"The Great Aetherium can't be allowed to absorb all of this." A human-form Supreme God said, "Their Emperor is already a late-stage Supreme God with combat power at the peak. After this battle, he should actually ascend to the peak. Remember that he's a Space-Time Lord and then no one in the Endless Continent would be able to check him."
"We go to the battlefield." The Dragon Lord said, "Not to destroy the Great Aetherium. Just to pressure them into releasing the four surviving Supreme Gods—Malakar, Skarion, Mordra and Micteya. The Lich Lord is already sealed. We let him keep that one. But we absolutely can't let them harvest four more."
He couldn't simply act alone. The Dragon Lord needed the assembled Supreme Gods behind him to make the intimidation credible.
The other Supreme Gods considered it, but nobody moved. Then suddenly the scrying window shifted. They saw Celestia's appearance and her holding a hammer.
"Celestia, and that hammer. That's Varkath's natal artifact."
The room absorbed this. Varkath was a peak Supreme God with a top-level Supreme God Tier natal artifact and a hundred thousand years of post-war cultivation.
He'd come out of that encounter missing a weapon and unable to intervene in the battle he'd been paid to influence. Nobody moved toward the battlefield and everyone understood the implications.
"The Great Aetherium has two peak Supreme Gods." A Supreme God said carefully, "His Majesty Kazehaya's combat power already matches the peak while Her Holiness Celestia is actually there."
"I'm not going." The human-form Supreme God took a sharp u-turn, then disappeared. The others followed, one by one, each offering the Dragon Lord a variation of 'nothing I can do' before evacuating.
The Dragon Lord stood alone.
"The elders have predicted it all. The Great Aetherium's rise can no longer be stopped." He watched the feed a moment longer, "But the God King's Throne still belongs to me. The elders foresaw it all. Everything else is just noise."
He left.
…
The void stayed empty briefly, then a figure stepped out of nothing, waved a scepter through the air, and caught something invisible from the space the Dragon Lord had occupied, a residual thread of his scrying, still warm.
"A Fate Dragon in the early stages of the Supreme God Tier dares to spy on everything?" Her voice was almost amused, "The Dragon Lord thinks he's destined for the God King's Throne. Aschenkranz thinks the same. Everyone thinks the same."
She let the thread dissolve.
"But the throne… it belongs to only one person. And it isn't either of them."
She left without another word. If Haru had been present, he would have recognized this person as his future wife Svetlana, the Goddess of Fate, who had been monitoring the entire battlefield from the moment the war began. Not just the Dragon Lord's meeting. Everything.
She'd been watching the whole time, intervening only when the threads of fate required small corrections, otherwise invisible. Exposing her connection to Haru before the right moment would complicate everything she'd arranged. The veil would lift when it was supposed to lift, and not before.
…
First war zone.
Celestia's arrival, and Varkath's hammer in her hand, had given Haru the opening he needed. With both Seas of Origins shattered, two divine bodies exploded.
Malakar and Skarion rebuilt themselves with their Godhead's power. Again, their seas of origin were gone, their reserves draining with every reconstruction, but they kept reshaping their bodies because capture meant the Holy Grail, the Angel Reincarnation Pool, a soul rebuilt as Haru's believer.
Haru blew up their bodies again. They rebuilt. The process repeated until their last remaining drop of Divine Power was exhausted.
It was worth noting, watching them hold out this long, that Haru's combat experience was considerably thinner than theirs. Tens of thousands of years against a few months. Celestia, with equivalent strength, had suppressed Varkath and returned to the main battlefield before Haru had finished with two weaker opponents.
When she eventually recovered her God Monarch Tier Law Fragment she'd comprehended in the Illusory Angel Realm and became a Pseudo God Queen, her strength would reach a tier comparable to the Demon Emperor. Possibly beyond it. But that was future Celestia. At present, Haru was winning anyway, just more slowly than she would have.
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