"Then we target the Dark Empire instead. Our Divine Power Sources are similar, both from the Light and Holy Factions. We just need to disguise our Gods as Angels, alter their appearance, and strike the Dark Empire's powerhouses. The Dark Empire will have no way to tell us apart from the Angels."
The ministers straightened.
Another minister spoke up. "Your Majesty, what if the Dark Empire simply submits? If they believe it's the Great Aetherium warning them against overreach, they may choose to bow their heads and withdraw rather than fight back. The Great Aetherium is powerful enough that silence would be the rational response."
Asher paused. It was a fair point. Even if the actual Angels killed the Dark Empire's powerhouses, swallowing the humiliation quietly was entirely within the Dark Empire's calculations.
"Then we remove the rational response from the table." He said, "Kill their heirs."
Gods had almost no fertility. For many of them, a single heir represented thousands of years of effort. Grief of that scale didn't stay rational.
"Wait until the Dark Empire has occupied enough territory that they feel bold. Then strike. It must be clean, no fingerprints, no time to think. Make them feel before they can reason. If they're already emboldened and suddenly furious, they won't swallow it."
In the hall, the ministers bowed. Several of them looked, for the first time all morning, like they had something to look forward to. The Dark Empire had chosen this moment to drive into their homeland while they were already bleeding. No one in the room would lose sleep over what came next.
…
Back at Havenloch.
The battlefield had been cleared. The loot was divided: fifty percent to the Great Aetherium, fifty split among the Castle Lords and Rangers who had fought.
No one complained. Without Haru's two Astral Cities and Airship Corps, the barrier might never have cracked. His Guardian Angels had also pulled fallen Castle Faction Gods back from death during the battle, hundreds of them, including Castle Lords and Rangers themselves who would otherwise have stayed dead. On the mortal level, they'd saved countless troops as well.
Among the two hundred thousand True Gods in the Great Aetherium's ranks. Several major Gods were suppressing the battlefield overhead. This victory had been possible because of them, and everyone knew it.
"Fifty percent of one city's loot is nothing." The Castle Lords said to each other. "The Light Empire spans tens of millions of kilometers. There are hundreds of such cities. We've only just started."
The army split.
From all five breach points—Havenloch, Novara, Helix City, Vireo, Axion—the castle faction's legions poured into the empire's heartland in different directions. Weaker forces hit villages and noble territories. Powerful ones followed maps toward fortified cities where elite imperial legions were garrisoned, because only supernaturals granted exp worth having.
The Evil and Undead faction Castle Lords moved differently. They stayed in the ruins longer, working their bone staves across the fields of the dead until their arms went numb, raising corpses into undead creatures and dark puppets. To them, every battlefield was a resource. What they were assembling would eventually become something closer to a natural disaster than an army.
…
In the east and southeast, the Dark Empire's advance was something else entirely.
The castle forces killed supernaturals and left everything else alone, civilians had almost no exp yield. The Dark Empire made no such distinction. Their feud with the Light Empire ran back hundreds of thousands of years, to the Ancient Era of Faith. Behind them, they left no corpses, only new dark faction creatures, swelling their ranks as they marched. An inch of grass, as the saying went. They left none.
…
Back in the Great Aetherium.
Haru stood in front of his four [God-level Angel Reincarnation Pools] and stared.
'Why is there one more?!'
Yesterday there were three of them. The God Level pools were easy to distinguish by size. Ordinary Level 9 pools ran a kilometer in diameter, God Level pools had three, and he could see at a glance that one of his ordinary pools was gone, replaced by a fourth God Level one.
The total number of pools hadn't changed. Still ten. But something had evolved overnight without his input, and he had no explanation for it.
Back in the capital, only two Supreme Gods were currently stationed: Haru himself, and Celestia, who was deep in retreat, working through the 1.6 million Godheads captured from the recent Divine War against the Evil Pantheon, extracting their law sources one by one.
Nova was still deployed at the front with Lysandra. She hadn't returned. Which meant she hadn't used today's building slot yet. So where did the fourth pool come from?
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