Chapter 48 — The Chain of Belief

The Sovereign’s colossal chain fell, blotting out the world.

Kael raised the fractured blade with both hands, his muscles screaming in defiance. For a heartbeat, the chain and sword collided—light against shadow, prophecy against anomaly. The impact shook the ruins, bending the horizon itself.

The girl clung to broken stone, her voice trembling.
“Kael—your body can’t hold it!”

He ignored her. Every nerve burned, every bone threatened to splinter under the weight of the toll. But in that agony, he felt something strange. A pulse. Not from his body, not from the blade—
—from the world itself.

The Sovereign’s voice thundered.
“You are no hero. You are a lie given form. This chain is the will of history. Against it, you are nothing.”

But Kael’s vision swam with fragments. Not his memories—others’. Snatches of prayers, stories told by villagers, ballads sung in taverns. Faces he had never seen whispering of heroes who never came. Children crying out for salvation that history had already denied.

And among them… he saw his own shadow, nameless, erased.

The chain bore down harder. Cracks split across Kael’s arms as if the world itself rejected him. Yet the fractured blade flared, feeding on the very doubt that engulfed him.

“Nothing, huh?” Kael’s voice was hoarse, but steady. “Then I’ll be the nothing that cuts down your everything.”

The sword roared. It wasn’t flame or void now—it was belief twisted raw. The hopes that had been denied, the legends left unwritten, the voices erased by the Sovereign’s toll.

The chain shattered. Not in pieces—in silence. As if the story it represented had been erased, just like him.

The Sovereign staggered, for the first time. Its countless eyes flickered. “Impossible. You should not be able to touch the root.”

Kael stood in the settling dust, his chest heaving. His shadow writhed beneath him, stretching outward like grasping hands.

“Maybe not. But you erased me wrong.” His eyes burned with grim fire. “And now your perfect chain has a missing link.”

The girl stared at him, wide-eyed.
“Kael… what did you just do?”

But Kael didn’t answer. He knew the truth already:
It wasn’t just Tsuyoi. It wasn’t just vengeance.

He had begun to wield the one thing the Sovereign feared most—
a power born not from prophecy, but from the belief denied by prophecy.

The Sovereign’s laughter rumbled low, almost admiring.
“Then you are more dangerous than I imagined. Perhaps… you are the true toll.”

The sky darkened. A new bell stirred in the void above.

DONG.

The eleventh toll had begun.