An absolute, ringing silence descended upon the chamber, a quiet so profound it was more deafening than the preceding chaos. It was the silence of a tomb, a vacuum left where power once resided.
Dust, the atomized remains of a century-old obsidian table and priceless crystal artifacts, drifted through the air like mournful spirits, catching the fractured light from the groaning, Aether-infused walls.
Two Silver Guards, one Gold Guard, and Commander Magnus—the martial pride of the Wintercroft family, heroes who stood at the absolute zenith of Zenith City's C-Rank power structure, masters who could make a figure like Captain Comet seem like a novice—all lay broken and unconscious.
They were little more than discarded puppets against the far wall, their state-of-the-art armor crumpled like waste paper, their formidable Aether cores silenced.
And the battle, terrifyingly, still wasn't over.
"You're next," Lyra's voice sliced through the stillness. It wasn't a shout, but a low, hungry promise that coiled in the air.
A wild, predatory laugh bubbled in her throat as her burning gaze, filled with the thrill of the hunt, pivoted to lock onto the four noble parents.
Orion landed beside his sister as silently as a falling shadow, the last vestiges of his glacial power reabsorbing into his core. He offered the four rulers of the city a sneer that was somehow both charming and utterly contemptuous.
"Can you defend against this?" he asked, his voice a silken mockery. "From mere Sump rats?"
His momentum, a chilling, absolute cold that promised an inevitable end, superimposed itself over Lyra's storm of chaotic, kinetic energy. The two forces, yin and yang of destruction, merged into an oppressive aura that made the very air feel thick and heavy, like liquid lead.
For the first time in their lives, Theron, Kaelen, Elara, and Alya felt a tremor of genuine fear. Their eyes widened, and without a shred of their former restraint, their Aether cores detonated.
An immense pressure, a true cataclysm that dwarfed even Commander Magnus's peak output, howled across the ravaged chamber, forcing the glittering dust to the floor and scouring the walls anew.
Four distinct, overwhelming torrents of power—two of glacial ice, two of solar plasma—erupted, threatening to tear the fabric of the room asunder.
Theron Wintercroft's eyes, usually pools of icy calm, narrowed into furious slits.
"You dare!" he roared, his voice booming with the authority of a lifetime of command. "I admit, your value is terrifying. Your potential, world-shaking. But even a dragon must know when to take a step ba—"
"Shut up and take our strike!" Lyra's retort was like a physical blow, utterly disrespectful and brutally decisive.
She clasped her hands together, a gesture of prayer that promised only damnation. As she pulled them apart, a vortex of pure, untamed power materialized between her palms.
With a guttural cry, she thrust her hands forward, and the vortex surged out, condensing into a raging, chaotic tornado of high-frequency vibrating Aether that shrieked as it tore through the air.
At the exact same instant, an opposing force howled out from Orion. The absolute-zero cold clinging to him vanished, replaced by a searing, sun-like heat that bleached the air of color. A second spear, identical in form to its icy twin but forged from incandescent, hard light, roared into existence in his free hand.
His power surged again, climbing to a degree that dwarfed the combined momentum of everyone in the room.
"This...!" Kaelen Vance's voice was a choked gasp. He and his wife Alya stared, utterly bewildered, their own solar Aethers recoiling in shock. They recognized that quantum signature, that specific wavelength of photonic energy.
It was Lisanna's talent, the sacred bloodline of House Vance, perfectly replicated. But this was no fledgling power; it was wielded with a terrifying depth of control and a raw, untainted purity their daughter had yet to even dream of achieving.
They had no time to ponder the horrifying implications. Not when they faced a pressure that made their very souls tremble.
"HAH!"
Theron, Kaelen, Elara, and Alya bellowed as one, surging the absolute might of their strongest skills. Above their heads, the air buckled.
Theron and Elara condensed a vast phantom moon of glacial ice, a celestial body of absolute zero that radiated an aura of entropy.
Kaelen and Alya manifested a colossal phantom sun of burning plasma, a miniature star that pulsed with the fury of a solar flare.
These were their ultimate techniques, the culmination of their bloodlines, powerful enough to level districts and turn armies to ash.
In that moment, as the vibrating Aether tornado soared toward them, a flash of profound insight ignited in Orion's mind. His System, the [Progenitor's Legacy], screamed with data, analyzing the clashing forces, the four C-Rank ultimate skills, and the two paradoxical energies he now held in his hands.
A new path, a terrifying fusion, unlocked in his consciousness.
With a cold, decisive grace, he thrust both the ice spear and the light spear forward simultaneously.
They did not fly as two separate attacks. In a spectacle that defied every known law of Aether physics, they merged. Ice and light, frost and fire, entwined into a single, spiraling beam of paradoxical energy—an annihilating torrent of icy light and frozen fire that tore a screaming wound in space as it advanced.
The combined attack simply overwhelmed all other momentum in the room. Its presence was so absolute that Chloe, her face pale, instantly triggered the chamber's final emergency defense protocol.
A thick wall of reinforced, Aether-infused steel erupted from the floor, and she threw herself and the two girls behind it, layering her own shimmering golden barrier on top for good measure.
The four noble parents felt a primal, gut-wrenching horror grip their souls.
This wasn't a power they could fight.
It was a judgment.
A thunderous shattering rocked the entire chamber and even extended to the Wintercroft Manor, the shockwave propagating outwards, startling maids, butlers, and security personnel across the vast estate.
The vibrating tornado and the ice-light spear smashed apart everything in their path. The four massive phantom constructs—the ultimate techniques of four peak C-Rank nobles—resisted for less than a single, agonizing second.
Crazed shockwaves of conflicting energy erupted in every direction before the phantom moon and sun were not merely broken, but unmade, dissolving into a chaotic storm of inert particles.
In that split second of impending doom, the parents roared in defiance, surging their most powerful defensive skills. Layered walls of diamond-hard glacial ice and shields of hyper-compressed plasma materialized before them.
Yet even these defenses, tough enough to withstand a tactical missile strike, could only hold for a heartbeat before they, too, were violently shattered into nothing.
The remaining, untamed force of the attack, chaotic and absolute, brutally smashed into the four nobles.
"AHH!"
A harmony of shrieks, stripped of all dignity, tore from their throats as their personal Aether defenses failed catastrophically. Their bodies were ruthlessly thrown across the floor like ragdolls, blood arcing from their lips as they tumbled and skidded through the debris, carving new trenches in the broken floor before finally coming to a rest in a tangled heap.
Seconds ticked by, each one stretching into an eternity.
The violent shockwaves slowly subsided, their echoes fading into the groaning of stressed architecture.
Silence.
A complete, and utter, abyss-like silence filled the ruined chamber.
Behind the now-retracting steel barrier, Elysia, Lisanna, and Chloe stood utterly, completely gobsmacked, their minds refusing to process the scene before them.
Four C-Rank nobles. The absolute rulers of Zenith City. The masters of the Apex, whose every word could decide the fate of millions. They now lay scattered across the floor, completely and utterly defeated.
Theron, Kaelen, Elara, and Alya weren't as catastrophically injured as their guards, but they were groaning in agony, struggling and failing to even push themselves to their knees.
"This... this..." Elysia and Lisanna could only stutter, their minds a canvas of white noise. No words existed to describe this reality. There was nothing in their lives, nothing in their entire conception of the world, that could make sense of this apocalyptic scene.
Into that abyss, Lyra's loud, carefree giggle rippled across the destroyed chamber, a sound utterly alien in the solemn wreckage.
Her laugh drew every eye.
"Princesses," she called out, planting her hands on her hips, her expression one of pure, unadulterated amusement. "Don't let your jaws drop to the floor now. Like we said, this is only the tip of the iceberg. You'd better start getting used to this kind of scene."
"You...!" Elysia narrowed her eyes at Lyra, the sheer audacity in that casual, mocking tone somehow piercing through her shock, if only for a second.
Lisanna, however, let out a shaky giggle of her own, her shock mutating into a familiar, dazzling brightness. "You can't say she isn't consistent, Ellie!"
In that moment, Orion stepped forward, the remnants of his paradoxical power dissolving from his hands into harmless motes of light and frost.
He flashed the two girls a disarmingly charming smile. "She's right, in a way. Elysia, Lisanna... it won't be long before you two are standing shoulder to shoulder with us. It'll be a great team. My sister, and two lovely maidens who I find are absolutely adorable and elegant at the same time."
"Shameless!" Elysia instantly shouted, a furious blush climbing her neck and ears as she completely forgot the defeated, bleeding parents on the floor. "Mind the time and place!"
Even Lisanna gained a large, matching blush, puffing out her cheeks in a flustered pout. "You're too bold! Playboy!"
Witnessing this scene—their precious daughters, the heirs to their legacy, blushing and bickering with the very man who had just systematically dismantled their entire power structure—caused a wave of profound, suffocating despair to engulf Theron, Kaelen, Elara, and Alya.
It was painfully, crushingly evident. These two Sump rats—no, these two nightmarish anomalies—had already sunk their claws deep into their daughters' hearts and minds.
Theron let out a long, pained sigh, the sound a mix of rattling breath and broken pride. Pushing himself onto one elbow, his voice, now stripped of its arrogance and left with only weary, shattered pragmatism, gained everyone's attention.
"Just... what do you two want?"
There was nothing else to say. They had all been easily, contemptuously defeated. Neither Orion nor Lyra looked the least bit winded. This kind of monstrous power didn't belong in Zenith City. It didn't belong in a C-Rank Province. This was the power of a natural disaster given human form.
Orion's casual smile returned, his gaze sweeping over the defeated nobles with the air of a landlord inspecting a new property.
"I'll say the same thing I told your daughters," he stated, his tone light but his words carrying the weight of an unbreakable decree. "We're here to make a change. With me, and my sister, at the helm of everything."
He walked forward, his footsteps echoing in the silence, stopping just short of the broken parents. His shadow fell over them, a stark, definitive eclipse.
"Consider this a new partnership," he announced. "You just have new leading allies now."
The vast chamber, ripped open and ravaged by the siblings' casual power, fell silent once more. The only sounds were the groans of stressed crystal architecture and the ragged, pained breathing of the four most powerful people in Zenith City.
Theron, Kaelen, Elara, and Alya slowly, agonizingly, pushed themselves into sitting positions on the debris-strewn floor. The pain stinging their ribs was a dull ache compared to the glacial shock freezing their minds.
But they were rulers. Even in the face of total, humiliating defeat, their focus snapped immediately to the new, terrifying reality.
Kaelen Vance, forcing the blood from his lip with his tongue, spoke first. His voice was a strained rasp, all its fiery arrogance burned away. "And... I assume our new 'leading allies'... would be you two?"
A loud, sharp giggle cut through the tension.
"Hey, look at that!" Lyra mocked, pointing a thumb at him as she rolled her shoulders, not a single drop of sweat on her brow. "A solid beating really does knock the sense into you! You learn fast for old-timers."
The noble parents went utterly silent, their expressions a complex mask of fury, humiliation, and grim acceptance. They watched Orion, whose charming, casual smile had never once wavered, as if he'd just finished a light jog rather than single-handedly dismantling their world.
They watched Lyra, whose mocking sneer was open and contemptuous, a predator who had finished playing with her food.
But most importantly, they watched their daughters.
Lisanna and Elysia were already walking toward the siblings, their steps hesitant but undeniable. The fear and anxiety they'd felt upon entering were gone, replaced by a bewildering mix of profound shock and... a strange, terrifying acceptance.
Even Chloe, their most trusted protector, trailed behind the girls, her posture relaxed, her deference aimed not at them, but at the new center of gravity in the room.
That single visual—their heirs and their strongest guardian aligning so naturally with the invaders—forced the four parents to internally sigh as one.
The fight was over long before the first Aether had been unleashed.
What more could they possibly do?
Once, in the primitive years people now only read about in historical data files, power meant armies. It meant technology, wealth, and strategic weapons.
A single person, no matter how skilled, could not overpower a nation.
But the First Wave had changed the very definition of reality.
Now, power was singular. Individuals existed who could shatter mountains with a fist, ignore nuclear ordinances as if they were firecrackers, and bend the laws of physics by sheer force of will.
A single B-Rank hero was considered a terrifying one-man army, a living weapon that could dominate any C or D-Rank Province with absolute, unquestionable ease.
And there was no need to even mention the horrifying legends that were A-Rank or the god-like S-Rank Heroes.
It was precisely for this reason that the world was fractured into regulated Provinces. The system wasn't just administrative; it was containment. It was a cage built on a global scale, designed to ensure that an A-Rank entity couldn't simply walk into a C-Rank territory and establish absolute dominion overnight.
Cascadia, for all its technological marvels and societal structure, was a C-Rank Province. They were the strongest fish in a carefully protected, artificially maintained pond, and they had spent their entire lives mastering its rules.
Today, two dragons had been born in their pond.
Orion and Lyra were that anomaly. They were the terrifying, nation-toppling powerhouses who should, by all rights, have been born and cultivated in an A-Rank superstructure.
But by some cruel twist of fate, they were here. And they were growing at a rate that defied all comprehension, threatening to shatter the very cage that was meant to keep the world in balance.