The silence that followed the revelation was heavier than the gravity of a dying sun. It was a silence pregnant with dread, where the only sound was the collective heartbeat of an army that, for the first time, felt small. The figure in the center of the burning crater, Dren's personal nightmare made manifest, did not move. It just watched. It challenged.
Then, it took a first step.
Just one.
The sound was unnatural. It was not the sound of a boot on rock, but of tortured metal scraping against molten glass. A screech that tore through the stillness and broke the spell of fear. It was a declaration of intent. It was coming for them.
This time, it wasn't just the fire of three dragons that stood in its way.
The response from Vhalmir was instantaneous, a symphony of power executed with ancient, seamless coordination.
Above the battlefield, the seven dragon riders acted as a single mind. Their hands shone in unison, and complex arcane symbols, third-degree amplification glyphs, flared to life on their gauntlets and on the foreheads of their mounts. The magical power of the beasts, already overwhelming, multiplied. Their scales began to glow from within, their eyes became white-hot furnaces, and the air around them distorted with pure, latent heat.
On the ground, within the camp's perimeter, the transmuter mages knelt. With palms outstretched to the lunar soil, they traced a convergence sigil that lit up with an azure glow.
"Now!" the captain of the riders roared.
Seven torrents of white fire, no longer flames but pillars of pure energy, erupted from the dragons' maws. But instead of striking the target, the seven beams curved through the air as if drawn by an invisible magnet, spiraling down toward the transmuters' sigil. There, in a blinding vortex of power, the seven currents were woven, braided, and fused into a single pillar of energy as thick as a siege tower.
But the assault was not yet over. Three archmages, the most powerful in the contingent, positioned themselves in a triangle around the newly formed beam and added the final layer.
"By the will of Vhalmir!" they shouted in unison.
The pillar of white energy compressed, its roar turning into a high-pitched shriek that tore the air apart, and its color shifted to a blue so intense it looked black—a fragment of absolute nothingness, ready to erase reality.
This was no ordinary attack. This was the Sky-Breaker Beam, Vhalmir's ultimate annihilation spell.
It tried to protect itself.
It raised its fragmented arm, and a magic shield deployed, made of shards of broken magic and stolen essence. A prismatic field that seemed to twist the light… but it was useless. The beam pierced it like a fiery spear through wet paper. The impact rocked the entire ground zero.
The world turned white. The sound became a physical pressure that crushed everything else. The moon's surface trembled, and Elizabeth's carriage was thrown about like a leaf in a storm, while the shockwave rattled the very magical foundations of the camp.
Everything fell silent.
The lunar dust, kicked up into a thick, golden fog, concealed the scene for long seconds. The air smelled of ozone, of burnt metal, of victory.
"Target eliminated…" one of the transmuters whispered.
But no one celebrated.
When the light dimmed, everyone held their breath. Where the knight once stood, there was now a crater more than six meters deep, its edges vitrified, gleaming like polished obsidian. In the center, a column of black smoke rose slowly.
It had to have worked. It had to have.
"There is… there is not a single known material in the six kingdoms that could withstand that without being completely disintegrated," Mayron murmured from inside the carriage, his voice a mixture of awe and scientific relief.
But as the smoke dissipated, a shape remained.
It wasn't the knight. Or, not entirely. Kneeling at the bottom of the crater, almost completely destroyed, was a metallic skeleton. A frame of a blackened, unnatural metal, its rib cage burst open and one arm torn clean off. It struggled to stand, its movements clumsy and spasmodic, like a puppet with its strings cut. A high-pitched screech, of metal protesting its own destruction, emanated from its joints.
It was defeated. Broken. But it was not destroyed.
The relief in the camp evaporated, replaced by a deeper horror.
Elizabeth felt something else break inside her. That attack was the upper limit of human power. It was the blow that disintegrated fortresses, melted dragons, pulverized mountains. There was no known material, creature, or magic on record that could withstand it.
And yet…
That abomination was still trying to rise.
"That…" Vincent muttered, his voice trembling. "That shouldn't exist."
"That… is not a living being," Narel whispered, his eyes fixed on the staggering figure.
The temperature dropped. Not from the environment, but from fear.
Azrael took a step forward, his cape billowing behind him.
"We are witnessing a heresy. That powerful beam should have vaporized it, along with the crater it left in its wake. It was a concentrated and exponentially amplified spell."
On the magic screen, Elizabeth watched as the metallic skeleton's head slowly turned, its empty sockets seeming to fix directly on the viewer. And in that moment, they all understood the terrifying truth.
They were not fighting a soldier. Not even a demon.
They were witnessing the anatomy of something impossible. And they had just peeled back its skin.
Only a few minutes passed, but they felt like a geological age. The unnatural glow in the skeleton's sockets flickered and died. The searing metal cooled, creaking as it contracted, until the strange figure became completely still. It was no longer an enemy. It was a monument to the impossible; a grotesque statue kneeling in a final act of defiance.
The carriage door opened with a hiss. Elizabeth descended, her boots barely making a sound on the lunar dust. She ignored the astonished stares and the murmurs of the soldiers. Her eyes were fixed on the remains. She couldn't help but recall a vague echo from her past life, a film where machines from a dark future rebelled against their human creators. But something else disturbed her even more, a cold and terrible epiphany that chilled her blood more than the battle itself.
This can't be it.
It was too resilient, yes. Too hostile, as well. But if that was all, the Sky-Breaker Beam would have erased it. If that lone soldier was the enemy that annihilated a kingdom, then it would already be ashes.
No.
That was just the threshold.
What she saw in her dreams, the annihilation of an entire kingdom, had to be the work of something far, far more dangerous.
And that thought terrified her. Because it meant that this… this battle that nearly cost them their most powerful spell… hadn't been the war.
It had been a mere skirmish.
A new strength, a clarity born from panic, took hold of her. She forgot that she was only the princess of Aurél, a guest in Vhalmir's territory. In that moment, she was the only one who understood the true scale of the horror looming over them. She turned, and her voice, though not a shout, cut through the air with an authority no one dared to question.
"Search every millimeter of this place! I want a full analysis of that crater and those remains! I want to know where this thing came from and how it got here!"
A Vhalmir knight, the same one who had announced the start of the expedition, looked at her in dismay, his face a mixture of confusion and the residual fear from the battle. "Your Highness… what do you mean? Wasn't… wasn't this what we came to the moon for?"
Elizabeth looked at him, and her expression softened with a compassion that was even more terrifying than anger. "No," she said, her voice barely a whisper that everyone heard. "This was not the enemy. It was the greeting at the door. We still haven't found what we came here to find."
Then, her eyes met Narel's. "Tell me, is this the entire army that Vhalmir possesses?"
Narel, who was watching her with a new and grim intensity, shook his head. His usual lazy air had been incinerated, leaving only the seriousness of a king facing a catastrophe. "It is not. This isn't even five percent of our total strength."
"Return to your kingdom at once and prepare the entire army," Elizabeth commanded, her voice devoid of doubt. "Master Vincent, mobilize all of Aurél's legions."
Veldora, beside her, tensed. The shock rattled her stoic composure. What the princess was asking for was not a defensive measure. It was not an excursion. It was the preparation for a full-scale war, one involving a foreign land. What did this girl know that the rest of them didn't? For the first time since she met her, the loyal knight felt tempted to challenge her authority.
"Lord Vincent, it is a royal command!" Elizabeth reaffirmed, sensing her guard's doubt. "Bring the entire army here. Leave only what is necessary to protect the kingdom. I assure you, what we are about to face here is much worse than that."
"Your Highness…" Vincent intervened cautiously, his face grave. "What you ask is not simple. I need this country's permission. Deploying our entire army here could be considered an invasion. If I summon portals for an entire army without this country's authorization… it could be considered an invasion."
"Do it," Narel said without a shred of doubt. "Consider this my direct order. I authorize the use of the portals. Do not be late."
The word resonated in the silence. Everyone, especially the nobles of Vhalmir, looked at their prince in disbelief. What he had just authorized was a surrender of their sovereignty, an invitation for a foreign army to occupy their territory. An unthinkable, desperate act. But Narel's expression allowed for no argument. When one of his advisors stepped forward to protest, the prince simply raised a hand and pointed.
He pointed toward the desolate horizon.
And then, they all understood.
In the distance, where the gray wasteland met the black sky, something was moving. At first it was a trembling line, a distortion in the air. Then, the line fragmented into individual points. Black dots that grew, taking shape.
Shapes of black knights.
It wasn't one, or two. It was dozens.
And behind them, more emerged from the lunar dust, as if sprouting from the dead earth itself.
They did not scream. They did not brandish weapons. They did not roar.
They simply walked.
With arrogance. With purpose. With patience.
And with every step they took, the future trembled.
Elizabeth felt her skin crawl.
A silent army of metallic nightmares, with arrogant, synchronized footsteps, was heading toward them. A tide of black iron, advancing to drown the world in darkness.