Beyond the Void Rift, the battle looked grim, like a storm-pale sea about to swallow the shore.

Inside the ravaged allied line, the fighting still churned, smoke streaming like torn banners.

“Qifeng, watch out!”

It was Silan who shouted, panic ringing like a struck bell. Her warning fell short. The First Generation beside her buckled under the Chaos Beast’s field pressure, mind blanked, body slack.

A sudden spike-tentacle telescoped from the monster’s crown. It swatted her mid-air, a whip of iron rain. Blood burst from her lips, a red comet scar slashed across the sky.

Good news—she flew toward a prepared allied sector. Sigils flared. Several mages snapped into action, a cushioning array blooming like lily pads, catching her before she smeared into Elven paste.

Even so, good was relative. Her small frame puddled like melted wax. Precious Elf blood beaded along her lips, then ran down her collar, like a child’s bib tied by fate.

Among the First Generation, Qifeng was youngest in years and size, a bright spring sparrow among old pines. The other Elven sisters adored her, calling her Little Junior.

She was the darling of the grove. If nettles scraped her on a mountain path, at least one First Generation would flatten that peak in fury, like a thunder god swatting flies.

Now, none had the breath to care.

She wasn’t the only wounded. She wasn’t even the worst. Others had already been broken by the Chaos Beast’s domain, and each loss snowballed, turning a narrow ledge into a cliff.

In that moment, the Elven First Generation couldn’t spare focus for their darling. All thoughts tightened to one point, bracing against the Beast’s unraveling field, keeping arrays from shredding.

“Front six, right nine!”

Magic messaging across that disassembly field was a luxury they couldn’t afford. Even Silan dropped encryption, skimming over fire-clouds like a phoenix, shouting coordinates between predator jaws.

Blood-ink bubbles burst into flight, bead-like missiles. They rushed to the called grid, interposing between Silan and the Beast. A swift tentacle slammed into them and skittered off, its arc deflected.

“Ayu! I’ll pin it!” Silan snapped a whip of red flame, lashing tight around a tentacle, iron cobra in a furnace. “Cut this one first!”

As head of the Carne Family, Silan ranked among the strongest First Generation. But she abandoned offense, choosing chains over blades, her power a bridle on the Beast’s movements.

The reason was simple. Inside the disassembly field, most attributes were strangled. Breaking the Beast’s defense was like prying granite with fingers. Queen Dreamlan and the Lionheart Hero were silent.

So the First Generation shifted together, choosing support, threading defense like loom-work, and pinned all attacking hope on the two still standing within the storm.

“Túrin ion Húrin Túramarth—”

Ayu’s voice rose, low and shadow-cold, like moonlight on iron. The blood-ink bubbles around Silan flickered, answered their master, and surged onto the lashed tentacle, cocooning it tight.

Rare panic rippled through the Chaos Beast’s centipede-legs. They jittered, withdrew, as if to reel the tentacle back. Too late—rings formed midshaft from clustered bubbles, then imploded inward.

“—Skrii!”

With a blast like a cracked bell, that tentacle blew in half. The front chunk slammed down, an earthquake ripple rolling through the ground, hope staining the First Generation’s faces.

Yes—most attributes were crushed here. But Blood Magic stood apart, a skew line through iron law. Ayu, the only Blood Magic specialist among them, suffered the lightest suppression.

Her strike honored the hope laid in her hands. The Chaos Beast roared—more wrath than pain—its voice caught between insect chitter and beast bellow, like hail on bronze plates.

The field swelled. The severed tentacle regrew in a heartbeat. Others stopped flailing and snapped outward, a forest of spears born in an instant. Every tip angled toward Ayu.

Some shaped into scythes for close pursuit. Some unfurled into cannon maws, belching ruin. Every half second, a mountain ridge vanished, the land shaved clean like wood under a lathe.

Silan, Bingxia, and the remaining First Generation stopped holding back. Their house secrets flared like fireworks in snow, shielding Ayu’s path. Ayu didn’t waste it.

She flew on bat wings with a two-meter span, a night spirit threading a web of fire. She slipped through kill-lines, then detonated one tentacle after another, rhythm like drumbeats.

For a few brief breaths, she outpaced the Beast’s regeneration. Its nightmare crown—those writhing, blasphemous spawns—thinned visibly. A ragged dawn split the clouds. Hope cracked the dark.

But only that—it wasn’t enough.

Ayu was known for reason, a clear mind like winter water. She knew better than anyone: this path led to nowhere.

She could sever those tentacles because they lay far from the core. The field’s pressure waned at the edges, like weak tide. Hurting the body would be no simple matter.

Their mana wouldn’t last forever. The Beast drank the Void Rift like a spring, power near bottomless. A dance-and-drain war meant defeat, sure as frost falling at night.

Knowing that, a rare thread of panic stitched her dark-ringed eyes. She’d faced impossible questions as a scholar, but none had ever felt so “unsolvable,” a closed door in a storm.

What now? Does it end here? The thought bit her, cold and cruel. She almost blanked like Qifeng, her evasion a half-beat slow, shadow slipping under her heel.

Silan and Bingxia covered her. She escaped by a hair, but her wing membranes tore, char-holes smoking like burned paper. Her face went pale as winter ash.

Then—something flickered at the edge of her vision.

Her gaze sharpened, a needle catching light. She snapped her wings wide, dragged a brutal air-brake, wind clawing her. She dismissed the bat flight in a breath.

The mana fueling it raced to her fingertips, a river changing course. She chanted at a sprint. Both hands traced twin-symmetry arrays in the air, dark sigils mirrored like lake and sky.

She looked ready to wager life for a chance.

“—táli lantalasselingië!”

The final syllable rang like a gong. A flood of ink-dark bubbles poured from the built array, storm-scale and giant-sized—far larger than before.

This time, they didn’t chase the tentacles. They swarmed the roots, the near-body anchors, closer to the Beast’s core, like bees targeting the heart of a hive.

“Left forty-four, front seventeen!”

The tentacles screamed toward her—she didn’t dodge. She spat the coordinate at the last instant, then got smashed like a ragdoll, a plume of dust rising where she fell.

Her attack still landed. The impact zone matched her shouted grid, a stitch pulled tight.

Bubbles coated the root region, ink like obsidian rain. The moment they touched the disassembly field, they boiled like sodium meeting water, a seething blood-ink lake gnawing flesh-defense.

High above, the Follower of Pleasure, Cruz, watched from the Beast’s crown. He didn’t even change posture. He only shook his head, weary as a cat in the sun.

“A spell thrown to the death, and still just this? Ugh, how boring.”

He even sounded regretful. Ayu’s magic only rasped the surface layer. Truth laid bare: the ink-blood didn’t truly corrode the field. It was meant to implode once attached.

The Beast’s domain smothered the trigger. The bubbles couldn’t self-detonate. They clung to the flesh like useless gum, no bite, no spark, only empty stain.

Seeing the yawning gap between sides, Cruz sighed and added a lazy yawn, like a lake rolling under wind.

He started to look away.

Then a white blaze lit the field, bright as a newborn sun, shadowless and clean.

Its source sat where a Type 59 battle tank had been written off as scrap, hydraulic braces snapped by the Chaos Beast and tossed aside like tin.

[External targeting system: calibration complete; Overload limiters: released; Safety Protocols One and Three: overwritten; Charge level: Error—beyond gauge.]

Hundreds of Nacha clustered around the hull, hands like ants building an altar. Though its factory sights were dead, the barrel pointed true at the Beast, white light boiling inside.

From the start, Tela and her Nacha comrades had scrounged materials, hammering a rotating platform under the chassis, a crude hand-aim disc like a wheel turned by fate.

Now that raw system was tuned. Tela sat at the controls, teeth clenched, eyes like flint on the Beast.

“You %$#@—you called us scrap?”

She bristled, fur up in a storm. She ignored the over-limit redlines burning her panel, and slammed her fist on the crimson trigger.

“Show it a miracle, Moonforged Miracle!”

[Module Five—Execute.]

Her roar and the tank’s voice layered, both swallowed by the cannon’s thunder, a mountain cracking under sky-fire.

The high-frequency hum rose again, a blade through air. The Chaos Beast tried to flinch, but its hill-mass could never outrun plasma.

The over-overload Module Five plasma shot struck its hide, right where the ink-blood covered—Ayu’s final call wasn’t for nothing, a grid the hand-aimers could trust.

Her setup paid off. The plasma hit the ink-blood and forced detonation. A visible shockfront rolled across the battlefield, flipping anything not bolted down, wind like a sandstorm.

The Beast toppled, jaw-first. Its lower maw lay exposed a heartbeat, field skin flickering unstable, a ripple in its iron calm.

Even so—Ayu plus over-overload plasma only peeled that defense for an instant. Such was the power of the highest Chaos Spawn, the last guardian before the Void Rift.

But the Type 59 and Ayu weren’t the last cards left to the living side.

The moment the explosion bloomed, a bolt of lightning cut from afar, speed beyond mortal sight, a clean scar through dust, leaving air bright and breathless.

By the time everyone realized she’d returned, a lightning-lit longsword had already speared into the weakened deconstruction field under the Chaos Beast’s jaw.

Then, like slaughtering livestock, she sliced open the barrier in one clean stroke, baring the Chaos Beast’s true body.

Skree—eee!!!

The Chaos Beast screamed again; tentacles and a thousand eyes convulsed together like grass whipped by a storm.

It happened so fast that even Kruse’s face showed shock; he watched the golden-haired silhouette and muttered.

“Wait, this one… seems stronger?”

His frown tightened; he wasn’t thinking of Ayu alone, but of the other candidate Lady Silan’s side pinned hopes on—Mira.

She’d just been sent flying, a speck against the sky, yet she returned as if unhurt.

Her knack for condensing magic to a single point had sharpened; paired with lightning speed, she tore a gap in that defense.

Even with Ayu and the Type‑59 tank pre‑weakening the shell, her power had climbed a step.

But more baffling than Mira’s rise was what she did next.

She didn’t chase; she slipped away like a lightning stroke fading into cloud.

Ayu’s burn‑the‑boats charge, the Type‑59’s reckless overload barrage, then Mira’s lightspeed thrust—the living camp had relayed everything to rip the shell.

Yet once the deconstruction field was cut, with the core at last exposed, Mira’s next move was… retreat.

Yes—swift as her entrance, she pivoted, slid out, and opened distance.

Her reason surfaced a heartbeat later.

She wasn’t the last card.

As she cleared the lane, a cross‑shaped flare bloomed at the Void Rift like a rose.

Then came a shockwave like mountains collapsing and seas overturning.

From that cruciform origin, every ray of light bent, then vanished.

In that instant, Kruse stood in an endless corridor; only unknown dark filled the far end; wall candles holding back the night were snuffed one by one.

Hoo—

A soft breathing rose; each exhale pushed a swath into lightless terror, until the dark pressed against Kruse’s face.

The last sconce went out.

Pure darkness wrapped him like cold water.

Cold.

A static death crowded in; every thread tying him to the world felt severed; with no reference, even his own being seemed swallowed, made one with the night.

The Follower of Pleasure, Kruse, shivered.

It was a blink’s illusion; his sight snapped back.

So—what happened?

As if someone hit reset, the battlefield held no stray spells, no earth‑shaking shouts—only silence.

A sour, blood‑tinged wind with no source rolled over the flats, carrying blood‑red moonlight that revealed the scene and the Chaos Beast’s ruin.

The lower jaw where the ward had failed was blasted to pulp; thousands of tethered tentacles never even touched ground.

Cut, they were eaten to nothing in midair, turning into meaningless sigils.

Since Varie, this was the Chaos Beast’s first wound this deep.

Kruse lifted his face and looked for the source of the strike.

First into his gaze came the moon.

A moon that shouldn’t exist.

When the Void Rift opened, the spilling chaos had shrouded the sky and erased the moon.

Yet now a moon hung high, scarlet yet somehow sacred.

Beneath that blood moon stood a white‑haired figure.

Adelaide stood there. A magic array a hundred times her height turned behind her like a slow wheel. Her red eyes pinned Kruse. Scorn and delight wrote across her face.

Then, looking down at him on the Chaos Beast’s crown—she gave him a thumbs‑down.

“I…”

Her rose‑red lips parted—though a kilometer apart, her silver‑bell voice landed clean in Kruse’s ear.

“I crawled back from hell to find you, Senior Kruse!”