The battlefield was silent.
Smoke drifted lazily over shattered stone and broken banners. Blood soaked the cracked ground. The Imperius warships still hovered above like dark clouds, but no one moved, and no one spoke.
They couldn't.
Every soldier, every officer, and every attendant who had witnessed the scene stood frozen in place, their minds struggling to process the impossible.
Their patriarch—Adrian Evan Imperius—had been kidnapped.
Not by an ancient monster.
Not by a rival SSS-rank powerhouse.
By a boy who wasn't even half his age.
If anyone had heard that story without seeing it, they would never have stopped laughing. They would have called it a joke, a bad rumor, an insult. And yet, they had seen it with their own eyes: Adrian had turned into motes of light and been sucked into a ring on Arthur's finger, right before that same boy tore open space and disappeared.
The shame sank in slowly.
Then Agnus screamed.
