CHAPTER 502: SHADES III

The chamber didn’t heal.

Normally, when a Rank fell, when a trial ended, the Obsidian Ants’ arena would mend itself—walls knitting back together, the air resetting, the scars of battle wiped clean. But here... the silence stayed broken. Cracks still ran across the floor where Roman’s hammer had struck. The air still stank of burned decree from Milim’s inferno. Even the emptiness felt scarred.

That was the price of fighting a Throne.

Leon coughed again, forcing himself upright. His body trembled, his veins still glowing faintly with violet fractures, but the Fifth Echo’s howl had finally gone quiet. Fracture Requiem had been sated... for now.

Roselia reached him first, her hands trembling as she pressed against his arm. "You idiot," she whispered, though her voice cracked with relief. "That pulse could have torn you apart."

Leon managed the faintest of smirks. "Yeah... but then you’d have been short a conductor."

Naval gave a dry laugh from where he leaned on his trident. "Conductor? More like you dragged us all into a requiem we didn’t even know we could play."

"Dragged us?" Roman rumbled, his chest heaving, hammer resting against his shoulder. "Nah. You gave us a chance to hit something that thought it was untouchable. I’ll take that any day."

Milim bounced on her heels despite her scorched clothes and bleeding lip, her usual grin sharp and defiant. "We won! That’s what matters! Do you guys realize what we just smashed?!"

Liliana’s gaze, however, stayed fixed on Leon. Her barrier fragments still glimmered faintly around her shoulders like broken glass. "But at what cost?" she asked quietly.

Her words landed heavy. Leon’s breath rasped. Every muscle felt like it was one second away from giving out. His heartbeat was... wrong. The Fifth Echo had left its imprint, and no healing magic could smooth fractures made in essence.

He didn’t answer her. Couldn’t.

Instead, the chamber itself did.

A rumble coursed through the floor. The broken throne—the once-glorious seat of the lattice being—dissolved into threads of light. They spiraled together, not reforming the throne, but condensing into a single shard, jagged and glowing with authority. It pulsed, slow and heavy, like a second heartbeat in the air.

The First Throne Fragment.

It drifted toward Leon, stopping just above his chest.

Every instinct screamed to reach for it. To claim it. To anchor his existence in it. But as he lifted his hand, his team spoke at once—

"Careful." Roselia’s grip tightened on him.

"Don’t you dare take it alone," Naval snapped.

Liliana whispered, "It’ll break you if you do..."

Roman’s voice was low. "But if you don’t, someone else will."

The fragment pulsed, patient, waiting.

Leon’s hand hovered beneath it, his vision swimming, the weight of choice pressing harder than the battle itself.

Leon’s hand shook, trembling under the fragment’s weightless glow. His breath came shallow, uneven. The Fifth Echo still reverberated inside him like a cracked bell—fractured, unstable, but not silent. The shard hovered, pulsing in rhythm with his heart.

He could feel it already—power, command, authority. If he seized it now, the fragment would root itself into him, becoming the cornerstone of a throne that was his alone. The Fifth Echo would devour it, stabilizing for a time, but chaining him tighter to the Requiem’s instability.

But when he glanced sideways—at Roselia’s desperate eyes, at Liliana’s trembling hands, at Naval’s tense posture, at Milim’s barely contained excitement, at Roman’s steady watchfulness—he knew the truth. The Throne War wasn’t something he could fight as one man. Not anymore.

Leon drew in a ragged breath and lowered his hand.

The fragment pulsed, sensing his hesitation. Instead of descending into him, it began to fracture again—splitting into seven finer shards of burning light. One for each of them.

Roselia gasped. "It’s... dividing."

Liliana shook her head, awe flickering across her pale face. "No. It’s responding. Leon’s choice redirected the binding. The throne will not belong to one—it will belong to us."

The shards hovered before each of them, quivering like candles in a wind.

Roman grunted, "Never thought I’d be king of anything. But... I can bear a piece of this weight." He reached, and the shard sank into his chest, his hammer glowing faintly in answer.

Milim laughed and clapped her hands before her shard rushed into her. She threw her arms wide as if soaking in sunlight. "Oooh, I like this one! Makes me feel even more like a goddess!"

Naval exhaled sharply but didn’t resist when his shard sank into his core, his trident humming with new resonance. "If this war wants a fleet, I’ll be the spearhead."

Roselia’s shard flickered nervously until she finally lifted her hand, tears brimming in her eyes. "If it means keeping you alive, Leon, then I’ll carry it too."

Liliana hesitated, lips pressed tight, then let hers sink into her with a whisper of glass and flame.

Leon’s shard descended last. When it touched his chest, he arched forward with a gasp. The Fifth Echo inside him howled—but instead of devouring the shard, it recognized it, weaving its broken resonance around the fragment. The shard didn’t stabilize him entirely, but it gave the fractures a pattern, a rhythm.

The seven shards pulsed together—seven heartbeats, one throne.

A voice rumbled faintly through the chamber, ancient and resonant:

"Flamebreaker... not king alone. A chorus shall rise. A throne of echoes, not of one, but of seven."

The light faded, leaving the team standing in the scarred arena, their bodies burning faintly with shared resonance.

Leon straightened slowly, sweat dripping down his brow, his voice hoarse but steady. "Then... we go forward as one. No throne will crown me alone. We’ll crown each other."

And somewhere beyond the arena, beyond the walls of Obsidian Ant domain, beyond the Tower itself... other Thrones stirred, watching.

The war had begun.

The resonance lingered long after the light faded. The Obsidian Ants, who had borne silent witness through the duel, began to stir. Their mandibles clicked in strange rhythms—not hostile, not celebratory, but reverent. The elder drones lowered their heads in unison, their armored bodies bowing not to Leon alone, but to the seven of them.

The Elder Ant who had once warned Leon of his limits approached, its vast shadow falling across the group. Its voice carried like stone grinding against stone.

"Never in all the cycles... never has the shard divided. A throne shared... chorus instead of crown. The hive shall remember this as rupture."