The next day began like any other in Horus.
Demons either woke early or never slept at all. The city moved with the same raw rhythm it always had, heavy footsteps, loud voices, the scent of heat and iron rising with the early red light.
Armus had twelve high-level Abomination zones, each one massive enough to swallow multiple cities. The three great families divided those zones between them, and every day they sent warriors in and pulled warriors out. That cycle never stopped.
Horus might have been only one capital, but the Bloodreavers controlled hundreds of other cities across the planet. Those cities acted like furnaces, constantly producing new fighters to send into the zones. The whole world worked like a machine. Not a kingdom, not an empire... something different. Something built on blood and strength.
I hovered above in the sky, unseen and hidden, watching the city wake up.
My eyes drifted to one of the open arenas scattered across the city. These arenas weren’t small. They were huge stone circles, some with burning pits, others with runic floors, and every one of them packed with demons fighting bare-handed, with weapons, or with awakened abilities. They trained like their lives depended on it. And maybe they did.
I understood, then, why the demons stayed strong. This was their culture. Their foundation. A part of me liked it. I even wondered if I could bring something like this to Vaythos when I returned. Let the young fight, learn, push their limits. Create a culture where strength felt natural.
My gaze drifted again, rising higher, up toward the drifting pocket-space hidden far above the city.
It let out no movement. No disturbance. Nothing tried to come out. No ripple of laws. No phantom yet.
The pocket-space kept shifting slowly across the sky—moving like a cloud that didn’t belong here. Clever hiding method. If someone wasn’t looking for it, they would never notice. Even now, it felt quiet.
I thought about following it. About slipping in and tracking where it connected. It would be easy. One moment of will, one ripple of space, and I could move through the pocket like a thread.
But I forced myself to stop.
Not now.
I had already seen enough last night to know the entire conflict was planned carefully and precisely. If I stepped too early, I might break the timing, and I needed the enemy to reveal themselves. Let them move first. Let them believe their plan will work.
Below me, the noise of the streets thickened.
Two demons walked beneath a cracked archway, both muscular, both carrying blood-red axes on their shoulders. They spoke loudly, like most demons did.
"You hear about the mess in Hawk City?" one snorted. "Del Rey dogs hit our city again."
The second demon laughed, shaking his head. "Hit? Brother, they butchered them. Over a hundred Bloodreavers gone in one night."
"Hah! And yet everyone still pretends this isn’t a war."
"Yeah, yeah," the first demon waved his hand, "our elders keep calling it a misunderstanding. Sure. A misunderstanding that keeps killing us."
The second demon laughed harder. "If this keeps up, we’ll misunderstand each other right into extinction."
They both broke into loud, rough laughter, like the loss of a hundred men was nothing more than a story to laugh over.
But I could feel the edge beneath their voices.
Fear.
Anger.
And thirst for revenge.
That was the atmosphere of Horus.
******
I remained floating for another two hours. That was when I finally felt it, a disturbance in the Essence. A ripple, sharp and unnatural.
My eyes went straight to the drifting pocket space above the city as spatial fluctuations spread across its surface. The next instant, the hidden portal inside it flashed.
Five abominations dropped out.
Beasts unlike anything I had ever seen or read about.
They had four arms and vaguely humanoid demon bodies... but that was where anything normal ended. Mouths covered their stomachs and backs, tongues dangling out. Their smiles were wide and twisted, skin patched with black and red like rotting stone.
The portal flashed again, and another five appeared. Then another five. And another.
Fifteen... twenty... twenty-five...
Batch after batch poured out until the pocket space pulsed one final time.
That was when the Phantom arrived.
A towering figure, almost ten feet tall, wrapped in rising coils of black smoke. Two horizontal lines glowed faintly where its eyes should have been. It carried a massive greatsword in one hand.
The moment it landed, the abominations went still, shivering as if frozen by pure terror.
The Phantom rotated its neck once, slowly, as though adjusting its body after a long sleep.
Its rank was Transcendent, as expected, and the twenty-five abominations with it were all around level 290.
They carried enough force to seriously damage the Bloodreavers, especially if their ancestor failed to come out and resist the Phantom. That was the Del Reys’ original plan. Kill the Bloodreaver ancestor first, then let the Phantom wreak havoc on the city of Horus.
But that wasn’t going to happen now. Not with me involved.
I hovered silently, watching the scene unfold.
A part of me was curious, would the Phantom destroy the portal and the pocket space, or leave it intact as an escape route?
My question was answered in the next instant.
The Phantom simply flashed out of the pocket space, and the abominations followed, leaving the drifting pocket untouched.
The moment it appeared in the visible sky, it let out a blood-curdling roar and its aura exploded outward.
BOOM!
Instantly, the entire city of Horus froze.
The Phantom’s terrifying presence blanketed everything in a thin haze of deathmist. The flow of Essence slowed. Demons: young, old, warriors, merchants, looked up at the sky in pure shock.
And then the city alarms erupted at full scale.
"It’s a Phantom attack!" a demon grandmaster shouted, his voice echoing across the streets.
The Phantom’s laugh answered him, deep and distorted.
And chaos began.