Titan King: Ascension of the Giant

Chapter 1663: Ashes of the Pantheon

The Continent of the Pantheon belonged to the Titanion Realm. Yet, the things that belonged to the four gods were ultimately reclaimed.

A wind swept across the Continent of the Pantheon. It was an executioner’s gale. Like the swing of a reaper’s scythe, everything in its path withered, decayed, and crumbled into dust. It was an apocalyptic scene.

The continent was drained of its life force. Massive expanses of dead desert replaced the once-vibrant landscape. The fertile topsoil eroded, vegetation peeled away like scorched skin, and bedrock splintered. Structures bearing the motifs of the four gods disintegrated instantly, reduced to absolute nothingness.

Through Orion’s senses, the Continent of the Pantheon devolved into a wasteland of howling wind, ash, and doom. In mere moments, everything was pulverized. It felt as if the continent had become a hollow shell, brittle enough to shatter at a touch. This apocalyptic sandstorm, whipped up by the Four-Faced Beast, nearly destroyed the continent—and it blew straight over Archbishop Kysar.

"What belongs to the four gods was never truly ours," Archbishop Kysar murmured. "I made the right choice. If I hadn’t merged the fourth world into the Titanion Realm, I would never have escaped their chains. Free from the cage, returning to nature at last."

He smiled. Surviving the sheer terror of death and shedding the mantle given by the four gods had fundamentally shifted his mindset. Relying on the Titanion Realm’s Will of the Realm, along with the support of Orion, the Lifeless Dreadgod, and Moriphara, he had carved out a slim chance at survival. The Continent of the Pantheon suffered catastrophic losses, but its foundation survived.

"You were plotting this from the moment the swarm merged with the Titanion Realm," the Lifeless Dreadgod snarled, his face dark. "You scheming bastards planned to use us as meat shields to tank this disaster. And you succeeded."

If anyone ever called the four Archbishops of the Cult of Four fools again, he would kill them himself. The Lifeless Dreadgod had a gut feeling that Maximilien and Eryx weren’t truly dead. Even Archbishop Kendry, who had been instantly obliterated by the God-Slaying Ballista, was likely clinging to life through some esoteric means. It was his intuition, an innate talent born of his domain.

"Gentlemen, trees wither and bloom. It is the way of nature," Archbishop Kysar said, his voice suddenly sounding incredibly ancient. He trembled, struggling to sit upright on his throne.

Orion and the others watched clearly as Kysar’s body began to rot. His flesh crumbled away like falling sand. The soft rustle of his disintegrating body carried an overwhelming sense of finality.

"What does the storm matter... what does the Four-Faced Beast matter... what do the four gods matter..." Kysar rasped, his voice fading. "My colleagues... for the Divine Mantle... to attain godhood... we must press on."

Every word was clear despite his waning strength. As he forced out the final syllable, he completely transformed into petrified, dead wood.

It wasn’t just him. His branch of the World Tree withered alongside him. This was a severe wound to the Titanion Realm, and a devastating loss for Orion and the others. Their world Authority visibly weakened. Operating on pure instinct, the Titanion Realm’s Will of the Realm began siphoning origin energy and laws from the remaining three branches to keep Kysar’s withered branch from dissolving entirely.

Withered did not mean dead. They all knew this. Yet, staring at Kysar’s petrified form, Orion, the Lifeless Dreadgod, and Moriphara were at a loss for words.

"What is our next move?" Moriphara asked. Ever pragmatic, she immediately refocused on the imminent threat. Kysar’s fate, tragic or not, was in the past. "This crisis isn’t over."

The Lifeless Dreadgod sighed heavily. Watching a peer suffer such a fate shook him. He had absolutely no intention of ending up like Kysar.

"How do we kill the Four-Faced Beast?" Orion asked, shaking off his melancholy. His tone turned cold and calculating.

"An expert at the demigodsixth stage," the Lifeless Dreadgod replied bluntly. "Or a fifth-stage combatant wielding a Demigod Artifact. And those are just the bare minimum requirements. Even then, I don’t know if it would be enough to kill it."

His assessment cast a heavy silence over the group.

The sixth stage? A Demigod Artifact? They lacked both. Orion possessed a Divine Vessel, but taking on the perfect form of the Four-Faced Beast with a single phalanx bone was a joke. He shook his head, burying the suicidal thought.

"Dammit!"

"No!"

"Hell!"

Mental alarms blared simultaneously for Orion, the Lifeless Dreadgod, and Moriphara. Having sucked the Continent of the Pantheon dry, the Four-Faced Beast shifted its gaze. It locked onto The Primordial Continent, the untamed expanse within the Titanion Realm.

When the continent merged with the Titanion Realm, a portion of its World Essence had flowed into The Primordial Continent. The beast intended to reclaim what belonged to the four gods, ravaging The Primordial Continent in the process. If it succeeded, Orion couldn’t fathom how the Titanion Realm could continue to grow. It would likely be crippled, plummeting straight out of the Ascendant Plane.

Sensing the existential threat, the Will of the Realm panicked. It ruthlessly siphoned the origin essence of the three remaining branches, desperately bolstering its own defenses and fortifying The Primordial Continent.

And then, the Four-Faced Beast struck.

Its four maws opened wide, chanting overlapping, dissonant prayers. The four sword-like peaks on its back split apart, unleashing an endless torrent of divine power. The energy pooled around the beast, writhing like living tissue until it coalesced into a colossal serpent. Its eyes were black holes, its maw a swirling galaxy.

Coiling its massive form, the serpent lunged, its jaws snapping shut around the Titanion Realm.

In that terrifying instant, Orion realized the truth: the beast wasn’t just after The Primordial Continent. It wanted the entire Titanion Realm.

Facing total annihilation, the Will of the Realm drastically increased its extraction from the World Tree branches. Orion, the Lifeless Dreadgod, and Moriphara shuddered violently. Drenched in cold sweat, all three collapsed onto their thrones, completely drained.

Yet, the Will of the Realm kept pulling.

"What is happening?" Moriphara murmured, slipping into unconsciousness.

"What are they trying to do?" the Lifeless Dreadgod gritted out, his vision fading to black. He fought to keep his eyes open, his voice dripping with bitter resentment.

"Looks like there are things I’m not meant to know," Orion muttered, succumbing to the darkness shortly after the Dreadgod.

Truthfully, he didn’t feel the absolute despair of impending death. He had the Commander backing him, and his Divine Kingdom had stabilized. He had an out. His only regret was the things the Commander had kept hidden. The Titanion Realm was at a dead end, yet the Commander and his forces still hadn’t appeared.

Why? Orion really wanted to know.

***

Stoneheart City. The Silent Goblet.

Down on the tavern’s main floor, two figures pressed in among a crowd of low-rank mercenaries, all of them jostling to "worship" the succubus dancers up on the central stage—as if leaning an inch closer and ducking their heads an inch lower might earn them a glimpse up those lithe dancers’ skirts.

"Hey. Hey. The kid’s already been beaten into a dead sleep, and we’re just going to keep standing here with our hands in our pockets?"

Kaidric stood at the Commander’s shoulder. The two let the crowd shove them back and forth, both of them savoring the press and clamor of bodies.

"Listen to yourself. If they don’t go dormant, how are we supposed to make our move?"

"What, you’d rather play your pieces out in the open across all four continents? Pull your tricks right under their noses?"

"And even if we kept our hands clean, you think everyone else would mind the rules?"

The Commander and Kaidric had been friends for years and spoke without holding back. He wasn’t scheming behind Orion’s back—that was beneath the Commander, and the very idea turned his stomach.

The truth was, ever since the Titanion Realm had ascended into an Ascendant Plane, its Authority had been locked down tight in four hands: Orion, the Lifeless Dreadgod, Archbishop Kysar, and Moriphara. They might claw at one another without end, but against any outsider they stood as one.

Under those conditions, no ordinary demigod—no sixth-stage power—could force a way in, let alone carve off a share of the world’s Authority.

That cut both ways.

On one hand, it kept the world stable and gave it room to grow, slow as the growth might be.

On the other, it scared off every outside backer. No bets, no investment, no flood of early resources or allies to lean on.

"You’re right. Wait for those four to nurse the Titanion Realm up to something the size of the Abyssal World, and we’ll be standing here until the seas run dry."

"The four of them are greedy by half!"

Kaidric jabbed a finger toward one of the dancers and urged the Commander to look—quick.

The Commander caught the cue without missing a beat. His eyes flicked over just in time to catch a flash of pale underthings before the falling hem swallowed it again.

"Show me one soul reaching for the Divine Mantle who isn’t greedy."

A lecherous glint crossed the Commander’s face, his eyes hungry and unsatisfied—an appetite he hadn’t felt in years.

"So which of the other three do you figure cracks first and makes a move?"

Even while ogling the women, Kaidric found time to needle the powers lurking in the dark.

"The succubus blood in Orion’s territory runs thin," the Commander said. "Not filthy enough. Not fierce enough. Not pure."

He didn’t answer his friend so much as start appraising the Stoneheart Horde’s succubi like a connoisseur.

"The Abyssal taint on these ones is faint. That raw, primal hunger for slaughter and lust—there’s not enough of it. They’ve picked up a trace of something human."

"Reason winning out over desire. You can see it on them."

"On top of that, this whole world is steeped in the kid’s bloodline. The succubi here have been soaking in it for ages. They aren’t true Abyssal succubi anymore. By the Abyss’s own reckoning, they’d rank as a mutant offshoot at best." He weighed the word. "Stoneheart Succubi. Yes—Stoneheart Succubi has a ring to it."

When the talk turned to the Abyss and its succubi, no one carried more weight than Kaidric. He hailed from the Abyssal World himself, and he understood the breed far better than Orion or the Commander ever could.

"Heh heh heh... even a whole continent away, I can smell the genuine article wafting off The Lifeless Expanse. Pure Abyssal succubus, the real thing. What do you say, my friend—want me to drag one of those little tarts over here to dance for you?"

The leer on Kaidric’s face ran a shade thicker than the Commander’s. One had to wonder whether shared taste was what had bonded the two of them in the first place.

"Keep your nose out of it. That’s a fish Orion’s keeping in his own pond."

"Wait until that little wife of young Orion’s hits her ceiling and can’t push through to demigod. Then we’ll see whether Orion still bothers keeping her around."

Understanding dawned on Kaidric, and a light kindled in his eyes and held.

"Still—us sitting on our hands. Doesn’t that feel a little dirty?"

The conversation had wandered in circles, but he’d finally come back to where he started. He had no wish to drive a wedge between himself and an ally like Orion over the matter at hand.

"Of course it’s dirty. No question about it. But if we cover his losses—better yet, pay him back far past anything he saw coming—then it stops being dirty. It becomes a contingency play." The Commander pulled his stolen glances off the dancers and turned to meet Kaidric’s eyes. "And no one calls strategy dirty, do they?"

"Cover his losses? Turn it into strategy?" Kaidric blanked for a beat, then caught on. "You can play it like that?" He grinned. "Is he that gullible? You really think he’ll swallow it?"

The question alone showed Kaidric had already pegged Orion as the Commander’s devoted little fanboy—the kind who’d believe anything he was told.

"Are you the gullible one? Would a fool pour a hard-won Divine Vessel into the Titanion Realm? Could a fool have carved out a position this strong?"

The Commander stared at Kaidric like he was looking at an idiot. Kaidric only chuckled, not bothered in the slightest.

If the Commander could say as much, it meant he already had a way to smother whatever resentment took root in Orion once this round played out.

"Now watch the show. The real fool just made his move."

In the middle of the crowd, the two of them lifted their heads—toward the Void, toward the World Tree, toward the battle unfolding beyond the edge of the world.

Not one soul around them noticed a thing. To the crowd, Kaidric and the Commander might as well have not existed at all.

Beyond the world, with the Titanion Realm cornered at the brink, one of the powers behind the curtain finally broke. It cast off the role of the player at the board and stepped onto the board itself.

Skreee.

An insect’s cry.

The instant that chitter rang out, space tore open. The starry cosmos shuddered, and every element, every shred of faith, all divine power recoiled like a tide dragged out to sea.

An insect-shaped star-core burst from the rift and descended beyond the Realm Barrier. It shattered the great serpent the Four-Faced Beast had conjured and hauled the Titanion Realm back from the lip of ruin.

Only as the serpent scattered did the progenitor’s true body come into view.

A Void Progenitor. Countless scales, each one congealed from a shard of frozen space, armored its shell. Its twenty-four pairs of jointed limbs hung like so many scythes, and every sweep of them folded spacetime and wrenched the air out of true.

The most monstrous part was its mouth. Not flesh at all, but a vortex—a black hole, deeper and vaster than the one the Four-Faced Beast had gathered in its own grip.

"Void Insectoids? Shouldn’t it be a God-Devourer?"

Doubt nagged at Kaidric. This didn’t square with the intelligence he’d been handed.

"Nothing strange about it. Void Insectoids and God-Devourers are both branches of the swarm. The brood in the Titanion Realm is a crossbreed of the two." Commander Thresh spared the creature a single glance and passed his verdict. "And this particular Void Progenitor’s no powerhouse. It’s no match for the Four-Faced Beast."

...

Stoneheart, the Silent Goblet.

On the tavern’s main floor, two figures blended into a throng of low-rank mercenaries. The crowd surged and shoved, practically worshipping the succubus dancers on the center stage. The men craned their necks, acting as if inching just a bit closer would grant them a glimpse beneath the dancers’ swirling skirts.

"Hey... the kid’s been beaten into a slumber. Are we really just going to stand by and watch?"

Kaidric stood beside the Commander. They let the crowd jostle them, both men genuinely enjoying the rowdy, packed atmosphere.

"What are you talking about? If they don’t go down, how do we play our pieces?" the Commander replied. "Do you want to play openly across the four continents, pulling tricks right under their noses? Even if we hold back, do you think everyone else will play by the rules?"

The Commander and Kaidric were old friends and spoke without filter. The Commander wasn’t scheming behind Orion’s back; he found such petty tricks beneath him.

Ever since the Titanion Realm ascended to the Ascendant Plane, the world’s Authority had been locked down by Orion, the Lifeless Dreadgod, Archbishop Kysar, and Moriphara. Despite their constant infighting, they presented a united, impenetrable front to outsiders.

Under these conditions, an ordinary demigodsixth stage expert couldn’t even interfere, let alone siphon away their world Authority.

It was a double-edged sword. On one hand, it stabilized the realm and allowed for steady growth. On the other, it repelled outside investors and factions, choking off vital early-stage resources.

"You’re right. Waiting for those four to slowly nurture the Titanion Realm to the scale of an Abyssal World would take a bloody eternity," Kaidric said. "They’re too greedy."

He pointed at one of the dancers on stage, gesturing for the Commander to look.

Right on cue, the Commander glanced over just in time to catch a flash of pale skin hidden by a falling skirt.

"Who isn’t greedy when aiming for the Divine Mantle?" The Commander gave a lecherous look, his eyes betraying a deep, lingering hunger—an emotion he hadn’t felt in years.

"Which of the other three factions do you think will snap and strike first?" Kaidric asked, mocking the other hidden powers while continuing to ogle the women.

"The succubi in Orion’s territory have impure bloodlines. They lack the right charm, the kick, the purity," the Commander noted, critiquing the succubi of the Stoneheart Horde instead of answering. "The abyssal aura on them is too thin. They lack the primal urge for slaughter and lust. They smell too human. It’s the outward sign of reason conquering desire. Besides, this world is saturated with that kid’s bloodline aura. These demons have been influenced for too long to be pureborn succubi anymore. In Abyssal terms, they’re just a mutated offshoot. Stoneheart succubi."

When it came to the Abyss and succubi, Kaidric—who hailed from the Abyssal World himself—was the undisputed expert. He knew them far better than Orion or the Commander ever could.

"Heh... Even across a continent, I can smell the pure succubus scent drifting off The Lifeless Expanse. My friend, want me to snatch that little wench so she can dance just for you?" Kaidric’s grin was even sleazier than the Commander’s. One had to wonder if they had bonded over such shared, degenerate tastes.

"Mind your own business," the Commander said. "That’s Orion’s catch. Once that little wife of his hits a bottleneck and fails to reach demigod, we’ll see if Orion still keeps her around."

Realization dawned on Kaidric. A sharp glint flickered in his eyes.

"Are we being dishonorable by holding back?" The conversation finally circled back to the real issue. Kaidric didn’t want to risk souring an alliance with someone like Orion over current events.

"Of course we are. It’s completely dishonorable," the Commander agreed. "But if we compensate for his losses—if we give him far more than he ever expected—then being ’dishonorable’ transforms into an ’adaptive strategy’. You can’t exactly label grand strategy as ’bad form,’ can you?"

The Commander finally pulled his gaze from the dancers and met Kaidric’s eyes.

"Compensate his losses? Adaptive strategy?" Kaidric paused, then quickly caught on. "We can play it like that? Is he stupid? Will he even buy that?"

By asking that, Kaidric was basically assuming Orion was a gullible fanboy who would swallow whatever the Commander fed him.

"Are you stupid?" The Commander stared at Kaidric like he was the real idiot. "Would a fool willingly fuse a hard-won Divine Vessel into the Titanion Realm? Would an idiot be capable of forging this absolute masterpiece of a board state?"

Kaidric just chuckled, entirely unbothered. If the Commander said so, it meant he already had a plan to smooth over whatever resentment Orion would harbor after this crisis.

"Watch the show. The real fool is making a move."

In the packed tavern, Kaidric and the Commander tilted their heads back. Their gazes pierced the ceiling, peering into the void, locking onto the World Tree and the catastrophic battle raging beyond the realm.

The surrounding crowd noticed absolutely nothing. To the mercenaries, the two men might as well not exist.

Beyond the world’s borders, right as the Titanion Realm was pushed to the brink of destruction, a hidden mastermind finally snapped. Abandoning the safety of the chessboard, they plunged into the fray.

Skreeee!

An insect shrieked.

As the cry echoed, space tore open. The cosmos shuddered, and all elemental energies, faith, and divine power receded like a terrified tide.

An insectoid stellar core blasted out of the spatial rift. It descended beyond The Realm Barrier, instantly shattering the colossal serpent manifested by the Four-Faced Beast, yanking the Titanion Realm back from the edge of annihilation.

As the serpent’s energy dissipated, the true form of the progenitor insect was revealed.

It was a Void Progenitor. Its carapace was armored with scales forged from solidified spatial fragments. Twenty-four pairs of scythe-like appendages slashed at the void; every single movement folded time and warped space.

But its most horrifying feature was its maw. It possessed no flesh or mandibles—only a swirling vortex, a black hole deeper and vastly more massive than the one the Four-Faced Beast wielded.

"Void Insectoids? Shouldn’t it be God-Devouring insects?" Kaidric frowned. This contradicted his intelligence.

"Nothing strange about it. Void Insectoids and God-Devouring swarms are both offshoots of the insectoids. The swarm here in the Titanion Realm is a hybrid of the two," Commander Thresh said, glancing at the cosmic beast to pass his verdict. "This Void Progenitor isn’t that strong. It’s no match for the Four-Faced Beast."