The trumpet of war did not arrive as a single sound. It arrived as a hundred small alarms — reports bleeding together into a truth none could ignore. Border villages fell silent. Patrols never returned. The Magic Knight Command flooded with intelligence: coordinated raids, supply lines severed, towns burned in the dark. The Eye of the Midnight Sun, which had been hinted at like a shadow on the horizon, had stepped out into the light and declared its war.
Satoru felt it in his bones before the official summons. His Star Magic orbs, which usually hummed with distant curiosity, tightened their rotations and pulsed with a new, urgent cadence. The system fed him a steady cascade of data: troop movements, mana spikes, villages under siege, and the rare, terrible signature he had already learned to dread — unnatural mana patterns that pulsed like a heartbeat not human-made.
System Alert: Mobilization Order — All available squads prepped. High-importance nodes: northern corridor, eastern supply lines, central villages. Threat level: Critical. Recommended role: Tactical coordinator + rapid response.
Charlotte called her Blue Rose to formation with the steely precision that had become her hallmark. The Blue Rose flag snapped in the wind as Satoru stepped forward to the briefing dais, orbs calm but ready. Around him, the kingdom's scattered defense coalesced: Golden Dawn scouts, Black Bulls' raw numbers, and smaller squads hastily redirected from routine patrols. The plaza smelled of fear and resolve.
"Protect civilians first," the Command instructed. "Neutralize Eye of the Midnight Sun factions where possible. Do not engage large consolidated forces without support." The order was both strategy and plea.
Satoru's mind began to organize the battlefield like a board of constellations. He issued quiet commands to Blue Rose units and pushed coded Star Magic threads outward — to Golden Dawn for aerial reconnaissance, to Black Bulls to draw frontal attention. He had learned to act not as a lone star but as a small system of satellites: survey, manipulate, coordinate.
They moved in waves. First the Scouts — Yuno's squad slicing wind over the treetops, locating ambush parties and striking key nodes. Next, the disruption teams: a mix of Blue Rose precision and Black Bulls chaos to fracture the enemy lines. Satoru took a flank near a ravine where intelligence placed an Eye cell. He positioned Star Infinity orbs high, a lattice that could transform into surveillance, shields, or concentrated strikes at his command.
At first the battles were tactical, sharp, survivable. Satoru's Hollow Purple barriers swallowed incoming torrents of mana. Reversal Red arcs sent enemy spells back to their casters. Shooting Star projectiles sizzled through gaps between spell formations. Villagers were guided out through corridors carved by Yuno's winds and Asta's violent, mana-null paths. The three worked like a single engine: Satoru's mind, Yuno's precision, Asta's blunt-force clarity.
And then the Eye escalated.
Like a sickness blooming, the rituals began.
It did not start with a single spectacle. It started with a village that had been saved the night before posting silence the next morning. Scouting teams found the streets empty except for flags — Elven sigils crudely painted across doors, children asleep with starlight in their eyes. Then the first confirmed report: a town guard, staunch and known for his iron-willed defense, entered a checkpoint and greeted the patrol with a voice not his own. His pupils were the wrong color, his mana felt wrong — thinner, colder, threaded with ancient melodies.
Satoru's system recognized the anomaly and flagged it.
System Alert: Mana Transmutation Detected — Elven signature overlay. Process: Ritualized Reincarnation / Possession. Spread rate: exponential without containment. Recommended priorities: isolate affected zones, prevent travel, secure refuges, disrupt ritual nodes.
They had stolen a piece of the old magic and calibrated it into a weapon. The Eye of the Midnight Sun had found or recreated the rites that the elves had used to drive their vengeance — a way to pour elven will into human hosts, to resurrect the pain and purpose of a lost race inside living bodies. In practice, the result was a populace that woke with the clarity of an elf's grievance and the strength of a magic that had been sleeping for centuries.
Satoru watched the first test up close. He and a small strike team reached a farm where neighbors had fled; instead they found the villagers in a ring, silent and bright-eyed, chanting. At the center, a cursed lattice of mana pulsed — rune-sigil stones humming with the same sickly lullaby he'd heard in the Midnight Sun hides. A high priest-like figure intoned and the villagers rose, but their rising was not their own.
Satoru reacted as a commander and as a scalpel. He could have cut through with Shooting Stars and ended dozens of lives — ensured no further spread — but he also saw the tragedy and the political apocalypse that mass slaughter would trigger. He hesitated, then did what he had always done: choose the most surgical path that would save as many as possible.
He trained one of his orbs — a Star Infinity node — to act as a temporary mana filter. It took concerted focus; the system calculated strain, the orb heated with absorbed mana, and Satoru routed a slice of his Elf-like reservoir into it to expand the filter's capacity. For a breath, his heart thought in code and numbers.
System Task: Deploy Mana Filter (temporary). Cost: high Elf-mana draw. Reward: isolate ritual node. Risk: temporary fatigue and detection.
The filter dropped like a net across the ritual lattice. The chanting faltered. Asta lunged into the gap, anti-magic blade cleaving through the physical sigils while Satoru's filter bled off the elven overlay. Yuno's wind pressured the now-vulnerable operatives into exposure. Rogue mages fell. The affected villagers slumped, breathing easier, confused but alive.
It worked — but only as a test. The Eye had multiple nodes in motion. For every lattice they isolated, two more lit up at dawn on different maps. The ritual spread like a contagion designed for panic: elven possession meant whole communities suddenly affected and aggressive toward outside interference; it meant civilians turned into soldiers by remembrance.
Throughout the first week of open war, Satoru's system ran constant background tasks: Node mapping; filter deployment; containment probability; level growth. Each successful isolation rewarded him with experience points and system leveling jingles he'd long since learned not to be flippant about. His Star Magic proficiency surged; new tactical modules unlocked — Mana Purge Array, Targeted Lattice Collapse, Containment Net (temporary). The cost was fatigue proportional to power — Elf-mana drained faster than human reserves — but the payoffs saved lives and earned time.
The politics of the war became visceral. Town leaders, often older and cautious, begged for heavy-handed extermination of the turned. Others demanded patience and containment. Captains argued in councils. Charlotte's Blue Rose held to precise objectives; Yami's Black Bulls argued for blunt, effective force; the Golden Dawn tried to coordinate with bureaucratic calm. The Wizard King's earlier injury — the battle with Licht — left an uneasy gap at the highest level. Commanders looked to the promising young talents. Satoru, who had always preferred calculations to speeches, found himself a node of advice — the man who could precisely pick which ritual to isolate and which threatened an uncontrollable spike.
Then came the turning point: the Eye staged a mass ritual at a border fortress. They did not move covertly; they wanted spectacle. The fortress was ancient, built over an elven leyline. The Eye's operatives dragged out relics, recited the old words, and opened a maw of mana that howled across the map. Villagers who watched from the hilltops sang along before the spell had finished — eyes bright as stars, faces blank in devotion.
Satoru arrived with coordinated squads arrayed — Blue Rose flanking, Golden Dawn overhead, Black Bulls busting forward in the center. The battle that followed was not only brute force; it was a race against propagation. Every second the ritual continued, the altar shed threads to the surrounding farmland and town. The orbs became a thousand small tasks: protect the evacuation corridors, pick off conjured illusions, disrupt nodes. Satoru focused his system on one operation: sever the altar's broadcast without annihilating the surrounding hosts.
System Proposal: Sequence — Stage 1: Create Constellation Shield (local mana inversion). Stage 2: Apply Reversal Red harmonics to reflect ritual energy back toward the source. Stage 3: Asta executes Anti-Magic detonation at the focal disruption point. Timing tolerance: ±0.3s. Risk: extremely high.
Satoru triggered the plan. Star Infinity grids winked in the sky, forming a dome that warped the ambient line of mana so that the altar's weave could not propagate outward. For a heartbeat, the Eye's ritual backfired into its own lattice; the web buckled. Satoru saw the perfect moment and fed an anti-magic strike — Asta at the focal point. The anti-magic blade opened a hole in the ritual's continuity.
It should have been the victory. Instead, the altar responded. A figure stepped into the light — not just any operative but a high-ranking member of the Eye, one whose mana signature made Satoru's system jitter with warnings. The figure moved with ancient grace and spoke a single name into the air in a language older than the Clover Kingdom. The effect: the altar, instead of collapsing, spilled a wave of elven will that seized anyone caught in its echo. Many fell under its light, only to re-emerge with voices that sang of revenge and old wrongs. The ritual did not merely spread: it awakened.
At the head of that wave stood a man whose presence made the battlefield still — a figure who matched the stories of elven commanders in muscle and mind. And then the worst moment came: his eyes found Julius Novachrono. A clash of titans erupted; the Wizard King, despite his earlier injury, rose and met the leader. For a time the clash was myth-making: time magic against elven legacy.
Satoru watched as the duel escalated to cataclysmic force. Julius's time spells were masterful, but the elven leader's power was not merely raw: it was rooted in grievance and centuries of contained magic. In a shattering turn, Julius faltered; the field echoed with the king's fall — an event that rewrote the morale equation of the entire war. Commanders broke into furious, frightened plans. Without the Wizard King's stabilizing presence, every sortie became a risk of collapse.
Satoru felt the shift like a tide. His system flooded with updated directives: High strategic risk. Command cohesion: unstable. Recommendation: form coalition command, prioritize civilian sanctuaries, increase filtration operations, tactical strike teams on altar nodes. The war stopped being only about the battlefield and became an existential crisis of culture and memory: the Eye's magic did more than kill — it reclaimed.
What followed were days of frenetic theater. The Eye attacked a string of sites where elven energies could be amplified. Entire hamlets underwent conversion ceremonies that birthed silent, precise soldiers — citizens made into instrumented memory. Armies moved to contain or, when needed, to evacuate. Satoru's Star Magic and system became indispensable for the surgical work: targeted dispels, lattice collapses, anti-magic windows, logistical routes for evacuation.
But even as he succeeded, the moral fog deepened. Each time Satoru isolated a node and saved people, dozens more woke with alien recollections of massacre and the will to reclaim what had been stolen. The conflict's edges blurred: farmers who had been turned stood rigid in fields and cried out in archaic dialects, demanding vengeance for elves long dead. Knights who fired on them for safety returned home with a hollow stomach. Political pressure built; nobles demanded harsher measures, while others pleaded for containment, rehabilitation, and diplomacy.
Amid the chaos, Satoru's system continued to provide cold calculus: XP, new skills, growth stats. He watched the digits climb with a clinical half-smile and felt the human cost weigh on him all the same. Quest Log Updates:
"Disrupt Border Altar" — Completed (+4300 XP; unlocked Mana Purge Array)
"Isolate Village Node" — Completed (+1900 XP; unlocked Containment Net)
Active Quest: "Locate Central Ritual Nexus" — Critical; unlocks high-value intel on the Eye's command structure.
And then, in the long, ragged night after Julius's fall, Satoru sat with Asta and Yuno under the blown-out stars. They were no longer three kids who played with orbs and brooms. They were commanders of a desperate defense, each carrying a different kind of burden.
"We can fight them," Asta said, voice raw. "We have to hit their leaders, get their nodes offline."
Yuno's gaze was distant. "We can't just cut. The more we cut, the more they twist the story. This is a war of memory now."
Satoru's system chimed softly, as if impatience itself had become a mechanical voice. He answered in the only way he could: with plans, with prioritization. "We split tasks. We'll run offensive teams to disrupt the central nexus — surgical only — while increasing containment bands around population centers. We must preserve civilians and strike the core nodes when we can isolate them."
Their plan, executed over the next weeks, carried the weight of everything that had happened: battles, skirmishes, ritual nodes, the moral calculus between extermination and salvation. Satoru's Star Magic and his system were the scalpel and the map; Asta's anti-magic was the open wound that severed continuity; Yuno's wind and precision knit the edges, keeping them safe.
The war had started in noises and alarms. It had become a war of people turned by grief into soldiers, a war where the past moved through the present like a contagious dream. Satoru and his friends were not destined to victory by power alone. They would need to fight with strategy, with surgical precision, and, perhaps most painfully, with mercy.
At the end of the chapter, his log chimed one more update — a quiet, stark reminder that their next move mattered more than any experience points: New major quest unlocked: "Assault the Central Ritual Nexus." Time constraint: critical. Allies required: Multi-squad coalition. Risk: Cataclysmic.
Satoru closed his eyes for a moment, felt the hum of his orbs, and let the weight of that quest settle. The rising star had been noticed by kings and cults alike. Now the war would truly begin.