CHAPTER 495: WAR OF THRONES IV

Kaelith’s laugh rolled across the arena like thunder, drowning even the chaos of the crowd. His one good eye burned bright, not with pity, not with condescension—but with fire.

He stepped closer, boots grinding through the fractured stone, and stopped before Leon. The warlord’s massive frame cast a long shadow, but there was no malice in it—only weight.

"Breaker," Kaelith said, voice low now, for Leon alone. "The Tower bent to see you. And it found no cage to bind you. You carry a wound as a crown."

Leon’s breath rasped through blood and dust. He forced himself upright, meeting Kaelith’s gaze without flinching. His whole body screamed, every vein still thrumming with the unstable rhythm of Fracture Requiem, but his eyes were steady.

"I don’t want a crown," Leon said. His voice was hoarse, but it cut sharp enough to pierce the silence that had settled between them. "I want the Tower itself to fracture."

For a moment, Kaelith was silent. Then—his teeth flashed in something that wasn’t quite a smile. Pride, maybe. Or something deeper.

"Then fracture it you shall."

He turned, raising his arm to the roaring masses. His voice, now unrestrained, shook the entire Throne ring:

"Bear witness, all of you! The Tower itself has marked him! Not as heir, not as usurper—but as Flamebreaker, the jagged Throne!"

The title ripped through the crowd like a blade. Some chanted it with fury, others with awe, others with hatred. Flamebreaker. Flamebreaker. Flamebreaker.

And far above, in the highest tier of the Tower where only the eldest Thrones sat in shadow, unseen eyes opened.

Their whispers were not for the crowd, nor even for Kaelith, but they slithered across the air like invisible chains:

"A fractured sigil... impossible."

"It will destabilize the order."

"No—this is the order. The Tower has chosen. The Fifth Echo was always meant to crack."

"Then we cannot leave him alive."

"Or... we cannot leave him alone."

Leon swayed where he stood, barely clinging to the last strands of his will. But he felt it—that weight above him. The gaze of the Upper Thrones. Their judgment had already begun.

Kaelith leaned close one last time, so low only Leon could hear. "Rest now, breaker. Heal your wound. Because soon... the Thrones will move against you. And then the Tower will shake."

Leon’s vision blurred. The fractured sigil still burned above him, warped and jagged, a rhythm all its own. His body collapsed—but not in defeat. He fell into the dark, carrying the sound of the crowd, the mark of the Tower, and the warlord’s words deep into the marrow of his being.

The Throne War had begun.

The roar of the crowd still echoed in the Tower even after Leon was carried from the arena. The chant—Flamebreaker, Flamebreaker, Flamebreaker—refused to die, a wildfire word spreading through every rank of the Obsidian Ants and beyond.

But high above, far above the rabble, the chamber of the Upper Thrones was silent.

The council sat upon vast seats carved into the Tower’s very bone. Each Throne was shrouded in its own veil of power, their forms warped and indistinct, but their voices carried like iron through the stillness.

The first voice was ancient, cold as fossilized stone.

"The Fifth Echo was never meant to manifest. Not in this era. Not in his hands."

Another voice answered, smooth and sharp like silk woven around knives.

"Yet the Tower itself did not reject him. It crowned him with fracture. That makes him ours—or worse, it makes us his."

A third rumbled, a voice like chains dragging across a battlefield of corpses.

"A child wielding a Requiem. He should have been obliterated. Instead, he stood. Instead, he claimed."

Whispers filled the air, each Throne bleeding its own judgment.

"If left unchecked, he will undo the cycles."

"Perhaps that is what the Tower desires."

"Desire is irrelevant. Order must endure."

"Order?"—a laugh, harsh and cruel—"Or the illusion of it?"

The chamber shivered with tension. For the first time in centuries, the Upper Thrones did not speak as one.

Finally, the eldest Throne stirred. Its silhouette was vague, formless, yet every other power in the chamber fell quiet when it spoke.

"The Flamebreaker is not a rival. He is a test."

The words hung heavy, incomprehensible yet undeniable.

"The Tower bends. It has always bent. This time, it bends toward fracture. If he survives, he is meant to. If he falls, then the cycle resumes. Nothing more."

The silence that followed was absolute—until another Throne, defiant and younger, spat venom into the void:

"And if we do not wait? If we move against him now?"

The eldest Throne’s reply was a whisper that froze the chamber:

"Then you will learn whether the fracture claims you first."

Meanwhile, far below in the recovery halls, Leon’s team gathered around his unconscious body. Naval’s arms were crossed, his jaw tight, but his eyes betrayed worry. Liliana kept a silent vigil at Leon’s side, her hands faintly glowing with restoration spells that struggled against wounds born of Requiem itself.

Roselia, trembling still from the resonance she had felt when the fractured sigil burned above, finally whispered:

"He... he tore the cycle. Didn’t he?"

Milim, usually irreverent, for once spoke with a seriousness that made the others pause.

"No. He broke it. And breaking things always wakes the gods that sleep above."

Roman glanced toward the arena, where even now the chants still lingered. His voice was grim.

"Then the Tower isn’t done with us. The Thrones won’t stay still."

They all turned to Leon. His breath was shallow, but steady. On his chest, faint and flickering, the fractured sigil still pulsed—like a wound, like a heartbeat, like a war drum yet to be struck.

The Throne War had not just begun.

It had already claimed its first mark.

The clash became less a duel of blows and more a war of persistence.

Every motion Kaelith unleashed was meant to seal inevitability—his Core radiated certainty, a force that declared: This strike lands. This moment bends to me.

Leon’s Fifth Pulse answered in kind, refusing.

Each fracture denied the certainty, redirecting inevitability into delay, into disruption, into fractured consequence.

The two stood at the center of a battlefield where reality itself could no longer decide.

Stone tore itself apart under their feet, only to knit back together in jagged patterns. Echoes of their movements lagged behind—Kaelith’s shadows of command clashing against Leon’s spiraling fractures. What should have been decisive moments became tangled webs, echoes of victory and defeat superimposed in fragile balance.

The crowd had gone silent. They were no longer watching a fight. They were witnessing two laws colliding.

Kaelith’s next blow came not from his arm, but from his very presence. His Sovereign Core swelled outward—an ocean of command that no mortal or ascender had ever resisted. It was not a strike. It was judgment.

"Bow."

The word was not shouted, but it rang as if carried by the roots of the world. A single decree that had leveled nations, ended wars, broken legends.

Leon felt it drive down like the weight of ages, demanding surrender. His knees threatened to buckle, his lungs collapsed under invisible chains, and his pulse skipped—faltering against the tide of inevitability.

But then—his Fifth Pulse fractured. Not outward, not against Kaelith, but inward.

Every decree carried into him splintered, refracting back on itself. The demand to bow broke into a dozen stuttering echoes: bow—stand—fall—rise—submit—defy.

For a heartbeat, Kaelith’s command was no longer law. It was noise.

Leon straightened, his chest burning with the strain, his voice hoarse but steady:

"Your command... fractures here."

Kaelith’s eyes widened—not with shock, but with exhilaration. His grin returned, savage and bright, as though he had been waiting centuries for this resistance.

"Then show me," the Sovereign Warlord thundered, his Core igniting in full Sovereign flare, "if your fractures can survive the weight of a Throne."

The arena shuddered. The duel was no longer simply theirs—it was becoming something the world itself would have to endure.

Kaelith’s Sovereign Core roared.

Not as an aura, not as a tide—no, it was the unveiling of a Throne.

Above him, behind him, within him, a vast silhouette unfolded—an ancient seat of war wrought from obsidian banners and fractured steel. The Throne was not built of stone or gold, but of submission itself. Every warrior who had once knelt before him, every battlefield that had once yielded to his decree, layered into a monument of inevitability.

It pressed down with such weight that the air froze into crystalline fractures. The world bent to host it.

Leon staggered, feeling the pulse of command ripple through his marrow. This wasn’t a technique. This was Kaelith, seated upon inevitability itself.

The Sovereign Warlord’s voice echoed from within the Throne:

"Before a Throne, all echoes collapse."

And then it moved. Not as a man, but as a totality. His strike wasn’t a swing of his fist—it was the decree of a king whose war banners rewrote skies. The motion carried inevitability: it would land, it would end, it would conquer.

Leon’s Fifth Pulse met it.

Fracture Requiem.

The strike shattered—not entirely, but enough. The inevitability splintered into cascading shards of possible outcomes, each fracturing against Leon’s will. The punch no longer struck once—it struck a thousand ways, some grazing, some missing, some tearing—but none fulfilling their absolute decree.

The arena cracked, screaming with the stress of conflicting laws. Dust hung suspended, frozen midair by the clash of two impossible truths.

Leon roared, voice trembling but unbroken:

"Your Throne bends the world to obey... but my Pulse breaks the path itself!"

His body was shaking, his veins burning with molten strain. The Fifth Pulse was unstable, each fracture cutting into him as much as into Kaelith’s certainty. Blood seeped from his nose, his ears, even his fingertips—yet his Core did not yield.

Kaelith leaned forward, eyes blazing like a man staring at the sunrise of a long-forgotten dream.

"Good. Then fracture me, Flamebreaker!"

The Throne blazed brighter. Its banners whipped in phantom winds, and Kaelith’s Sovereign Core flared into an absolute command: not a blow, not a word—a decree that Leon would break himself before the Throne broke.

The air trembled, the stone ruptured, and the Sovereign’s shadow fell like the sky itself.