The sky above Earth darkened—not from clouds, but from presence.
The Grand Marshal, the Marshal, and the High Commander hovered above the hemisphere, the air around them convulsing like boiling water. Their armor dripped cosmic fluids, their weapons pulsed with void-born life, and each of them radiated a pressure that would've flattened continents.
But standing across from them—
hovering casually, arms loose at his sides—
was Armageddon.
Not roaring.
Not flexing.
Not posturing.
He simply existed.
And that alone was enough to distort the horizon.
A slow breeze pushed across the sky as if the entire atmosphere exhaled in dread.
The High Commander was the first to speak, voice cracking like a broken war drum.
"…You. You shouldn't be here."
Armageddon didn't blink.
His eyes glowed like two miniature suns—alive, ancient, too aware.
"I should be exactly here," he said.
His voice wasn't loud.
But it carried.
It settled into the bones of the world.
"This planet is under the Sovereign's protection."
The Grand Marshal lifted his chin, forcing a laugh that didn't fit his eyes.
"Protection? You think you can protect anything? The Father sent us. You're nothing compared to—"
Armageddon vanished.
One moment he was twenty meters away.
The next, he was directly in front of the Grand Marshal, their foreheads almost touching.
"Finish that sentence," Armageddon said quietly,
"and I'll tear it out of your skull."
The Grand Marshal stumbled backward in shock, his wings flaring open.
The Marshal hissed, raising his spear.
The High Commander shifted into a fighting stance, cosmic armor tightening.
Armageddon glanced downward.
Civilization glimmered far below—cities, oceans, forests, lives that had no idea what was hovering above them.
His expression hardened.
"No."
A pulse of power radiated from him—gentle, controlled—and the entire trio was flung upward, carried into the upper stratosphere by pure force.
The Grand Marshal screamed,
"What are you doing—?!"
Armageddon rose after them, slow, deliberate.
"We're not fighting over their heads."
Within seconds, they were above the clouds—above storms, above the breathable world—hovering in a vast ocean of cold blue.
Here, only sky and silence existed.
Armageddon stopped rising.
"Here," he said.
"This is where your graves will be."
The Marshal didn't wait.
He lunged first, spear whipping forward in a blur that tore a hole in the upper atmosphere.
The spear wasn't a weapon—it was a slab of pure annihilation, forged from a dead universe's heart.
Armageddon caught it with two fingers.
The Marshal's entire body convulsed.
"What—?!"
Armageddon's voice remained almost bored.
"You came to Earth carrying this?"
"I could sneeze and break it."
He snapped the spear in half between his fingers.
The Marshal screamed as the weapon's death-feedback blasted through his nervous system, ripping open his armor and hurling him backward like a meteor.
The Grand Marshal charged next, wings spreading like a collapsing galaxy.
Chains whipped toward Armageddon—chains that once bound a stellar consciousness, capable of enslaving gods.
Armageddon turned his head slightly.
The chains shattered against his shoulder.
"Those were supposed to bind Ashura himself!" the Grand Marshal roared.
"They wouldn't bind a wounded insect," Armageddon replied.
He flicked his wrist.
Just a flick.
A ripple spread through space—smooth, silent, beautiful.
The Grand Marshal's chest caved inward with a monstrous crack.
He was thrown so far back he vanished from the visible horizon, a streak of glowing debris arcing through the sky.
The High Commander was shaking.
His armor expanded, revealing dozens of eyes blinking open across his body.
Weapons unfolded like organic machinery.
Reality around him twisted into geometric shapes.
He whispered:
"…This… this wasn't in the Father's calculation."
"This wasn't—"
Armageddon appeared behind him in a heartbeat.
"Nothing involving the Sovereign ever is."
The High Commander spun, unleashing a dimensional shockwave meant to erase entire civilizations.
Armageddon walked through it.
And he didn't slow down.
"You fear Ashura."
He raised a glowing hand.
"And you should."
The High Commander froze, every eye wide with terror.
"Because while he fights your gods…
I fight you."
Armageddon's hand closed around the High Commander's skull.
A boom echoed across the heavens.
The High Commander slammed through three layers of atmosphere and vanished into the clouds below.
The Grand Marshal returned, blood spraying from his mouth, face twisted in fury.
"You monster!"
He dove with both wings ablaze.
Armageddon tilted his head.
"You came here to destroy a planet full of children."
"And you're calling me the monster?"
The Grand Marshal shrieked, swinging chains wrapped in anti-light—
Armageddon's fist met his face.
Not a punch.
A message.
The shockwave tore open the sky for hundreds of miles.
Clouds vaporized.
Air detonated.
Light bent.
The Grand Marshal plummeted, wings broken.
The Marshal rose again, charging with a roar of desperation.
Armageddon caught him by the throat mid-charge and held him in place, feet dangling.
"You three marched here thinking Ashura wouldn't prepare," he said softly.
"Do you really not understand…?"
He tightened his grip.
"I am the contingency."
The Marshal's armor cracked.
His body went limp.
Armageddon dropped him, letting him fall like discarded trash toward the ocean.
The High Commander burst upward from below, eyes blazing, firing a beam that sliced clouds apart.
Armageddon swatted it aside like dust.
"You don't belong here."
He raised a hand.
The sky dimmed.
Space rippled.
And a translucent sigil—ancient, colossal, shaped like a burning crown—formed above his palm.
The High Commander's eyes widened in primal terror.
"N—No… that's… that's the mark of—"
Armageddon finished for him:
"Ashura Bellet."
The sigil dropped.
A pillar of pure annihilation crashed onto the High Commander, engulfing him in white-gold obliteration.
When the light faded, nothing remained.
The Grand Marshal stared, horrified.
The Marshal crawled up the wind, barely conscious.
Armageddon simply hovered, wings opening like void-born monoliths.
He didn't look angry.
He looked disappointed.
"You should've stayed in your master's realm."
The Grand Marshal gritted his teeth, voice cracking.
"You think this changes anything?!"
"The Father is fighting your Sovereign as we speak!"
"You can kill us—kill all of us—and it won't matter. He has a—"
Armageddon's gaze sharpened.
He leaned forward slightly.
"A plan?"
He smiled—slow, cold, knowing.
"That's why I'm here."
The Grand Marshal froze.
Armageddon continued:
"You thought Ashura would walk into battle without covering every angle?"
"You thought he wouldn't know the Father would send you here?"
"You thought this planet was unguarded?"
He shook his head.
"He sent me.
Long before you arrived.
Long before the rift even opened."
Armageddon's eyes gleamed like two dying stars being reborn.
"And as long as I'm here—
Earth will not fall."
The wind howled around him.
Clouds spiraled.
The sky bent.
Lightning crawled across the stratosphere in silence.
The Marshal whispered hoarsely:
"…Impossible…"
Armageddon extended one hand toward them.
"Let me show you what real impossibility looks like."