Arka’s Aksesa eyes operated far beyond normal mortal thresholds. His pupils dilated massively, absorbing the harrowing details of the millions of titans choking the horizon.

  He was struck by absolute, paralyzing awe.

  His mouth went bone-dry, entirely devoid of words. His chest hammered a frantic, violent rhythm, as if his heart were desperately attempting to sync with the seismic footfalls of those colossal entities.

  Madness... absolute madness... his mind shrieked. What realm is this? Is this the forgotten past of some nameless world? Or an entirely extinct dimension?

  Arka swept his gaze across the endless ranks. However, his breath hitched.

  His focus snagged upon a glaring anomaly.

  Behind the vanguard of the titans... far in the rearguard, where the swirling dust was thickest.

  Arka narrowed his eyes, violently sharpening his visual acuity.

  Those were humans.

  "Humans???"

  Arka nearly choked on his own saliva.

  "What..."

  They were there. Thousands of them. But in this realm, their scale was pathetically minuscule. They resembled a colony of frantic ants swarming around the toes of gods. They were clad in primitive hides and coarse, woven cloth, their faces tilted upward, painted with an agonizing blend of terror and desperate hope.

  Then, Arka saw and heard it.

  One of the titans—wearing a scarred war-helm with a sheared-off horn—slowed his massive stride.

  The titan bent his knee.

  THOOM!

  The earth violently bucked as a kneecap the size of a mountain struck the crust. He crouched low, bringing a face as broad as a sprawling battlefield down toward the trembling cluster of humans below him.

  The titan’s voice bled out. Not a roar, but a hushed whisper that vibrated the very tectonic plates.

  "You are our little brothers..." the voice was leaden, saturated with a profoundly tragic affection. "...whom we are sworn to protect."

  The titan extended a single index finger. The tip alone dwarfed a grand manor, yet he touched the crown of a human elder's head with an impossible, agonizing tenderness.

  "You have learned the arts of sorcery and physical conditioning from us..." the titan continued, his eyes—vast as abyssal lakes—staring with profound sorrow.

  "O little humans... please, survive this cataclysm..."

  It was a farewell. The passing of a legacy.

  Arka felt a suffocating tightness in his chest witnessing the tableau. The entirety of human history... magic, cultivation, martial supremacy... it all originated from them?

  However, that poignant moment was instantaneously shattered.

  THOOM... THOOM... THOOM...

  The sound arrived.

  It was not the percussion of footfalls. It was the beating of a war drum.

  The pitch was abyssal, a frequency that actively ravaged the auditory nerves and made the marrow within the bones ache.

  The drumming fractured Arka’s focus. The hyper-lucid visual of the titans and humans began to ghost and warp, distorting violently like a corrupted transmission.

  Arka snapped his head up in a blind panic.

  He stared at the sky.

  The violent violet firmament was now violently fracturing. The drumbeats did not emanate from the mountains, nor from the bowels of the earth.

  The drumbeats were bleeding from the heavens.

  And there, behind the violently parting violet clouds, something was descending. Something that made even the millions of titans tremble in absolute dread.

  THOOM... THOOM... THOOM...

  The cadence of the drum accelerated, mirroring the frantic, explosive rhythm of Arka’s own heart.

  He stared upward, his neck locked rigid.

  Up there, the violet sky was not merely parting. It was being violently churned.

  Thick, bruised clouds spiraled into a colossal vortex. The colors aggressively bled into one another—deep indigo, pitch black, and a sickly, necrotic green—forging a gargantuan, surreal hurricane. The vista resembled a living, breathing painting suffering a violent nightmare; the celestial striations warped, undulated, and pulsed with cosmic insanity.

  And from the dead center of that maelstrom's eye, his Dark Gate descended.

  The scale of the gate defied all rational comprehension. It eclipsed half the firmament, reducing the dying suns of this world to the size of glowing pebbles.

  The gate was no inanimate monument. Arka could perceive it with terrifying clarity now, for his "eyes" had been fully attuned to this dimension.

  The left portal was a taxonomic nightmare. Its surface was suffocated with high-relief carvings of beasts—ranging from three-horned dire-wolves to wingless drakes, down to nameless, abyssal monstrosities. The thousands, millions of carvings were not static. They pulsed. Their stone musculature coiled and slacked, their eyes blinked in terrifying unison, their jaws snapped silently, rabidly awaiting their turn to be unleashed.

  The right portal was a petrified forest of absolute death. Its surface was choked with high-relief carvings of thick, thorn-riddled vines and monstrous flora. The stone blooms—shaped precisely like maws brimming with serrated teeth—blossomed and contracted as if drawing breath. The stone tendrils writhed sluggishly, coiling around one another like a nest of agitated vipers.

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  KRAAAKOOOOM!!!

  The gate unleashed a deafening shriek. The sound made Arka’s ears ring with agonizing pain, forcing millions of titans below to drop to their knees, clutching their skulls.

  And the apocalypse spilled forth.

  From the left portal, millions of beasts erupted from the massive archway.

  They plummeted from the heavens like a meteor shower of flesh and fang. Entities armored in pitch-black scales, monsters bristling with wire-like fur, savage beasts bearing carapaces as thick as fortress walls. Their sheer mass rivaled the titans waiting below. They roared as they fell, a bellow saturated with millennia of starvation.

  Simultaneously, the flora erupted from the right portal.

  They did not fall; they violently thrust downward with horrifying velocity. Dark green vines, as thick as ancient redwoods, speared toward the earth like the tentacles of a cosmic kraken, their spear-length thorns glinting lethally. They instantly impaled the crust, carving out craters, and began to propagate like a hyper-accelerated plague.

  The slaughter commenced before their feet even struck the soil.

  Arka bore witness with absolute, paralyzing horror.

  The titans—the "protector brothers"—hoisted their obsidian greatshields and roared their defiance against destiny.

  Initially, they held the line. A titan captain swung a mace the size of a mountain peak, obliterating a winged monstrosity into a bloody mist mid-air, raining black gore upon the earth.

  But the sheer volume of the enemy was insurmountable.

  A six-legged behemoth from the gate violently rammed the titan vanguard. Three heavily armored giants were tossed aside like ragged dolls, their bodies pulverized.

  Yet, the most harrowing threat was the flora.

  The gargantuan vines did not merely engage in combat; they consumed. Arka watched a thorned tendril whip around a titan’s leg. The giant attempted to sever it with a colossal battleaxe, but the vine merely constricted, crushing the obsidian plate armor as if it were brittle parchment. The titan was violently dragged down, hauled into a thicket of stone blooms that now tore their petals wide, revealing rows of grinding teeth prepared to masticate flesh.

  The lush, emerald world devolved into an ocean of blood and absolute anarchy within minutes. The agonizing roars of the titans, the blood-hungry bellows of the gate monsters, and the sickening crunch of predatory flora dominated the air.

  And in the distance, Arka watched the cluster of tiny humans—the progenitors of mankind—doing nothing but weeping and fleeing in abject helplessness, forced to watch their protectors be butchered by the very power that would one day be inherited by their own bloodline.

  The battle was profoundly tragic.

  The blood—the rich, crimson vital fluid of the titans mingling with the oily, black ichor of the gate monsters—amalgamated into entirely new rivers that violently flooded the valleys. The violet sky was suffocated by bone dust and shattered shrapnel.

  The titans fell.

  One by one, the mountain-sized bodies collapsed.

  Arka witnessed a titan whose left arm had been violently torn away by the jaws of a celestial dire-wolf, yet his right arm continued to relentlessly swing his obsidian mace, reducing the beast's skull to bloody pulp. Another giant was impaled through the chest by over a dozen thorned vines, yet he remained standing rigidly, utilizing his own corpse as a barricade to prevent the abominations from hunting the humans cowering behind him.

  Conversely, the vanguard pouring from the gate suffered equally catastrophic casualties.

  The beasts perished in the millions. Their carcasses piled up, forging rotting hills of butchered meat. Arka saw a wingless drake decapitated by a titan's broadsword, its massive head rolling and flattening an entire forest.

  The stone blooms were shattered, the vines violently severed.

  The carnivorous flora that had initially seemed invincible was now being torn asunder. Petals lined with teeth were pulverized into gravel by the crushing fists of the giants. The creeping green tendrils were brutally ripped apart, their sap geysering into the air like toxic fountains.

  Yet, the true horror lay not within the staggering death toll. It lay within the utterly illogical valor.

  Not a single titan retreated or broke ranks.

  Not a single heel turned. Not a single plea for mercy was screamed.

  They all marched forward.

  Even when their armor was entirely shattered, when their weapons snapped, they fought with their teeth and bare, bloody hands. They hurled themselves into the tidal wave of death with a valiant, desperate roar. They knew they would perish. They knew this was the absolute end of their epoch.

  But behind them stood the humans. The "little brothers" who absolutely had to survive.

  Meanwhile, the Death Gate in the heavens exhibited zero mercy.

  The relentless deluge of flora and fauna continued to violently erupt from the stone reliefs.

  Every time a beast was slain, two more vaulted down to replace it. Every time a vine was severed, three fresh tendrils whipped out. The Gate possessed an infinite, inexhaustible supply of ammunition. The carvings upon the portals throbbed with manic intensity, as if actively mocking the futile, desperate struggle of the titans.

  Arka stood trembling violently amidst the vision.

  This is...

  Tears bled unconsciously from the corners of his eyes, flash-freezing upon his numb cheeks.

  He was profoundly devastated, yet utterly awestruck.

  Devastated witnessing the sheer, selfless sacrifice of the titans who loved humanity so purely. A sickening guilt pierced his chest, realizing that the apocalyptic force currently butchering these noble protectors was the very power now slumbering within his own veins.

  Yet he was also awestruck.

  He was in awe of the absolute, sovereign might of the Death Gate. A power capable of entirely erasing a god-tier civilization within a single solar cycle. The power was so absolute, so utterly unstoppable, and so majestic in its pure cruelty.

  "So this is it..." Arka whispered, his voice hoarse, choking back a sob of mingled grief and reverence. "...this is the legacy I bear?"

  Before that primordial, apocalyptic vista, Arka Sagara finally comprehended the true meaning of "The Absolute."

  A sudden, jarring halt.

  As if a colossal "pause" button had been depressed upon the very fabric of the cosmos, the apocalyptic theater ceased entirely.

  The thorned vine, mid-strike to crush a titan's neck, froze in place.

  The obsidian mace, descending to obliterate a drake's skull, hung suspended in the air.

  The agonizing shrieks, the blood-hungry roars, the sickening crack of pulverized bone—all of it was instantly muted, usurped by a suffocating, terrifying absolute silence.

  Then, a voice echoed from the heavens once more.

  Not a thunderclap, but a resonant frequency that violently fractured reality itself.

  "Va'al karalagh nagh lagha'lah marg'darah...."

  The dialect was entirely alien to Arka, yet his very soul autonomously translated the syllables as a definitive death warrant:

  "Your time has expired... O flesh that refuses to return to the earth."

  The titans roared.

  It was not a roar of agony, but a bellow of pure, unadulterated fury. Millions of them synchronously hoisted their weapons toward the firmament. Spears towering as high as spires and broadswords vast as battlefields were all leveled at a singular point within the swirling maelstrom.

  They challenged him. They knew precisely who had arrived. They knew their absolute end was upon them, yet they viciously refused to perish upon their knees.

  Arka stared upward, his eyes burning with strain.

  A terrifying realization crystallized within him: The Death Gate was commanded by an entity.

  The colossal portal was merely the "hunting hound." And now, the Master had descended.

  He watched the figure drop.

  The entity drifted down lazily from the dead center of the hurricane's eye, hovering directly before the maw of the Death Gate.

  By scale, to the eyes of the titans, the figure was "minuscule"—perhaps only reaching their kneecaps. He appeared as a mere plaything to them.

  But to Arka...

  To Arka, who possessed the stature of an ant, the figure was as towering as a monolithic skyscraper.

  It was a gargantuan humanoid, looming hundreds of meters tall, yet appearing dwarfed by his own adversaries. He was draped in a mantle forged of liquid shadow that continually dripped onto the earth, instantly incinerating whatever soil it touched.

  From his back erupted six wings—not forged of plumage, but constructed entirely from thousands of interlocked, bleached bones, forming a majestic, macabre fan of death.

  His visage was concealed behind a featureless, bone-white mask devoid of eyes, nose, or mouth. There was only a single, jagged vertical fissure running down its center, violently bleeding a dark, oppressive violet light.

  In his right hand, he wielded his instrument of command—a colossal scythe, its curved blade forged entirely from the light of dead, dying stars.

  His mere presence made the atmosphere impossibly dense. Gravity itself seemed to warp and center entirely upon him.

  Arka felt his knees turn to water merely by gazing upon him. The aura radiating from this entity was millions of times denser than the aura of the Death Gate itself.

  "Who is he..." Arka hissed, the words strangling in his throat. "What is that thing?"

  The Lantern Bearer beside Arka bowed his head deeply, utterly refusing to raise his eyes to the entity hovering in the sky.

  "He..." the old man answered, his voice violently trembling.

  "...is the First Master of the Death Gate."

  "A God violently excised from Heaven because he loved annihilation far too deeply. The First Monarch."