Chapter 512: The Plan
The silence of the stasis zone had grown heavy, a sheet of unreality where even the crackle of Lucifer’s demonic mana seemed to suffocate. Loriel, the archangel who had reached the rank of Seraph, stared at Konstantine with a wariness that fought against her own stupor.
She looked down at her own hands, hands that had carried out divine orders without ever questioning them. Her fingers trembled slightly, and she clenched them into fists to hide the weakness. "Enemies? What do you mean, enemies?" Loriel asked, her voice vibrating with an uncertainty she had never felt in millennia of existence.
Konstantine smoothed his blond hair with deliberate slowness, a smirk curling his lips. He wasn’t looking at her directly; his attention was fixed on the streams of probability he perceived through his < Spirit Eye >, those invisible lines connecting future events in a complex web.
"I’m talking about the Constellations. The Twelve... and the sealed Thirteenth," he answered in a cold tone that brooked no argument. His voice was calm, almost gentle, but every word fell like a blade. "They use us, us mortals, but you too, angels and demons, to fuel their sick games. You’re nothing but variables in an equation whose outcome they’ve already written."
Loriel stepped back, her wings shivering in a rustle of silver feathers that scattered icy sparks into the air. Frost crystals briefly formed around her before dissolving. "Constellations? I’ve heard of them in the old texts... But I thought the Seraphs and the Demon Princes were the most powerful. They’re the ones who rule the upper and lower worlds."
Her fingers tightened on the hilt of her sword, the cracked blade reflecting her inner confusion. She had spent centuries serving Heaven, believing in the celestial hierarchy, and now a mortal sorcerer was shaking the very foundations of her faith.
Konstantine let out a laugh, devoid of all mirth. "They’re all fools... Have you never wondered why demons and angels have been fighting since the dawn of time without either side ever winning for good?"
He paused, watching the faces of the two women listening to him with an attention mixed with anger and doubt.
Without waiting for a reply, Konstantine joined his hands in a complex geometry. His fingers intertwined at perfect angles, each joint cracking slightly under the tension. Threads of golden light burst between his palms, forming a mandala that spun on itself with hypnotic slowness.
"< Mystic Art: Vision of the Genesis >!"
The white space around them tore open to reveal a series of panoramic visions stretching across the sky like painted canvases. These weren’t malleable illusions; at their level of perception, Loriel and Aeshma could see that these images were direct projections of the fabric of reality. Every detail was authentic, every movement an exact copy of the past.
They saw the Twelve Thrones floating above the firmament, colossal structures made of light and obsidian, watching the mortal world like an anthill. The divinities seated there were barely visible, mere immense silhouettes whose gazes crossed dimensions like laser beams. They saw the System, that invisible code siphoning the energy of dying souls to feed the solar and stellar divinities, a network of runes and numbers running through the world like the veins of a gigantic body. They saw that every "war" was nothing but an organized harvest, a way to recycle mana so mortals never became powerful enough to threaten the established order.
The two warriors stayed silent. The visions slowly faded, leaving a bitter taste behind in the air. Aeshma, the Princess of Death, whose black veils suddenly seemed too heavy on her shoulders, was the first to break the silence. Her eyes turned toward Lucifer, still unconscious on the ground, and a wave of despair swept over her face.
Konstantine followed her gaze. His expression darkened. "Aeshma... this man is going to die," he declared, without a trace of pity in his voice. "His body isn’t optimized to withstand the frequency of energy you tried to pour into him. He’s burning up from the inside."
He approached the unconscious body and crouched beside it, placing two fingers on Lucifer’s neck to check his pulse. The demon’s veins glowed with an unstable light, flickering between brightness and darkness. "The muscle tissue is tearing with every pulse. His internal organs are starting to necrotize under the pressure. In less than three hours, his heart will stop for good."
Aeshma looked at the sorcerer with a flicker of despair she struggled to hide beneath her regent’s mask. Her fingers, which had held weapons and taken lives, trembled slightly as she stroked Lucifer’s hair. "Then... what can I do?" she asked, her voice catching on the last words.
She knew that if Lucifer died... the promises she had made, all of it, would vanish into nothing. The Demon Princes, who tolerated her maneuvering only because they feared her power, wouldn’t hesitate for a second to devour her if she found herself without the support of the Antichrist’s avatar.
"I have a plan," Konstantine announced, straightening to his full athletic height. The starry runes on his skin glowed with a silvery intensity, forming patterns that resembled celestial maps. He adjusted his torn tunic and crossed his arms behind his back. "Loriel, come with me. We need to stop the simultaneous opening of Heaven and the Abyss before the Constellations intervene directly to purge the area. If both gates open at once now, the shockwave will vaporize the entire continent."
He then turned to the Princess. "And Aeshma, you know what needs to be done. We need Sulyvhan."
Loriel flinched violently at the name. Her eyes welled up with an emotion she had tried to seal away for twenty years, an old pain resurfacing like a drowning man rising from the depths. Her wings folded against her back, and her voice broke as she said, "I can go find him, I—"
"I don’t want your romantic feelings for him mixed up in what comes next," Konstantine cut in sharply, his golden gaze fixing on the angel with an authority that silenced her instantly. "Your feelings for him are an unstable variable that could throw off my calculations."
In truth, Konstantine had another objective. Sulyvhan was imprisoned, certainly, but it wasn’t the man he needed. Or rather, he needed his essence. The founder of the Alexandria Empire possessed the purest aura frequency ever recorded in human history, an energy signature that could serve as a catalyst for a guaranteed Genesis.
Konstantine pulled Aeshma aside, stepping away from Loriel to make sure the angel’s heightened senses wouldn’t catch their words.
"You already know the truth, so I’ll be blunt with you," Konstantine murmured in Aeshma’s ear, his warm breath brushing her skin. "We mortals stand no chance against the Twelve Thrones as things stand. But I’m willing to give up my essence... and if Sulyvhan gives his, combined with the Antichrist System you carry, we’ll have a chance at creating a human powerful enough to do it."
Aeshma froze. She immediately understood the magnitude of the sacrifice. Fusing the essence of the first Master of the Aura, the essence of the Sorcerer of Babylon, and the code of the Usurper into a single vessel... It was a forbidden experiment, an artificial Genesis that could birth a god or an abomination. The risk of creating an uncontrollable creature was immense, but the alternative was worse: staying pawns on the chessboard.
Her fingers dug into her own arm, nails sinking into her black flesh. "So... you’re pinning all your hope on a Lucifer you don’t even know?" Aeshma asked, incredulous. Her voice was low, almost a whisper. "He’s nothing but a broken warrior. You saw the state he’s in. He failed."
"I don’t need to know him personally," Konstantine retorted with a smirk that already carried a hint of the arrogance to come from Kaiser. He released Aeshma’s wrist and stepped back, arms crossed. "I know he’s a mortal carrying immeasurable hatred. And in this cosmos run by sociopaths, hatred is the one fuel that never runs dry. He’ll be effective against them."
He pulled away from Aeshma, whose gaze betrayed a forced acceptance born of logic. The demoness’s teeth ground slightly, but she nodded. The pact was sealed between the Wizard and the Princess of Death, an alliance of nothingness to counter the hypocritical light of the stars.
Konstantine walked back to Loriel, who waited for him with an expression of resignation mixed with hope. She had gotten back up, patching her armor with mechanical movements. He made a quick Mudra, his fingers weaving through a complex sequence, and the walls of the spatiotemporal zone began to dissolve like salt in water. The white light faded away, revealing once more the torn sky of the Ash Plains, where columns of black smoke rose toward the horizon.
"Let’s go put down this trash," Konstantine said, pointing toward the angels and demons still slaughtering each other in the distance, their gleaming armor flashing under bursts of magic, unaware their end was already written.