Chapter 129: NEW KING
Thirty minutes before VIR was activated.
Below, Francis felt the pressure lift.
The targeting sensation—that faint thermal precursor that preceded each orbital strike—faded and then disappeared entirely. The sky above him, still dark with residual clouds, went quiet.
He didn't wait.
Wings reformed and he dropped into a low trajectory, cutting across the terrain at a speed that left nothing visible behind him. The landscape blurred—mountains, then floodplain, then the dark outline of a giant scorpion.
He had already fixed the direction.
Verak's corpse was unmistakable even from a hundred kilometers out. Not just because of its size. It was the energy signature. Dense, radiating outward in powerful pulses.
Francis descended without slowing and hit the ground running.
The corpse loomed ahead like an ancient structure, its body textured like the surface of the ground itself.
Up close, it was different from Rynik. Less dignified. The carapace had split in several places, and the surrounding hills had been crushed at odd angles.
He found an opening along the underside of the thorax and entered.
The energy here was denser, more chaotic—less like a river and more like a pressure system on the verge of releasing. It pushed back against his senses as he moved deeper, not hostile, just immense.
The liver was easier to find. He already knew what to look for.
He placed his hand against the surface.
The white space arrived instantly, just like the previous one.
But this time it wasn't peaceful.
It was loud.
"BWAHAHAHA! Finally! The little devourer arrives! I was wondering when you'd show up!"
The shape forming above him was enormous—a scorpion's silhouette assembling itself from . But where Rynik had been measured and composed, this presence filled the entire space like it was trying to burst out of it.
Francis looked up at it flatly.
"You're Verak."
"The one and only! Greatest of the Kings, most handsome, most powerful—don't let my siblings tell you otherwise, they're all liars and cowards."
"Your siblings said you all agreed to this plan."
"Oh, we agreed. Sure. Unanimous vote. Very solemn. Very moving." A pause. "Do you want to know the truth?"
Francis said nothing, which Verak apparently took as enthusiastic consent.
"I did NOT want to die."
The admission came out explosively, like it had been held under pressure for centuries.
"I want to be very clear about that. I am on record. I objected. Multiple times. I made very reasonable arguments. I pointed out that we could simply keep living forever and find something to do with ourselves."
"Rynik," it continued, dropping its voice into a mockery of solemnity, "says 'we have suffered long enough.' Eerak starts crying with her two eyes—she had six, by the way, she was being theatrical. And Glakor just nods along like the absolute spineless creature he is. Just—" it made a deflated sound, "nods."
Francis watched the scorpion vent.
"Bunch of pussies," Verak concluded, with the air of someone who had been waiting a very long time to say that out loud to someone new. "That's what they are. An immortal existence and they decide the answer is to just—quit. Because it's 'getting repetitive.' Repetitive! I was just getting started!"
"And yet you went along with it."
The scorpion shape was quiet for exactly one second.
"…Yes, well." Another pause. "They're my siblings. Even if they're all dramatic and insufferable. And Eerak's vision was very specific. She was never wrong about that kind of thing."
A long, theatrical sigh rippled through the white space.
"Also, I'll admit, after a couple of reincarnation, it does start to lose a certain… freshness. Don't tell them I said that."
Francis lowered his hand slightly.
"Are you done?"
"Probably not. But I'll let you eat me anyway." The shape above him shifted, energy beginning to gather at its edges. "Just so you know, I'm the strongest one you'll face. Rynik was smart. Glakor is patient. But me?"
The entire white space seemed to contract slightly, as if even it was taking a breath.
"I'm the only one truly capable of destroying this entire planet. I control earthquake, for God's sake. I can create tsunamis like Glakor, trigger volcanic eruptions, and if I really wanted to, I could change the weather across the whole world.
For the first time, Francis felt it—something beneath the humor, beneath the noise. A pressure that was entirely different from Rynik's composed weight. He met it without flinching.
"Then this will be worth it."
"Ha," Verak said. And for a moment, its voice was quieter.
"Make it count, little devourer. I'll be really pissed off if you don't become overpowered after devouring my perfect body."
"I will."
After devouring Verak's power, Francis reached another level. Strength surged through every part of his body. He felt as if he could crush mountains with a clenched fist, and when he stomped the ground, the impact triggered a tremor that shattered the already weakened peaks around him.
But that was not all.
As he spread his wings and burst free from the corpse, he realized he could use the same power to push his speed even further. The air cracked behind him as he accelerated.
Without wasting another second, he headed for Glakor.
Others might have been intoxicated by the feeling of becoming stronger, but for Francis, all of this was merely a means to an end. His real goal was to revive his daughters.
After that, he would not care if he lost all his power.
He would not even care if he died, as long as he knew his daughters could live normal lives.
At the same time, he began thinking about what would come next. He was fairly certain this world would never be safe for his daughters as long as the beasts existed, so he had to consider what happened after everything was over.
One option was to follow the Kings' approach. He could allow a portion of humanity to survive and guide them as they rebuilt civilization from the ground up.
This way, his daughters could live lives close to the ones they were meant to have. They could grow up, go to school, make friends, and have jobs like ordinary people.
As for the beasts, he could simply kill them all. It wasn't as though he felt any attachment to them. They were nothing more than obstacles standing between him and the future he wanted for his daughters.
Yes, now that he thought about it, that was probably the best option. It was a good thing he had not killed all the humans in the capital. With the remaining infrastructure and technology, they would be able to recover quickly.
And just to make sure no single-sided power could ever threaten the peaceful era he was imagining, he would also destroy all the orbital cannons in space.
The land below him shifted from brown and grey to white. Ice coated everything in uniform layers. Trees stood encased in it, their branches locked into position, preserved rather than frozen.
'So this is what a dead King leaves behind,' he thought.
Glakor had been the third to fall. He knew that much from what Rynik had told him — four Kings, one dead continent, and the orbital cannons that had managed the impossible by targeting them in sequence.
Francis kept flying.
Then he saw the beasts.
They were moving towards him — an army of beast stretching across the frozen ground below him, thousands of them at minimum, possibly more concealed in the broken terrain beyond his immediate sightline.
Francis descended further, reducing altitude until he was perhaps thirty meters above the leading edge of the army. His intention was simply to pass over them — they were irrelevant to what he needed to do, and engaging them would only cost time he hadn't budgeted.
The first creature to notice him stopped moving.
Then the one beside it stopped.
Then the one beside that.
The reaction propagated through the beast like a wave moving backward. Within ten seconds, every creature in his line of sight had gone motionless.
And then, one by one, they knelt.
Not in any uniform way — the forms were too varied for that, the anatomies too different to produce a synchronized gesture. But the intent was unmistakable.
Heads lowered. Bodies compressed toward the ground. The enormous creatures folded whatever passed for their forelegs beneath them. The smaller ones pressed themselves flat against the ice. Some tilted their heads at angles that exposed their throats.
Submission. Recognition. The posture of things that understood a hierarchy and were demonstrating exactly where they placed themselves within it.
Francis flew over them without slowing.
He didn't acknowledge the gesture. He didn't alter his course, didn't look down with any particular interest.
It wasn't a mystery, not really. He had absorbed Rynik's, and then Verak's power. Whatever biological or metaphysical signal those Kings had emitted during their lives — that signal was now being broadcast by himself.
He was, in whatever way the beasts understood these things, a King.