In another, even more exclusive district of the Apex, the Valerian Family estate was drowning. It wasn't submerged in water, but in a darkness so profound it felt liquid, a tangible miasma of failure and doom that seeped into the marble and stained the very air.
The gloom was absolute, a heavy shroud draping every inch of the sprawling manor.
The reason for this despair was just as absolute: their patriarch and their most powerful heirs were dead. It was a monumental, lineage-ending blow, a decapitation from which there could be no recovery.
What little significant power remained was now concentrated in two figures. The matriarch, Diane Valerian, and the family's leading Commander Guard.
At this moment, Diane was a broken effigy of her former self, slumped over the grand obsidian desk where her husband once spun his continent-spanning schemes. Her head was buried in her hands, her shoulders trembling with silent, wracking sobs.
Beside her, the commander stood like a statue carved from granite and rage. His fists were clenched so tightly that his nails, reinforced by Aether, bit into the flesh of his palms, crushing the disciplined calm he had spent a lifetime cultivating.
Diane, once a paragon of noble beauty whose smile could influence policy, now looked haggard. Her face was a ruin, a canvas of grief-etched wrinkles and the dark, bruised smudges of sleeplessness under her eyes. The pain was an overwhelming tide, an agony so immense it buckled her spine and stole the air from her lungs.
"Just what… what can I do now…?" she muttered pitifully, her voice a ragged whisper lost in the cavernous, silent room.
The commander's jaw was a knot of rigid muscle. He was about to speak, to offer words of vengeance he didn't believe or hollow comfort he couldn't feel, when a voice boomed through the manor.
It wasn't projected from a single point; it was omnipresent. It emanated from the very air, from the walls, from the shadows themselves, a sound that bypassed the ears and resonated directly in their Aether Cores.
"Valerian Family. All those at peak or high C-Rank, come out to the front courtyard right now. If not, every single person in this manor will be erased from history."
"Ahh!" Diane's body jerked as if struck by lightning, a strangled gasp tearing from her throat. She went utterly pale, the blood draining from her face to leave a waxy, terrifying mask. Her voice cracked, a trembling whisper of pure horror. "That—that voice… it's him."
The commander, who had faced down Aether beasts in the Broken Wastelands, likewise went rigid. The rage vanished from him like blood from a fatal wound, replaced by an ice-cold dread that seized his heart. "He-he… is he really going to kill us all?"
A moment later, a second voice joined the first, this one feminine, sharp, and laced with a cruel, terrifying impatience. "You lot have five seconds before we erupt chaos. One… two…"
The count was not a threat; it was a promise. It shattered what little remained of Diane's composure. The abstract horror of her family's fall was nothing compared to the imminent, physical threat of total annihilation.
The thought of generations of power, prestige, and blood being extinguished in a single, violent moment was more than she could bear.
Infusing her voice with every last shred of Aether she possessed, she shrieked, a sound of pure, animalistic terror that echoed through the desolate halls.
"STOP! STOP, WE'RE COMING OUT!"
She didn't wait for a reply. Like a madwoman possessed, she launched herself through the nearest floor-to-ceiling window. The armored glass, designed to withstand a siege, exploded into a thousand glittering pieces.
The commander gritted his teeth until they cracked, a spray of blood speckling his lips, before his form flickered and he too flashed out into the night.
One by one, from all corners of the vast estate, the remaining top heroes of the Valerian Family—a dozen figures who could once command armies—appeared in the front courtyard, their faces masks of naked terror.
The sight that greeted them was one of brutal, symbolic destruction.
The two C-Rank guards who had been stationed outside were now mangled corpses, their Aether-laced armor shredded like paper.
The grand gates, forged from nigh-indestructible alloys and once an indomitable symbol of their power, were a twisted ruin of molten metal and shattered stone, still glowing with residual heat.
And standing amidst the carnage, illuminated by the cold moonlight, were the four figures who had become the world's new nightmare.
Orion's indifferent, almost pleasant smile. Lyra's sneering, predatory face. And behind them, like twin goddesses of judgment, stood Elysia and Lisanna, their expressions radiating a regal, chilling calm that was somehow more terrifying than any overt threat.
In that moment, all pride, all thought of resistance, evaporated from Diane's soul. She threw herself forward, not caring for grace or dignity, and smashed her forehead against the pristine flagstones as she collapsed to her hands and knees.
"Don't kill us! Don't kill us, Guardians! Please, show mercy!" she begged, her voice raw and broken.
"Mercy?"
This time, it wasn't Orion or Lyra who spoke. It was Elysia. Her voice was as cold and sharp as the absolute-zero ice she commanded, and her glacial gaze swept over the prostrating nobles, causing every Valerian to shiver uncontrollably.
"Where was your so-called 'mercy' when you schemed to overtake both the Wintercroft and Vance families?" she spat, each word a venomous dart of frozen fury. "Where was your mercy when your idiotic husband and son colluded with the Ironhearth Province to ambush and kill Orion and Lyra? You, after every vile, treacherous act your family has committed for generations, dare to crawl on the ground and beg for mercy? Pathetic."
Lisanna snorted, a sound of pure contempt, her golden eyes flashing with a light that was anything but warm. "Hmph. You should be grateful we are even granting you this audience. The nerve of it all is truly astounding."
Diane clenched her teeth, her hands gripping handfuls of manicured grass and rich soil. She wasn't done. She was a Valerian. She would scheme until her last breath. Desperation fueled a final, desperate gambit.
"If—if you kill all of us, then what's the difference between you and the Villains you claim to despise?" she shouted, her voice rising with calculated hysteria. "Are none of us deserving of a second chance? Moreover, a massacre like this… it will lead your reputation to utter ruin! The other heroes, the Provincial Hero Association Directorate—they will not stand for it!"
Lyra blinked slowly, a deliberate, predatory motion. Then, a smile of genuine, cruel amusement spread across her face. "Hoh. So that's where the brains of this family were hiding. Those were some nice words. A good little speech."
She took a single, deliberate step forward, her smile widening into a terrifying grin that promised annihilation. "Too bad for you that we Guardians couldn't possibly give a shit about our reputation. And we give even less of a shit about the Directorate."
Those words were the final hammer blow, shattering the very foundations of Diane's world. Her eyes went wide, then hollow. The last flicker of desperate hope was extinguished.
In that moment, she truly, finally understood.
In this new era, old rules, old allegiances, and old institutions were meaningless. The carefully constructed balance of power, the unwritten laws of conduct between nobles, the authority of the Directorate—it was all a fragile illusion.
An old saying, one that heroes and nobles alike publicly disdained but secretly acknowledged, surfaced in her mind with the force of divine revelation.
There was only one unbreakable truth: absolute might makes the rules.
Orion smiled, seeing the dawning horror and broken acceptance in her eyes. "Glad to see that look in the end."
And with that, he and Lyra snapped their fingers in perfect, terrifying synchronicity.
Chi.
For the leading commander and the other Valerian heroes, the world ended.
It was not a sound. It was a trigger. An event.
The commander's mouth opened, his battle instincts screaming at him to rally a final, defiant defense. "Fight to the de—"
He never finished.
Reality dissolved into an incomprehensible sensory overload. It wasn't a fight. It wasn't even an execution. It was a paradigm shift. A blinding, silent flash of impossible energy—of icy light and frozen fire—erased everything. It was a fundamental contradiction given form, a conceptual attack that tore apart the laws of physics before it tore apart their bodies.
A wave of light that carried the crushing, absolute weight of a continental glacier. A wave of cold that burned with the searing intensity of a sun.
The very Aether in the atmosphere screamed, not in defiance, but in submission, before being utterly annihilated.
When the impossible light cleared, Elysia and Lisanna bore witness to a scene of profound and gruesome finality.
The remaining powerful C-Rank Valerian heroes were dead. They hadn't just been killed; they had been unmade, turned into grotesque monuments of their assassins' power.
Some stood frozen in their final, terrified poses, their bodies impaled by dozens of crystalline pikes of solidified, glowing light that jutted from their chests like a horrific new ribcage.
Others had simply ceased to exist from the neck up, their headless bodies collapsing in a heap a second later.
The leading commander was a statue of absolute-zero ice, his final shout of defiance frozen on his lips forever.
And Diane's corpse lay crumpled on the ground, a perfect, paradoxical end delivered with artistic cruelty. A single pike of pure, reality-warping ice was driven through her heart, while another of searing, solidified light pierced her brain.
This was it. The end of the Valerian Family's reign.
Elysia and Lisanna let out soft, synchronized sighs, their breath misting in the supernaturally cold air. They shook their heads, not in pity, but in grim acceptance.
This was the first time they had witnessed such a one-sided, absolute massacre. A chilling certainty settled deep in their hearts: it certainly wouldn't be the last.
Orion's voice, now calm and measured, boomed out once more, carrying for hundreds of meters in the silent night—a clear, deliberate message for every listening ear and hidden recording device.
"To all those remaining in this Family, know this: go against us, and you will be six feet under. Although," his tone turned faintly, chillingly amused, "with your current position, you should be more worried about the scavengers around you now. Oh, and for all the hidden cameras and others watching, let this serve as a proper demonstration of how a noble hero family is destroyed."
With his final piece said, he, Lyra, Elysia, and Lisanna turned on their heels and walked away from the silent, glittering graveyard they had created.
Nobody dared to stop them. No cop, no Aegis Academy patrol, no righteous hero, no neighboring noble family dared move a single muscle. The entire district was held in a grip of collective, paralytic fear.
A moment later, a luxurious armored transport, black as a starless night, glided to a silent stop before them. The door hissed open, revealing a driver waiting patiently inside, utterly unfazed by the scene of carnage.
As they entered the vehicle and sped away into the night, the message of their brief, brutal tour was seared into the consciousness of the world. An irreversible change was no longer coming.
It was already here.
…
The night did not end; it shattered. Its fragments scattered across the global Aether-net in a blinding, instantaneous explosion of information.
The hours that followed were a chaotic whirlwind, a maelstrom of fear, awe, and opportunistic fervor that swept through Zenith City and rippled out to engulf the entire Cascadia Province and its neighbors.
News stations, once the purveyors of curated heroism and sanitized conflict, became frantic broadcasters of a new, terrifying reality. Their holographic anchors, faces etched with a mixture of professional gravity and ill-concealed shock, spoke in blaring tones from every public screen and private terminal.
The first seismic shockwave was political. A formal, joint announcement from the Sterling, Wintercroft, and Vance families declared the formation of an unbreakable, lifelong alliance.
The Sterling House, a pillar of C-Rank nobility for centuries, didn't just align themselves; they submitted. The language of the contract, leaked to the Aether-net within minutes of the announcement, was one of explicit fealty. They pledged their resources, their loyalty, and their very futures to the Wintercroft and Vance families, and by extension, to the Guardians who now stood behind them as their undisputed masters.
For a great Noble House to so publicly bend the knee was unprecedented, a shocking display of pragmatism born from pure, unadulterated terror.
The announcement opened the floodgates.
Dozens of lesser Noble Houses, influential mega-corporations, and even powerful independent hero teams scrambled to follow suit.
The Wintercroft and Vance comms lines were flooded with desperate, sycophantic pleas for similar arrangements, all hoping for a chance to simply exist in the orbit of Cascadia's new, blazing suns.
But it was the second, far darker piece of news that chilled the world to its core.
The brutal, systematic execution of the entire Valerian Family's C-Rank leadership. This wasn't a battle; it was an extermination, a cleansing.
News channels, hungry for ratings and emboldened by the institutional silence, pushed the boundaries of journalistic decency. Some broadcasted high-resolution drone footage of the gruesome aftermath.
The world saw the Valerian guards, once proud figures, now reduced to mangled corpses impaled on pikes of frozen light.
They saw Diane Valerian, the matriarch, crumpled on the ground in a final, paradoxical tableau of ice and fire. The sheer, artistic brutality of the scene was a statement more powerful than any declaration.
The remaining Valerian officials, a terrified skeleton crew of non-combatants and low-ranked Talented, tried to manage the crisis. They attempted to clear the courtyard for a private burial, but Orion's lingering Aether made it a near-impossible task. The crystalline constructs refused to melt, bend, or break under conventional means, each one a chillingly permanent monument to his power.
This macabre difficulty was compounded by the internal chaos; the family was imploding, its members frantically liquidating assets and plotting their escapes, knowing they were now a carcass surrounded by circling vultures.
What was perhaps most unsettling was the silence from on high. Hours bled into the early afternoon, yet there was no official response.
The Zenith City police force remained conspicuously absent.
The Hero Association of Cascadia (HAC), the supposed regulatory body for all Talented, issued no statement.
The other great Noble Houses, who would normally be posturing and condemning such a blatant power grab, were as silent as stones in a tomb.
Then, the narrative began to shift, guided by unseen hands. Pundits, politicians, and rival nobles, sensing the violent change in the political winds, began to speak. They didn't condemn the Guardians; they condemned the Valerians. They meticulously rehashed the family's long history of arrogance, corruption, and brutality. They framed the alliance with Ironhearth not as a political maneuver, but as a cowardly act of treason against Cascadia itself.
Soon, some of the more shameless commentators even began to praise the Guardians' actions.
"They were shown mercy," one popular Zenith Broadcasting anchor declared, her face a mask of solemn sincerity. "The Guardians could have erased the entire bloodline. Instead, they performed a necessary cleansing of a corrupting influence and left the rest to rebuild. In a way, the Valerians should be grateful."
Naturally, a silent majority of more righteous heroes and nobles were horrified. They saw the act for what it was: a ruthless consolidation of power through terror, a complete rejection of the laws and ethics that held their society together.
But not a single one dared to voice their dissent publicly. The image of the Valerian courtyard was burned into their minds, a permanent warning. It was now terrifyingly evident what happened to those who opposed the Guardians.
And so, through a masterful combination of fear, opportunism, and clever narrative manipulation, public perception within Cascadia swung dramatically, unnervingly, in Orion and Lyra's favor.
The Province was being remade in their image, and the first day of this new era had only just concluded.