Ancestral Lineage - Chapter 453

Chapter 453: The King Walks the World Again

The battlefield should have felt relieved.

Instead, it felt small.

Because when Ethan stood, reborn in braided gold and silver, the world didn’t just stabilize.

It knelt.

The dimensional space stilled the way prey freezes when the apex returns to the territory. Even Leon’s Chaos Avatar paused as if some older instinct whispered, predator above predator.

Ethan didn’t flare his aura. He didn’t emit killing intent. His presence simply existed… and the fabric of reality adjusted itself to accommodate him, as if the universe were sliding furniture out of the way for its returning landlord.

A faint ringing sound stirred behind him.

Not a chime.

Not a bell.

Something deeper.

The sound of a throne remembering its king.

Light gathered, not just gold, not just silver, but the fusion of both, a shine so ancient that time itself hesitated to look directly at it. The ground behind Ethan cracked open in straight, geometrically perfect lines, like the battlefield was being carved by an artisan that existed before geometry itself.

Something stepped forward from the cracks in reality.

No… sat forward.

A throne emerged, and it didn’t appear like an object summoned. It appeared like something that had always been there, simply masked behind the thin veil of lesser truth.

A throne sculpted from the same dual light that had remade Ethan. The seat was framed in gold that hummed with primordial laws, and the back was woven from silver strokes of mystic script that shifted between runes, constellations, and equations of creation.

On that throne sat a being.

Ethan’s Avatar.

But it wasn’t a simplified echo of his essence like other Saints manifested. This was a world-sized truth condensed into a king-shaped idea.

The king was tall, almost impossibly so, as if his proportions were correct only in dimensions the eye could barely parse. Its body radiated gold, not glowing but burning silently, defining the edges of reality through presence alone. Draped across it was a mantle that flickered between starlight and molten law.

Its eyes…

Right silver.

Left gold.

A perfect inverse of Ethan’s own.

When those eyes drifted toward him, it felt like a star and a black hole were contemplating their child.

Yet the strangest part wasn’t the king.

It was what surrounded him.

Shapes materialized in the brilliant haze behind the throne, dozens, no… hundreds of golden beings, each different.

Some were tall and winged with halos of script.

Some appeared beast-like with runic fur and burning eyes.

Some were humanoid, some serpentine, some abstract shapes with faces hidden in light.

All bowed.

Every one of them.

Some knelt with heads pressed to the ground.

Some folded in reverent stillness.

Some vibrated with emotion too sacred for the battlefield to interpret.

But all of them were in submission to the king.

And the king was not a fragment of Ethan.

It was Ethan.

The whole of him, the part of his existence too heavy, too old, too infinite to walk in a mortal shell.

Ethan inhaled. This time it was soft. Gentle. Human.

The avatar responded by straightening slightly, as if that small breath was a command from which entire eras could unfold.

Ethan’s voice cracked, not from weakness, but from the weight of a memory clicking into place after lifetimes of silence.

“I remember now…”

The words trembled with awe rather than despair.

“So all that time… you were with me…”

His throat tightened, and his gold-silver eyes softened in a way that felt almost sacrilegious in the presence of this impossible being.

“…thank you.”

The King of Gold and Silver, the Avatar who was also his truest, oldest self, lowered its head.

A bow.

Not deep.

Not deferential.

A nod.

A recognition of a bond never broken, merely forgotten.

The golden court behind it bowed deeper, their forms flickering with emotion: devotion, pride, relief. Even the battlefield’s laws rippled, whispering in a tongue older than creation, the king remembers.

Ethan felt something shift inside him, like a lost room of his soul unlocking, releasing a warmth that had been waiting ages to be recognized.

The throne sank back slightly, no longer hiding in cracks of reality but standing openly behind him, a declaration:

The King walks the world again.

And now the battlefield, the watching realms, and every being who understood power…

They all felt it.

Ethan was no longer simply a fighter standing on the edge of death.

He was the crown that had been forgotten.

The crown that had returned.

And the universe would soon have to remember what that meant…

Leon’s Chaos Avatar twitched.

Not with strategy.

Not with calculation.

With animal panic.

It was the fear of a predator who suddenly realized it had been hunting in a dragon’s shadow. His fractured, faceless avatar recoiled, fractals stuttering, claws curling in on themselves as if trying to hide their trembling.

Leon himself snapped, his voice cracking with something he had never tasted before.

“No… no, NO! This is impossible!”

The sound tore from him like a man drowning in air. The Chaos energy around him convulsed, reality bleeding at the edges as his panic fed straight into his power.

“You were dead! DEAD! I HEARD YOUR SOUL CRACK!”

His eyes bulged, and the Chaos flared again, ripping open a dozen mouths along his avatar’s arms, shoulders, and chest.

“You’re not allowed, YOU’RE NOT ALLOWED TO COME BACK STRONGER!”

His avatar erupted.

A mass of claws, fanged spirals, and void-pits surged forward, aimed directly at Ethan’s throat, like a desperate beast slashing at the sun.

The attack wasn’t refined.

It wasn’t tactical.

It was a scream made physical.

The golden beings behind Ethan tensed, some lifting their heads, some drawing weapons sculpted from worship and law. The King on the throne did not move, but the air around it sharpened, ready to unmake anything that dared approach.

Yet Ethan simply stepped forward.

Just half a step.

Enough for the world to shift with him.

The Chaos storm collided with…

Nothing.

It hit an absence, a void shaped perfectly around Ethan’s silhouette, like reality itself refused to permit contact.

Leon screamed again, hurling another wave of attacks, chaotic rifts, distorted spears, space-tearing crescents of broken causality. They folded into themselves, dissolving like snow hitting a furnace.

Ethan didn’t even raise his hand.

He just looked at Leon.

And when he spoke, his voice had changed.

Not louder.

Not deeper.

Just inevitable.

“Stop.”

The command hit the battlefield like a law being rewritten in real time.

Chaos froze mid-air, claws suspended, ripples halted like a beast caught in amber. Leon’s avatar spasmed, limbs locking in impossible angles. The fractures in space stitched themselves shut with a soft, silver glow.

Leon himself collapsed to his knees, clutching his throat as if the command had reached inside him and forced obedience straight into the core of his being.

His voice cracked into a whisper.

“What… what did you do…?”

Ethan didn’t advance.

The throne behind him did.

Not physically, the space it occupied expanded, stretching its influence outward like a tide reclaiming land. The golden beings’ shadows spilled across the battlefield, long and regal, brushing against Leon’s avatar with the weight of a thousand kneeling worlds.

The King’s eyes, those inverted gold-and-silver stars, opened fully.

And Leon shuddered as if staring at the anatomy of his own insignificance.

Ethan’s expression didn’t hold hatred. Or anger. Or even pity.

It held memory.

The calm, terrifying memory of a being who had commanded armies of cosmic beings like they were extensions of his breath.

Leon trembled, grinding his teeth, fighting against the invisible grip forcing him down.

“You… you can’t… I won’t kneel! I WON’T!”

The King’s finger twitched.

Leon’s avatar slammed face-first into the ground.

The battlefield shook.

Ethan didn’t glance back at the king, but something passed between them, a silent allowance, a shared authority.

He stepped toward Leon, his gold-silver eyes glowing softly, not with fury but with the kind of power that did not need anger to be devastating.

“You lost the right to defy me,” Ethan said, voice steady, each word threading itself into the rules of existence.

“Long ago.”

Leon choked, still pinned by a command that reality itself was honoring, and the world around them waited, trembling, because the next breath, the next step, the next thought from Ethan…

Would decide everything.

Your gift is the motivation for my creation. Give me more motivation!