{Chapter: 107: War Is About To Begin}
He leaned forward, his monocle flashing.
"Huh… Are those…?" he mumbled.
Then it hit him.
"That's from Indescribable Fist, isn't it?"
Dex chuckled to himself. Years ago, before committing to his true calling—drawing scandalous nude sketches of queens, noble ladies, and various "tastefully compromising" portraits—he had dabbled in comics. One of his short-lived series had featured absurdly over-the-top martial arts inspired by drunken brawls and wine-fueled imagination.
That was a cartoon he drew a few years ago when he was acting as an art master and had some free time, but his interest came and went just as quickly.
After all, his main hobby is drawing nude sketches of beautiful Queens, Princesses and Noble Ladies, and low-end products like comics do not suit his main sexual interests.
He had lost interest before he even wrote the dialogue.
The manuscript was tossed aside—left to curl and yellow in a pile of abandoned sketches.
Most of the pages ended up in the trash.
"I bet someone found them rummaging through a garbage bin," Dex muttered to himself with mild amusement. "After all, even the discarded drafts of an art master have some value."
The realization struck him slowly, like a tide creeping in from the ocean. He vaguely remembered the comic now—the rough panels, the exaggerated motions, the whimsical fight sequences. It had been a brief creative detour during a time when he posed as a master artist, idly sketching between lessons and commissions. The comic, titled Indescribable Fist, was never meant to be anything more than a side project—just a few spurts of inspiration scribbled between his main works.
He had created the techniques himself. Despite being casual doodles, they held a surprising amount of technical depth.
The moves above were all made up by him, but he was a master of fighting after all, so those random drawings had some technical content.
Not because Dex had trained in martial arts, but because his keen eye for movement and form lent a certain plausibility to the absurd moves.
He didn't know whether any of them would actually work in real combat—he never tried. He was, after all, a demon painter, one of strange talents and private appetites, who lived alone in a foreign world, keeping a low profile in obedience to unspoken rules. What did he know of battlefields or martial rigor?
And yet... the moves those two were using—those fists, that strange, flowing footwork—it was his. His half-finished dream come alive on a stage he never intended to exist.
---
Two years passed.
Time, like a river too wide to grasp, flowed inexorably forward.
The world changed.
As had long been predicted by sages, seers, and secret oracles, the cosmic balance began to shift. The gravitational tides of destiny bent toward convergence. In the boundless cycle of world movement, the borders that once held firm between two civilizations—between the world of the arcane and the empire of science—began to erode.
The first signs of rupture came not with noise, but with silence—a trembling of reality, a thinning of dimensional walls.
Eventually, a passage opened.
A narrow, unstable channel, floating in the void, bridged the two realms. It formed a pocket of neutral space, created and stabilized by the combined efforts of the Wizarding Council and the technocratic Jaenser civilization. Both powers agreed—this battlefield would serve as the proving ground.
Neither side was foolish enough to allow full invasion to reach their homelands—not yet. The cost of war spilling into cities and sacred lands was too steep, too ruinous, to risk outright.
Instead, they compromised: fight first in this neutral space. Only after total defeat of the other's forces would planetary-scale warfare be justified. Of course, sabotage and minor raids still slipped through—but for now, open conflict was caged.
---
Charles stood amidst the heart of preparation—far above the world, aboard one of wizardkind's greatest military constructs: the Alsop Star. Mobile Destroyer.
From the outside, it resembled a titanic sphere, nearly forty kilometers in diameter, suspended in the skies above the neutral dimension. It cast an eternal shadow on the battlefield below, rotating slowly like an artificial moon, its surface inscribed with countless runes, magical wards, and containment rings.
He adjusted his robes, standing on one of the command platforms that ringed the massive witchcraft tower under his supervision. The tower, towering fifty meters tall, pulsed with ethereal light. It was not a structure in the traditional sense—it was a magical machine, a living fortress capable of channeling energy from the depths of the core.
Far beneath him, hidden hundreds of meters within the spherical planet's crust, rested the Energy Furnace. A throbbing heart of power, it burned brighter than any star, contained by an impossibly complex lattice of arcane symbols. Layers upon layers of protective enchantments ensured nothing—not even the whisper of its heat—escaped without permission.
Billions of runes had been carved and enchanted over the course of centuries. It was said that the furnace's design came not from a single generation, but from dozens of long-dead Wizards, each adding a layer of complexity, as if preparing for these very wars.
As Charles linked his soul with the internal mind web of the tower, a surge of illusionary divinity overtook him. He felt himself stretch, expand, become something more. It was as if his senses multiplied, his thoughts split across hundreds of eyes, all feeding him information at once. The tower obeyed his commands like a limb, pulsing and humming to his intent.
From here, he could level a mountain with a thought. One strike from this tower could pierce battlefields, decimate armies. And yet, his tower was but one among thousands—ten thousand, to be precise. Each housed similar or greater destructive potential, all synchronized into the battle protocol of the Alsop Star.
Rumors whispered of even greater systems—ritual engines that could redirect comets, or unleash fragments of the sun, or reverse entropy itself. None of these were in his department, but he'd heard the chatter from overconfident engineers and drunken sorcerers.
He turned his gaze upward, to the floating crystal display etched with glowing numerals.
Countdown: 1 day, 3 hours, 19 minutes
The projected time when the armies would make first contact.
Even knowing the stakes, he couldn't help but smile.
With weapons like this… we can't possibly lose.
And yet, somewhere deep inside him—buried beneath the illusion of power, the buzz of magic, and the comfort of belief—a single thought lingered like a spider in a web:
What if the other side feels the same?
*****
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