The city of Rūme did not fall at night.
It fell at noon — under a sky so blue, so perfectly cloudless, that Sergeant Denn of the Third Imperial Guard would later struggle to reconcile the memory of it. A sky that beautiful should not have been the ceiling of the worst day in four hundred years of Latium history.
---
He was eating when it started.
Dried beef. Stale bread. The usual. He sat on the wall's eastern rampart with his boots dangling over the edge, watching the market district below pulse with midday noise — cart wheels, vendors, children chasing each other between stalls. Rūme. Eight hundred thousand souls. The jewel of the Latium Empire.
The first scream came from the south gate.
Denn chewed. Probably a pickpocket.
The second scream was a sound he had never heard a human being make before.
He was on his feet before he finished the thought.
---
The south gate was gone.
Not open. Not breached. Gone. The forty-foot iron structure, the stone archway that had stood since the Empire's founding, the two guard towers flanking it — all of it had been replaced by a smooth, circular scar in the earth. Still glowing faintly at the edges. Like the rim of a brand pressed into skin.
And walking through the scar — through the hole where a gate used to be — was a single man.
Denn saw him from two hundred meters away and his legs stopped working.
White hair. Black coat. Unhurried pace, like a man crossing a garden path.
One man.
---
"INTRUDER — SOUTH WALL!" The call erupted from a dozen throats at once. The Imperial Guard moved the way they were trained to — smooth, disciplined, no panic. Two full battalions formed up in under a minute. Crossbows leveled from the walls. Rank 3 mages took positions on the elevated platforms, channeling their Soul-Brands into combat stances, blue and gold light crackling at their fingertips.
Commander Ras stepped forward. Decorated veteran. Twenty years of service. The kind of man who had stopped a Demonic incursion with forty soldiers and walked out decorated.
"HALT!" His voice carried the full weight of his authority. "You are in violation of Imperial Edict 7. Identify yourself and—"
The man in the black coat tilted his head slightly.
A small gesture. Almost polite.
Commander Ras ceased to exist.
Not dead — ceased. No body, no blood, no explosion. One moment he was there, armor gleaming, hand raised in command. The next there was a faint shimmer of black-and-white flame where he had been standing, and then nothing at all. Not even ash. Denn's mind rejected it for a full three seconds, insisting that Commander Ras had simply moved, that he was somewhere off to the side, that there was a reasonable explanation for what his eyes were—
"FIRE! ALL UNITS — FIRE!"
---
The volley hit the white-haired man like a storm.
Two hundred crossbow bolts. Twelve mage-attacks — columns of compressed lightning, crystallized wind-blades, a boulder of earth-force the size of a wagon.
The man walked through it.
The bolts didn't deflect. They didn't bounce. They simply burned — dissolved in the air two meters from his body, eaten by a lazy curl of black-and-white flame that moved like smoke and moved like something alive. The mage-attacks went the same way. The earth-boulder touched the fire and came apart silently, its mass converted to nothing in the span of a breath.
He didn't even look up.
What is that fire? Denn's hands were shaking. He had seen fire. He had been a soldier for eleven years, seen Rank 4 mages reshape battlefields, seen monster-class creatures tear through fortified lines. Nothing burned like that. Nothing moved like that — lazy, patient, inevitable. Like it wasn't in a hurry because it didn't need to be.
"RANK FOURS TO THE FRONT!" General Blaze — the garrison commander, the highest military authority in Rūme — pushed through the line. A mountain of a man, Rank 4 Sovereign, his Soul-Brand blazing crimson-gold across both arms. He was the kind of officer who turned battles. Denn had seen him lift a siege engine with his bare hands. "Every Rank 4 in this garrison, on me, now — form IMPERIAL WALL FORMATION—"
The white-haired man finally stopped walking.
He stood in the middle of the broad avenue leading from the south gate. Around him, two hundred soldiers in a rough circle. Rank 4 officers closing from four directions. The sounds of the market had gone completely silent — the entire city holding its breath.
The man looked up.
Denn was close enough — thirty meters, pressed against a pillar, crossbow loaded and utterly useless in his hands — to see his face clearly for the first time.
He's young. That was the first thing, absurdly. Denn had been expecting something ancient, scarred, monstrous. Not this — a face almost too well-made, smooth and precise, like someone had sculpted it with the specific intent of producing something unsettling in its perfection. White hair framing features that should have belonged to a nobleman's portrait. And eyes — golden-green, vivid, perfectly calm.
Calm.
The man was looking at four Rank 4 officers closing on him from all directions, backed by two battalions, and his expression was that of someone mildly interested in the weather.
"Imperial soldiers." His voice was unhurried. Conversational. "Where is your Emperor's palace from here?"
Silence.
General Blaze's voice cracked like a whip: "ADVANCE — ALL UNITS—"
---
The four Rank 4 officers moved simultaneously. They were coordinated, practiced, the Imperial Wall Formation designed specifically to create overlapping fields of force that a single enemy — even a powerful one — could not escape. Blaze led the northern approach himself, his Soul-Brand igniting into a full combat flare, crimson-gold energy condensing into a war-hammer of compressed force above his fist.
Hit him. Hit him, hit him, one of them has to—
The fire came.
Not an explosion. Not a wave. It rose from the white-haired man's open hand like a breath — black flame with white edges, twisting slowly around itself. It was almost beautiful. Denn had time to think that before it touched the lead Rank 4 officer from the east flank.
The officer's Rank 4 Soul-Brand shield — a barrier that could stop a cannon shell — lasted approximately half a second.
Then the fire was through it. Through armor. Through the officer. And still moving, patient and unhurried, toward the next target.
General Blaze roared and swung his compressed force-hammer with everything he had.
The white-haired man caught it.
Not blocked — caught. One hand closed around the compressed energy structure and squeezed. The force-hammer, built from a Rank 4 Sovereign's full combat output, crumpled in his grip like paper soaked in rain. Blaze stared at his own power collapsing between a stranger's fingers.
"Rank 4," the man said, sounding neither contemptuous nor impressed. Just noting a fact. "Your Emperor keeps Rank 4 garrison commanders in his frontier jewel." He released the ruined attack. "I expected better of Latium's pride."
"What are you—"
"Tell me where the palace is," the man said, "and I'll burn the city in a more efficient order."
General Blaze — twenty years of service, a man who had never broken on any battlefield — took a step back.
The white-haired man watched that step. Something shifted in his golden-green eyes. Not satisfaction. Something colder than that.
"You're afraid," he said. "Good. Fear is accurate."
He raised his hand.
---
Denn ran.
He was not ashamed of it. He threw down his crossbow and ran the way every surviving instinct in his body demanded — north, away from the south gate, away from the man in the black coat, away from the black-white fire that burned through Rank 4 Soul-Brands like they were morning mist.
Around him, the army was breaking. The perfect Imperial formation disintegrating into individuals — a thousand individuals all arriving simultaneously at the same conclusion: we cannot fight this.
Behind him, he heard it.
Not screaming — the screaming came later. First was the sound he had no name for. The deep, resonant crackling of something fundamental being consumed. Like the sound of a massive fire, but wrong — too quiet at the base of it, too intimate, as if the sound were coming from directly inside his skull.
He did not look back.
The citizens of Rūme were flooding out of the market district. Carts abandoned, stalls collapsed, a river of eight hundred thousand lives running in every direction away from the south gate. Denn was carried along in it, too spent to direct himself, letting the current take him north toward the river crossing.
He made it two blocks before the heat hit his back.
Not painful — not yet. Just warmth, like standing near a hearth. He looked up and saw the color of the sky had changed in the south. A column of black-and-white light was rising from where the south gate used to be, slow and steady, reaching upward without hurry.
The sun was still blue-skied above it. Still perfect.
He's not running, Denn realized. He never ran. He walked in, he's standing in the same spot, and the city is burning around him and he is just—
He finally looked back.
One look. Just one.
From half a kilometer away, across the fleeing mass of humanity, Denn could see the white-haired man standing in the avenue. Completely still. Black coat. White hair. A small constellation of black-white fire orbiting him slowly, casting no shadows because the light it made was wrong — it ate the light around it rather than adding to it.
He was watching the city burn.
Not with rage. Not with joy. With the calm, evaluating expression of a craftsman checking his work.
Something in Denn's chest went cold in a way that had nothing to do with temperature.
He's not angry.
He's not even enjoying this.
He's just — doing it. The way you clear a field before building something. The way you burn old growth to make room for what you've actually decided to plant.
A woman crashed into Denn's shoulder, nearly knocking him down — a mother with two children in her arms, running blind. He grabbed her, steadied her, pushed her north. Around them, the sky was changing. The column of black-and-white light was spreading.
He ran again. He didn't look back a second time.
---
That night, camped with nine thousand other survivors on the northern bank of the Aurus River, watching the glow on the southern horizon, Denn heard the first report come through — carried by a relay mage who had barely survived long enough to transmit it.
· South gate: gone.
· Three Rank 4 officers: gone.
· General Blaze: gone.
· Estimated dead in first hour: unknown.
· Suspect: single individual.
· Rank classification: unmeasurable.
· Status: still inside the city.
Unmeasurable.
Denn stared at the glow. It was soft from this distance. Almost peaceful.
Eight hundred thousand souls lived in Rūme.
The man in the black coat had asked where the Emperor's palace was. Not whether it could be taken. Not who might try to stop him. Just — where.
As if the answer was the only piece of information he didn't already have.
Nine thousand survivors huddled in the dark, watching their city burn, and not one of them spoke above a whisper. Because something about what they had witnessed refused to be held in a normal voice. It was too large for that.
The glow on the horizon did not dim.
It was still burning in the morning.
---
Three hundred kilometers north, in the Imperial Capital of Byzantium, Emperor Krau I of Latium received the first report at dawn. He read it twice, then set it down carefully on his desk.
He looked out the window at his capital — his grand, unassailable capital, fortress of four centuries, seat of divine mandate, heart of the greatest empire in DEVAS.
"Close the gates," he said quietly.
His aides scrambled to comply.
The Emperor did not tell them that closing the gates of Byzantium against something that had dissolved the gates of Rūme was almost certainly pointless.
He was not in the habit of making his aides feel hopeless.
He was, however, in the habit of being honest with himself.
He poured himself a cup of wine and drank it slowly, watching the sunrise paint his capital gold.
If the reports were accurate — if a single man had done this, if no rank measurement could classify him — then the question was not whether Byzantium would fall.
The question was only: how long.