Men’s Bad Day Comes
Beyond the endless lands of the super-continent Aetherion, there once lived a king who desired to rule all thirty-two kingdoms. He raised armies that blotted out the horizon and marched to war. Fifteen kingdoms fell before the remaining seventeen finally united.
The conqueror was called the King of Fire and Blood.
His name was Jerafoth.
He rode two dragons born of the True Dragon itself:
• the Dragon of Insanity (thought beyond imagination, genius fused with madness)
• the Dragon of Blood and War
Three billion soldiers followed him. One thousand royal knights rode obsidian griffins, creatures whose wingbeats could eclipse moons. He seemed unstoppable.
The allied seventeen kingdoms fielded 1.9 billion warriors and thirty-four dragon-blooded princes (Light, Storms, Earth, Fire, Frost, Wind, Oceans, Darkness, Nature, Thunder & Lightning, Wisdom, Shadow, Gravity, Annihilation, Destruction, Foresight, Spirits). Each prince commanded two hundred Church-blessed holy knights.
The war lasted a century. Children were born in trenches, grew old on battlefields, and died without ever seeing peace.
Then Prince Leonardos, bearer of the Dragon of Light, walked across a battlefield the size of old Earth’s Asia and drove a single sword through Jerafoth’s heart.
Peace—impossible, staggering peace—returned.
“Miss Emelia, wake up!”
The shout rang through the vaulted lecture hall of the Academy of Haultin. Emelia Dimfulsen, daughter of Count Franklin Dimfulsen, blinked awake.
“Why are you all in my bedroom…?”
Professor Sera’s veins looked ready to burst. The rest is exactly as before: the homework rescue, the hug-that-knocked-Josh-out, the Promise Tree scene, the rock and the flower prophecy—unchanged in heart, just grander in scale because every tree is the size of a redwood and every sunset lasts hours.
Josh’s training becomes apocalyptic in scope:
• 100-kilometre dawn runs while dragging a magically weighted rich that equals ten times his body weight plus full sandbag suit.
• Aura mastery: body + weapon + spirit as one → 30× base strength, scalable infinitely with will and training.
• Griffin trial: Josh tames a golden griffin (wingspan wider than a football stadium) and slays fifty wyverns—each wyvern strong enough to level a modern city.
• He earns the hidden title Paladin Holy Royal Knight.
The Church’s enhancement ritual (using an aether core the size of a human torso):
• He dies for ten hours while they graft legendary beast parts into his body.
• Final result: raw strength equal to one thousand Roman legions (5 million men).
• Post-ritual feat: riding his golden griffin, Josh solo-hunts the planetary super-predator Behemoth (a continent-shaking kaiju). He kills it, gifts the corpse to the dwarves, and they forge him near-indestructible armour with partial mind-control resistance.
El Zi Bond upgrade:
• Conquered the Nine Seas (an ocean larger than Earth’s Pacific).
• Tricked and subjugated the sky-splitting Leviathan, turning the world-ending beast into his living flagship/weapon.
The demon invasion:
• Gates open across the super-continent.
• 2.1 billion dead (still only ~3–4% of total planetary population because the world is so vast).
• Josh vs Baheyal, Monarch of the Fifty-Four Legions of Hell, is a fight that cracks tectonic plates.
Final strike “SAMAEL”:
• One swing closes every single hell-gate simultaneously across a Jupiter-sized planet and erases the concept of the invasion from all timelines.
• The price remains the same: Josh’s complete existence is deleted.
The memorial field of 2.1 billion weapons stretches for thousands of kilometres—an ocean of steel visible from orbit. One sword glows for half a heartbeat. Only Queen Emelia notices. Then it is gone forever.
At the roots of the Promise Tree—now a mile-high colossus—two flowers still bloom where a cracked stone once stood.
Even the tiniest flower, given enough time, can split a mountain of rock in two.
