Under the white, rciless sun of the Fourth Realm, a battle raged again between the forces of the Life Path and the Freedom Path. Heat shimred across the broken plains, twisting the air into ribbons of light as warriors hurled their powers against one another.
Roars of exertion mingled with cracking space rifts, bursts of annihilation fla, and the tallic echo of divine armor striking bone. Every combatant fought with absolute determination, forcing every iota of strength through battered ridians in an effort to overwhelm the other side.
Yet one combatant held back.
Where others strained and bled, Cain conserved. His movents were sharpened to the bare minimum-precise footwork, efficient bursts of energy, no flourish wasted. His only responsibility was to keep the Alpha-Oga Overgod Prototype contained.
No one else on the battlefield could survive a direct exchange with it -not for minutes, much less hours. Cain's restraint was therefore not questioned. Every ArchDeity understood that as long as the Prototype remained locked in place, the Life Path still had a chance.
Ti stretched into exhaustion. When the fifth hour finally bled into existence, both armies staggered backward, too drained to continue. The Freedom Path's forces-led by Crowley-had endured just long enough. Any additional push risked catastrophic casualties among the Life Path, forcing Skull Lord to withdraw. The call echoed through the command channels, bitter but necessary.
A draw.
No cheers, no triumph-but no despair, either. Despite their failure to crush Crowley's forces and secure the continent, not one ArchDeity under the Life Path had fallen.
The high command accepted the outco with pragmatic calm. They
would recover. They would strike again. Ti was their most renewable resource.
With practiced efficiency, the Life Path soldiers disengaged from the frontlines, not a single one missing.
Far away-beyond the battlefield, in a hidden sanctum layered with forbidden runes-an individual draped in a mantle of light watched their departure.
The shroud obscured everything but her eyes: two pale orbs full of calculation, hunger, and doubt. The Prophetess focused her vision into the Divination Pool before her, a lake-sized bowl of liquid starlight that reflected the armies retreating to their domain. When her sight passed over the Scarlet King, her expression flickered with sothing darker.
A tremor of aning. A warning she could neither decipher nor suppress.
Ti and ti again, she had attempted to map the Scarlet King's future-probing into every possible tiline, every quantum pathway, every divergence that could reveal his intentions. Yet divination around him always collapsed into static, as though reality itself refused to be written where Cain walked.
Only once had she gained anything at all, after performing a lot of sacrifices to empower her divination, but what she saw terrified her.
"Those eyes... what are those red eyes?"
The vision she had earned from that sacrifice had been nothing but a pair of gargantuan red eyes-vast enough to drown the skies, rciless enough to swallow creation, patient enough to outlast civilizations. The mory alone still shook her.
She forced her breathing back under control and stared again at Cain's distant figure. The more enigmatic he beca, the more desperate she was to wrench open his future-to twist it, shape it, and force it to align with her will.
But just as that hunger surged, Cain's distant figure paused in the sky and turned.
Shock carved across her features. The Scarlet King-flying with the Life Path's retreat-seed to look directly at her through the Divination Pool. And then, faintly... he smiled.
Before she could process the madness of that expression, her entire castle shuddered violently. Hidden formations howled in protest- barriers, cloaking fields, dinsional veils-then shattered like fragile glass. A scarlet cot plunged from the sky and slamd into the fortress, tearing half of it apart in a volcanic bloom of fla and pulverized stone.
"Impossible!" she scread, staggering backward as smoke and psychic pressure rolled over her.
The dust parted, revealing a figure erging from incandescent embers-bright scarlet eyes burning, plasma wings unfurled, bone-spikes jutting from his arms and legs.
She could not pierce his future. But she had always believed she could track his present movents. She had been certain—absolutely certain-that the Scarlet King was still flying away with the Life Path's army. That image in the Divine Pool should have been unassailable.
Yet the truth stood before her, breathing heat into the ruins. She had been deceived. Tricked. And now death stood within arm's
reach.
Horror beca clarity. Clarity beca instinct.
"Ten seconds. I only need ten seconds."
Her eyes blazed with survival's mania. She struck the crystalline sigil embedded in the back of her hand, shattering the divine transmitter- a signal even the Supercomputer Assistant could not intercept. In the sa instant, two counterasures triggered.
Runes erupted across the fractured castle-etched into stone, tal,
and air-then activated in a synchronized pulse. A gravitational storm detonated outward, collapsing into Cain with the weight of continents, pressing down on him like the hand of a titan.
Simultaneously, the Divination Pool exploded into thousands of
droplets, each drop reshaping into a temporary astral clone of the Prophetess. They sward the chamber, identical in aura and expression-thousands of bodies, thousands of false signatures.
"RUMBLE."
The gravitational pressure enshrouded Cain, burying him in mass beyond comprehension. Half the clones marched toward him, blocking his vision. The other half scattered through the fortress corridors-any one of them could be real.
Cain's eyes widened-genuine surprise flickering across his face as he saw the runic formation.
"This could pin down even an Early Alpha-Oga Overgod," he murmured. A beat of acknowledgnt passed-followed by a faint,
amused smile.
"And it would have worked-last week."
Power rippled through every fiber of his being. Muscle strands ignited with radiant destruction. Space groaned around him.
"CRACK."
The formation shattered under raw physical strength-runes splintered, gravitational anchors snapped. Cain stepped forward, unburdened, shedding the weight like dust from his shoulders. Destroying the formation was only the first task. He still needed to locate the true Prophetess before she escaped-and even he could not distinguish the real one from among the astral herd. Worse, he could already sense another presence approaching-powerful, fast,
drawn by her distress signal.
Yet, he did not look troubled.
"Fortunately," Cain said, wings pulsing with renewed radiance, "I don't
need to identify the real one. They're all connected."
He smiled as his bright scarlet eyes intensified and he struck the
nearest clone.
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