Chapter 38: The Ash and the Golden Light

The Demon King… was gone.

Because of the blinding radiance that had erupted at the very end, it was impossible to discern the exact mechanics of what had transpired, but one objective truth remained indisputable. The Demon King, who had stained this world in an absolute, suffocating blackness, had vanished.

Ilya, who had been commanding the vanguard from the furthest rear, surged out of his position and fell heavily to his knees. The world, now filling to the brim with pure light, was a sight so overwhelming that his chest ached under the sheer weight of it.

The grueling, seemingly endless war was finally over. Hot tears traced paths down his cheeks, pooling before dripping onto the barren dirt below. No, it wasn’t barren anymore. The very ground touched by the violet holy aura the Hero had unleashed at the last moment was already drinking in a renewed surge of vitality.

The suffocating shroud of darkness parted, revealing a sky that was high, crisp, and brilliantly blue. A soft, gentle breeze drifted across the plains like a tender caress. The sun cast its transparent, unblemished light over the world. A chorus of whispers from the newly awakened soil blanketed the vast earth.

Ah, everything is so beautiful.

Unable to summon the will to stand, Ilya remained on his knees, weeping openly as he stared up into the heavens. The joy was so sharp it felt like a physical prickling against his skin. Even if it meant going completely blind, he had to look at that sun. For the past ten years, the demonic energy veiling the firmament had stolen that very light from them.

As Ilya lost himself in his tears, staring blankly into the solar glare, a shadow suddenly fell across his vision. Though his eyes were too dazzled by the light to form a distinct silhouette, he could tell someone was standing directly in front of him.

“……Ilya.”

It was Felix.

Felix reached down, grabbing Ilya by the arm to pull him upright. Scurrying to his feet under Felix’s grip, Ilya stumbled slightly as he scrambled to offer proper imperial etiquette.

“Y-Your Highness. The sun… the sun is……”

As he blinked, the last reservoir of tears spilled over his eyelashes and slid down his cheek. Felix reached out a hand, gently wiping the moisture away.

“Indeed.”

“The sun… the Empire finally has its sun, its light back……”

“Yes. We won, Ilya. We survived it.”

Felix, thoroughly caked in dry, dark crimson blood, let his features twist into a weary, genuine smile.

“Hurry, sound the horns. Raise the trumpets of victory, gather the fallen, and tend to the wounded. We must prepare to build what comes next.”

A strange, deeply unsettling premonition suddenly flickered within Ilya, causing him to hesitate.

“Your Highness, where is… everyone else?”

“None of the core figures of this campaign have perished. Not yet. Therefore, securing this battlefield must take priority. Pull yourself together, Ilya. Order comes first.”

Even now, it didn’t feel real that a war spanning a decade could conclude in a single, fleeting instant. In stark contrast to Ilya, who remained entirely trapped within the emotional afterglow of the victory, Felix was already dispensing commands and monitoring the state of the camp as if it were any ordinary day. Anchored by that steady presence, Ilya finally forced his mind into focus and surveyed his surroundings. Though he felt as if he were walking through a hazy, disjointed dream, his years of ingrained administrative experience took over, allowing him to efficiently oversee the aftermath despite the glaring lack of reality.

Once the baseline tasks were established, Felix left the remaining logistics in the hands of Claire and Cézanne, immediately transporting himself and Ilya back to the Imperial Palace. The power of the Dragon was omnipotent—capable of traversing from one edge of the continent to the other in a single breath. Tasting a profound boundary of power that existed entirely separate from traditional teleportation magic, Ilya stepped foot into the palace late that afternoon.

It was there that Felix bared the unfiltered truth to him: the Demon King had vanished, but they had no concrete proof of whether he was truly destroyed. Judging by Felix’s guarded tone, almost no one else on the continent was privy to this unsettling reality. At best, Zeimer might have caught a hint of it. From this moment onward, the future rested entirely in the hands of the Goddess.

Felix offered a bitter, hollow smile. Yet, he wiped the expression from his face almost instantly, unleashing his brilliant golden power without a shred of hesitation.

What followed was a bloody, systemic purge that raged through the night. Ilya remained by his side through every agonizing second of it. Holding the entire Imperial Palace firmly within his grasp, the descendant of the Dragon systematically hunted down his opposition, culminating in the capture of his own uncle, who was dragged down into the subterranean dungeons. Everything was executed in the dead of night, enveloped in absolute, chilling silence.

The morning sun broke. Within the halls of the Imperial Palace, the thick, metallic scent of fresh blood still seemed to vibrate through the air. Though they were childhood friends, it was the first time Ilya had ever witnessed Felix wield his devastating authority against living human beings, and the memory of the previous evening sent a violent shiver down his spine.

Before Ilya could even indulge in the sentimentality of returning to his home after nine long years, the sheer velocity of the bloody purge left his heart completely cold. Everything was in far worse shambles than he had anticipated. Excluding the common servants, the number of survivors was drastically eclipsed by the dead. Armed with a perception that could pierce through all deception, the sovereign of the continent had completely filtered out those who truly belonged to him within the palace walls.

Standing rigidly behind Felix, who still radiated the faint scent of copper, Ilya descended into the depths of the underground prison. Zeimer, who had rushed to the palace the moment his mana recovered in response to Felix’s summons, walked silently by his side.

The subterranean dungeons had been completely neglected over the years, leaving the air thick with the damp, choking stench of mildew. With every step down the spiral stairs, the moisture caused the soles of their boots to stick and peel against the stone with a wet, heavy rhythm that echoed throughout the gloom. Felix finally halted his advance only when they reached the deepest, most secure cell.

“Kill me.”

With both wrists bound by heavy iron chains anchored to the ceiling, his arms suspended awkwardly in mid-air, the Emperor—no, the man—muttered without even lifting his bowed head.

“Just kill me.”

Though his lavish dress uniform was heavily stained in dried blood, frayed, and torn in multiple places, the man still managed to exhale a hollow, wheezing laugh full of mockery.

“Simply.”

Felix’s empty voice reverberated against the stone walls of the dungeon. It was a voice so entirely devoid of emotion it was downright bone-chilling.

“Did you say… to simply kill you just now?”

Perhaps, rather than lacking emotion, the words were simply too narrow a vessel to hold the cataclysmic surge of fury overflowing within him.

“Because of you alone. Because of your singular existence.”

Ilya squeezed his eyes shut, his eyelids burning with friction. He couldn’t tell if the exhaustion stemmed from spending the entire night tearing through the mountains of documents recovered from the former Emperor’s desk, or if it was the sheer psychological weight of enduring one impossible crisis after another. Zeimer stood nearby, looking deeply fatigued as he crossed his arms, leaning his weight onto one leg as he slouched crookedly against the damp stone wall.

Felix continued to speak, but the man before them barely seemed to register the words. His head remained deeply bowed, his disheveled hair spilling forward to completely mask his expression. He seemed to have entirely resigned himself to his fate.

“Countless lives have perished. The third defensive line was shattered, and half of the Empire’s sovereign territory was utterly obliterated because of your treason.”

The man who had been dragged from the highest pinnacle of power down to the absolute dirt finally raised his head. Though he was forced onto his knees, the glare he directed at them was as feral and malevolent as a cornered beast. His golden eyes—strikingly, terrifyingly identical to Felix’s—slowly swept across Felix, then Zeimer, before finally settling on Ilya.

“I was… nothing more than a half-breed, after all.”

“……”

“Unable to comprehend what was truly right, I was nothing more than a pathetic, mortal human.”

Only then did Zeimer show the barest hint of interest in the prisoner. The heels of his leather riding boots clicked sharply against the unpolished, uneven stone floor, creating a jarring, echoing rhythm. Around Zeimer’s frame, a transparent yet distinctly blue aura of mana began to ripple and swell.

“A human.”

“Indeed.”

“A human, you say.”

Zeimer dropped into a low crouch directly in front of the man. Reaching out with a slender, elegant hand lined with prominent veins, he brutally gripped the man’s jaw, forcing him upward to lock eyes. The heavy ring adorning Zeimer’s finger tore into the flesh of the man’s chin. Under the crushing, unforgiving pressure of that grip, the man’s lips split apart, letting a dark smear of blood break through.

“Zeimer!”

Panic-stricken, Ilya instinctively shouted the mage’s name. Yet, despite the name echoing loudly throughout the cavernous cell, Zeimer merely dismissed it with a lazy, irritated wave of his hand, ignoring the Chancellor entirely.

Zeimer stared intensely into the man’s eyes for a long, agonizing moment. As the echoes faded, the subterranean chamber dissolved into a profound silence, broken only by the intermittent, rhythmic drip of water from the ceiling. Ilya watched the shadows of the kneeling man, Zeimer, and Felix stretch across the walls, feeling as though they were swelling into monstrous proportions.

Eventually, as if unable to endure the sheer weight behind Zeimer’s gaze any longer, the man shifted only his pupils, turning his eyes toward Felix. But realizing that Felix’s gaze was laced with something far more suffocating and absolute, he quickly dropped his eyes back to the dirt. Felix… merely stood there. Perfectly still. Doing absolutely nothing.

Only then did Zeimer rip his hand away from the man’s jaw, tossing him aside like a piece of discarded garbage.

“Right. You truly are just a human.”

Completely drained of all interest, Zeimer turned on his heel and walked out of the underground dungeon with detached, unhurried steps, never once looking back.

Felix’s features remained frozen into a mask of pure ice as he looked down at his half-collapsed uncle. Though the man had been thrown by Zeimer’s rough handling, the chains binding his wrists to the ceiling kept his torso suspended, leaving him hanging in an awkward, contorted posture.

Despite his pathetic display, the man looked up at Felix and let a faint, ghostly smile spread across his face. Though his tangled hair shrouded his features, the upward curve of his lips was unmistakably clear.

“The words of a sinner are entirely unworthy of being heard. Kill me. My beloved, precious nephew.”

Felix stared down at the man for a beat longer, before reaching out to pull him flush against his frame. Hauling the man up until he was standing rigidly upright on his own two feet, Felix suddenly wrapped his arms around him in a tight, crushing embrace.

And Ilya bore witness to it all.

Beginning from the very spine where Felix held him tight, the man’s entire body began to flush with a brilliant, radiating gold. Then, starting from the outermost edges of his flesh, his form began to shatter and dissolve into a flurry of scattering light.

The golden radiance flooded the entire cavernous cell. The overwhelming brilliance flared for a magnificent second before vanishing entirely, leaving nothing behind but a lingering, sparkling dust. It was a sight so breathtakingly beautiful that one could easily lose their sanity and forget the horrific tragedy of the context.

Once the light dissolved into nothingness, Felix slowly looked down at his entirely empty hands.

“It is finished.”

The lingering remnants of emotion in the air were piercingly cold. Within that heavy, suffocating tragedy, Ilya’s mind involuntarily drifted back to their childhood—to the days when they, as boys, would run and play through the imperial gardens alongside this very man. They were beautiful, unblemished memories, but they were entirely useless now.

It was finally time to turn away from the ashes of the past, and march toward the future.