just bleeding in the dirt again, like a mutt that bit more than it could chew.
He crouched.
The movement was fluid. Too fluid. The moment his knees bent, the world around him dimmed slightly. His long coat dragged against the dust, silent. He leaned in closer to Dark. Just enough that his voice could be heard if Dark was even half-conscious.
And then, one hand rose.
Pale. Long-fingered. His nails were sharp. Not grotesquely long, but enough to make the air hum when he moved. Similar in shape to a demon's, jagged at the edges yet smooth near the base. Something between surgical precision and feral design. They gleamed faintly, catching light from a source no one could trace.
Magic began to gather.
But not Ryo. Not Demonic. Not Divine.
This was something else.
A stream of violet smoke, threaded with pitch black veins and faint threads of gold, coiled from his palm. It shimmered like oil, but breathed like a living beast. The energy didn't burn or roar. It whispered. It wove.
It was ancient. Forbidden. A relic of a time where language hadn't yet been shaped and gods still feared the concept of being forgotten.
Sukojo: This is Reikan. An art lost in the bowels of our buried verses.
Sukojo: Kheheh, so amusing.
The magic flowed from his hand and curled over Dark's chest. It didn't enter him all at once. It danced. It measured. Then, like ink spilling through cracks in shattered glass, it slipped into his wounds.
Dark's body flinched.
Sukojo: Do not fear it.
His veins lit up faintly. Each one glowed in sequence. His reflex systems—nervous, spiritual, and arcane—tightened, then relaxed. His lungs expanded. His heart, damaged and dulled, thumped hard, once, then again.
Reikan didn't just heal.
It recalibrated.
Behind Sukojo, the wind shifted again.
Astaroth, now distant, but ever watchful, turned his gaze toward Dark. One side of his mouth tugged upward.
Blood still clung to his lip, dried like scripture.
Astaroth: He hath endured. Broken, yes, yet breathing still. A vessel of resilience and madness intertwined.
His voice carried easily, deep and cruel, but tinged with respect. He stared a moment longer, then added—
Astaroth: When thou awaken, Dark. Venture forth to my palace beneath the seventh sea of Hell, past the Maw of Screaming Thrones. I extend an invitation. Let us speak as kindred who share contempt for weakness. I offer no chains. Only choice.
Sukojo didn't look back at first. He kept one hand hovering over Dark's chest, watching the Reikan flow. But when Astaroth's words settled, he chuckled. A strange sound—low, raspy, almost fond.
Sukojo: Now that, I did not expect. The first time I've seen you treat a half-spawn like something more than dust beneath your clawed foot.
He looked up. Smiling.
Sukojo: Should I be worried? Are you... softening?
Astaroth: Hold thy tongue. Or lose it.
Sukojo: There he is.
He turned back to Dark, eyes narrowing slightly as the final traces of Reikan finished sinking in. Already, Dark's breathing had steadied. Color had returned to his face. His muscles no longer spasmed beneath the skin. And though unconscious, there was a tension in his body now. Like a blade being pulled slowly from a sheath.
Sukojo whispered—not to Dark, but to the soul inside him.
Sukojo: Reikan will do more than mend your shell. It will sharpen your awareness. Your speed. Your reaction to fate itself. When the next divine strike falls, you won't block it.
You'll move before it ever thinks to swing.
He stood.
Dusting his hands lightly. The Reikan trails faded, sucked into Dark's form like mist returning to the forest floor.
Then silence again.
Only the soft, slow rhythm of wind passing through clean air.
And the steady, growing thrum beneath Dark's ribs.
Astaroth turned his back, cloak dragging behind like a curtain of midnight.
Sukojo watched him leave.
The battlefield, once ruined, now stood still.
And somewhere deep inside that silence, beneath the dirt and power and pride—
Dark's fingers twitched.
Just.
Slightly.
To Be Continued...
End Of Arc 6 Chapter 17.