The incandescent pillar pulsed against the sickly crimson sky. Dalvion counted down ten minutes with the cold cadence of a network benchmark. Now, staring at the pillar of light, his lips thinned. This wasn’t some esoteric exploit. This was a direct collision with an unmanaged loop about to fry the hardware. "Kholgath," Dalvion said, stepping past a rusted joint. "We are skipping the trash mobs. Route me to the primary processor. Now." Kholgath, still trembling, his tea-stained apron fluttering around his gaunt frame, conjured a shimmering, ephemeral map in the air. The undercity tunnels twisted under the demon's claws, a red trace flaring upward toward the imperial tier. "The high palace, Lord Dalvion. The seat of the throne. The font of the Great Cleansing." "Adequate," Dalvion muttered. He did not bother walking; he sheared through stone conduit and iron grate in a clean linear vector, leaving the demon lord flapping in his slipstream through the flues until the floor thrummed with raw copper static. They broke into the grand hall, an expanse of carved obsidian and veined marble. Hooded chanters circled a monolithic altar of volcanic slag. Bound by umbral chains across the slab lay Emperor Zethris, shaking against his irons, his ribs carved with glowing runes that vented pressurized steam. High Chancellor Vordrak stood over him in shadow-spun mantle, raising a dark glass dagger. He was mid-incantation when the vault portals—two slabs of warded adamantine—caved inward, peeling off their bronze pivots and crushing two ranks of armored Praetorians into scrap against the masonry. Dalvion stepped through the dust cloud, scowling at the mess. He paid no heed to the red smears on the masonry or the stunned silence gripping the acolytes, staring straight past the dagger to Vordrak. "Listen up, lead programmer," Dalvion said, his tone dry and flat. "This whole deployment is garbage. Your backend tables are corrupt, the sector has massive memory leaks, and now you try to push a hard wipe during peak hours? Unacceptable. Where are the documentation notes? Explain this implementation." Vordrak's skin turned pale, then purple with rage, looking from his crushed vanguard to the intruder stepping over a shattered breastplate. “Insolent… *anomaly*!” Vordrak’s voice shook with suppressed rage. “You dare interrupt the Ascendancy’s apotheosis? You dare challenge the will of Vaelia? You will be purged! Your very essence will fuel the new dawn!” Without another word, Vordrak unleashed the full, concentrated might of the Ascendancy. The very air around him warped, condensing into a single, devastating torrent of raw, unholy power. It wasn't a spell; it was a focused blast of cosmic obliteration, drawn from the ritual itself, from the sacrifice, from the collective will of an empire, aimed directly at Dalvion’s chest. The hall groaned, shadow curling from the flagstones as Kholgath shrank behind a pillar. The black projectile struck Dalvion dead-center and dissolved without displacing a fold of his tunic, the geometry slipping harmlessly around his frame. Dalvion blinked. "Clipping error. Abysmal collision detection." The deflected blast rebounded into the slag-stone dais. Fissures split the stone and cracked the empty air behind it into black geometric seams. Outside, the vertical beam wavered, stuttering in brightness. Zethris screamed as the marks on his skin flared purple, venting iridescent smoke. Dalvion weighed the logs: the central node was desynced, the realm stuck midway through a fatal exception. He could overwrite the altar's loop to save the region, leaving the scrawny mortal to burn out as a fuse, or pull the boy off the stone and let the partition disintegrate.

The Patch Notes