Year 742 of the Current Era, Capital of Eryndor, Aurelion Empire
That day, something descended from the sky.
At first, it was nothing more than a dark shape—too high to be understood, too slow to be ignored. Those who noticed it first thought it was an illusion—a stain in the blue, a trick of the light. Then they stopped, stared harder, and realized that the point was not falling.
It was descending.
A murmur spread through the streets. Fingers pointed skyward. People called out to one another. Conversations broke off, replaced by a shared attention, almost instinctive. Little by little, gazes rose by the hundreds, then by the thousands.
Then the wings became visible.
Six immense black masses, arranged in three perfectly symmetrical pairs. They did not beat. They remained spread wide, motionless—far too vast to belong to any known creature. Even from that distance, their presence seemed to weigh upon the air, as if the sky itself had grown heavier around them.
As the silhouette drew closer, the wings ceased to be mere shapes. Feathers appeared—dense, orderly, a deep black that absorbed light rather than reflecting it. No shimmer. No wasted movement. Only a perfect span, held without any visible effort.
Then the body took form.
A humanoid figure, suspended between sky and earth, carried by those unreal wings. Long black hair drifted slowly around his face, stirred by a wind no one could feel on the ground. His posture was straight, controlled, devoid of tension, as though gravity no longer applied to him in quite the same way.
Some then noticed his eyes.
Red. Deep. Visible even from afar. They did not search the crowd below, nor did they seem to observe it. They stared straight ahead, beyond the city itself, as if what lay beneath him were nothing more than a detail.
Finally, the halo appeared.
Above his head floated a ring of black thorns—broken, irregular, suspended without any visible support. A shattered crown, silent, which did not descend with him yet accompanied him all the same, as if bound to his very existence.
The figure continued its descent for a few more moments.
Then it stopped.
For several seconds, he remained motionless in the air, wings spread wide, paying no attention to the city below. The world could wait. By reflex, his mind turned inward, away from the outside, toward something else—toward what he knew, toward what normally always responded.
Status window.
Nothing.
He frowned slightly, without moving, as though expecting nothing more than a brief delay.
Menu. Interface. Settings. Log. Map.
The silence persisted. Complete. Unacceptable.
He tried again, changing the phrasing, instinctively searching for the right command, like someone facing a stubborn bug they refuse to acknowledge.
System display. Connection. Support. Contact an administrator.
Still nothing.
Not even an empty response. No latency. No error. Just a total absence of feedback—blunt, almost insulting. As if those words held no meaning here. As if they had never existed at all.
A dull tension rose in his chest.
Fuck…
This wasn't normal. Even during the worst crashes, Age of Genesis always returned something. An error message. A freeze. A forced logout. Here, there was nothing. Not even proof of a malfunction. As if the very concept of an interface no longer existed.
He clenched his fists slightly.
What's going on…
Before he could try anything else, a voice cut through the air.
"W… who are you?"
He froze. The mental commands vanished instantly, swept away by a sudden, total focus. Slowly, he moved his head, searching for the source of the voice.
A man stood beneath him.
Full armor, worn more by use than ornament. A tense, controlled stance—someone ready to act without knowing how. Behind him, an entire unit had formed, organized, silent. Soldiers. Not static figures. Men who breathed, hesitated, and felt fear.
…He doesn't know who I am?
The thought crossed his mind, brief and almost absurd. In Age of Genesis, Elohim was known to all. Even minor entities recognized his wings and his halo. Ignorance was not possible.
An NPC reset?
The idea died almost instantly.
He lowered his gaze slightly toward the city.
And what he saw bore no resemblance to anything familiar.
Faces. Thousands of them. All different. All imperfect. Some frozen in fear, others in shock. A few knelt, murmuring prayers without taking their eyes off the sky. Trembling hands. Moist eyes. Ragged breaths.
This was not a rendered crowd.
It was a living one.
No engine. No game. No hardware could display such detail, such human inconsistency, such chaotic fear.
This isn't a game…
Then he saw her.
A faint, unstable golden glow, almost smothered, in the middle of the crowd. It came from a child.
Small. Too thin. Slumped shoulders, a frail body marked by exhaustion. Her white hair, dull and faded, fell to her shoulders, matched by eyebrows of the same washed-out color. Her yellow eyes, wide open, reflected neither panic nor hope—only a weary vigilance.
Around her neck hung a collar.
Chains were attached to it.
…A slave?
The thought made him pause.
It made no sense. None at all. A signature like that—even weakened—would have drawn every kind of greed. In AOG, a being even remotely close to the Vision of Midas would have been captured, protected, exploited, traded. Never reduced to this.
Interesting.
The decision was immediate.
[Divine Interval]
He vanished.
Before the eyes of the entire capital, the winged silhouette disappeared as if it had never existed, leaving behind a brutal, almost painful emptiness. Then it reappeared in front of the child, only a few steps away.
His wings were now folded. The crown of thorns still floated above his head, unmoving. He towered over her, yet his gaze softened slightly as he took in her condition more closely.
Up close, she looked even more exhausted. Dark circles marked her pale face. Her clothes were worn, ill-fitting in places, clumsily mended. Around her wrists, old marks were still visible—not recent enough to be ignored, not old enough to be forgotten.
She slowly raised her eyes to meet his.
And for the first time since his arrival, what he saw in a human gaze was not fear, but recognition.
The voice that reached him was weak, almost smothered by the effort it took to speak.
"Are you here… to kill me?"
He remained still for a moment, surprised less by the question itself than by what it implied. So that was it. That look held neither faith nor admiration. It was silent relief—the thought that everything might finally end here.
What suffering had she endured for death to seem preferable to going on?
Poor girl…
In that instant, all hesitation vanished. This world was definitively not Age of Genesis. Not with words this heavy, not with suffering this real. For reasons he did not yet understand, he had become his character—but this world was not the game.
He lowered his head slightly to meet her gaze.
"No. I'm here so that you may live."
She blinked, unsettled. The words seemed to slide past her without taking hold. A brief moment passed, then her gaze dulled once more.
"Ah… I see…"
He observed that resignation closely.
"Is there anything you still need to do in this kingdom?"
She thought for a few seconds, then slowly shook her head.
"No. Not really."
Then he raised his hand.
The gesture was calm, precise, almost gentle. His fingers closed around the collar, and the metal gave way instantly, cut with unreal cleanness. He did the same with the chains around her ankles, which fell to the ground with a sharp clatter.
A man dared to speak.
"Hey… you can't—"
The sentence died there.
The look Elohim gave him was enough.
He had intended to be merciful. But that misplaced interruption made his resolve waver. He turned his attention back to the child.
"Was it him who did this to you?"
She lowered her eyes, then nodded.
"Yes."
Something cracked within him.
His red eyes darkened slowly, as if the light were drowning within them, until they became a deep, bottomless abyssal black. When he spoke again, his voice did not rise. It fell—heavy, laden with a heat that did not belong to this world.
[Flames of Purgatory]
The fire was born without explosion.
It erupted directly from the air around the man—black flames, thick and shifting, casting no light yet devouring everything they touched. They coiled around his body like living chains, slipping beneath his skin, into his flesh, into his breath.
The man screamed.
A raw, torn cry that no longer sounded human. He fell to his knees, struggled, clawed at the ground as if he could escape it, while the flames intensified with every movement.
"Mercy— … I… I… … Stop… H-Help—!"
His words shattered between screams, swallowed by pain. Each cry seemed to feed the flames, making them fiercer, deeper, as if they were gorging themselves on his sins.
Elohim watched him burn without the slightest emotion.
"The flames of Purgatory consume a being in proportion to his sins," he said coldly.
He let silence fall, then continued.
"If your soul is pure, you have nothing to fear."
The screams intensified, then changed. They grew shorter. Weaker. Until they became nothing more than muffled rattles—before fading away entirely. The black flames slowly dissipated, leaving behind only scorched ground… and silence.
A heavy, suffocating silence that no one dared to break.
He turned away and, with unexpected gentleness, lifted the little girl into his arms. She was light. Far too light. Her body still trembled, but she did not resist—and then, without warning, they vanished before everyone's eyes, for the second time.
That day, in the hearts of Eryndor's inhabitants, a rumor was born—of an angel who had descended from the sky. Of a being who burned evil itself, and carried the innocent away with him.
A legend had begun.