The sky went wrong all at once.
Patches of shadow peeled off the storm clouds and flew—hundreds of shapes, fast and angry, breaking formation and streaking toward the horizons. Their roars sounded like burning metal.
Guy snapped his head up, eyes narrowing. "These cowards… they're going for the civilians!" He turned, voice like a whip. "We split—now!"
"Calm and coordinated," Veldora said, already weaving storm-sigils with one hand. Even in his human form he looked like a king carved from thunder. "I'll anchor the field. Defend the nations. No city burns on our watch."
Above them, unseen, Saiki drifted on invisible air, spooning coffee jelly like this was a late-night snack. "Yare yare… crisis management speedrun," he muttered, amused.
Vorathis' laugh rolled across the land. "Scatter as you please. You cannot be everywhere."
"Watch us," Velgrynd shot back, gold eyes blazing.
Veldora's voice boomed in all their minds at once—clean, steady, decisive. "Assignments: Velgrynd—Eastern Empire. Velzard—Dwargon. Guy and Diablo—Ruberios front, then pivot to Falmuth. Testarossa with Ultima—Blumund and Sarion corridors. Carrera—Eurazania wall. Milim—sky patrol, intercept anything that slips the nets. Move."
Velgrynd drew a circle with her palm. Aetherburn Corridors—a ribbon of molten light—unspooled under her feet and shot east like a flaming highway.
She erupted over the Eastern Empire's capital as shrieking, armored wyverns dove for the palace spires. Rudra rose from the balcony, hand half-raised—then froze when the sky turned scarlet.
"Stand down," Velgrynd said, voice ringing like a bell. She clapped once. Scarlet Maelstrom spiraled from her, a cyclone of compressed heat that caught the first wave and baked them to ash without touching a single tile below.
A triple-headed drake broke through, jaws opening, hurling a wedge of black gravity. Velgrynd's lips curved. "Cute."
She thrust two fingers forward. Phoenix Vortex Spear. A lance of spinning fire punched through the drake and blossomed into a fireflower high above the city, the explosion curving outward and upward—never down.
Rudra stared, stunned. "You… aimed the blast away from us."
"I can aim," she said, already gone—chasing the next herd streaking for the border forts.
Dwargon
Dwargon's mountains glimmered under a sudden aurora of ice. Velzard floated in silently, blue eyes calm. The dwarven forges flickered through the snow haze—then the monsters came: iron-mawed giants throwing chunks of frozen night.
Velzard exhaled. Absolute Zero Baptism. The world went glass-clear; sound itself slowed. Chunks of "night" froze midair, frost crawling across their surfaces until they were delicate sculptures.
She touched the first with a fingertip. Diamond Coffin. The sculpture shattered into glittering dust that chilled the shockwaves to nothing.
A behemoth charged, hide plated in anti-magic scales. Velzard's eyes softened. "Sleep."
The temperature dipped one more breath. Eternity Frost. The behemoth slowed, slowed, then stopped—locked in a beautiful, painless stillness. She lifted her hand and guided the statue down into a glacier crevasse, out of harm's way.
"Dwargon holds," she said softly, and stepped through a snow-portal to the next threat line.
Ruberios' cathedral district shook as winged horrors swarmed its spires. Guy arrived like a stormfront, cloak snapping.
"Diablo," he said, smirking, "don't get jealous if I save more."
Diablo's smile could've cut stone. "Guy, I will endeavor to leave you a few survivors."
Guy snapped his fingers. Crimson Dominion. A ring of red light slammed outward, carving a clean sphere around the city. Everything that crossed the line boiled to vapor; the line itself never wavered.
A titan bat dove inside the ring, its scream bending the air. Guy turned his palm. Cardinal Rift. The bat folded into a thin line of existence and vanished—clean, bloodless, elegant.
Diablo walked the air like a staircase. Chains of black script coiled from his sleeves. Hell Court: Ninth Bench. Each chain speared a monster and pinned it mid-flight inside invisible cages.
Diablo's voice was velvet and merciless. "Judgment: Erasure."
The cages inverted. The monsters were gone, as if they'd never existed.
"Falmuth is screaming," Guy said, glancing west.
"I'll wrap here. Do greet them with style," Diablo bowed.
Guy tore open a red seam in reality and stepped through. Diablo's shadow lengthened. New attackers swarmed. Diablo sighed, delighted. "Very well, encore."
Abyssal Bloom unfurled—black fire blooming like roses—catching the next wave and eating their reality clean.
Blumund's plains; Sarion's forest edges—two fronts at once. Testarossa drew Silver Tribunal across the sky, a grid of shining law-sigils that mapped every hostile heartbeat and marked them with hair-thin light.
"Precision only," she murmured. Argent Guillotine. Threads tightened. Heads dropped—no spillover, not a single hut singed.
Ultima clapped cheerfully, eyes glinting. "My turn!"
She exhaled a shimmering cloud and bit her thumb, flicking droplets into the mist. Plague Rosary. Pearls of anti-matter plague seeded the cloud, then blossomed only when they touched marked targets. The air chimed like a music box as enemies blinked out—poof, poof, poof.
A hulking centipede ripped open a tear underground to pop beneath a village. Testarossa's heel tapped once. Nocturne Lock. Space shivered; the centipede emerged… inside a tiny silver cube, unable to move, unable to scream.
Ultima wiggled her fingers at the cube. "Boop." Pandora Kiss. The cube turned into confetti.
"Charming," Testarossa said, lips lifting. "Sarion secured. Crossing to Blumund's south flank."
"Save me a few~," Ultima sang, skipping through a portal.
Eurazania's border canyons cracked under the stomp of a rhino-drake coated in annihilation runes. Carrera cracked her knuckles, grinning like a maniac.
"Hey, big guy. Race to the bottom?"
The drake fired a beam that carved a canyon. Carrera skated along the beam's edge, boots sparking. Railgun Cataclysm! She launched a coil of compressed kinetic rounds that wrapped the beam, chewed it up, and smashed into the drake's chest.
It staggered—and charged.
"Now we're talking!" Carrera slammed her palms to the ground. Atomic Quake. The bedrock pulsed once—hard—turning the ground beneath the drake to rubber then stone again. It face-planted at Mach 3.
She raised her hand, caught the beast's horn like it weighed nothing, and suplexed it into the canyon wall. The rune-plates shattered. The shockwave veered sideways into empty desert, neatly shaped by her Blast Corridors so no village felt more than a breeze.
"Next!"
Milim zipped higher than the clouds, eyes blazing pink, scanning for stragglers. A swarm of needle-wasps arrowed toward a trade road. Milim turned into a comet.
"Get AWAY from them!"
She vanished, then reappeared behind the swarm. Dragon Nova: Scatterburst. A galaxy of tiny novas detonated in midair, each micro-star hugging a wasp and folding it into bright nothing.
A serpent clouded in fear magic hissed at a caravan. Milim punched the fear out of the air. "Boo." Starbreaker Punch. The serpent folded like origami and drifted into sparkles.
She hovered for a second, breathing, wings spread wide. Then she heard crying—a village square, people pointing at a falling shadow.
Milim vaulted past sound. Meteor Skip. She collided with the shadow—a fortress-sized beetle—caught it by the mandibles, spun, and hurled it into the uninhabited hills. It exploded in a bouquet of dirt. She flashed a thumbs-up toward the village.
"Go inside! I got this!"
They couldn't hear, but she waved anyway, and then she was off again, laughter trailing behind her like a ribbon.
Falmuth's royal quarter was about to be erased by a rain of bone javelins. Guy stepped out of red light, bored.
"Tacky."
He traced a rectangle in the air. Regal Lattice. Every javelin folded at perfect right angles and fell harmlessly into a neat stack—then the stack teleported into the ocean.
A crowned nightmare dove for him, screaming. Guy leaned aside and sighed. Zero Dominion. Space hit mute. The nightmare froze in a bubble where time didn't move, its scream hanging like a statue.
Guy flicked it away like lint.
"Next."
Through it all, Veldora remained at the staging ground, hands moving in patient, royal arcs. Lightning sigils tethered to distant horizons. Storm King's hand rose over each threatened nation—thin as silk, strong as mountains.
He felt every strike echo through the net: Velgrynd's heat, Velzard's cold, Guy's razor geometry, Diablo's velvet annihilation, Ultima's mischievous plague, Testarossa's surgical light, Carrera's earthquakes, Milim's starbursts.
"Good. Very good," Veldora murmured, eyes half-lidded, voice low and proud. "My champions, you are harmony in a hurricane."
Saiki floated above him, spoon poised. "They're buying the illusion perfectly," he said to himself, amused. "Yare yare… method acting with global stakes."
Vorathis' voice purred across the sky again. "Shall I show you more? Every road, every home, every prayer—turning to smoke?"
The horizons flickered with new armies, new screams. The team pivoted, faster, smarter—adapting. For every decoy flock, a counter. For every feint, a net.
Veldora (telepathy): "Status."
Velgrynd: "Capital secure. Border five hot. Moving to intercept."
Velzard: "Dwargon is calm. I am escorting a refugee caravan—no casualties."
Guy: "Falmuth is tidy. I left them a neat pile of regrets."
Diablo: "Ruberios sings a hymn of silence. Proceeding to mop-up."
Testarossa: "Blumund stabilized. Sarion line secure. Ultima?"
Ultima: "Hee-hee—no more bugs. Saving some for dessert!"
Carrera: "Threw a mountain at a lizard. The mountain won."
Milim: "I'm good! Ten more squadrons, then snacks!"
Veldora smiled faintly. "Hold formation. Remember—strength without care is a storm with no shepherd. Guide your power."
"'Guide your power,' he says," Velgrynd muttered, but her heat ring curved just a hair safer around a watchtower. Velzard's next frost caught a stray shard inches before it would've pierced a roof. Guy's lattice shifted to catch tumbling debris. Diablo's cages rotated to redirect an explosion upward like a firework.
They were fighting like gods—and thinking like guardians.
The sky bled a deeper black. A line of colossal silhouettes marched across the clouds—cities high, world-ending wide.
"You cannot protect everything," Vorathis murmured, voice intimate as breath. "Not the farms. Not the ferries. Not the forgotten. Choose what matters to you, and watch the rest fall."
Veldora's eyes hardened. "No."
Thunder gathered in his palms. Basilisk Array. A web of storm-lines arced to every active front, doubling their shields with his power without stealing their control. The world hummed like a harp.
"You forget," he said, voice ringing across their link, "we do not fight alone."
Above him, Saiki licked his spoon clean, eyes half-lidded. "Yare yare… nice speech, king."
Minutes stretched into a long, burning hour. The "world" shook, cracked, screamed.
But no city fell.
Velgrynd's corridors carved safe lanes for evacuation that never had to be used. Velzard's frost turned avalanches into snowfall and monsters into sculptures. Guy's geometry made artillery look stupid. Diablo's courts erased nightmares with clean, quiet judgments. Testarossa drew fatal lines so thin no innocent ever crossed one. Ultima's plagues were playful, precise, and terrifying. Carrera broke titans with physics homework and laughter. Milim stitched the sky closed with joy and meteors.
Vorathis' army kept coming.
And then… in the weird hush between two thunderclaps… the air changed.
Something old and awful pressed through the last, darkest portal.
Veldora turned slowly to face it, eyes bright as storms.
"Champions," he said, voice low, warm, unshakable, "you have guarded the world. Now let me guard you."
The shadow stepped through, swallowing light.
Veldora's cape lifted in the wind. He smiled—not cocky, not careless—just a king ready to carry the weight.
Saiki, above and unseen, tipped his cup of coffee jelly in a lazy salute.
"Yare yare," he whispered. "Boss fight time."