Read Novel Full Chapter 696: Dominance
Chapter 696: Dominance
The three arms of the Suryax-Regalon army crossed the ocean, and the participating kingdoms braced for a war.
The war they braced for did not happen.
Because the moment the assault committed, the second part of the plan moved, the part that had been preparing in silence for the entire war. Across all three target islands at once, the native halves of the alliances simply left.
It happened through Natalia’s network, the silent channel that had bound the three native sovereigns to Suryax-Regalon since the night in the impossible room. At the exact moment the army split three ways, the signal went out. And the three native kingdoms, who had spent the war conserving their forces and quietly drawing their people into a shape that could move at an instant’s notice, moved.
The Virexion Dominion peeled away from Kezryx. Its storm-fleets banked off their patrol lines, its people pulled back from the shared defenses, the native half of the eastern alliance simply detaching from the participant half and withdrawing along corridors that Big D’s network had mapped and Suryax-Regalon’s forces had quietly left open. The Stormlord took his kingdom and stepped off the board, cleanly, before Kezryx understood what was happening.
The Thalmyr Ascendancy did the same in the north. The Crystal Sage had spent the war preparing for exactly this instant, and when the signal came, her perfect city moved with the precision her kingdom was built on. Thalmyr separated from Ronethis in a single coordinated motion, the native half withdrawing through gaps that opened for it and closed behind it.
The Celestara Sanctum split from Dravokh in the northwest, the Dawn Matriarch leading her radiant people out and away, her kingdom slipping free of the conclave that had spent it twice over.
In the space of a few minutes, three alliances stopped being alliances.
What remained on the three islands was only the participants. Kezryx. Ronethis. Dravokh. The outsiders, stripped of the native kingdoms that had made up half their strength, suddenly alone in front of three arms of an army carrying power they had never seen.
And then Suryax-Regalon showed them the power.
---
All five Tier-100 weapon systems deployed at once.
The eastern arm of the army opened on Kezryx with the Virexion storm-system, and the irony of it was lost on no one. Kezryx’s own native kingdom’s deepest technology, developed by Suryax-Regalon from a stolen blueprint, turned against the participant that had commanded Virexion for the entire event. Lightning unlike any storm Kezryx had ever fielded gathered across the eastern sky, not violet but a deep, impossible white-gold, and it came down in lattices, structured cages of living current that folded over the Kezryx fleet and contracted. Where the lattices closed, Kezryx ships did not explode. They were unmade, their structure pulled apart along the lines of the current, dissolving into the storm itself.
The northern arm opened on Ronethis with the Thalmyr precision-system. It did not look like an attack at first. It looked like the air around the Ronethis fleet quietly filling with thin lines of pale crystalline light, geometric, beautiful, almost gentle, a lattice of precision spreading through their entire formation. Then the lines activated, all at once, every one of them finding a seam, a joint, a critical point, and the Ronethis fleet came apart along ten thousand perfect cuts at the same instant, sections sliding away from each other in clean geometric pieces.
The northwestern arm opened on Dravokh with the Celestara light-system, and the sky over the northwestern approach turned to a dawn that had never existed. Radiant light bloomed across the Dravokh formation in waves of gold and rose and white, harmonic, layered, almost unbearably beautiful, and where it washed over the Dravokh ships, it did not burn them so much as resolve them out of existence, light dissolving shadow until there was simply nothing left where the dark constructs had been.
And the Daybreak Judgement System and the Discord Bloom System deployed across all three fronts at once, carried by the new exotic units and the re-equipped army.
The golden blades of the Daybreak System fell on whichever participant tried to mass a defense, reaping their formations the way they had reaped the Doom hammer. And the Discord Bloom System, never shown until this moment, bloomed across the fighting in waves of dark, petaled light shot through with order-bleeder resonance, and where it touched the participant forces, their weapons unraveled, their defenses bled apart, their structures came undone from the inside.
Five Tier-100 weapon systems. Five colors of overwhelming power. Storm-gold, crystalline-pale, dawn-radiant, sun-blade, and the dark blooming discord, all of it deployed at once across three fronts by an army the ocean had spent the entire event underestimating.
The participating kingdoms felt the world slip out from under them.
---
In the eastern command center, Jaskrit Kezinos watched the storm-gold lattices fold over his fleet, watched the Virexion Dominion that had been half his strength withdraw and vanish, and understood the entire shape of it in a single instant.
He did not rage. He did not waste a breath on disbelief.
His suspicion of months had crystallized into certainty two days ago, and now the certainty had a shape, and the shape was complete and elegant and entirely beyond his power to fight. Suryax-Regalon had held the real blueprints the whole time. They had turned the native kingdoms before the war even ended. They had built overwhelming power in the dark and deployed it the instant the window opened. There was no counter. There was no version of standing his ground that did not end with Kezryx erased from the event.
So Jaskrit did the wise thing, the thing he had decided on weeks ago on the western slope, when he had said that sometimes one rode the wind instead of fighting it.
He cut his losses to the absolute minimum and retreated.
He pulled his people back, pulled his army into a tight withdrawal, and prepared to exit the event entirely, surrendering the field without spending a single life he did not have to. And before he went, he sent one message through the open channel that Suryax-Regalon was, for once, willing to receive.
It was short.
"Well played. I would like to have tea with you all sometime, after this, if you don’t mind."
And then Jaskrit Kezinos and the whole of the Kezryx Void Imperium disappeared from the warfare event, withdrawn cleanly, losses minimal, a defeated rival who had been wise enough to lose well.
Almond read the message in the war room beneath the palace, and he allowed himself a small smile.
"Sure, let’s have some tea later."
---
The other two were not as quick, but they were not stupid.
Ronaisan El Topov watched the crystalline lattices take his fleet apart along ten thousand perfect cuts, watched Thalmyr withdraw and vanish, and ran the calculation he always ran. He ran it three times, looking for the variable that changed the answer.
There was no variable. The answer did not change.
Ronaisan had spent the entire event proving he understood the shape of a battlefield better than anyone, and the shape of this one was simple. He had lost. Not through any error he could have avoided, but through a game that had been played on a board he never knew existed, by an opponent who had been three moves ahead since the depth chamber. There was a cold, professional respect in the way he accepted it. He did not throw his people into a fight that would only kill them. He ordered the withdrawal, conceded the field, and prepared the Ronethis Apex Sovereignty to exit the event.
He sent no message. That was not his way. He simply went, the same way he did everything, cleanly and without waste.
Dravokh held out the longest because Dravokh was the most stubborn, and the Dravokh Tyrant Conclave had built its entire identity on never yielding. For a few minutes, they tried to fight. They threw their remaining strength at the northwestern arm of the assault, and the dawn-radiant light of the Celestara system simply resolved their attacks out of existence as fast as they came, and their ships dissolved into nothing, and their formations came apart, and the beautiful, terrible golden dawn kept advancing.
It did not take long for even the Tyrant Conclave to understand.
There was no win here. There was only the choice between leaving and being erased, and the Doom Monarch’s example of what erasure meant for a force that fought to the end was fresh in everyone’s memory. Dravokh swallowed its pride, because pride was worth less than survival, and conceded. The conclave withdrew its forces and prepared to exit the event, the last of the three participants to accept what the other two had already accepted.
Across the ocean, three participating kingdoms vanished from the warfare event, one after another, withdrawn into whatever realm they had come from.
The five colors of Tier-100 light faded from the sky.
The ocean went quiet.
---
When the dust settled, the board had changed completely.
Of the five participating kingdoms that had entered the warfare event, four were gone. Oblivion’s Velkarion, destroyed months ago. Kezryx, Ronethis, and Dravokh, withdrawn within the span of an hour, conceding the field rather than be erased by power they could not match.
Only one participating kingdom remained.
Ananta Regalon.
And it did not stand alone. Around it, where there had once been four rival alliances, there were now four native kingdoms, free of the participants who had spent them, allied to the kingdom that had set them free. Suryax, which had been an ally from the start. And Virexion, Thalmyr, and Celestara, the three sovereigns who had said yes in a room outside the world and prepared in silence and walked away from their partners at the signal.
Four native kingdoms. One participating kingdom. One ocean, reshaped exactly the way Almond had described it months ago in the war room, the night they had decided not to simply destroy their rivals.
The leadership gathered that evening, the whole of it, on the central terrace where Ainen set up his cooking arrays, and for the first time in a long time the gathering was not tense. They had done it. They had won the contest, taken the field, turned an entire ocean to their side, and walked out of the participant war with overwhelming power intact and almost no cost.
But Rudra, looking north toward the dark line of the mainland, said what all of them already knew.
"It is not over."
"No," Almond agreed.
The window was open. The Doom Monarch sat weakened in his dominion for three months. And the actual victory, the only true victory the event had ever offered, was still waiting at the end of the road they had spent months clearing.
The five pieces of artifact. One held in each of the five existing kingdoms. Combined, the only thing that could destroy the Doom Monarch and end the warfare event in true triumph.
Four of those kingdoms now stood with Ananta Regalon.
The fifth had been Oblivion, and Oblivion was gone, and what that meant for the five pieces was a question no one at the table could yet answer.
Almond looked north, at the weakened Monarch waiting in the dark, at the window that would not stay open forever, and at the last and largest obstacle still standing between his kingdom and the complete victory he had been building toward since the day they arrived.
"Now," he said, "we go after the Doom Monarch."