Above the Seventh Spire, the sky burned with the fury of forty artificial stars.
The forty heavy celestial aether-cannons mounted along the broadsides of the Ashford Armada had reached the absolute peak of their charging cycle. Blinding coronas of scarlet and sapphire mana swirled violently around each cannon muzzle, ionizing the air into thick, suffocating plumes of purple plasma.
The unbearable, high-frequency coil whine reached ninety-nine percent capacity.
*EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!*
On the elevated forecastle of the flagship *Iron Sovereign*, Fleet Admiral Balthazar Ashford raised his leviathan-bone greatsword high above his gilded helm. His crimson cape whipped wildly in the violent thermal up-drafts, his eyes flashing with cruel, imperial certainty.
"All batteries locked!" the chief gunnery officer screamed over the deafening mechanical roar. "Target coordinates: The squatter cottage! Core containment chambers are at maximum pressure!"
Balthazar’s lips twisted into a savage, victorious sneer.
"Let this desolate peak be an eternal reminder to any who defy the Ashford name," Balthazar roared, his voice amplified by the ship’s acoustic horns across the sky. "Fire on my command! In three! In two—"
*Squeak.*
A tiny, dry sound interrupted the countdown.
It was the squeak of a rusty iron hinge.
The front door of the weathered timber cottage slowly swung open.
Through the doorway shuffled a young man wearing rumpled gray pajamas, frayed straw slippers, and hair that looked like it had survived an explosion in a mattress factory.
Felix Vance stepped onto the porch.
He had his hands shoved deep into his oversized sleeves. His eyes were half-lidded, bloodshot, and clouded with the deep, righteous rage of a gamer who had been denied his afternoon sleep.
He didn't look at the sky-galleons. He didn't look at the glowing cannon batteries. He just walked to the edge of the weathered porch railing, scuffing his slippers across the cedar boards, and rubbed his right temple with two fingers.
At the top of the stairs, Lyra turned her head, her breath hitching in pure, devotional awe.
"Senior Brother!" Lyra cried, her voice trembling. "You... you have emerged from the Void Trance! Have you stepped forth to witness the twilight of the Ashford Clan?!"
Felix didn't answer. He didn't even look at her.
He slowly tilted his chin upward, squinting at the twelve colossal iron dreadnoughts hovering five hundred yards directly above his roof.
A translucent black text box popped into his field of vision, hovering over the glowing muzzles:
【Target: Heavy Ashford Celestial Siege Battery x40】 【Status: Overcharged (99.8% Firing Capacity)】 【Acoustic Output: 118 Decibels of Pure Unshielded Garbage】 【Inspector Note: Forged by imperial blacksmiths who clearly skipped basic electromagnetic shielding class. These vacuum capacitors are humming like broken fluorescent lightbulbs in an abandoned subway station. Whoever engineered this coil layout should be permanently banned from public modding forums.】
Felix stared at the glowing blue-and-red cannons.
His left eyelid gave another sharp, irritated twitch.
"Unshielded copper coils," Felix murmured, his voice deadpan, flat, and hollow as an empty tomb. "Right above my bedroom window. At three in the afternoon."
Up on the flagship, Balthazar froze, his greatsword still raised above his head.
He stared down at the scruffy youth in straw slippers.
There was no battle aura radiating from the boy. No swirling vortex of sword intent. No majestic imperial talisman hovering in the sky.
Just a tired-looking mortal rubbing sleep crust out of the corner of his eye.
"Is that him?" Balthazar scoffed, his voice booming with arrogant mockery. "The legendary squatter disciple of Vivienne Frost? A beggar who dresses in burlap rags?! You dare step out before forty heavy siege cannons without even bowing your head?!"
Balthazar swung his greatsword downward with all his might.
"FIRE!" the admiral roared. "VAPORIZE HIM!"
Forty gunnery officers slammed down the heavy copper firing levers.
At that exact, microscopic fraction of a second, Felix Vance took a deep breath.
He leaned against the wooden post of his porch. His chest expanded slightly.
He opened his mouth.
And he let out a massive, unhurried, bone-deep afternoon yawn.
*"Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah—"*
Deep inside Felix's solar plexus, in the core of his dantian where the 1.0-Earth-Mass terrestrial planet had been spinning in quiet idle balance, something shifted.
Because Felix stretched his diaphragm during the yawn, his internal mana pressure relaxed by a microscopic increment.
The gravitational containment field surrounding his miniature planet slipped by exactly zero-point-zero-zero-zero-zero-five percent.
A single burp of compressed solar plasma—less than a cubic inch of pure, dense, multi-million-degree thermonuclear fire—vented out from his stellar furnace.
It passed up his throat.
It drifted casually past his tongue.
And as Felix exhaled his weary yawn, that microscopic speck of vented stellar matter touched the open atmosphere of Aethelgard.
*BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!*
The universe did not simply make a sound; reality itself screamed in agonizing thermal shock.
The afternoon sky didn't turn golden. It didn't turn red.
The entire firmament above the Seventh Spire was instantly bleached into a blinding, retina-scorching, absolute white.
A colossal ribbon of pure, incandescent solar prominence—a ten-thousand-mile crescent of raw, unbridled thermonuclear plasma—erupted from Felix's open mouth and shot straight up into the stratosphere like the wrath of an awakening galaxy.
The heat was incomprehensible.
In the span of a single microsecond, the ambient temperature of the upper atmosphere spiked from a chilly mountain breeze to twelve thousand degrees Celsius.
The clouds didn't evaporate; they were atomically disintegrated.
The air itself ionized into a howling, blinding sheet of neon-blue ozone and blinding ultraviolet light that bent space into an optical kaleidoscope.
And right in the path of that solar prominence sat the Ashford Vanguard Armada.
*SKRRRRRRRRRRRR-SSSSSSSSSSST!*
The forty heavy celestial aether-cannons never got the chance to fire their volley.
Before the firing pins could even spark, the wave of pure solar plasma washed over their star-iron barrels.
The heavy imperial cannons didn't detonate. They didn't crack.
They simply melted.
Forty monstrous, six-ton siege cannons were instantaneously converted into glowing, bubbling streams of liquid white slag.
The molten metal ran down the hull plates of the twelve dreadnoughts like hot candle wax, dripping into the void below in weeping rivers of incandescent star-fire.
And the solar prominence didn't stop there.
The kinetic shockwave of the expanding plasma wave swept upward like a scythe swung by an ancient cosmic titan.
*CRACK-CRACK-CRACK-CRACK-CRACK!*
All forty-eight towering masts across the twelve sky-galleons—carved from thousand-year-old iron-wood and reinforced with imperial mithril—were cleanly, effortlessly sheared off at their bases.
The colossal crimson war-banners embroidered with the Ashford Hawk were turned into floating ash before they could even hit the deck.
The four massive obsidian war-anchors embedded in the Seventh Spire snapped like dry toothpicks under the gravitational shear, their runic suppression chains vaporizing into puffs of red vapor.
The shockwave tore the heavy iron plates clean off the dreadnoughts' hulls, stripping the twelve mighty warships down to their smoking, charred ribcages, sending hundreds of imperial soldiers sprawling flat onto the blackened teak decks.
And yet—
Through an impossible, miraculous display of pinpoint gravitational lensing, the incandescent inferno neatly curved around the cottage.
Down on the Seventh Spire, none of the wooden shingles were even singed.
The crooked pine tree didn't lose a single needle.
The five-star Sun-Lotus Cabbage in the garden merely swayed gently in the warm, fragrant breeze, its jade leaves absorbing the ambient solar fallout and blooming even brighter.
Even the cold jasmine tea in Felix’s chipped mug on the porch railing stayed completely still, undisturbed by the cataclysm overhead.
*"—huuuuuumph."*
Felix closed his mouth.
His teeth clicked together with a small, lazy snap.
He blinked away a tear of sleepiness from the corner of his eye, rubbed his chin, and smacked his dry lips.
"Man," Felix muttered, rolling his shoulders to get the kinks out of his neck. "Sleeping with a draft gives you the worst neck cramps."
He reached into his sleeve, pulled out his cracked obsidian slate, and tapped the screen to check the notifications.
A series of amber boxes rolled across the glass:
Felix smiled faintly, nodding in deep satisfaction.
"Ah, much better," Felix said, tucking the slate back into his tunic. "The coil whine is finally gone. Guess those noisy hot-air balloons finally blew a fuse."
He glanced down at his straw slippers, noticing a few specks of ash floating down from the sky like gray snow.
"Pity about the fireworks, though," Felix added mildly, turning back toward the bedroom door. "Cheap pyrotechnics always leave so much smoke in the air."
Up on the charred, mast-less, cannon-less wreck of the flagship *Iron Sovereign*, complete and absolute silence reigned.
Fleet Admiral Balthazar Ashford was lying flat on his stomach against the blackened deckboards.
His gilded helm had partially melted, fusing into his silver-streaked hair. His grand crimson cape was gone, reduced to a few charred threads smoking against his armor. His leviathan-bone greatsword lay ten paces away, its blade warped into a crooked pretzel by the sheer ambient heat.
His body shook.
He was not shivering from cold; he was trembling with a primal, soul-crushing terror that made his bladder threaten to empty itself into his gilded greaves.
*A... a yawn...* Balthazar wept internally, pressing his forehead into the soot-covered deck, too terrified to raise his eyes.
*He didn't draw a blade. He didn't recite an incantation. He didn't even tap into the spiritual veins of the earth.*
*He merely... opened his mouth... and breathed.*
*That was not human mana. That was not high magic.*
*That was the Primordial True Sun of the First Firmament.*
Beside him, the surviving imperial flag-captain lay face down in the ash, clutching his chest as he hyperventilated in sheer existential agony.
"Admiral..." the captain whispered, his voice cracking like dry glass. "The... the forty heavy siege cannons... are gone. The fleet... is stripped bare."
Balthazar didn't move. He couldn't move.
His soul was paralyzed by the image burned forever into his retinas: the image of a young man in gray hemp pajamas, looking at an entire imperial armada like it was an annoying mosquito, and blowing it out of the sky with a single afternoon yawn.
"Signal..." Balthazar managed to wheeze out through cracked, soot-covered lips. "Signal the unconditional surrender... before he takes another breath."