---
The coppery scent of blood and the frigid aura of melted ice hung heavy in the royal church. Sarah leaned heavily against a shattered pew, her body screaming in protest from the aftermath of Auto-Battle mode. Kenta stood nearby, sheathing Yami no Hikari with a final, soft click, the malevolent crimson fading from his eyes to be replaced by profound exhaustion. They had survived. Mirage and Phantom were dead.
Princess Alessia, her regal composure cracked but not broken, looked from the two battered warriors to the carnage that had been her clergy. "You have my eternal thanks," she said, her voice hushed but sincere in the hallowed, desecrated space. "You saved me from a blade in the dark. But this... this feels like a prelude. Eclipse and the others are still out there. A man who sacrifices his own for power does not simply vanish."
As if the universe itself were confirming her fears, the very stones beneath their feet trembled. It was not a violent shake, but a deep, resonant hum that traveled up from the bowels of the earth, a feeling of wrongness that set their teeth on edge. The few remaining candles guttered.
Then, the screams began. Not from within the castle, but carried on the wind from the city beyond the walls. Distant, collective, and filled with a primal terror.
The throne room doors burst open. A guardsman, his armor smeared with soot and something darker, stumbled in. He fell to his knees before the princess, his face a mask of pure, unvarnished horror.
"Your Highness! Reports... from all fronts!" he gasped, his chest heaving. "The dead... the dead are walking! They're rising from cemeteries, from battlefields... from everywhere!"
A cold silence, colder than Mirage's ice, gripped the room.
"How many?" Alessia asked, her voice a whisper that seemed dangerously close to breaking.
The guard trembled, unable to meet her gaze. "The scouts... the last message... they said the western horizon is black with them. They estimate... they estimate one billion."
The number landed in the room with the weight of a tombstone. One billion. It was not an army; it was a geological event. A tsunami of rot and bone that would scrape the kingdom from the map. Panic, sharp and acrid, began to bloom in the eyes of the courtiers.
Sarah and Kenta shared a look that bypassed words. The fight in the church, the tournament—it had all been a feint. This was Eclipse's true masterpiece: not a surgical assassination, but an extinction-level event.
"How long?" Kenta's voice was like a whetstone on steel, grinding down the rising fear in the room.
"Hours. Perhaps less. They move with a single purpose... towards the capital. They will be at our gates by nightfall."
The math was simple, horrifying, and absolute. One castle. A few hours. One billion enemies.
The war for the kingdom was over. The war for survival had just begun.
---
Deep within a forgotten, geode-encrusted cave, the air was thick with the iron scent of blood and the ozone crackle of cataclysmic magic.
Eclipse stood before a massive, rune-covered altar, the five ancient artifacts—a twisted horn, a black prism, a petrified heart, a serrated dagger, and a void-dark orb—pulsing with a synchronized, sickly light. His four remaining cult members—Zephyr, Nocturne, Shade, and a hulking brute named Basalt—knelt in a circle around him, their faces a mixture of fanatical devotion and unease.
"Brothers and sisters," Eclipse's voice echoed, devoid of all warmth, a stark contrast to the false charm he'd wielded in the castle. "The time for subtlety is past. The princess lives, and new players have entered the field. Now is the time to transcend our mortal forms and become the foundation of a new world, purified by darkness."
Before a single question could form, Eclipse moved. The serrated dagger was in his hand. In one fluid, merciless motion, he plunged it into Basalt's back, directly into his heart. The large man gasped, his eyes wide with utter betrayal, his body convulsing as a torrent of his life force was siphoned directly into the artifacts.
Eclipse did not stop. He was a grim reaper in a circle of his own disciples. Zephyr tried to rise, to flee, but an unseen force—the same binding magic he had used to control the blessing—held them all in thrall. One by one, he moved through them, a farmer harvesting a crop he had sown solely for this purpose. They were the pillars of his dark church, and he was tearing it down to build his cathedral. The cavern floor grew slick with their blood, the only sounds the wet, final thuds of their bodies collapsing.
Soon, Eclipse stood alone amidst the carnage, the sole survivor and beneficiary of his followers' blind faith. He raised the five artifacts high. Their pulsating light intensified, feeding on the spilled life force, glowing with the power of five sacrificed souls.
"By the blood of the faithful and the power of the ancients," he chanted, his voice a thunderous command that shook the very foundations of the cave, sending cracks racing up the walls. "I call upon the void! I wish for an army! One billion strong, risen from the dust of this world, bound to my will alone! Let the dead march for me!"
The artifacts erupted. A light so profound it was darkness itself exploded outwards, swallowing the cavern in an absolute silence that was louder than any sound. It was the silence of the grave, of the vacuum between stars. A seismic groan echoed from the depths of the earth, as if the planet's soul were being violated. And then, from every direction, carried on a suddenly frigid wind, came a chorus of unearthly, ragged moans—the sound of a billion graves opening at once.
---
Back in the capital, the war room was a storm of grim, desperate activity. Maps were unfurled, troop deployments shouted, but a pall of hopelessness hung over everything. The number one billion was a parasite, eating away at all strategy.
Princess Alessia's voice, however, cut through the noise, clear and resolute. She looked at Sarah and Kenta, the only two people in the room who had looked upon the face of this enemy and lived. "Kenta, Sarah. You will lead our defense. Our survival rests on your strength and your strategy. Every soldier, every resource, is yours to command."
"We will not fail," Kenta pledged, his voice like folded steel, a bastion against the despair.
Sarah's mind was already a whirlwind, her System's HUD overlaying the physical maps with tactical data, calculating kill zones, choke points, and fallback positions with cold, inhuman efficiency. "We'll turn this castle into a fortress they can't breach," she said, her voice tight with focus. "But we can't win a war of attrition. We have to find Eclipse."
The kingdom mobilized with the frantic energy of a doomed creature. Two million soldiers—every guardsman, conscript, and retired veteran—lined the battlements. Alongside them stood 160 adventurers, their faces grim but determined, a thin line of living, breathing hope against the approaching tide of silent, shambling death.
From the highest tower, Sarah and Kenta watched the horizon darken. It was not like a storm cloud; it was like watching the world end. A slow, inexorable wave of grey and brown, a billion moving parts, advancing with a mindless, terrifying unity. And above them, a speck against the bruised twilight sky, flew Eclipse on wings of solidified shadow, a dark god surveying his unstoppable domain.
With a sweeping gesture, Eclipse cast a strengthening spell downwards. A wave of violet energy washed over the front lines of the undead horde. Their shambling gait sharpened into a sprint, their empty eye sockets glowing with a malevolent light. The surge forward was a physical force.
The two forces collided. The sound was a hellish symphony—the dry crack of shattering bone, the scream of metal on ancient shields, the wet, sickening thuds of decayed flesh meeting steel, and the desperate battle cries of the living. Kenta was a whirlwind, Hikari no Ha a blur of silver light, shearing through ranks of skeletons. Sarah fought with fierce, System-guided precision, her movements a dance of death, her spells carving temporary firebreaks in the endless horde.
But it was futile. For every enemy they destroyed, ten more clambered over the ashes of their fellows. The wall of bodies began to rise, a gruesome ramp forming as the undead used their own fallen as stepping stones. The line was buckling.
"It's no use!" Sarah shouted, her voice raw, cleaving a ghoul in two only to be immediately confronted by three more. "We can't kill them all! There are too many!"
Before Kenta could answer, before the line could fully break, the very air changed.
It grew heavy, thick with a primal, terrifying pressure that had nothing to do with numbers. It was the weight of absolute, apex authority. The battle itself seemed to falter. The relentless moaning of the undead stuttered into silence. The desperate shouts of the soldiers died in their throats. Every living creature, from the lowliest soldier to Sarah and Kenta, felt an instinctual, soul-deep fear—the fear of a mouse that has just realized a hawk is circling overhead.
High above, a new figure had appeared. He was a simple silhouette against the setting sun, but his aura was a physical force, a suffocating mantle of power that made the very light seem to bend away from him.
A guard on the battlement pointed a trembling finger skyward, his voice a strangled whisper. "Y-Your Highness...! It's... the Demon of Battle... Kanji Naein!"
Princess Alessia's blood ran cold, colder than any ice spell. A Beyonder. A legend. A walking cataclysm. Why is he here? her mind screamed. Is this another enemy?
On the battlefield, Sarah recognized him instantly—the man from the dungeon, the one whose mere presence had been a lesson in absolute power. Kenta and the soldiers could only stare, their fight forgotten, their minds unable to process the magnitude of the presence now overshadowing the battlefield.
Kanji's gaze, devoid of any emotion, swept over the billion-strong horde with utter disinterest before locking onto Eclipse. His voice, when he spoke, was quiet, yet it echoed in the mind of every single being present, drowning out all other sound.
"You," the single word was a judgment. "You dare to play at rulership?"
Eclipse, his god-like confidence shattered by the sheer, overwhelming presence of a true Beyonder, stammered, "I-I have the power! An army of a billion! You cannot stop me!"
"A ruler requires more than a horde of mindless puppets," Kanji stated, his tone flat, dismissive, as if lecturing a particularly slow child. "You lack the vision. The strength of will. You are not even Emperor-tier. You are a child who has found a loaded crossbow, waving it at the adults."
With a flick of his wrist, so casual it was insulting, Kanji summoned thirty concentric dark magic circles in the sky. They were vast, intricate, and hummed with the power of dying stars. They did not unleash fire or lightning. They rained down a storm of pure, absolute negation. Black arrows of void energy fell, and where they struck, the undead did not shatter or burn—they simply unmade. They dissolved into motes of black ash and fading shadows, their existence erased from reality.
The billion-strong army, the apocalyptic threat that had sealed a kingdom's doom, was wiped away in the space of ten heartbeats. The field before the castle was suddenly, eerily empty, save for a fine black dust settling on the ground.
"You thought numbers were a threat?" Kanji mused, his sarcasm as sharp and final as his magic. He then turned his dispassionate gaze fully to Eclipse, who was now frantically trying to flee. Kanji didn't chase. He simply pointed.
An orb of searing black flames, hotter than any sun, materialized around Eclipse. His screams were not of pain, but of existential terror, and they were cut off abruptly as the orb constricted into a single, blinding point of light and then winked out of existence. There was no ash, no smoke. Eclipse was gone, as if he had never been.
The silence that followed was absolute, profound, and more terrifying than the battle had been.
Then, in the space between one blink and the next, Kanji was simply there, standing on the battlement before Princess Alessia. The guards were too stunned to even flinch.
He looked at her, his crimson eyes holding a spark of analytical interest that hadn't been there for Eclipse or his army.
"We should talk," Kanji said, his voice low and serious, carrying an weight of impending revelation. "There are things you need to know about the kingdom you rule. The true threats are not the ones that march on the horizon."
The apocalyptic battle was over, ended by a whim. A far more dangerous and complex conversation had just begun.
___