Time soon passed, and with the help of two demigods Theron and Elizabeth, the third General was easily banished back into the void

Howeve even at that, neither of them rested as and Damien and his family soon left the empty capital and went to Sunfire Groge

A place intercepting the capital from the rest of the empire

Sunfire Gorge was considered the impenetrable throat of the Dragon Kingdom. It was a narrow, jagged scar carved through the continental mountain range, flanked by sheer cliffs that reached into the clouds.

Fifty thousand elite Imperial loyalists were entrenched within the pass. They had spent the last three weeks fortifying the gorge, digging trenches, erecting anti-air wards, and setting up overlapping fields of heavy mana-artillery.

Towering over the encampment stood three First Era War Titans—massive, fifty-foot mechanical behemoths made of enchanted mithril and black iron, their chest-mounted plasma cannons humming with lethal, humming energy.

General Richter, a Peak 6th-Order Knight clad in heavy golden armor, stood on the command parapet. He gripped the hilt of his broadsword, staring down the empty southern road. They were waiting for the Alliance Vanguard. They were prepared to drown the rebel army in blood to protect the Imperial Capital lying hundreds of miles behind them.

The air above the road suddenly warped.

There was no marching army. There were no war horns or banners. Space simply tore open like a fragile piece of parchment, revealing a swirling, pitch-black void.

Three figures stepped out onto the dirt road.

Theron Voss, the King of Darkness, his heavy broadsword resting casually on his shoulder. Elizabeth Voss, the Empress of Deceit, her silver hair catching the afternoon wind. And walking slightly ahead of them, a young man in a tattered black combat coat, a silver mask covering his face, and the dormant Pantheon Sword strapped to his back.

General Richter sneered, his golden aura flaring to life.

"Three people!" Richter’s voice boomed through the gorge, amplified by the communication crystals stationed along the walls.

"The great Alliance Vanguard sends three people to break the Sunfire Blockade? Arrogance! Theron Voss, you are a traitor to the crown! Surrender now in the name of the Emperor, and I will grant you a swift execution!"

Theron didn’t draw his sword. He didn’t even look at the General. He simply folded his arms across his chest and looked at Damien.

Damien stepped forward. He walked slowly up the dirt road, closing the distance to the heavily fortified gates.

"Fire a warning shot!" Richter commanded, irritated by the boy’s absolute lack of fear. "Turn the ground at his feet to slag!"

One of the First Era War Titans shifted its massive arm. The mana-cannon whined, gathering a terrifying sphere of condensed blue heat.

Damien didn’t stop walking. He didn’t raise a magical barrier. He placed his hands in his pockets.

The Titan fired. The beam of plasma tore through the air, carrying enough kinetic force to vaporize a small hill.

Elizabeth Voss sighed. She raised a single, elegant finger.

[Domain of Deceit: Spatial Inversion].

The space ten feet in front of Damien rippled. The plasma beam hit the ripple and seamlessly curved upward, bending ninety degrees into the sky. It detonated high in the clouds, painting the afternoon sky with a harmless, violent blue explosion.

The fifty thousand soldiers in the gorge gripped their weapons tighter. Sweating artillery mages scrambled to recalibrate their cannons.

"I wouldn’t waste the ammunition," Damien’s voice echoed across the gorge. He didn’t use a spell to amplify his words; he used his [Siren’s Chord] intertwined with a sliver of his Will, ensuring every single soldier felt the vibration of his voice in their teeth.

Damien stopped fifty yards from the barricades. He looked up at General Richter.

"You demand our surrender in the name of the Emperor," Damien said flatly. "You are guarding the road to the capital. You are prepared to die for the Dragon Kingdom."

Damien reached into his tattered coat and pulled out a small, standard Memory Crystal.

"But you are guarding a ghost."

Damien tossed the crystal high into the air. He channeled a pulse of twilight-purple Eclipse mana into the gem, using the same [Shadow Manipulation] technique he had utilized during the Centennial Exchange in the Abyss to create a massive, three-dimensional projection.

ZOOM.

The sky above Sunfire Gorge darkened. A colossal holographic screen materialized, stretching hundreds of feet across the canyon walls, visible to every single soldier stationed in the pass.

The projection began to play.

It was raw, unedited footage from Damien’s own perspective. The soldiers saw the grand throne room of the Golden Palace. They saw the slaughtered bodies of the Emperor and the royal princes, drained of blood, their corpses discarded on the marble floor like trash. They saw the grotesque, shifting mass of the High Envoy of the Abyss sitting on the Emperor’s throne, surrounded by hundreds of Void Demons.

A collective gasp of horror rippled through the fifty thousand troops. Ranks broke as soldiers stumbled backward, dropping their shields.

"Lies!" General Richter screamed, his face paling as he pointed his broadsword at the sky. "It is an illusion! The Empress of Deceit is tricking your minds! Do not look at it!"

The projection shifted.

It showed the sky above the capital tearing open. It showed the descent of the 3rd Demon General, a towering Demi-god of the Void wielding a star-forged halberd. And then, it showed the absolute, colorless wave of conceptual erasure dropping onto the city.

The soldiers watched their home, the pinnacle of human civilization, silently dissolve into a perfectly smooth, empty crater. They watched millions of lives, their families, their merchants, their history, turn to fine grey ash in a fraction of a second.

The projection flickered and died, leaving the memory crystal to fall back into Damien’s waiting hand.

The silence in Sunfire Gorge was absolute. It was the heavy, suffocating silence of fifty thousand men simultaneously losing their reason to exist.

"It’s gone," a young spearman in the front ranks whispered, dropping his weapon into the mud. He fell to his knees, weeping openly. "The capital... my wife was in the capital."

"No," General Richter breathed, his hands shaking so violently his armor rattled. "No, this is a Voss trick. The Emperor is safe. The Kingdom stands! Gunners! Obliterate them! War Titans, eradicate the traitors!"

The artillery mages hesitated. The men inside the Titans stared at their monitors in shock.

"I SAID FIRE!" Richter roared, his 6th-Order aura exploding in a desperate, fanatical frenzy. He leaped from the parapet, bringing his glowing broadsword down in a massive, suicidal arc aimed directly at Damien’s head.

Damien’s twilight-purple eyes narrowed behind his mask.

The sorrow of the soldiers was a tragedy. But the blind, fanatical denial of the General was an annoyance. And the Greedy King hated being annoyed.

Damien stepped forward. He bypassed his sword entirely, tapping deep into the perfectly unified singularity in his chest.

"You want to die for a dead kingdom?" Damien asked, his voice dropping into a register that made the very bedrock of the mountain range groan.

"Domain Expansion: The Greedy King’s Court."

VWOOOOM.

A blinding, majestic wave of twilight-purple light erupted from Damien’s body. It expanded outward with the force of a tsunami, swallowing the entire expanse of Sunfire Gorge in an instant.

The physical laws of the world were violently overwritten by Damien’s absolute authority.

General Richter, frozen in mid-air, was slammed into the dirt. The 6th-Order kinetic force he had gathered was completely absorbed and nullified by the sheer, crushing density of Damien’s 8th-Order presence. The General’s golden armor crumpled inward, and the stone beneath him spider-webbed as the localized gravity multiplied by a thousand.

But it didn’t stop with the General.

The twilight-purple light washed over the trenches, the barricades, and the fifty thousand soldiers. It was an overwhelming, tyrannical demand for ownership.

CLATTER. CLANG. THUD.

Every single soldier in the gorge collapsed to their knees. Their weapons fell from their numb fingers. The air was so thick with the King’s Pressure that their lungs fought just to expand. They were pinned to the earth, entirely stripped of their will to fight.

Even the machines bowed. The three towering First Era War Titans groaned loudly as their massive ley-line reactors sputtered and powered down, their internal mana completely choked out by the superior Law dominating the atmosphere.

Damien walked slowly through the kneeling army. His black combat coat billowed behind him, untouched by the dust.

He stopped in front of the struggling General Richter. The man was coughing blood, his face pressed into the dirt, but his eyes still burned with stubborn denial.

"The Dragon Kingdom is bankrupt," Damien stated, his voice echoing cleanly across the subjugated gorge.

"The Emperor was a puppet controlled by the Void. The capital was nothing but a sacrificial altar designed to summon a Demon God. The crown you serve is ashes, and the people you swore to protect were erased."

Damien crouched down, placing his gloved hand on the General’s crushed shoulder plate.

"You have no home to return to. You have no Emperor to receive your reports. The board has been wiped entirely clean."

Damien stood up, turning his back on the General. He looked out over the sea of fifty thousand broken, kneeling men.

"The Void Cult burned your city. They vaporized your families. And they used you as a blind, ignorant distraction at this border while they committed genocide."

Damien drew the Pantheon Sword. The white crystal blade ignited, humming with a starved, predatory vibration that cast long shadows across the canyon. 𝓯𝓻𝒆𝙚𝒘𝓮𝙗𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝒍.𝙘𝓸𝙢

"You can stay here and die in the mud for a ghost," Damien’s voice rose, vibrating with the pure, unadulterated ambition of his Intent.

"Or you can stand up. You can follow the Black Thread. And you can march with me to build a new world on the crater of the old one, and make the Void Demon God bleed for what he stole from us!"

The silence hung heavy for a long, agonizing moment. The crushing pressure of the Domain remained, testing their resolve.

General Richter slowly pushed himself up. His golden armor was ruined, his broadsword lying useless in the dirt. He looked at the white light of the Pantheon Sword. He thought of the empty crater where his sovereign had once sat.

The General fell forward, pressing his forehead against the mud in a deep, absolute bow.

"My sword..." Richter choked out, his voice breaking with grief and newfound rage. "...my sword belongs to the Black Thread."

Behind him, the ripple started. A captain knelt fully. Then a lieutenant. Then a thousand spearmen.

Within seconds, fifty thousand Imperial soldiers bowed their heads to the lone figure in the black coat. The loyalty they had harbored for a dead empire transferred seamlessly to the monster who offered them revenge.

Damien retracted his Domain. The suffocating twilight-purple light vanished, allowing the army to breathe freely once more.

He didn’t celebrate. He walked past the kneeling ranks, heading straight for the colossal feet of the nearest First Era War Titan.

Damien placed his bare hand against the cold, dormant mithril plating of the machine’s chassis. He pulsed his Eclipse Core, sending a surge of his own unified mana into the Titan’s stalled reactor.

VMMMM.

The massive war machine hummed back to life. The glowing runes along its legs turned from imperial blue to a deep, ominous violet. The Titan straightened its posture, its optical sensors igniting with Damien’s own cross-shaped signature.

Theron and Elizabeth walked up the dirt path, joining their son amidst the assimilated army.

"Fifty thousand troops and three Titans," Theron rumbled, resting his broadsword on his shoulder. He looked at the vast sea of new recruits. "You just stole the Emperor’s entire remaining military asset in less than five minutes."

"I didn’t steal it, Dad," Damien replied, his eyes locked on the distant, bleeding scar in the sky where the Void Rift still lingered.

"I salvaged it."

Damien tapped his foot against the dirt. The grief of the capital’s destruction was gone. The board was reset, but the pieces were now entirely his to command.

"The intermission is over," Damien whispered, resting the Pantheon Sword on his shoulder. "Let the true war begin."