Lee Seong-jun's voice cut through the throng like a blade. "This is your last warning."
The angels in front of him stiffened. They had expected posturing, perhaps a theatrical display of celestial authority, but there was nothing performative in his tone—only quiet, absolute menace. Even Ramiel, who had been striving to maintain an air of control, paled under that pressure. To simply hear Lee say it was enough: he would not hesitate to spill angelic blood. The implication rested heavy in the air, and more than one winged envoy fell silent, their bravado evaporating.
A gust of wind carried a familiar, sardonic voice from the nearby barracks. Anna, perched calmly at Lee's side, surveyed the scene with narrowed eyes. "So this is a celestial," she muttered. Her annoyance was obvious, but there was a hint of amusement too. She glanced at the angels and then at Lee. "You don't need me to handle this."
"Please," Lee said dryly.
Anna feigned modesty and then, in the precise, efficient manner of the dragon kin, untangled the legal knots that bound the angels. Contracts that would have taken others weeks to disentangle—agreements between a single human and multiple celestials, clauses buried in metaphysical loopholes—were solved in a single telling motion. When she spoke the final line, her smile hardened into steel. "If even one of you betrays, everyone dies. Take care of one another, or don't bother living."
The threat was clinical, not cruel; it required no embellishment. The angels swallowed, then answered with unity and fear. Ramiel bowed until his forehead almost met the ground. "In the name of the Archangel, this will not happen again," he proclaimed, but Lee's eyes were like ice.
"Prove it with action, not words," Lee snapped.
Ramiel barked orders, attempting to reassert control—classified everything that had happened as a top-level security incident, forbade disclosure, threatened execution at the slightest deviation. It was a frantic attempt to regain dignity, but Lee's disdain made the effort pointless.
"Stop acting like you're offended," Lee said. "Leave, now."
With their chains—both literal and reputational—secured, the angels obeyed, retreating in formation toward a Black Gate that shimmered nearby. Ramiel produced a white-wreathed cube and shoved it into the portal. Sparks skittered across its surface; power roared inward like a tide. When the last angel vanished, the gate collapsed into a white swirl and then into nothing.
Lee watched the aftermath, curiosity and calculation flickering across his face. The teleportation had not been a casual skill of celestial will; it was mechanical, artifact-driven—advanced dimensional work. Anna, who had watched with him, nodded slowly. "It's complicated, but I can replicate it," she said. Lee's eyes brightened—not with idle curiosity, but with a raw, hungry desire.
"How much?" he asked.
"A lot," he admitted without hesitation.
Anna's answer came with a promise. She would begin research immediately. No waiting, no half-measures—she would build them a way to traverse such gates, to erase the one-sided advantage the celestials had enjoyed. As she took to the sky and vanished, Lee felt the small relief that comes with a plan forming.
But the victory at Yeouido felt patchwork to him. It bought time, nothing more. The real threat lay in what the angels could discern: the dragon-contract binding, the unnatural subjugation of a formidable species. A celestial of sufficient power could unravel it, and then the monsters would no longer be merely contained—they would be hunted. That meant something else, too: war. And the battlefield might not be Earth.
To fight across dimensions, Lee needed an edge bigger than artifacts. He needed strength—of body, of spirit, of allies. The Sura Reverse Skywalk's fifth form loomed before him: the first of a grueling, crucial ascents into power. He resolved to disappear into training, to give himself over to the discipline required. Fortunately, he did not have to abandon his realm to chaos. He had men and allies capable of maintaining order—Baek Mu-jin and Ko Tae-hyun at home, Julian, Theodore, and Nicholas Holt abroad, plus powerful figures like Victor, Wei Zhijiang, and Zhang Zhehan backing operations. If unusual threats appeared, they could buy him the moments he needed.
So Lee sent messages as he flew north—delegations to lead, contingencies to enact—and let resolve settle over him. Now came the hard, lonely work.
Where humanity lived in quotidian peace, the monster realms rotted with violence. Rivers of blood and mountains of corpses marked the warzones; by contrast, the human cities remained blissfully unaware. In one savage theater of conflict, Keron—the so-called Minotaur Emperor—stood defeated in a scene no one had predicted.
The great warlord laughed once, hollow and incredulous. "I…lost," he confessed as his throat opened and the sword fell. The elves who had besieged his forces were few by reported numbers, but led with a precision and ruthlessness that smashed his armies. A jet-haired elf who had been called fallen high elf stood aloof, his voice soft as he addressed Keron, "You were proud. You lost."
Keron's last cry was obedience to the Tau way: death over capture. The slaughter ended with the proclamation of a new imperial order, yet celebration was thin and uncertain. Power had shifted in ways the monsters thought impossible. The black-haired elves—those who had toppled empires or bent them to their will—offered congratulations that rang like ceremony more than sincerity.
Not everyone was at ease. The high elf who had won this victory bore unease in his eyes. "Not yet," he whispered. The title of emperor remained incomplete to him. It was not enough to scatter rival tyrants. There was one sovereign above all: the human Emperor of Earth.
"He will lead it himself," the high elf declared after sensing something of Lee Seong-jun's presence from afar—an intuition that the human emperor carried a different gravity, an authority unlike any other. The elf's voice chilled as he donned a dark helm and ordered his troops forward. "Advance. We will destroy the land of Korea, where the human emperor resides."
The last lines hung in the night like the promise of winter storms: Lee was training, allies were rallying, Anna was researching gatecraft—and across the rift, forces once dismissed as peripheral had found a strategy sharp enough to topple kings. The next war would not be simple. The first shots had already been fired.