In the Light Empire's Imperial Capital, the temple hall held Asher and his twenty core ministers.
"They're not slowing down." One minister said, "The Demon Monarchs' projections appeared and the Castle Faction, instead of stopping, has accelerated their offensive. They want to finish us before the Battle of Planets begins."
Asher's face was stone. He knew exactly what the Castle Faction wanted, but had no capacity to stop them.
"The Great Aetherium's Angel Army…" Another minister said, with the flat effect of someone reporting a natural disaster, "It's simply too monstrous."
Asher understood the problem precisely. The other troops of the Great Aetherium were also stronger than usual, but within a range his ministers could analyze and plan around. The Angels were different. At equal level, an Angel wasn't fighting one-vs-one or even one-vs-three. They fought at least one-vs-five and they barely even felt it.
Light Empire's most elite troops had gone to the battlefield expecting a hard fight and found themselves dead before they could establish one. Even coordinated group assaults on individual Angels rarely worked.
What made it worse was understanding why it was so. Haru's Angels were the only troops that the GM recognized as combining every possible favor and advantage simultaneously. They were born with combat experience and skills already embedded. On top of that, the [Holy Light Temple], a god-level building, granted a flat twenty percent increase to both attack and defense across the entire Angel Army.
The Guardian Angels' defensive buffs added another layer of overall combat strength. The high ranking Angel commanders' legion-type divine blessings stacked further on top of that. The result was an Angel Army whose baseline was already exceptional and whose ceiling kept rising with every buff applied.
At equal rank, even pure-blooded Thunder Titans and pure-blooded Dimensional Demons, both God Class races with the same status as Angels, couldn't suppress the buffed Angels. The Light Empire's troops had no chance at all, and the more wings an Angel carried, the worse the gap became. The advantage compounded upward through every pair of wings added.
Then there were the Guardian Angels's resurrection spells. Every time an Imperial Army's troops fell, a Guardian Angel pulled them back. The Imperial Army was strong enough to win consistently, and nearly impossible to keep dead.
Asher had turned this over many times and arrived at the same place each time: the Angel Army was the lever. Remove it, and the Great Aetherium's advance dropped to something manageable. What he hadn't found was a way to remove it.
…
One of the core ministers named Baldwin stood up.
"Let me go." His voice was flat, decided, "Dismiss me from the empire, strip me of my official standing. Then I'll have no institutional connection to the Light Empire when I act. Whatever punishment the Laws deliver will fall on me alone, not on us. And with my strength, I can reach the battlefield and destroy their mortal army in a single strike. Every creature on that battlefield, Angels included. All of them will be wiped out."
Silence descended in the hall. Baldwin was a late-stage High God. In the central region of the Endless Continent, this was a name that carried weight. He had a realistic path to the Supreme God Tier someday. And he was proposing to spend that future on one battle, with full knowledge of what the Laws did to Gods who used Divine Power against mortal armies.
The other ministers looked at him with something between admiration and shame. If the positions were reversed, most of them would not be standing up.
Asher, from the throne, felt it too, and beneath the admiration, he felt the cold arithmetic. The Light Empire had more than twenty High Gods. If sacrificing one of them could destroy the Angel Army and slow the Great Aetherium's advance enough for the Battle of Planets to begin, that was not a bad trade. He was about to say so when another minister stood.
"It won't work."
The hall turned to him.
"Baldwin, your dedication is genuine, and I mean that. But you'll die for nothing. You won't even reach their mortal army."
Baldwin frowned, "I'm a High God—"
"The Great Aetherium has deployed 200,000 True Gods on the battlefield, with multiple Supreme Gods among them. You're a High God trying to approach a mortal army being protected by Supreme Gods. They will intercept you before you get close. And even if somehow you reached them, even if you got your one strike off and destroyed everything on the ground, their Guardian Angels would begin resurrecting the fallen immediately. Your sacrifice wouldn't hold."
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