CHAPTER 489: BANNER V

In the lower rungs of the Tower

A thousand lesser factions whispered the new name like prayer and curse.

"Flamebreaker."

Mercenaries etched it into tavern walls. Pilgrims muttered it with awe as they crossed domains that once bent to Kaelith’s shadow. Guildmasters began shifting resources, preparing for the inevitable upheaval.

To defy inevitability was to prove the Tower itself could be bent. And that meant the rules of Ascension were no longer untouchable.

In the middle floors, among rival Ascenders

Some laughed, some raged.

"Good," snarled Vorrak, the Anvil Thought, from within the war-prisons of his faction. "If Kaelith can fall, so can the rest. Even the Thrones."

Others recoiled in dread. A trio of Ascender-lords from rival factions gathered, voices low:

"You don’t understand. The Ants nurtured him. Fed him fragments. This wasn’t chance. This was... design."

"And now the Upper Thrones know. He won’t last."

"...Or he’ll consume them."

Among Leon’s allies

Back in their temporary sanctuary, his team gathered close.

Naval leaned against the shattered wall, voice steady but grave. "Every faction worth a damn will be moving now. Recruitment, assassinations, wars of territory. We just lit the fuse for a conflagration the Ants can’t contain."

Roselia exhaled, magic threads coiling around her fingers. "Then our position is simple. We either hide, or we seize momentum before someone else does."

Liliana frowned, her tone sharp as ever. "And you think the Thrones will sit idle while we play at empire-building? No. They’ll test us. Send envoys, assassins, challengers. Leon’s name is currency now, but it’s also a target painted on all of us."

Roman chuckled darkly, cracking his knuckles. "Then let ’em come. Makes my job easier."

Milim crossed her arms, her tail swishing with raw energy. "Don’t hide, don’t run. Take the fight upward. If the Thrones are watching, then we show them why Flamebreaker isn’t just some accident. He’s the one who sets the tempo now."

Leon

Leon sat in silence through their debate. His hands trembled faintly—the aftershock of Fracture Requiem still gnawed at him, body and soul. Yet within that instability, a fire burned.

He finally spoke, voice cutting through the storm.

"We don’t hide. We don’t rush. We build. The Thrones want to drag me into their war? Fine. But we choose the battlefield."

His gaze lifted, fractured aura flaring faintly in response.

"From this moment on, no one climbs this Tower without reckoning with the Flamebreaker."

And high above, in the unreachable silence, a dozen Thrones stirred.

The Throne War had begun.

Kaelith’s response was thunder made flesh.

His Core surged—not in simple bursts, but in phases. Each strike wasn’t just a blow; it was an unfolding tide, a layered Sovereign tempo that reached backward and forward, claiming the instant before his strike as much as the one after.

His fist crashed forward. To any ordinary opponent, it was an inescapable truth—past, present, and future bent into inevitability.

But Leon had already unraveled inevitability.

The Fifth Pulse spiraled—fractures coiling inward, folding time’s fabric not in lines but in recursive loops. Kaelith’s forward beat struck... and in the same breath, struck again... and again... each repetition hollowed, siphoned into the spiral until only a ghost impact remained.

The shockwave still tore through Leon, shoving him back across obsidian. His ribs screamed, blood laced his breath—but he was still standing.

Kaelith tilted his head, grin widening, not insulted but exhilarated.

"You dare fracture a Sovereign tempo itself... you truly mean to rewrite the battlefield."

Leon’s hand clenched, fractures sparking along his arm, bleeding resonance. His voice was hoarse, but steady.

"I’m not here to rewrite it." His eyes burned with the echo’s spiral light. "I’m here to break it."

They moved again.

Kaelith’s strikes became storms, the kind that rewrite continents. Every step birthed a shockwave, every flex of muscle an era-ending decree. He wielded his Throne like a law that could not be bent.

Leon wove through it, body straining under the cost of the Fifth Pulse. Fractures weren’t elegant—they cut him as much as Kaelith. But with every broken tempo, every shattered rhythm, he bent the warlord’s absolute flow off-axis.

A swing meant to crush his spine became a half-step stumble.

A stomp that should’ve split the arena floor rippled sideways.

Kaelith was never weaker—only forced to adjust, his sovereign momentum interrupted again and again.

And then—Leon struck.

Not a spell. Not a grand invocation.

Just a palm, driven forward, wrapped in the spiral fracture.

It landed against Kaelith’s chest.

The warlord’s body absorbed it easily—flesh, bone, Core untouched. But behind that grin, for the first time, something faltered.

His rhythm staggered.

The Sovereign beat missed its note.

The crowd gasped—Obsidian Ants sensing something they’d never imagined possible: the unbroken tempo of Kaelith the Warlord... had skipped.

Kaelith stepped back, laughter booming, not enraged but exultant.

"You actually cut it. My Sovereign beat." He bared his teeth, eyes alight. "Leon the Echo-Breaker... you might be the first in eternity to make me fight for real."

The arena floor convulsed as Kaelith’s Core began to swell—no longer pacing himself, no longer toying.

This was no longer a duel.

This was a Sovereign War.

Kaelith’s second blow was a hammer meant to flatten timelines.

His gauntlet dropped like a sovereign’s decree, the weight of it not just physical but metaphysical—dragging threads of possible futures into alignment, forcing them toward one outcome: Leon’s annihilation.

But the Fifth Pulse was not a wall. It did not resist—it fractured, spiraled, bent, redirected.

The warlord’s strike landed, yet the quake it carried was rerouted through a dozen impossible seams. Instead of collapsing Leon, the ground erupted behind him, obsidian shards flung like shrapnel toward the stands.

Kaelith’s eyes narrowed.

Leon stood untouched in the quake’s eye, breath sharp, body taut with strain.

"Still standing," Kaelith rumbled, voice carrying like rolling thunder. "But tell me—how long can you rewrite a Throne’s decree before your own rhythm turns against you?"

Leon’s chest burned; the Fifth Pulse wasn’t harmony—it was razorwire spun into tempo. Every fracture he summoned cut into him as well, threatening collapse. But collapse was familiar. Collapse was where Echo was born.

He didn’t answer Kaelith. He only raised his hand, fingers splayed like a conductor poised at the edge of crescendo.

The Fifth Pulse spiraled outward.

Fractures bloomed like constellations, snapping and reforming, each loop catching a piece of Kaelith’s Sovereign rhythm and pulling it off-center.

Kaelith charged through it.

He accepted the stolen beats, twisted them into fuel, his aura spiking higher. The Sovereign Core roared—a colossus refusing to be tangled.

Their clash was no longer strike against strike.

It was tempo against tempo.

Kaelith hammering inevitability into the battlefield, Leon slicing inevitability apart until nothing was certain but the next fracture.

The crowd could no longer follow. To their eyes, the duel had turned into stuttering fragments of violence—two figures moving in ruptured time, blows landing in echoes, strikes unfolding both before and after they seemed to be thrown.

Kaelith’s grin widened as his fist met Leon’s palm, impact detonating a shockwave that fractured not stone, but sound itself.

The world rang silent for a heartbeat—an unnatural void.

And in that silence, Kaelith leaned closer, voice like steel dragged across stone.

"You’re dancing close to ruin, boy."

Leon met his gaze, sweat streaking down his face, the Fifth Pulse spiraling tighter around his form.

"That’s where I do my best work."

The void broke.

The duel surged forward—tempo unraveling, Sovereign decree colliding with the spiral of fracture.

The tempo shattered again.

Kaelith’s gauntlet swept out in an arc, not a simple strike but a decree writ in force. The blow carried not just weight but command—the kind of strike that rewrote what the battlefield must accept. Rocks had no choice but to split, air had no choice but to burn, and Leon’s body had no choice but to yield.

Except—

It didn’t.

The Fifth Pulse spun, caught, fractured.

Leon’s arm trembled as he deflected, not by matching the weight, but by scattering the certainty of Kaelith’s strike. The decree hit a dozen fractures, splitting into conflicting truths—did the blow land? Did it miss? Did it tear the ground or carve the air? The contradictions gnawed at the Sovereign’s rhythm until the strike collapsed in on itself.

Kaelith staggered half a step.

For the first time, his rhythm faltered.

The crowd gasped—though most couldn’t even perceive why. They only saw the impossible: a Throne’s decree failing.

Leon’s lungs burned; his pulse was ragged.

Every fracture cut deeper into his core, but the Fifth Pulse swelled louder, hungry, demanding. He raised his hand again—this time pulling the spiral wider.

The arena itself began to warp.

Stone, dust, sound, even echoes of past battles etched into the coliseum’s memory—all were dragged into the spiral, fractured and realigned. It was no longer just Leon wielding the Fifth Pulse. It was the arena’s history, resonating with him, fighting alongside him.

Kaelith’s grin vanished. His aura surged like an inferno flaring higher, Sovereign Core resonating so violently that his entire body gleamed with searing cracks of light.

"Good," he growled, voice a furnace. "You’ve earned it."

He slammed both fists together, and the Core inside him answered. His aura expanded—no longer a warlord’s rhythm, but the Sovereign’s March.

The Fifth Pulse fractured again, straining against the sheer momentum flooding the battlefield. Leon’s spiral bent under the onslaught, nearly collapsing.

For a split second, Kaelith loomed over him like inevitability given flesh, hammering down with a strike that carried the weight of a dynasty.

Leon didn’t flinch.

He whispered, almost too low to hear:

"Echo of Origin."

The fractures did not resist this time. They did not scatter. They sang.

Kaelith’s hammer strike landed, but instead of breaking Leon, it resonated—answering with the tempo of the Fifth Pulse woven through the Echo of Origin.

The shockwave that followed was unlike anything the arena had ever held.

Two rhythms didn’t just clash—they fused, for a heartbeat, into something greater.

Both fighters were blasted back, Leon staggering, Kaelith skidding trenches into the ground.

The air rang with silence again—no sound, no movement, only the thrum of two cores straining against each other.

Kaelith straightened slowly, blood dripping from his lip, a wild fire in his eyes.

"You’re not just climbing," he said, voice sharp with exhilaration. "You’re tearing open the path itself."

Leon exhaled, blood seeping from his fingertips, the Fifth Pulse still spiraling but flickering on the edge of collapse.

"I told you..." his voice was hoarse, steady. "...ruin is where I work best."

The duel had transcended testing.

Now it was war.