Extra: Yandere Milfs Obsessed with me!

Secluded in the bowels of a cavern whose granite walls vibrated under the effect of his experiments, the heterochromatic sorcerer spent most of his time in meditative trance. His long blond hair, once impeccable, now hung in disheveled strands over his athletic shoulders, while sweat traced rivulets in the dust accumulated on his brow. Around him, dozens of shattered flasks littered the rocky ground, their iridescent residues forming puddles that emitted a twilight glow.

He had chosen this place, on the border of the Kingdom of Yggdrasil, because the mana flows there were chaotic enough to scramble his energy signature. This natural feature offered him protection against the Constellations, those entities he had once served and whom he had decided to flee. But his seclusion was not an ignorant withdrawal into himself. Each day, he devoted several hours to complex divination rituals, and it was thus that he managed to stay informed of the events agitating the outside world.

One evening, while the grayish hearth at the center of his cave cast flickering shadows on the crystal walls of mana, Konstantine allowed himself a moment of respite. He sat cross-legged on the polished stone slab, closed his eyes, and let his mind immerse itself in the ethereal currents. After a few minutes of concentration, he perceived the first images: a besieged city, caravans of refugees on muddy roads, and farther on, forests burning beneath a sky of ash. He slowly opened his eyelids.

"Let’s see what the ants are up to today," he muttered with a smirk that pulled at his cracked lips.

His vision crossed the oceans to settle on the Human Continent. There, the chaos of tribal wars and seigneurial conflicts seemed to have subsided. He saw vast armies bearing unified banners, cities rebuilding under a nascent central authority. The humans, who had been fighting one another for centuries, had gathered under a single banner.

Konstantine let out a sigh of boredom. The unification of the weak only produces a larger mass to be crushed. None of this interested him. To him, these political structures were nothing but sandcastles awaiting the next tide of the Constellations.

He was about to break the vision link when a singular energy frequency, dark and heavy as lead, drew his attention toward the southern rifts. In a desolate plain, he glimpsed two figures walking through a field of charred corpses.

The first was a woman of baleful beauty, wrapped in black silk veils that seemed to absorb light. Her eyes were abysses of darkness. Konstantine immediately recognized Aeshma, the Princess of Death, whom the Antichrist had mentioned to him.

But it was the person accompanying her that made the sorcerer’s heart miss a beat.

He was a man of imposing stature, whose mere presence made space bend around him. His eyes shone with an unprecedented coldness.

"Lucifer..." breathed Aeshma, her voice reaching Konstantine like an echo from beyond the grave.

Konstantine widened his heterochromatic eyes. The resemblance between this being named Lucifer and the 13th Constellation, the Antichrist, was striking. It was the same face of cruel nobility, the same aura, the same way of smoothing his hair with a disdainful gesture.

So this is the incarnation the 13th spoke of, thought Konstantine.

For an instant, Lucifer turned his gaze toward the void, as if he had perceived Konstantine’s presence across the eons. The sorcerer had just broken the connection, having accomplished what he had come to do. He remained frozen for a long moment, his eyes fixed on the gray flames dancing in the hearth, their pallid light carving shifting shadows on the stone walls.

"Let them destroy each other," he finally articulated, and his voice had regained its calm and assured timbre, stripped of all superfluous emotion. "The affairs of the outside world are no longer mine."

He rose in a fluid motion, and his joints cracked in the silence of the cave. The decision was now irrevocable. If the world was to sink into the dangerous game that Lucifer and the other celestial thrones had undertaken, then he needed a sanctuary, a place where he could withdraw and observe the turmoil from afar. However, this was not a mere cavern to hide in: he was conceiving a bastion of science and power, an intellectual fortress where he could dictate his own laws, freed from the rigid morality of the elves of Yggdrasil and the servile piety of humans.

Konstantine left his cave without looking back and began the descent toward a steep valley, naturally protected by inaccessible peaks whose summits were lost in the clouds, and by permanent mana storms that made approach perilous for anyone who did not master energy flows. It was there, in this hollow forgotten by maps and gods, that he would build his work.

When the first buildings began to emerge, he used his Mystic Arts to shape stone and metal according to his visions. Over the decades, the city rose little by little, defying both gravity and the architectural logic of other realms. Konstantine had no use for horizontal palaces and sprawling dwellings; he wanted structures that pierced the firmament, fingers of stone and glass reaching toward infinity. Thus Babylon was born, a city unlike any other, a thorn driven into the flank of the known world. Its structure rested on three colossal towers, each dedicated to a specific domain of knowledge and power.

The first, the Forge Tower, was a permanent roar of hammers and pressurized mana, a beating heart where the first Forgers learned to bind technology to ancient artifacts. Apprentices relieved one another day and night, their faces blackened with soot, their calloused hands shaping alloys that no one had ever dared to compose. The second, the Alchemists’ Tower, glowed with suspect lights, its shuttered windows diffusing green or crimson flashes that danced on the cobblestones of the central square. Its chimneys exhaled thick vapors, and these fumes, laden with unstable compounds, changed the color of the clouds above the valley, tingeing them with orange or purplish hues according to the experiments. Finally, the third tower, taller and more slender than the other two, was reserved for pure arcane studies; Konstantine had made it his personal laboratory, a sanctuary where he could scrutinize the workings of reality without being disturbed by the futile quarrels of mortals.