CHAPTER 435: CHAPTER 435: CALL ME LIGHT.

He could feel her power washing over him, probing at the edges of his suppressed abilities, trying to understand the contradiction before her. The assessment left her even more confused than before.

"I don’t even know your name, shadow-walker," she said finally, her voice carrying a note of genuine perplexity. "How did someone like you free me? When we fought, you were..." She paused, choosing her words carefully. "So weak. Yet something shattered the bindings that held me for so long."

David hesitated for a moment. Giving his real name felt dangerous, but he needed some form of identity that wouldn’t raise more questions. "You can call me Light, Your Majesty."

The Sun Empress stared at him with obvious bewilderment, her expression a perfect mixture of amusement and disbelief. "Light? You introduce yourself as Light while wreathed in literal shadows?" Her tone carried the inflection of someone who couldn’t quite believe what they were hearing.

Even as the words left his mouth, David realized how ridiculous they sounded. "I... work in contrast to bring balance?" The explanation felt weak even to his own ears, but it was better than trying to explain the truth.

A ghost of a smile touched Solaria’s lips, the first genuine expression of warmth he’d seen from her. "Your niece guided me to the Sun Door because she knew you needed help," David continued, pressing his advantage. "There was something invisible keeping you trapped. I was able to deal with it, but it wasn’t easy."

The Sun Empress extended her hand, and for a heart-stopping moment, David thought she was preparing to attack again. Instead, her gesture was one of acknowledgment, perhaps even respect. "I owe you an apology, Light. And perhaps... a debt."

Before David could respond, his communication crystal blazed with urgent energy, Veylith’s desperate voice crackling through the air with crystalline clarity: "David! You need to hurry now! Elara is fighting the demon, and she’s losing!"

The blood in David’s veins turned to ice. Through the crystal’s connection, he could hear the distant sounds of combat, the ring of steel on claw, the thunderous impacts of supernatural strength meeting divine authority.

"Count Nicalo’s true form, it’s some kind of infernal knight, and it’s toying with her!" Veylith’s voice carried across the magical link, filled with the helpless frustration of someone forced to watch a massacre from a distance. "She can’t hold out much longer!"

David surged to his feet, his suppressed power blazing with urgent need despite its limitations. The king-rank strength he’d deliberately constrained himself to felt maddeningly inadequate for what was coming. "I have to go. Now."

But even as the words left his mouth, the crushing reality of the situation hit him like a physical blow. The distance between the palace and Elara’s battle was vast, even at full speed, even pushing his abilities beyond their safe limits, he would never reach her in time. The battle would be over, one way or another, long before he could arrive.

"Damn it!" The curse escaped him in a growl of pure frustration. "Even if I push my abilities to their limit, I’ll never make it in time!"

Turning to the Sun Empress with desperate urgency, David’s voice carried the weight of impending catastrophe. "Your Majesty, you’re the only one who can reach her in time. Elara is your strategic general, your Archon of Lysora County. If she falls..."

Solaria’s divine intellect grasped the implications immediately. This wasn’t just about losing a single powerful warrior or her link, Elara was the keystone holding the southern provinces together, the strategic mind that kept their defences coordinated and effective. Her death would create a power vacuum that would take decades to fill, leaving the empire vulnerable to exactly the kind of infernal incursions that ’Count Nicalo’ represented.

The communication crystal crackled again with Veylith’s increasingly frantic updates: "David, hurry! The demon just landed a hit! Elara’s bleeding badly!"

The Sun Empress’s expression hardened with divine resolve, solar energy beginning to radiate from her form in waves of barely contained power. "A mogrel dares threaten my Archon in my empire?" The question carried the weight of divine judgment, and David could feel the temperature around them rising as her authority built toward explosive release.

Without another word, Solaria exploded upward through the palace ceiling in a pillar of pure sunlight. The very stone melted and flowed like water under the intensity of her passage, leaving a perfectly circular hole that continued to glow with residual solar energy. Her speed transcended anything David had ever witnessed, faster than light itself, she rocketed toward Elara’s battle like a star fallen from heaven to wage war.

As the echoes of her departure faded, David and Vespera carefully helped the weakened Princess Elyssira to her feet. Though the suppression elixir had stabilized her condition, she remained fragile from her ordeal, each step requiring conscious effort.

They navigated through the broken walls and damaged corridors left in the wake of David and the Sun Empress’s battle. Debris crunched underfoot, chunks of marble, twisted metal, fragments of tapestries that had once depicted the empire’s glory. Sunlight streamed through the newly created openings in ways that had never been intended, creating an almost ethereal atmosphere of destruction and renewal.

As they walked, Princess Elyssira spoke quietly, her voice carrying an odd note of certainty: "She will reach Elara in time, David."

David glanced at her with curiosity. "Can you see that with your abilities?"

The princess shook her head weakly, her ash-pale hair catching the light streaming through the damaged walls. "No. I just... know."

As they made their way toward her chambers, the distant sounds of a truly cosmic battle began to echo across the capital. Even from this distance, David could feel the reverberations of divine power meeting infernal corruption. The Sun Empress had found her target, and the very foundations of the empire trembled with the force of their conflict.

The Nightveil Embrace armour began its slow process of self-repair, the hairline cracks sealing themselves with threads of living shadow. David felt the familiar weight and comfort of the relic restoring itself, preparing for whatever challenges lay ahead. Because despite the immediate crisis being handled by divine intervention, he knew this was far from over.

Count Nicalo’s presence in the empire, his ability to maintain his deception for so long, suggested something far more sinister than a simple demonic incursion. This was the beginning of something larger, and David would need every advantage he could gather for the battles to come.