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“Leon,” she said with warm affection.

“Ancestor,” he replied. “See something you like?” he asked as he nodded to the staff.

“I do,” she affirmed. “This is one of the most interesting artifacts I’ve ever had the pleasure of inspecting.”

“Really?!” That surprised Leon given how spectacularly ancient the Thunderbird was, not to mention the power she commanded at her peak.

“Yes. It uses a kind of lightning that I’ve never seen before. I’m actually having some trouble not only figuring out what it does but also how it summons something so unique. It hardly has any special enchantments, but that’s only what can be inspected from its surface.”

“It’s quite unique,” Xaphan agreed. “I wanted to crack it open and inspect its internal structure, but it was argued that I ought to wait…” He spoke with some bitterness, and Leon guessed that it wasn’t only words that the Thunderbird used to keep Xaphan from trying to dismantle his new artifact.

For her part, the Thunderbird just gave him a cheeky smile before turning back to the staff.

“There is some merit in trying to take it apart—see here and here? The staff is clearly designed to come apart. However, I thought it a foolish thing to do before making sure we inspect the entire exterior.”

“Thank you for that,” Leon said as he crossed to the other side of the table to inspect the staff himself. It had been hours since it had been given to him, but he’d yet to truly inspect the thing that was so powerful a single bolt from it defeated a tenth-tier mage. “I’d hate for it to be destroyed by anyone too overzealous in inspecting it…”

“Strange, that sounded like you were questioning my skills, boy,” Xaphan growled. “That couldn’t possibly be the case, though, could it? I could take this fucking thing apart and put it back together better than any empty-headed asslickers you have back on your little island.”

“No need to get so offended, demon,” Leon replied as Xaphan crossed his arms and gave him an audible ‘harumph!’

Focusing on the staff, Leon found that it, at first glance, was made of a single piece of iron—not steel or any other alloy, but pure iron, as far as he could tell. It was only because the Thunderbird had shown him the seams where she believed it could be taken apart that he was immediately able to pick them out. The biggest reason why they were so unnoticeable was because the surface of the staff was covered in thousands of intricate geometric etchings, their edges still distinct enough that Leon could be easily convinced that it had been made only recently.

And yet, it used strange magic, not something he’d ever seen Sunlit’s forces use before. He figured if they were capable of constructing such a weapon, then they’d be using it more than in just one singular staff, especially since it appeared on a surface inspection to be so simple. Intricate, sure, but not so complex that it would be some great barrier to production in greater numbers.

As Leon took it in, he wondered when or how it had been made. Some Sunlit mad genius, perhaps? Or a relic from somewhere else on the plane?

“Just for confirmation, this wasn’t made by our Clan, was it?” Leon asked.

“I doubt it,” the Thunderbird replied. “Something like this would’ve made waves had it been produced by any of my descendants or their vassals.”

“Would it…?” Leon whispered in thought as he brushed his fingers against the staff’s etched surface. The Sunlit Emperor had used the weapon on him in their latest fight, and he still remembered how it affected him…

As an experiment, Leon channeled a small amount of magic power into the staff. Not even enough to destroy the table it sat upon if Leon directly used that magic, only enough to try and activate the staff for a moment. His power slid through the staff with ease, racing through not only its external etchings but also its internal enchantments, the power shaping and changing along the way. Leon’s eyes widened in shock at the sheer complexity of the staff’s internal structure before a tiny dull yellow lightning bolt arced from the surface of the staff and into Leon’s hand.

Immediately, he felt a smile spreading across his face as the staff’s strange lightning arced throughout his body several times in less than a second. His heart began to race as euphoria lit him up from within. Leon’s mind remained crystal clear, though—in fact, he seemed to almost become hyper-aware of how the lightning moved throughout his body. He only became a little more alarmed when the power began to gather around his waist and hips, where it lit a spark of arousal that quickly became a raging fire.

Leon quickly withdrew his hand hardly a second after laying it upon the staff, but his body was already responding to the staff’s power; his pants grew tight, and he began to breathe hard.

“Well…” he huffed as he did his best to not show the staff’s effects. “I suppose… that’s a unique effect…”

“What do you mean?” the Thunderbird asked as she eyed him with some concern. “What did it do to you? Do you need healing?”

“No, no.” Leon waved away the seriousness of her question before answering, “This staff damaged Iron-Striker quite fiercely. In the hands of another tenth-tier mage, it defeated him with a single bolt, ravaging his body and paralyzing him completely. It’s… not doing that to me. It’s having quite a different effect…”

“What kind of effect?” the Thunderbird demanded to know.

“You need to ask?” Xaphan responded a little contemptuously. “Look at him, he looks like he’s about to start fucking this table if we were to only turn around.”

Leon grimaced as the Thunderbird glared at the demon. “As fine as this table is, it’s not really my type,” he said. “On the whole, though, you’re not entirely wrong in its effect. It seems to be inducing a… uh, well… it’s… eh, a reproductive urge? Ugh, why did I phrase it like that?”

“Is it really?” the Thunderbird murmured as she turned her attention back to the staff, to Leon’s immense relief. As she took a moment to study the staff a bit more, Leon focused his magic inward, dispersing the staff’s magic and trying to get his body back to normal. “Our Clan came up with many different ways to be fruitful, but this is quite new. I never even heard of lightning that could have this effect…”

“Not even from the Iron Needle?” Leon cast his gaze over at the Iron Needle as it lazily spun around in the larger golden tube that Nestor had first constructed for it.

“Not even from there.”

“Dismantle the staff!” Xaphan petulantly interrupted. “I’m dying here; just open the fucking thing, and let’s see what’s in it!”

He shrieked as the Thunderbird glared at him and her aura slammed him into the ground. However, a moment later, he was back on his feet, staring expectantly at Leon.

With a grin and a shrug, Leon laid hands on the staff again and set about trying to figure out how to take it apart. It was only three pieces, so he figured it ought not to be that hard. As it turned out, it wasn’t, and he soon removed one-third of the staff from the other two-thirds. Once it was no longer in contact with the other pieces, however, that one piece began to emit an odd aura, and the magic that filled Leon’s soul realm began to swirl around it.

“Nope. No, no, no,” Leon said as he hurriedly reattached the staff piece.

“Oh, come on!” Xaphan cried. “What are you doing? Just let it do its thing, why are you being such a little bitch? Not scared of ‘consequences’, are you? Just because you could be easily crippled if injured here in your soul realm? What kind of excuse is that?”

“Quite a good one, actually,” Leon murmured, though he knew the demon wasn’t being serious. His disappointment did appear genuine, if not quite to that exaggerated degree. “I’m not going to risk it doing something here in my soul realm. No, thank you. Not after losing two months.”

Xaphan sighed while the Thunderbird stared at the staff with great interest.

“Fine, whatever, do what you want,” Xaphan complained as he turned around and started making his way back to his pavilion.

Leon chuckled and shook his head as the demon ambled away. However, he remembered that he had some things he wanted to discuss with Xaphan, so he said his momentary goodbyes to the Thunderbird and followed the demon over to his pavilion, leaving his Ancestor to continue her studies of the staff now that she’d gotten a chance to see its effects firsthand.

‘What do you want, Leon?” Xaphan asked as he got himself settled in the pit in the center of the pavilion, the enchantment that Leon had built to help him absorb the Mists of Chaos warming up. “I’m about to be doing shit, you know.”

“Yeah, like trying to catch up to me, right?” Leon said provocatively. “Now that I’m here, it really feels like my soul realm has grown, doesn’t it? Maybe only two hundred miles or so to go until it’s tenth-tier, right? That means I might actually surpass you, doesn’t it?” Leon gave the demon the biggest shit-eating grin he could, and the former Lord of Flame grunted, unimpressed.

“I was once powerful enough to squash you like an insect,” Xaphan growled. “The depths of power I once achieved would’ve allowed me to effortlessly dominate this plane. Just because I need to recover that power doesn’t mean you can gloat about being temporarily stronger than me—which you are not, yet.”

Leon hummed as his expression turned a bit more serious.

“Those demons that Sunlit summoned,” he said, causing Xaphan to immediately straighten up, “are they from that time when you were stronger? Did you know them?”

“We… I…” Xaphan sputtered a bit before he went quiet for a long moment to gather his thoughts. “We didn’t… we didn’t say much to each other. We didn’t have much to say to each other.”

“Followers of Amon?”

“Probably an accurate guess. They weren’t wearing fucking name tags, though, so hey, they could’ve been from the Prince of who-gives-a-fuck instead of Amon. The Primal Devils could’ve sent them for all I fuckin’ know.”

“That’s… not a real possibility, is it?” Leon asked with some trepidation.

Xaphan grunted in amusement. “We demons were created by the Primal Devils, but the Primal Devils are all dead.”

Leon frowned slightly. Krith’is, a Primal God, had still been alive, so he honestly didn’t think it was too far-fetched to think that a Primal Devil could still be breathing somewhere in the Divine Graveyard. Still, he took Xaphan’s point at face value—the Primal Devils held no sway within the Void or the elemental planes at the edge of the universe.

“The Sunlit Emperor himself didn’t appear to be a vampire,” Leon said. “Still, I think it would be foolish to rule out the possibility that he’s working with Amon. He summoned six ninth-tier fire demons, how much power would that require?”

“The power of a Lord, at least,” Xaphan said. “Possibly even as much as a Prince. Assuming no power was used on the receiving end, at least. Your Clan was powerful enough to summon me and others not too much weaker than me. But they were powerful enough that that wasn’t surprising. Some puny Empire on a backwater plane summoning that many relatively powerful demons wouldn’t have been able to do that without help. Still, I didn’t sense anything with that fuckboy to suggest he’d made a contract. Nothing as powerful as ours, at any rate, and our contract is on the weaker side of things, all things considered…”

“So no contract with Amon, then?”

Xaphan took another moment to consider it before shrugging. “Probably not. That usurping bastard probably just sent those demons to try and kill us. I’d put this more on him than on Fuckboy.”

Leon hummed again. It was encouraging, at least, to hear that the Sunlit Emperor probably wasn’t in a power-sharing contract with Amon, but he still possessed some level of power gifted by a Demon Lord, so he couldn’t just assume that he wouldn’t pull something else unexpected out in the future.

Leon didn’t linger too much longer in his soul realm, though he resolved to further experiment with the staff when he had more time. For now, though, he did not have that time, especially once he left his soul realm and found an adjutant sent by the Jaguar bringing him good news.

It was now official: the Imperials were abandoning the Sword.

---

A week after the last battle, Leon stood on the bridge of the first Thunderbird destroyer, now serving as his personal ark. Anshu was the one in charge, for the most part, with Leon more occupied with strategic concerns than what the ark was doing moment-to-moment. And the current strategic matter lay before them: the port city that the Sunlit Empire first took in their campaign and that had served as their base of operations on the island ever since.

It was surprisingly small, being a city of about a hundred thousand before Iron-Striker first seized the island. About seventy thousand remained, though, and, Leon was told, were fairly amicable with the island’s occupying force.

At least, it wound up being fairly amicable, things were quite tense at the beginning.

Now, though, the city had swollen, with much of its hinterlands squashed and trampled beneath the boots of hundreds of thousands of Sunlit troops, and the newly-constructed facilities to support them.

Most of those facilities were now empty as everyone either fled behind the city’s tall walls or melted away into the countryside—Sunlit’s troops mostly doing the former while the island’s inhabitants mostly did the latter.

It was easy to see why the port was so prioritized by the Sunlit Empire: it was the largest population center on the northern coast, and its port was quite highly developed. The city’s port could service dozens of large ships at once, all while dozens more could be sheltered from the elements behind a massive earth magic-created breakwater.

That port was extraordinarily busy, with it being apparent even from dozens of miles away that the Sunlit troops were boarding transport ships as fast as they could and leaving the city. With his magic senses, Leon could see that the scenes at the other two remaining Sunlit-held cities on the coast were similar, with hundreds of thousands of Sunlit troops doing their best to get off the island as quickly as they could.

The Sunlit and Pegasi navies were doing an admirable job in this, Leon was pleased to see. After the retreat became undeniable, Leon had given orders to press the Imperial forces hard, but not so hard that they felt it was necessary to stand and fight. He just wanted them off the island and gave them the perfect motivation to keep fleeing for the coast. Fortunately, his strategy so far had been working, with few units staying behind to fight rear-guard actions or making suicidal last stands.

Part of the reason why was because Leon was quite liberally using the officers he’d captured, most notably including Arcaion, to convince some units to surrender, and others who tried resisting to flee instead. He didn’t want them fighting to the death, so anything he could do to make this go easier, he’d do.

Now, they’d pushed all the way here, and it looked like the Sunlit forces were going to need a few more days to evacuate. Leon was inclined to give them that time, but he also didn’t want them to forget why they were fleeing in the first place. As his ark hovered in the sky, its escorts at its side, staring down the few arks that the Sunlit Empire still had hovering defensively over the city, he projected his power outside of the ark and into the sky. The sky was already fairly overcast, but the gray clouds darkened and flashed with lightning. He kept it from raining or from the wind getting too wild, as that might’ve impeded the Sunlit evacuation, but he wanted everyone to know why they were running every time they looked up.

Down below his ark, the Tribes were already digging in, just in case. That meant they were also setting up Lance emplacements and were getting ready to bombard the city. Leon didn’t think that would be necessary, but he might need to light a fire under Sunlit asses to keep them moving.

Unfortunately, it seemed Sunlit himself had already fled the island, so Leon wasn’t going to get his third rematch any time soon, but he was content with this, for now. It would take a few more days, but this campaign was essentially over. The Sunlit Empire was retreating; Leon’s Kingdom had won.