"Have you decided?"
Phoebe looked up from the cage. She'd been quiet since Elyndor left, not exactly sulking, but hollowed out. The thing she'd spent her existence protecting was gone, and the planet she called home was already dying around her.
"The Arboriel that even the Dimensional Demons couldn't destroy…" She said, "…has been destroyed at Your Majesty's hands."
"If it weren't for me." Haru said coldly, "You'd all be dead within ten years, including her. Remember that."
Phoebe was quiet for a moment. Then, slowly, the tension in her face eased. It was hard to argue against facts.
"I want to see the Endless Continent." She said at last.
He dropped the cage, "Then go."
She bowed slightly and rose into the air. Behind her, thousands of native True Gods fell into formation, and below them tens of billions of native creatures began to move. The entire remaining population of Arboriel were following their Goddess into the unknown.
Haru watched them go. Phoebe didn't look back, but something in her had shifted. Whatever her instincts were telling her about the battle to come, they seemed to be pointing at him. She left carrying that certainty, even if she hadn't said it aloud.
…
The underground shuddered. Then shuddered again, harder. The planet was dying. The surface was already gone, and the underground was beginning to follow. Without Elyndor, the process would accelerate rapidly.
Celestia turned to Haru, her voice respectful and steady, "Lord Almighty, shall I summon the Imperial Army? It's time to return to the Endless Continent."
The underground was falling apart. Boulders the size of cities fell from the ceiling and hit the ground with impacts that shook the entire layers. Active volcanoes split open and magma poured down in orange rivers. The faint traces of vitality that had survived the Eye's feeding was gone, replaced by the smell of sulfur and death.
This was what a planet looked like when it lost its soul. Arboriel wouldn't disintegrate entirely, but in time, the underground layers would collapse and compress into a core, leaving behind an ordinary habitable planet. Enormous, nearly a hundred billion kilometers in diameter, but inert.
As Elyndor said, no Laws meant no extraordinary power. No mana, no Divine Laws, no path to Godhood. Whatever creatures survived would live and die as mortals, nothing more, until the day—if it ever came—that new Laws were born.
Haru watched the ceiling crack and said, "Let them finish the job first."
The war in the third layer wasn't over. More than a billion demons were still fighting, still refusing to surrender—not to Haru's forces, not even to some naive evil-aligned Castle Lords. That was their nature. Every other race, even evil-aligned ones, was an enemy to them.
Accepting demons would have been suicidal anyway as the GM would've given them a warning and if they still accepted the demon as their subordinate, they would've simply vanished. The GM wouldn't even need to take action. They would be declared enemies of the entire Endless Continent. At that time, the Pantheons of Faith and Empires of Truth would take care of it.
Even Haru wouldn't dare to take a Demon as his subordinate, not without converting them through the Holy Grail first. The Faith Pantheons alone had more than ten known Supreme Gods and tens of millions of True Gods. The Empire 'only' had three Supreme Gods and fewer than a hundred thousand true Gods. This was not a fight Haru would pick. Not yet.
…
He turned to the sealed Eye of the Abyss. The blood-red pupil trembled when Haru looked at it. It had watched him absorb the origin of the Abyss Law. Watched him break through to the late-stage of Supreme God Tier from Elyndor's feedback.
It watched him handle everything in this underground with the particular calm of someone who had already decided how things would go and was simply working through the sequence.
The Eye was a top-quality Supreme God Tier artifact, ancient and proud, built by the Demon Emperor himself, and right now it was afraid.
"The Demon Emperor's origin imprint is inside me." it said, trying for menace, "Attack me, and he'll lock onto you directly. When the Divine War begins, your empire will be the first target—"
"He can't lock me." Haru interrupted, "You know that."
The Eye said nothing.
"I'll give you two choices." Haru said, "Let me erase the Demon Emperor's imprint and take you as my own, or I destroy your spirituality, and you become a dead tool."
"I choose…"
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