Location: Battlefield of the Light Empire.
To the west, a million-meter lightsaber dropped out of the sky and detonated a city's barrier in a single strike.
Inside, tens of millions of mages were thrown backward, their spiritual consciousness had been linked to the barrier's core while they recharged it, and when it shattered without warning, the backlash hit them all at once. They hadn't even had time to disconnect.
The supernaturals who recovered first were furious.
"That was a God! An Eighteen-Winged Angel. I saw the phantom above the city! She used Divine Power on a mortal city. The Great Aetherium just broke the rules!"
Gods were prohibited from attacking mortals. This rule had been held since the Ancient Era's Divine War. Even the Dimensional Demons had observed it, their Demonic Gods working only in shadow, never openly, never where the attention of the planet's laws could land clearly. The penalty for open violation was simple: the Laws moved against you personally.
The supernaturals of the Light Empire waited for that penalty to arrive.
The Great Aetherium's army kept advancing. The city walls fell. The Demigod Tier battlefield overhead went against them. The Saints were overwhelmed. But the Laws said nothing.
The waiting stretched. The Great Aetherium's army didn't falter, it got stronger, capturing the four city walls in a sweep, destroying every war weapon mounted on them. And still no punishment came.
The collapse that followed wasn't just tactical.
"The Laws no longer protect us." Someone said, "If that's true, if the Laws have truly given up on us natives, then why are we still fighting to protect this planet? What's the point?"
It hit. The supernaturals on the walls had held their positions through everything, through the loss at the Demigod battlefield, through the barrier breaking, through the sight of Angels pouring in from all four sides. The idea that their home planet itself had stopped being fair was the thing that started breaking them.
Then a peak Demigod Tier powerhouse spoke, his expression tight.
"The Great Aetherium didn't break the rules. That wasn't a God attacking. It was an Astral City."
"The phantom of the Eighteen-Winged Angel was an energy construct, a weapon effect generated by the Astral City itself. The Astral City is a weapon of war, and such weapons aren't subject to the same restrictions as Gods directly using Divine Power.
Its output can reach High God Tier levels of force, but the Laws categorize it differently. That's why there's no punishment. The Great Aetherium isn't breaking the rules. It just found a loophole."
The city went quiet in a different way.
"The Astral City of the Great Aetherium has weapons that can kill High Gods?"
"The Nine Rings Tower of the Truth faction contains power comparable to a Supreme God. The Astral City is weaker than that, but not by as much as anyone would like."
It was a pointless comparison for the defenders of this particular city. The Angel army was already inside the walls.
…
The Guardian Angels moved through the battle behind the advance, pulling fallen Great Aetherium troops back from death. Whatever the fight cost them on paper, almost none of it was permanent.
The city fell in under two hours.
Surrendered supernaturals were absorbed immediately. In another Castle Lord's army, this would have been a loyalty problem, surrendered enemies were unpredictable, and most Castle Lords didn't dare trust them in the field, but Haru didn't share that concern.
One of the subsidiary effects of his natal artifact, the Scepter of Sovereignty, was forcing the loyalty of anyone who entered his empire's faction to a full 100 points. The moment a soldier of the Light Empire chose to surrender and join the Great Aetherium, their loyalty locked at maximum—absolute, permanent, indistinguishable from soldiers who had served Haru since day one. They turned around and marched on to the next city without hesitation.
The battlefield was cleaned. Loot was teleported to the rear. The army moved on.
Across two days of continuous city captures, the effects were compounding. The Great Aetherium's 1.8 million Holy Spirits had averaged up to Tier 8. King Tier and Saint Tier were within reach for most of them. Beyond that, Demigod Tier and then Godhood, was not a distant prospect for the stronger among them, provided the war kept feeding them targets.
On the battlefield, golden light flared constantly, promotion announcements, one after another, dense enough to be ambient. Stronger troops meant fewer losses. Fewer losses meant more kills. More kills meant more promotions. The cycle had been running for two days and was accelerating.
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