While they were on their way to their house in the city they governed, Ethan closed his eyes, his consciousness dipping away and he opened his eyes in the High Ascendant rank clone. Now he had to find the bait, if it can even be called that. Then Ethan ran to the city of the Drake family’s main lineage. Just as he was going—
In a dark, gloomy street, a boy who could be said to be well built and strong for someone who looked like a beggar was sitting on the corner of the street at the far end. He was Kaelan—a reincarnation of a man, a hero, or anything the humans called him on his main planet: a savior.
He had fought to protect humanity, to preserve the essence of what made them human. From the day his name resounded through the world from the goddess of the world that he was the one they had to support, provide resources, to make him strong so that he would be able to save the world from an invasion of the demons.
Chaotic beings who thrived on chaos and destruction—creatures born from the void between realities, feeding on negative emotions like despair, hatred, and fear. They possessed no concept of creation, only consumption. Their very presence twisted the natural order, turning fertile lands into wastelands, pure water into poison, and hope into madness.
The demons existed not just to destroy, but to corrupt the very essence of life itself, transforming anything pure into a reflection of their own twisted nature. They were beings of pure malevolence, their forms shifting between nightmarish shapes that defied mortal comprehension. Some appeared as grotesque amalgamations of flesh and shadow, while others took the form of beautiful angels only to reveal rotting corpses beneath their divine facade.
Their influence spread like a plague—wherever they walked, flowers withered, children’s laughter turned to screams, and the very air became thick with the stench of despair.
Kaelan had fought without any rest for years, his body pushed beyond all mortal limits. Every battle left scars not just on his flesh, but on his soul. He had watched countless villages burn, held dying children in his arms, and buried friends whose names would be forgotten by history. The weight of their expectations, their desperate prayers and pleading eyes, had become his burden to bear. Each victory came at a cost—a piece of his humanity chipped away, replaced by cold necessity and calculated brutality.
Just to get betrayed by the humans—the civilization he protected for many years. He had bled, sacrificed, and done everything in his power to do what they expected him to do as a hero and a savior. But he was stabbed in the back when he confronted the demon king, and he had learned the bigger picture from the saintess of the goddess who made him what he was.
The revelation had come at the worst possible moment. As he faced the demon king in the final battle, the blade that pierced his back wasn’t wielded by a demon—it was held by the saintess he had trusted with his life. In that moment of betrayal, she had whispered the truth into his ear like poison: he was never meant to win.
He was a sacrifice for the demon king. The goddess had fed him and kept him in a cage like a pig for when the demon king emerged—his body would be sent as a sacrifice, but as payment for them to not enter his land for the next 1000 years. The goddess and the demon king had been playing a game across millennia, using mortals as their pieces. His strength, his resolve, his very life—all of it had been carefully cultivated for this single moment of transaction.
But even knowing this, he was happy that he was able to save, he was able to achieve the goal he had fought for—even if it meant his own destruction.
Yet the disdainful looks of his party members—the saintess, the sage, the assassin, and the golem maker—shattered even that final comfort.
"You were always nothing more than livestock," the saintess had sneered, her holy facade crumbling to reveal the rot beneath. Her voice, once filled with divine grace, now dripped with contempt. "Did you really think we cared about a pathetic nobody like you? Every prayer I offered, every blessing I gave—it was all to fatten you up for slaughter."
"Your family?" the sage laughed coldly, his wise demeanor replaced by cruel amusement. "We orchestrated their deaths. Watching you cry over their corpses was quite entertaining. It made you so deliciously angry, so perfectly useful. Your mother’s last words were calling your name—such beautiful despair."
The assassin’s blade still dripped with his blood as she spoke with casual cruelty: "Every tear you shed, every scream of anguish—it was all according to plan. You were never our master, just a tool that needed proper... motivation. Do you remember how you held your little sister as she died? How you swore vengeance? That rage made you so much stronger."
Even the golem maker, who had seemed the most distant and emotionless, added his venom: "Your pain was the key to your power. We simply unlocked it by taking away everything you loved. Every golem I created to ’help’ you was designed to fail at crucial moments, ensuring maximum suffering for maximum growth."
The words cut deeper than any demon’s claws ever could. Every moment of trust, every shared meal, every laugh around the campfire—all of it had been a lie. They had been watching him, studying him, manipulating his emotions like a master puppeteer pulling strings.
At that moment, Kaelan actually felt betrayed—not just disappointed or angry, but fundamentally broken. He was a piece on a chess board, and the people who made the moves were the goddess and the demon king, while the whole human race watched the match from the sidelines, cheering for their champion without ever understanding the true game being played. The weight of this realization crashed down on him like a mountain. Every sacrifice had been meaningless, every victory hollow, every loss calculated.
He was at the brink of destruction, seething with emotions he had never comprehended. Rage, despair, and something darker—a cold, crystalline hatred that cut through his very soul like shards of ice. The hero who had saved humanity was drowning in the realization that humanity had never wanted to be saved—they had only wanted to survive at his expense.
Then he made his move—he self-destructed, pouring every ounce of his remaining power into a final, devastating explosion that would take them all with him.
Seeing his move, the demon king sneered, his voice echoing with ancient mockery: "This is futile. The space where you were stabbed was your mana core. You can’t do anything."
And at that moment, the hero smirked and said back: "Who said I had only one mana core?"