The sky above the Warpgate Citadel was cracked.
Fractured lines ran like spiderwebs across the firmament, revealing a pulsing rift where stars bled into the world. From this Gate—twisted and unstable—monsters spilled forth like nightmares incarnate.
They had no names.
They were not from this realm.
Dozens of elite Voidbinders, mercenary mages, and corrupted knights surrounded the gate, trying to contain the monsters' tide. Most failed. Claws laced with abyssal mist sliced through magic shields like paper. Wings the size of towers darkened the light. Screams echoed through the battlefield.
But none of that mattered.
Because he had arrived.
The battlefield quieted as the temperature dropped and the sky dimmed further—not from clouds, but from his presence alone.
A single man walked across the blood-soaked field.
Clad in robes darker than space itself, his face hidden beneath a jagged, crown-like helm forged from inverse starlight. His very aura bent the gate—reality rippling around him like glass warping under fire.
They called him...
Noctyros.
The King of Inversion.
Supreme Commander of the Shadow Consortium.
"Stand back," Noctyros said. His voice was calm, serene.
The Voidbinders obeyed without hesitation.
The monsters noticed him too. They surged at once—seven at first: a serpent made of solar wind, a behemoth of frozen bone, and a winged beast with a maw that devoured magic itself.
Noctyros did not draw a weapon.
Instead, he raised his left hand.
A black sigil appeared beneath his palm—a reversed version of the Leo constellation, warped and burning with negative flame. Not fire, but something older, something wrong.
"Let their light become ash."
The black flame erupted outward in an elegant spiral. The sky turned inside-out as the flame didn't burn the monsters—it unwove them, atom by atom, constellation by constellation.
Screams turned to silence.
The first wave of beasts disintegrated.
But the Gate pulsed again.
A second wave emerged.
Worse.
From its depths came a Celestial Tyrant—a Level IX Riftspawn. A creature born from the core of collapsed stars. Towering above even the citadel, it stepped through the gate with three faces: one crying, one silent, and one furious.
Its voice was a choir of ruined gods.
"You dare claim the stars not meant for you?"
Noctyros looked up at it—not with fear, but with pity.
"You are a fossil," he said. "Clinging to a cosmos that has already turned against itself."
He raised his right hand.
From the sky descended a mirror.
Massive. Shimmering. Forged from celestial glass.
As the Tyrant lunged, the mirror rotated—catching the creature's gaze.
And in an instant, it saw itself.
But not as it was.
It saw itself unborn.
It saw the moment of its death before it had lived.
It screamed.
The Gate shuddered.
The Tyrant collapsed into dust.
Noctyros crushed the dust beneath his boot.
Then he turned to his commanders, who waited in silence.
"Seal the Gate," he said, his tone as casual as asking for tea. "Bind the remaining rift-core to the Inversion Lattice. We'll need three more Gates conquered by month's end. The stars are aligning."
One of the commanders hesitated. "My lord, what of the Leo Prince? Reports say he survived the Echo—and the Sigil Hunters failed."
Noctyros paused.
Then chuckled.
"A lion's roar is loudest when it knows it's dying."
He turned to the Gate and ran his fingers along the edge of its frame. It bent to him, as though the very laws of the realm obeyed his presence.
Then he whispered something in an old, pre-stellar tongue, and the Gate's light inverted, condensing into a single cube—no bigger than a child's heart.
A sealed Gate Core.
Harvested.
Owned.
Consumed.
From afar, astral seers trembled.
One of the ancient constellation elders—hidden deep in the Astral Council—watched through a lens of divine stardust.
"Noctyros… has begun his campaign."
"He is claiming the Gates."
"And worse—he is rewriting the stars."
End of Chapter 13