The fight began at once.
Celestial against Eternal.
By all normal scales, that should have been enough to decide the outco already.
It wasn’t.
Because Lucien did not fight by normal scales anymore.
The Bull Beastman Eternal moved first. The Law of Stampede exploded around him in a brutal surge.
The square cracked beneath his feet, and his body beca a moving catastrophe, each step building force into the next. His law was simple, savage, and effective. Once he started, every mont made him heavier, faster, and harder to stop.
Against most opponents, that kind of law beca terror.
Against Lucien—
it beca sothing to study.
Morphis shifted in his hand before the Eternal even reached him. One mont it was a draconic blade. The next, it had beco a segnted spear, then a hooked halberd, then a chain-edged crescent that folded and reford with every motion of Lucien’s arm.
Combined with his Dragon Beast Mode, the weapon’s unpredictability beca worse than a second fighter.
The Eternal crashed forward with a fist strong enough to crush stone towers.
Lucien did not et it directly.
He twisted.
The Law of Stillness brushed the air at the point of impact, shaving the force off its natural rhythm just enough to ruin the Beastman’s acceleration. Then Lucien answered with Morphis in spear form, driving it toward the Eternal’s ribs with a draconic burst behind it.
The Beastman raised his other arm and blocked.
The square behind him exploded anyway.
He slid back a full step.
Murak’s good eye widened.
Lucien did not stop.
He layered laws as naturally as breathing now.
The Law of Burden dragged at the Eternal’s limbs whenever he tried to build montum. The Law of Nihility laced only the final edges of impact, not enough to waste energy recklessly, but enough that every successful strike left a wrongness behind that the Eternal’s body hated.
The Bull Beastman roared and lunged again.
This ti he slamd both feet into the ground first and forced the Law of Stampede outward through the earth itself. The whole square bucked. Chunks of stone lifted, then shot toward Lucien in a storm of force-laden debris.
Morphis split apart.
Dozens of dark draconic fragnts spiraled out, each carrying a thin edge of "Sharp" clauses. Lucien moved through the flying wreckage as if dancing through a collapsing ruin. Every fragnt he passed was cut apart before it could touch him.
Then he was suddenly in front of the Eternal.
His claws flashed across the Beastman’s chest.
Scales of force burst.
The Eternal staggered back for real this ti.
His eyes changed.
He had realized it now.
Lucien was not rely surviving.
He was driving him backward.
Murak stared.
The last ti he had seen Lucien, the young man had only been in Transcendence. And now—
now he was forcing an Eternal to retreat.
Hope rose in Murak so suddenly that it hurt almost as much as his wounds.
The Bull Beastman snarled and finally stopped trying to overpower Lucien through pure direct assault. He widened his stance and let the full shape of his law appear.
The air around him trembled. Multiple afterimages began overlapping behind his body. He turned himself into a moving sequence of inevitable collisions.
Then he ca again.
Lucien smiled.
"Wrong answer."
He let the Beastman build speed.
Let him lean into the next avalanche.
Then Lucien stepped aside at the exact last mont and struck with the Law of Horizon. Distance stretched by a fraction. The Eternal’s charge overshot. At the sa ti, Lucien drove Morphis into the ground.
The weapon transford instantly into a forest of draconic spikes erupting upward in the Eternal’s path.
The Beastman twisted, broke half of them with sheer force, and still took three through the thigh and side.
He roared.
Lucien answered by grabbing one of the broken spikes, reshaping Morphis in his hand into a hooked chain-blade, and slashing upward under the Beastman’s arm where the Law of Stampede had overcommitted his fra.
Blood sprayed.
The Eternal reeled back.
The Beastman tried a different approach. He gathered all his montum into one leg and kicked downward, intending to shatter the square and bury Lucien in a collapsing crater.
Lucien t that with sothing even crueler.
He released Dragon force into his claws, then drove both hands into the fractured ground.
The Law of Burden surged downward.
The shattered square did not collapse.
It condensed.
The ground beneath the Eternal hardened and deepened all at once, turning his own committed strike into a trap. His planted leg sank. His balance broke. For the first ti since the fight began, his upper body was open.
Morphis beca an axe.
Lucien swung.
The Eternal barely raised his arm in ti.
The draconic blade bit halfway through muscle and bone before the Law of Stampede forced him free again.
He tore backward, breathing hard now.
Lucien did not.
That was the real horror.
His draconic body was larger than the Beastman but his movents were smoother.
And even if the Eternal managed to break the dragon scales coating him, Lucien already knew those blows would still fail to properly reach the cohesion of his Celestial Body underneath.
This was not a gamble anymore.
It was an execution waiting for its proper shape.
And when Lucien felt, through the edge of his awareness, that Marie and the others had already finished cleaning the settlent—
He decided to end it.
Structural Insight activated. The world beca strings.
The Eternal’s body was no longer just flesh, force, and motion. It was a network of layered clauses. Lucien’s gaze sharpened as he looked past all the obvious power and located the truth beneath it.
There.
The pillar clause.
Morphis changed again.
This ti it beca draconic chains.
Lucien laced them with the Law of Petrification, enough to arrest motion at the critical joints. The chains lashed out, wrapped around the Eternal’s limbs and torso, and locked down in a single tightening instant.
The Bull Beastman roared and tried to break free.
Too late.
Lucien’s claws bulged with draconic force.
Then he reached in.
Into structure.
His hand sank through the visible body and seized the pillar clause directly.
The Eternal’s howl turned into sothing uglier.
Pain.
Existence-pain.
Lucien pulled.
Resistance answered imdiately.
Of course it did.
An Eternal did not unravel so easily.
Lucien smiled.
His divine energy surged.
His aura rose like a pressure front rolling over the burning settlent.
He tightened his grip and pulled harder.
The pillar clause yielded.
Only a little at first.
Then more.
Then all at once.
The Eternal... collapsed to his knees.
His law faltered. His aura cracked. The force that had made him terrifying a mont earlier spilled uselessly into the air.
He was not dead yet.
Lucien saw that clearly.
So he clenched his hand around the exposed pillar clause.
Then crushed it.
It exploded in his grip.
The sound did not co from the square.
It ca from the Beastman himself.
The Eternal’s body convulsed once...
Then fell still.
Silence descended.
Another Eternal had died.
And this ti, Lucien had not needed the Covenant of Ending.
He paused over the corpse.
Then, slowly, he exhaled.
He could finally kill an Eternal with his own hands.
That realization struck deeper than he expected.
Behind him, Murak was staring.
There was no pity in his face as he looked at the dead Bull Beastman. Only grief... and regret.
Not regret that his brother had died. But regret that he had not been stopped sooner.
At last Murak spoke.
"Brother Wolf... is that really you?"
Lucien let Dragon Beast Mode fade.
His body returned to human.
He smiled at Murak and stepped closer.
"It is," he said. "Brother Bull, can you tell what happened all these years?"
Murak’s eyes brightened at the confirmation.
Then they dimd again almost imdiately under the weight of mory.
Lucien did not rush him.
Instead, he used Genesis Command.
The effect spread gently.
Broken bone returned to form. Torn flesh restored itself. Blood loss replenished. The damaged eye cleared and reford. Murak’s body visibly righted itself, not with crude force, but with a return to what it should have been.
Murak blinked in shock.
He could stand again.
He did.
For a mont, he just breathed.
Then he looked toward the burning settlent in the distance.
The expression in his face changed.
Lucien saw it and said quietly, "Do not worry about the others. Marie is here. Sister Eirene is here too."
At those words, Murak finally released a long breath.
Then they moved to regroup.
•••
By the ti they reached the others, the battle was already over.
The raiders had been annihilated.
Eirene was healing the survivors with swift efficiency, though the dead remained dead. Marie and the others were reorganizing the people, separating the injured from the stable, restoring order to the streets before panic could return.
Murak looked at the settlent and guilt rose visibly in his eyes.
His people had not deserved this.
If his life alone could have paid for their safety, Lucien could tell Murak would have given it without a second thought.
Soon, Lucien gathered his group.
Now it was ti to hear the full truth.
From what Lucien had heard earlier, the attackers were searching for Eirene... or more precisely, for the location of whatever base the Exchange feared was forming around the remnants of Verdant Veil.
So Murak began to speak.
...
Years ago, after Lucien had been taken by the Nephralis Eternals, the world had already begun changing.
The Evershade Exchange surfaced in this continent too.
At first, the change had been subtle.
During those years, Murak realized soone was observing him.
Eventually, he discovered who it was.
His older brother. The Bull Beastman Eternal Lucien had just killed.
At the ti, Murak had been shocked. His brother had left the settlent years ago, long before, and now he had returned already in the Celestial Realm. He had approached Murak carefully, speaking like soone seeking reconnection after too much ti and distance.
Murak had believed him.
He had spoken openly.
His work in Verdant Veil. The important figures there. Which partners mattered. Which people should never be offended. Which nas carried real weight behind the smiling face of trade.
He thought his brother only wanted to understand his life.
Perhaps even join him.
He had even offered work.
His brother had shown interest. Asked about the important people Murak had seen, about the alliances, about who Verdant Veil trusted and where its true strength rested.
Murak had answered.
That was what rchants did.
They mapped power.
He had thought nothing of it.
Then his brother disappeared again.
And soon after—
Verdant Veil fractured.
Murak’s voice shook when he said that.
By the ti he understood what he had done, the damage had already spread too far to repair. The information he had shared in brotherly trust had beco one more blade used against the consortium.
That guilt never left him.
When Eirene withdrew with her loyal subordinates, Murak resigned from Verdant Veil soon afterward. He feared staying any longer would only draw further disaster onto those still connected to him.
So he returned to his settlent.
He strengthened its formation barriers with his own wealth.
He resud trade, moving between smaller settlents, sect outposts, and Dawnbinder’s city.
And over the years, he began to notice sothing horrifying.
The nearby settlents...
Little by little... they stopped being free.
One by one, the settlents he had dealt with for years began falling under soone’s rule. Quietly at first. Then openly.
Small sects. rchant enclaves. Minor tribes. Independent communities with no one strong enough to resist prolonged pressure.
They were being conquered.
And when Murak finally discovered who had done it—
His heart broke.
His own brother.
Under the Exchange, he had risen further.
By the later years, he had already stepped into the Eternal Realm and had been ordered to subdue every small settlent and minor sect in the region that lacked sufficient strength to matter.
Murak had confronted him more than once.
He had pleaded, argued, and demanded answers.
But nothing worked.
His brother had already crossed too far into service and poison to co back.
His brother had even warned him.
The only reason this settlent had remained untouched for so long was because he had chosen to spare it.
Until now.
Because recently, the command had changed.
Murak had learned that the Exchange possessed a diviner.
According to what had been said by his brother... Sothing hidden in the West would beco deeply harmful to the Exchange’s future interests.
Their first guess was the Verdant Veil remnants.
His brother was ordered to find it first.
And because Murak had once belonged to Verdant Veil, he was chosen as the path.
His brother had demanded the location of Eirene’s current base and whatever new center of activity had ford around the old remnants.
Murak told them nothing.
So the settlent was condemned.
...
When he finished speaking, guilt still weighed heavily on his face.
But no one in Lucien’s group blad him.
Not for this.
Shadow’s face had gone colder.
Marie’s expression was hard.
Eirene stood very still.
Lilith’s face was dark.
And the understanding that settled over all of them was ugly.
They had believed they were beginning a preemptive strike.
But the Exchange had already begun acting long ago.
Suppressing future threats before those threats fully took shape.
And now they knew one more thing.
The corruption in Sareth Region had spread deeper than they wanted to admit.
They could not delay any longer.
They had to act.
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