Prologue

The silence was the only lasting monument to the dead.

Voragoth had achieved what countless legions and endless wars could not: obliteration. His campaign was not driven by malice alone, but by a chilling, precise calculation. He sought not to rule, but to erase. The ancestral strongholds of the Orcs were reduced to fine, gray dust that drifted on the poisoned winds, a ghostly shroud over empty plains. The deep, fiery mountain halls of the Demons lay cracked open, their molten cores extinguished forever, leaving only cold, obsidian monuments to their folly.

And then came the final, most brutal blow: the scouring of the great celestial lineage—the ancient, powerful race from which Zero was the last, true-blooded royal. Voragoth had hunted them from their highest peaks to their deepest sanctuaries, leaving no fortress, no child, no relic untouched. The purity of Zero's bloodline was now also the purity of his solitude.

Voragoth stood upon a newly formed precipice of jagged, smoking obsidian, the air around him thick with the palpable sensation of successful finality. He was cloaked entirely in shadow, his burning red eyes sweeping across the ruined landscape, scanning with inhuman precision. He was not finished. His genocide was merely the groundwork, clearing the stage to seize the one final prize he needed: the source of ultimate dominion, a mysterious, glowing cube that held the key to universal mastery. Voragoth could feel its proximity; it was close enough to taste the victory.

In the deep, freezing shadows of the canyon below, a single figure stirred. Zero, stripped of his crown, his authority, and his entire world, was burdened with a unique, terrible power that felt less like hope and more like an inherited curse. He watched the destroyer, a ghost of the royal he once was—pale, broken, yet holding the cold, ancient fury of his ancestors. Zero knew the moment Voragoth claimed the cube, the war would become irrevocable, resulting not just in defeat, but in the total nullification of existence itself.

His existence was now a desperate race against time, a final sprint across the ruins of his world. Could a wounded royal, carrying the weight of an annihilated race, unleash a hidden power potent enough to challenge true oblivion and stop the final catastrophe? Or would the cost of that power prove to be the final, destructive act?

The reckoning was not over. It was only just beginning.