The spatial rift closed behind Malakor with a sharp, glass-like snap. He stepped out onto the jagged obsidian peak overlooking the endless black sea of Roanoke's legion. Five hundred million Dead Apostles—an ocean of glowing crimson eyes and raw, ravenous instincts—looked up at the solitary figure on the ledge.
Beside him stood Roanoke, draped in dark, miasmic aura, his posture exuding the overwhelming confidence of a conqueror who had just brought the Mage's Association to its knees.
"Master... took you long enough to show your face," Roanoke scoffed, a dark, amused sneer curling his lips. "I've already burned the Clock Tower to ash and permanently sealed away that old pest Zelretch. Don't tell me you were slacking off while I did all the heavy lifting."
Malakor didn't even turn his head. He casually tossed the freshly extracted, radiant Mystic Eyes of Enchantment into the air, catching them in his palm with effortless grace before stowing them beneath his coat.
"Shut your mouth, you insolent brat," Malakor replied, his voice echoing with a cold, smooth resonance through his porcelain mask. "While you were busy playing God and throwing a violent tantrum, I was executing the actual foundation of the Grand Zero plan."
Roanoke's sneer faltered, his crimson eyes narrowing as he opened his mouth to snap back.
He never got the chance.
Before Roanoke could utter another word, space around Malakor folded inward. Light, sound, and presence vanished into a single point, leaving Roanoke standing alone on the peak, glaring at empty air.
In a realm untouched by time and shielded from the chaos of human war, space fractured. The sacred, undisturbed floor of the inner sanctuary of Millennium Castle Brunestud. The ambient air here didn't smell like blood or ozone—it was dense with primordial mystery, vibrating with the pure, untouched energy of the world itself.
Deep within the silent, forgotten sanctum, a shadow slowly materialized before the throne.
Chained upon the stone, bathed in cold starlight, sat the Princess of the Moon. Her long, flowing golden hair cascaded down the dais, spilling onto the floor like liquid silk. Her gorgeous white dress radiated a regal splendor—a beauty untouched by the passage of eons.
With a silent gesture, Malakor severed the ancient chains binding her.
The empty castle trembled violently as her dormant power stirred. The ambient atmospheric pressure plummeted in an instant, space itself warping under the weight of her awakening.
"Why have you come to disturb my slumber, human?"
Archetype Earth opened her eyes. Her piercing crimson irises bored into the darkness, glowing like burning embers in a dead world.
Malakor stepped fully into the hall, his dark shadow coalescing into a distinct shape. Clad in his silent white porcelain mask, a hidden smirk curled beneath the paint.
"My name is Malakor," he murmured, giving a smooth, mocking bow. "It is a pleasure to meet you... Great True Ancestor."
Archetype Earth turned her head slowly toward him. The air grew impossibly heavy. A single stray leaf drifting through the hall disintegrated into nothingness mid-air before it could touch the ground.
"Malakor..." Her voice echoed unnaturally, layered with something ancient, divine, and heavy enough to crack the flagstones beneath his feet. "You dare step into my domain wearing that pathetic mask? I can feel your insignificance from here."
Malakor let out a soft, echoing laugh behind his porcelain face.
"Don't worry, Great Archetype Earth... or should I call you Arcueid Brunestud?" His tone dropped into a smooth, demonic cadence. "Since my student and I are near the completion of our plans, this world you guard won't even exist much longer. You might as well start praying before you lose everything."
Archetype Earth didn't move. She didn't flinch.
Yet, above the shattered ceiling of the castle, the sky bled. Crimson clouds spiraled into a violent vortex, blotting out the sun.
"You..." Her voice remained serene, yet it carried the terrifying weight of shifting tectonic plates. "...dare speak of erasing my world?"
A single tear slipped from her lash line. The moment it struck the marble floor, a massive crater exploded outward.
"Your student? Your plans?" She tilted her head slightly, her gaze cold. "I am Gaia's daughter. The Moon's heir. The first breath before creation."
Without her raising a single hand, the entire structure began to shiver, as if reality itself were rejecting Malakor's presence.
"If that were true," Malakor taunted, delight lacing his words, "you would have stopped Roanoke by now. While you were busy sleeping, he built an army of nearly a billion Dead Apostle-level vampires. As we speak, they prepare to wipe out humanity—and you woke up just fourteen hours before my partner fully releases them upon the Earth."
The crimson sky darkened further, shifting from blood red to absolute pitch. A suffocating silence fell over the realm, as if the universe itself had paused to hold its breath.
"...Roanoke?" Her voice grew impossibly quiet—not weaker, but colder than absolute zero. Frost instantly crystallized across the air. "That insignificant rogue who dared defile my name?"
The ground split open in a perfect, razor-sharp circle around Malakor's feet—a quiet unraveling of physical reality. For a fleeting heartbeat, her crimson eyes dimmed, hit by the sudden realization: She had slept too long. The world was already burning while she dreamt beneath moonlight and sacred runes.
Then, she inhaled sharply.
Every candle in the great hall flared to life at once, blazing with divine, blinding wrath.
"Fourteen hours..." she murmured. Then, louder, her voice cutting through stone like lightning through silk: "Fourteen hours! You say I slept? Yes... but I woke up just in time."
Arcane symbols bloomed around her hands, glowing in radiant crimson-gold.
"However," Malakor interrupted smoothly, his tone turning dead serious behind his mask, "I am not here for Roanoke's little war. I am here to claim the Earth Memory Core. My plan—the Grand Zero Ritual—has nothing to do with this physical world. I require the Memory Core because your Inner Conceptual Universe holds the precise record of how our cosmos originally existed. I need that recording to locate the Origin Anchor of the Universe."
The wind stopped dead. Birds frozen mid-flight miles away. Time itself hesitated.
"...You wish to steal the Earth Memory Core?"
Archetype Earth's voice was no longer human. It reverberated like the birth cry of a star, deep, primordial, and crushing.
"That core holds not just records... it holds the first breath. The origin pulse before space existed, before light was named. And you—a mere shadow behind a mask—believe you can take it? Believe I would allow such a thing?"
She took a single step forward, and reality cracked wide open beneath Malakor's feet, opening a rift into absolute nothingness.
"The Origin Anchor..." she whispered coolly. "That is beyond even my father's reach. You are playing with forces that erase gods by accident." A terrifying, cruel smile touched her lips. "So... you are not Roanoke's pawn. You are far more foolish than he is. Your ritual means nothing compared to what I am capable of destroying in an instant."
Without another word of warning, she raised both hands. The ceiling tore open as a massive spatial chasm ripped through the sanctuary above Malakor.
Snap.
Using the theoretical peak of Displacement, Malakor instantly exchanged his spatial coordinates with hers.
Archetype Earth plummeted directly into the abyss she had created, while Malakor materialized safely on the stable ledge above.
The moment she fell into the chasm, reality screamed. For the first time in eons, the Brain of the Planet was falling. Her Marble Phantasm destabilized; the castle flickered like a dying hologram as the sky fractured like brittle glass.
But deep within the abyss, a brilliant white light began to pulse.
Thump. Thump.
It sounded like a cosmic heartbeat.
Malakor smirked behind his mask, but for a single second, even his essence buckled under a sudden, suffocating pressure. It was like standing beside a supernova in paper armor.
Exploding upward from the abyss came a pillar of pure, cosmic energy. Archetype Earth did not scream—she ascended.
Her form towered higher than mountains, manifesting her Luminous Body: an infinite, radiant presence that warped space simply by existing. The massive chasm she had fallen into was reduced to nothing more than a ledge for her colossal fist as she pulled herself back into the mortal layer.
The smirk vanished from Malakor's face. The ground beneath him evaporated from sheer proximity pressure alone.
"Even with all the power of the World," Malakor hissed, his voice hardening, "it changes nothing. You will still die here like a magot!"
Malakor ascended into the air to match her scale, his orange eyes burning with false divinity as he looked down upon her Luminous Form.
Archetype Earth simply smiled—a cold, divine smile of the universe correcting an error.
Without moving her massive body, she raised a single finger.
In the blink of an eye, Malakor froze mid-air.
Not by physical force. Not by magical binding. His very existence within reality was suddenly being invalidated—like attempting to breathe underwater while the concept of lungs was erased from biology.
Time stopped around him. Space forgot his coordinates. Even the porcelain mask on his face began to flicker, as if it no longer remembered what it was created to be.
The universe stood still.
Bound within the absolute domain of Archetype Earth's finger, Malakor's physical form began to blur, his presence flickering like a dying candle in a gale. His spatial coordinates were being invalidated by the absolute Will of the World. Time forgot him. Reality rejected him.
Archetype Earth watched with cold, regal indifference as the masked intruder faded toward nonexistence.
"...Fools always believe they can challenge the star," she murmured softly.
Then, behind her, space shattered.
It was not a rupture of atmospheric air, nor the activation of standard Magecraft. It was the sound of an entire universe flexing its spine.
"Did you truly believe," Malakor's voice resonated—not from a single point, but from every direction at once, "that invalidating my presence within this reality would be enough?"
Archetype Earth's eyes narrowed as she turned.
Standing behind her, completely untouched, was Malakor. He had not survived her invalidation through raw durability; he had simply applied Cosmic Flash Air to replace his erased existence with a backup state drawn from beyond her immediate reach.
Before she could raise her hand a second time, Malakor spread his arms wide.
"Authority of the Third Beast — Infinite Conceptual Universe."
A violent, iridescent ripple exploded outward from his body. The ancient marble hall, the bleeding crimson sky, and the very ground beneath their feet dissolved into a blinding sea of endless, shifting cosmos.
In a fraction of a second, the terrestrial realm vanished.
Archetype Earth found herself standing in the center of an unbounded, infinite void—a domain composed of endless stars, shifting conceptual layers, and boundless space that stretched into true infinity.
Her Luminous Body flickered. For the first time since her awakening, a sudden, sharp coldness struck her core.
My connection to the Planet... her mind processed rapidly. It's being dampened!
By dragging her into an isolated, self-contained conceptual universe—assimilated from the authority of Kama—Malakor had successfully severed her direct, instantaneous link to Gaia's primary leyline network. She was no longer standing upon her domain; she was trapped within his.
"This space..." Archetype Earth's voice echoed across the cosmos, her gaze sweeping over the endless stars. "You built an inner universe... out of a Beast's authority?!"
"A necessary isolation," Malakor replied calmly, hovering in the void above her. "Without the direct backup of the Planet's scale-output, you are merely an high elemental spirit with vast reserves—no longer untouchable."
He snapped his fingers.
Space folded. Across the infinite conceptual expanse, thousands upon thousands of spatial rifts tore open simultaneously. From each rift stepped a perfect, identical duplicate of Malakor—an endless army of clones generated through Kama's self-duplication, every single one radiating the terrifying, infinite mana output of Cosmos Backup.
"Now," the original Malakor spoke in unison with ten thousand identical voices, "let us begin the extraction."
Archetype Earth gritted her teeth, her pride flaring into blinding rage. "Arrogant worm!"
Even severed from the Planet's direct core, her raw power remained catastrophic. Realizing her Marble Phantasm was suppressed without access to Earth's natural texture, Archetype Earth abandoned localized reality-rewriting and unleashed raw, unadulterated divine force. Waves of hyper-dense True Ether erupted from her Luminous Form, creating blinding shockwaves of pure cosmic pressure. Pillars of radiant white light obliterated hundreds of duplicates in single, sweeping arcs, shattering spatial layers like brittle glass as she sought to pierce the conceptual boundary and re-establish her link to Gaia.
But for every clone she erased, ten more materialized in its place.
The battle became a relentless, overwhelming game of conceptual attrition. Malakor did not engage her in a brute-force brawl. His clones danced around her massive form, weaving a suffocating web of Displacement Magecraft that targeted her posture, her kinetic vectors, and her spatial coordinates.
When she struck left, her attack was displaced to the right. When she attempted to collapse the space around them, the kinetic force was substituted into distant, burning stars.
She was a hurricane... trapped inside a maze built specifically to bleed off her momentum.
"He isn't trying to kill me..." realization struck her as three clones locked her left arm in a localized spatial fold, while five more anchored her right. "He's... pinning me down!"
"Correct," a voice whispered directly behind her ear.
The original Malakor materialized at the nape of her neck, his white porcelain mask inches from her skin.
Before she could unleash a shockwave of raw True Ether to blow him away, Malakor activated the full, concentrated focus of Cosmic Flash Air — Primordial Celestial Displacement Authority.
His hand thrust forward—not as a physical strike, but as a conceptual scalpel. He bypassed her skin, her armor, her divine authority, and her physical form entirely, targeting the underlying informational structure of her existence.
"Universal Conceptual Replacement — Target: Earth Memory Core."
"Get... OFF ME!" Archetype Earth roared, her Luminous Body erupting into a blinding supernova of energy that completely disintegrated the thousands of surrounding clones and shattered the boundaries of the conceptual universe itself.
The infinite cosmos collapsed inward, snapping both of them back into the real world—the ruined, empty sanctuary of the sleeping castle.
Archetype Earth landed heavily on her knees, her breath coming in ragged, heavy gasps. The sky above returned to its natural dark blue, but her glowing crimson eyes were wide with shock.
She pressed a hand against her chest.
Deep within her soul, the foundational record—the primordial blueprint detailing the original state of the universe—was gone.
Malakor stood a few paces away on the ruined dais. Held floating gently above his outstretched palm was a radiant, crystalized sphere of pulsating, golden-white light, swirling with the ancient memories of the Earth's creation.
The Earth Memory Core.
"Impudent... thief..." Archetype Earth hissed, trying to force herself to stand, but her energy reserves were severely depleted, her connection to the core severed.
Malakor looked down at the glowing sphere, the reflection of the golden light dancing across his white porcelain mask. He closed his hand gently, stowing the Memory Core away into the spatial folds of his coat.
"You fought admirably, Brain of the Planet," Malakor said, his voice flat, emotionless, and entirely devoid of malice or triumph. "Under normal circumstances, taking this from you would have been nearly impossible. But you slept... and the cosmos moves regardless of your slumber."
He turned his back on her, space beginning to warp and fold around his body as he prepared to depart.
"Step Six of the Grand Zero Ritual is complete," Malakor murmured, his form fading into the shadow. "Rest now, Princess. The world you know will soon be rewritten anyway."
With a soft, glass-like snap, space closed.
Malakor was gone, leaving Archetype Earth kneeling alone in the quiet, ruined hall under the silent light of the moon.
The spatial distortion unravelled at the peak of the obsidian cliff.
Roanoke stood with his arms crossed, his dark miasma still pulsing with restless, chaotic energy. He turned his head slowly, a condescending smirk playing on his lips as Malakor materialized out of thin air.
"Back so soon, Master?" Roanoke scoffed, trailing a clawed hand through the air. "Don't tell me you ran into a dead end while I was out here ready to unleash the legion."
Malakor didn't answer right away. He calmly adjusted his coat, his white porcelain mask giving away nothing. Then, with a slow, deliberate tilt of his wrist, he allowed a faint, blinding golden-white luminescence to bleed through the spatial seam in his palm—the primordial light of the Earth Memory Core.
The smirk on Roanoke's face vanished instantly.
Every Dead Apostle Ancestor standing in the front ranks flinched backward, their primal instincts screaming in absolute terror. They didn't know what that light was, but their blood recognized it: the authority of the Planet itself, harvested like a trophy.
"The preparations are finished," Malakor said, his voice cold, smooth, and echoing over the silent ocean of five hundred million vampires. He closed his hand, snuffing out the radiant light. "Roanoke... release the army."
Roanoke's crimson eyes widened before a manic, bloodthirsty grin split his face.
"All steps of the foundation are set," Malakor whispered, turning his masked face toward the pale moon above. "However... there remains one final loose end I must dispose of before the Grand Zero Ritual reaches its climax."
A chilling, subtle tilt of his porcelain mask caught the moonlight.
"I must personally execute the Holy Knight... Yukio."