With Sunfire Gorge firmly in his pocket, the Dragon Empire’s final breath was extinguished.

There was no grand, drawn-out siege. There was only an inevitable, overwhelming avalanche.

The assimilation of the Emperor’s final fifty thousand elite loyalist troops and the three towering First Era War Titans had completely broken the back of the Empire’s remaining military structure. What followed was a swift, continent-wide execution.

Theron and Elizabeth Voss led the charge, unleashing sixteen years of pent-up grief, betrayal, and righteous fury. They tore through the provinces, dismantling all remaining

Imperial resistance and Void Cultists in their path. Theron’s Midnight Domain swallowed corrupted fortresses whole, plunging them into an absolute darkness where the crushing gravity of his revenge left no survivors . Elizabeth, the Empress of Deceit, bent the cultists’ own spatial arrays against them, turning their escape routes into dead ends .

Elder Magnus, the Prince of Black Flame, descended upon the remaining Imperial loyalists. For sixteen years, he and the Shadow Ghosts had hidden in the dead zones of the Eastern Wastelands, surviving on sheer spite . Now, his obsidian arm pulsed as his Mana-Breaking dark flames burned the Abyss worshippers to ash, avenging the blood the Empire had spilled .

There was no escape. The Dwarven Ironclads, commanded by King Durin, and the Elven Rangers, guided by Queen Aelinor’s World Tree roots, locked down the borders with absolute precision, forming a suffocating perimeter , .

In a single day, the sprawling Dragon Empire changed hands entirely. The realm that had hunted them, bled them, and branded them traitors to humanity now belonged to the Voss family. The once vassal house of dark mages had conquered the board. They were now the royal family.

The board had been wiped clean, and Damien wasted no time claiming his prize.

His first act was not to sit on a throne, but to hold a ceremony. Standing on a hastily constructed obsidian platform overlooking the hundreds of miles of smooth, silent crater where the Imperial Capital used to be, he prepared to address the world.

Through the Black Thread’s continent-wide network of Magitech broadcast crystals—the very network Barnaby and Cipher had spent years meticulously installing in every city—the static cleared on millions of screens across Elias .

From the muddy streets of the Outer District slums where beggars huddled around stolen crystals, to the polished marble halls of the surviving noble houses, every eye on the continent turned to the broadcast.

The screen flickered to life.

It showed the towering figure of Zero. He wore his tattered black combat coat and the pristine white porcelain mask with the jagged ’’ hiding his face . The Pantheon Sword, the crystal blade that had devoured a Demigod’s attack, rested casually over his shoulder .

"Citizens of Elias," Zero’s distorted, metallic voice boomed through the screens, echoing with a heavy, sorrowful authority. "For over a decade, you were told that the Dragon Empire was your shield. You were told that your Emperor protected you from the dark."

Zero raised his hand, and the projection shifted. Raw, unedited footage from a Memory Crystal played for the world to see.

It showed the slaughtered bodies of the Emperor and the royal princes, drained of blood on the floor of the Golden Palace . It showed the grotesque High Envoy of the Abyss sitting on the throne, surrounded by Void Cultists. And then, the footage showed the bleeding sky tearing open, and the Demon General erasing the entire capital—and millions of innocent lives—in a single, colorless wave of absolute annihilation .

A collective gasp of sheer, paralyzing horror rippled across the continent. People wept in the streets, finally understanding the sudden, deafening silence from their capital.

"Your Empire was overrun with monsters," Zero declared, his voice cutting through their despair like a blade. "Your Emperor was a puppet, and your capital was nothing but a sacrificial altar meant to summon a Demon God."

Zero stepped aside, the wind whipping his dark coat as he gestured to the figures standing in the shadows behind him.

"But the era of their deception is over. The true protectors of this continent have returned."

Theron Voss stepped into the light. His heavy broadsword rested on his shoulder, his grey eyes burning with the quiet, overwhelming power of a man who had crawled out of hell to reclaim his home.

Next to him stepped Elizabeth Voss, her silver hair catching the wind, her posture unbroken despite the sixteen years of tragedy she had endured. And finally, Elder Magnus walked forward, standing proudly as the vanguard of a lineage that refused to die.

"The Voss Family has returned to cleanse this continent!" Zero’s voice resonated with absolute dominion, shaking the very bedrock of the crater.

The reactions across the world were instantaneous and explosive.

In the slums of the Dragon Empire, where the people had long revered Zero as their savior, deafening cheers erupted. Beggars, laborers, and freed slaves fell to their knees in the mud. They remembered the Voss family’s attempts to pass the Commoner Relief Act to feed them before they were framed . They remembered the bread with the golden coin stamp. They wept, chanting a chaotic symphony of "Zero!" and "Voss!" into the sky.

In the Kingdom of Light, the Pope dropped his golden chalice. He stared at the screen in absolute, trembling terror. Behind him, the massive marble statue of the Goddess of Light—the symbol of their faith for a thousand years—fractured, a deep crack running from her heart to her eyes .

Seeing the return of the Demigod-level dark mages, the Pope realized the balance of the heavens had irreparably shifted. The era of the Church’s uncontested influence was over.

Deep in the Western Dragon Lands, the Ancient Red Dragon Ignis watched the screen on a stolen magical tablet . The massive beast threw his head back and burst into a booming, fiery roar of laughter that shook his hoard of gold. "The crazy bastards actually did it! He took the whole board!"

Back on the obsidian platform, Zero looked directly into the recording crystal.

For a moment, the heavy, suffocating pressure of his aura vanished. He didn’t look like a warlord, a terrorist, or a monster. He just looked tired, yet profoundly relieved.

"For sixteen years, the world called the Voss family traitors," Zero said.

His voice suddenly dropped its metallic, magical distortion. It became smooth, young, and undeniably human.

Behind the mask, Damien’s mind flashed back to a cold, grey apartment on the Blue Star. He remembered being Lin Ye, a lonely boy eating instant noodles in the dark, wishing he just had someone to sit across from him at the dinner table.

He remembered reading the original novel, watching the original Damien Voss die alone, spitting curses at a world that hated him while his parents’ heads rolled in the capital square .

He had fought for sixteen years to rewrite that ending. He had bled in the Abyss, manipulated economies, hoarded Destiny Points, and walked through hell itself just to make sure those chairs at his table wouldn’t be empty.

The emotion swelled in his chest, thick and overwhelming. It was the fierce, protective love of a son who had finally brought his family home.

"They hunted us. They burned our name. They thought the shadows had been extinguished. They thought we would die quietly in the dark."

Zero reached up. His gloved fingers grabbed the edges of the white porcelain mask.

"But I did not come here today just to save this world," he whispered, a predatory, possessive ambition evident in his cracking tone. "I came to take back what belongs to me."

With a sharp pull, he took off the mask.

The world held its breath. 𝕗𝕣𝐞𝐞𝘄𝐞𝚋𝚗𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗹.𝚌𝕠𝚖

Silver-white hair fluttered in the wind. A flawless, aristocratic face was revealed to the millions watching. But it was his eyes that stole the breath from their lungs—a pair of terrifying, heterochromatic eyes. The left was an abyssal void of pitch black, and the right was a blazing sun of dragon gold, both split by a horizontal, cross-shaped pupil .

The nobles watching from their hidden estates collapsed in shock. The Imperial commanders stranded across the borders went pale as sheets.

Damien Voss.

"I am Damien Voss," he announced, his twilight-purple eyes staring down the entire continent, daring anyone to challenge him. "Son of Theron and Elizabeth Voss. Heir to the Voss family."

He rested his hand on the hilt of his sword. He didn’t look at the camera anymore; he turned his head, looking at his parents standing beside him.

The mask that had hidden his pain, his lonely nights, and his desperate schemes for over a decade was finally gone.

He offered the world a smile—not the twisted grin of a villain, but the soft, triumphant smile of a boy who had finally beaten fate.

"The Dragon Empire is dead," Damien declared, his voice echoing with absolute, unbreakable resolve across the silent crater.

"From this day forward, the Voss family rules this empire. And everything I did today... was for the revival of my family."