The surface world was quiet, but it was the silence of a graveyard.
Jeather stood in the epicenter of the ruined Viremont Manor, his boots resting on the charred, skeletal remains of the grand ballroom where his family had once hosted the high nobility of the empire. The moonlight was exceptionally pale tonight, filtering through the jagged teeth of the broken stone walls and casting long, skeletal shadows across the ash.
He closed his eyes and inhaled. The air here didn't taste like sulfur, mercury, or ozone. It tasted of damp earth, night pine, and the faint, bitter tang of a fire that had burned out months ago. To anyone else, it was the smell of tragedy. To Jeather, it was fuel.
"Master," the Spore-Mother whispered through the Hive-Link, her voice a soft, velvet rustle that echoed in his mind. "The soil here is dead. The surface-dwellers have salted the earth around your home. They wanted to ensure nothing ever grew here again."
"They were right to be afraid," Jeather replied internally, his fingers brushing against the edges of his Sovereign Deck. "Because I'm not growing. I'm harvesting."
He opened his eyes. The prismatic rim of his irises—the lingering mark of the Mirror-King—flared in the dark. He looked toward the northern horizon, where the spires of the Capital City pierced the night sky like silver needles. They were brightly lit, humming with the centralized mana-grid that Kael Dravenhart had stolen from him.
Every single light in that city was powered by a lie.
The Audit: The Vanguard of the Surface
Inside his soul-realm, the environment had shifted dramatically upon his return to the surface. The Aether-Forge was no longer fighting against the immense, crushing atmospheric pressure of the Under-World. Released from the subterranean depths, the energy of the Falling Star Core expanded smoothly, filling the quarry with a blinding, violet-silver radiance.
Saxum stood at the center of the forge, his body now a towering lattice of brass and crystalline titanium, a direct result of siphoning the World-Cracker Centipede.
"Jett! The surface grid is trying to probe us!" Saxum warned, his giant fists slamming together with a sound like a thunderclap. "The central towers are broadcasting a tracking frequency. They know the hatch was breached!"
"Let them look," Jeather said. "Astrael, prepare the network. We aren't hiding anymore."
The Demon-King nodded from his high ledge, his silver flames expanding into a massive, translucent dome that shielded Jeather's location from the Capital's radar. Beside him, the Jungle King Gorilla flexed his arms, the new titanium-plated joints humming with the Molecular Vibration trait they had stolen from the Centipede.
The Obsidian-Storm Hounds paced the perimeter of his soul, their bodies phasing in and out of reality, eager to be unleashed on the surface flesh. Twenty-eight beasts. A perfect, synchronized army of Platinum and Legendary entities, all tied to a single, independent mind.
Jeather hadn't walked half a mile from the ruins before the tall grass of the valley rustled. The Capital's automated defense grid was fast, but Kael's forces were faster.
Three sleek, silver-plated hover-transports dropped from the clouds, their anti-gravity engines humming softly. Before they even touched the ground, doors slid open, and two dozen elite tamers from the Imperial Vanguard deployed, their matching white-and-gold uniforms gleaming in the moonlight.
"Target spotted!" the lead tamer shouted, holding up a high-tier tracking crystal that pulsed with a frantic red light. "It's the Viremont anomaly! Do not engage in dialogue—execute immediately!"
They didn't call him Jeather. To the empire, he was just an anomaly. An unscripted variable.
The tamers drew their cards in perfect unison, summoning a synchronized wall of Glint-Steel Griffins (Rank: High-Gold). The beasts shrieked, their metallic feathers catching the moonlight as they dived toward Jeather, their talons extended to shred his flesh.
"Synthesis: The Phase-Stalker."
Jeather didn't run. He didn't even draw a card. He simply activated the Obsidian Wraith-Lord's trait alongside the Centipede's Molecular Vibration.
The lead Griffin slammed into Jeather at eighty miles an hour—and passed entirely through him. Jeather's body was a smoky, vibrating ghost. As the beast phased through his torso, the high-frequency vibration shattered the molecular bonds of the Griffin's metallic wings. The beast hit the dirt behind him, disintegrating into a pile of non-functional iron dust.
"What the hell is he?" the lead tamer gasped, his hands trembling as he reached for a backup card. "The scanner said he was a tamer, not a phantom!"
"My turn," Jeather said, his voice overlapping with the multi-toned resonance of the Trinity Sentinels.
He raised his right hand, and a single card slid into his palm: The Storm-Vassal King.
"Manifest: Harmonic Execution."
Jeather didn't summon the full body of the King. He simply projected the Thunder-Sunder Blade directly from the card. A six-foot slab of white-hot crystal materialized in his grip, connected to his arm by cords of silver silk.
He swung the blade once.
Because he possessed the Eternal Capacitor trait, the blade didn't just discharge a spark; it dragged a massive, vertical fork of cobalt lightning down from the clear night sky. The bolt struck the center of the vanguard's formation, the heat instantly vaporizing the hover-transports and sending a shockwave through the valley that flattened the tall grass for a mile.
The tamers who survived the initial blast were thrown to the ground, their white uniforms scorched black, their high-tier decks scattered in the dirt.
Jeather walked through the smoke, the heavy, metallic tang of the lightning trailing behind him. He stopped over the lead tamer, who was coughing up blood, his eyes wide with a terror that no textbook could have prepared him for.
"Kael told you I was dead, didn't he?" Jeather asked, looking down at the man with cold, unblinking eyes.
"He... he said you were a failed asset," the tamer whispered, clutching his shattered chest. "He said the deep would dissolve you."
"Tell him the deep was delicious," Jeather said.
He didn't use a regular sealing card on the tamer's fallen Griffins. He held up a blank Void-Steel Card and pointed it at the scattered, dying beasts of the vanguard. The violet vortex erupted, siphoning the remaining high-gold cores into his deck to fuel the forge.
[Siphon Successful: 12 High-Gold Cores Extracted]
[Aether-Forge Status: Stable]
Jeather left the tamers in the burning valley. He didn't need to kill the survivors; their broken spirits would deliver the message to Kael far faster than any comm-link.
He looked back toward the Capital City. The red alert lights on the outer walls were spinning now, a distant chorus of sirens beginning to echo across the plains. They knew he was coming. The entire empire was turning its wheels to stop a single man.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out the top card of his deck—the World-Cracker Centipede. The legendary beast pulsed against his fingers, its titanium armor reflecting the distant lights of the city he had once called home.
"They built walls to keep the monsters out," Jeather said, a small, predatory smile cutting across his face as he began his march toward the gates. "But they forgot that some monsters are born on the inside."
With every step he took, the ground beneath his feet vibrated, the "Weight of the Falling Star" finally aligned with a purpose that would shake the surface world to its very foundations.