(3rd Person POV)
Arthur finally moved.
He gave the order to the Hellsing Organization, and the World Domination Operation began.
At the same time, the men he had embedded inside the Solarus Faith — Lance Ashford the most public among them, dozens of others quieter — began to gather their inherited soldiers into a single rebel force. The Church would not fall in a day. But it would fall.
The storm was brewing.
To the people in the streets, nothing had changed. The mornings opened with cool air and shop bells, the markets ran as they always did, the food stalls smelled the same. They had no idea that, far above their heads, the high-ranking powers of the world had begun to feel the surface of the water stir.
---
In the great throne hall of the Morningstar Kingdom, King Luke could not sit still.
Crown Prince Azazel stood before him with a folio in one hand, his face grave.
"Father, our intelligence has flagged a new force. An organization calling itself Hellsing." Azazel's voice was tight. "They've moved against several nations in the last few days. Not skirmishes — they've defeated powerful figures. Multiple of them. They appeared out of nowhere, as if they'd been preparing for this very moment for years."
King Luke gritted his teeth.
"Whoever they are, they are not amateurs. They've already taken the Thorn Kingdom. Royal family included." His jaw tightened. "Their king is a puppet. It took them less than a day."
Azazel sucked in a cold breath.
The Thorn Kingdom's standing army was no joke. Morningstar's own forces had attempted to subjugate that kingdom three times across two generations, and every campaign had ended in a draw at best. Their nobility was hardened, their generals proven, their throne defended by oaths that did not break easily.
And some organization no one had ever heard of had swept the entire structure in a single day.
It was not war the way Morningstar understood war.
It was something else.
---
In the Holy Kingdom — the Solarus Faith's heart, the city of cathedrals and pilgrim roads — Lance Ashford had moved much earlier.
The propaganda had been seeded for months. The faithful had been gently pulled in two directions for longer than they realized. The defections were quiet at first, then less so, then loud. By the time the Church's higher officers noticed, the rot had already passed the point of cauterizing.
Now Lance was inside the «Dimensional Mirror».
The Mirror was one of the Church's highest artifacts — a layered pocket world that could be opened only by certain officials and entered only by combatants. Inside it, civilians could not be harmed. Outside, no spell-glow leaked into the streets. The faithful in the Holy Kingdom slept peacefully tonight, unaware that the war for their faith was being fought, sword to sword, inside the silver of a hand-mirror.
Lance stood at the center of the mirror's chamber. The blade in his hand was the holy sword the Pope himself had bestowed on him three years earlier — a weapon meant to mark the most loyal Champions of Solarus.
The Church had not expected him to turn it against them.
Across from him, Nathan Ashford — the Family Head of the Ashford line and Lance's own uncle — stood at the head of a small detail of senior knights and personal guards. The disbelief on his face had passed an hour ago. What was left was naked fury.
"You've stained the Ashford name, Lance." Nathan's voice shook with restrained rage. "What is the meaning of this betrayal? To turn your sword on the Church? On Solarus himself?" His finger extended. "Do you actually think you'll be allowed to walk away from this?"
Lance kept his stance easy, the holy sword held loose at his side.
"Family Head." His voice was calm. "The Solarus Faith has reached its end. You haven't seen it yet because you've lived inside it your whole life. There is still time for you. Convert. Take the Dionysus Faith. Live."
Nathan's face twisted with disdain.
"You — you've been swayed by a cult. By a demon's religion. The Ashford line has stood with the Sun for nine generations, and you would throw that away because some merchant gave you a few pretty words?" He gestured sharply at the guards behind him. "Men. Take that traitor down."
The blade kissed his throat before any of them could draw.
Nathan's eyes shot wide.
The hand holding the dagger to his neck belonged to his most trusted secretary. The man who had served his household for the past six years. The man who carried his correspondence, who managed his estate accounts, who slept three rooms down from him on every diplomatic trip.
"Y — you..."
The secretary smiled.
Then his features rippled, the disguise sliding off him like wet silk, and what stood at Nathan's shoulder was no longer the loyal aide of the Ashford line. It was a man Nathan had seen on the silver screens of three continents.
Joseph Nicholson.
The Hellfire actor. The one who had taken on character roles for half a dozen of Arthur's productions, including one of the Pope's personal favorites.
Behind him, the rest of the senior knights began to shift as well. Disguises peeled off in clean, practiced movements. Each one revealed an Hellsing operative in plain combat dress, weapons already drawn.
Lance's smile widened slightly.
"Good work, Hellsing."
Nathan's lips trembled. The fury in his face had been smothered by something colder. "You — you will not get away with this. Even if you kill me here, the Church will — "
"Hand over the Mirror," Joseph Nicholson said simply. His voice was almost bored.
Nathan's hand went on instinct to the pendant at his sternum — the Dimensional Mirror's anchor, the thing that bound the artifact's access to him as its current keeper. He gripped it, and for a brief, defiant moment, his demi-god aura flared around him in a ring of pale gold.
He was not a small power. He was not nothing.
It did not matter.
The Hellsing operatives moved like a single body. The fight was over in three exchanges. Joseph caught Nathan's wrist, broke the pendant's chain with a small flick, and stepped back with the artifact in his palm.
He turned and handed it to Lance.
Lance closed his fingers around the pendant and smiled, soft and certain.
"With this," he said quietly, "we can infiltrate every faction in the world. From the inside out. For our Lord."
---
On the Eden Continent, two of the most insulated powers of this world had already been quietly cracked.
The Dwarven and Elven Kingdoms had stood as the spiritual strongholds of the Moon Goddess and the God of Crafts respectively for several thousand years. They had been chosen to receive the heaviest infiltration first, before either deity could move openly against Arthur.
In a candlelit hideout deep beneath the Dwarven capital, Sylwen sat at a low table, sipping carefully at a pale tea. Her silver hair was loose. Her sword leaned against the wall behind her, unsheathed.
The door opened without a knock, and a slim figure in a deep crimson cloak slipped inside.
Lady Fox bowed low.
"It's done. We secured the Dwarven King's private office. The blackmail dossier was complete — names, dates, mistresses, financial siphons, the kind of weight that breaks a throne. He folded the moment he understood what we had." She straightened. "He's agreed to work with us. Under our terms."
Sylwen's voice was even. "Good."
She set the tea down.
"Proceed to the next phase."
Lady Fox bowed again and vanished into the shadow of the corridor.
---
Above all of it — far above, where the Divine Atmos shimmered and the angels watched the world below from their orbital outpost — the Altair Station had become, for the first time in its history, divided.
Scarlet had spent her months patiently.
Where she had begun by gently introducing entertainment to a handful of curious angels, she had ended by quietly planting the seed of a different loyalty in a much larger number of them. Solarus had been absent for centuries. Solarus had given them no warmth, no answers, no companionship. Solarus was a distant sun that scorched and did not embrace.
And in his long absence, a new lord — present, attentive, generous — had been listening to them. Building cinemas. Telling stories. Treating them as more than tireless cogs in a centuries-old enforcement machine.
The angels who had loved that, quietly, had become the New Order Faction.
They were the minority. But the minority grew every week.
In the council halls of the Altair Station, the old faction — the Solarus Faction, led by General Philip Grain and his second, Mikael — gathered around a long table that had never seen factional argument before in its history.
"Lord Solarus will not arrive for some time yet." Philip Grain's voice was hard. "If Arthur is allowed to keep moving as he has been — and we have all seen what he did to the avatar — we will be in very deep trouble by the time the Sun arrives."
Mikael's fists were clenched white on the tabletop.
"If we had moved sooner. If we had not waited for Solarus's permission for every breath. There would be no New Order Faction."
A senior angel halfway down the table leaned forward, voice low and harsh.
"There are reports the Pope has gone missing again. The bishops are facing armed rebellion across the Holy Kingdom. The Hellsing Organization is sweeping nations like wheat before a scythe. We are losing the ground game from every angle at once."
Another voice cut in.
"Then we stop playing the ground game."
The table turned.
The speaker leaned forward, eyes burning. "We open the «Anus Gate». We unseal the Nether Realm. We let what was caged out into the world. Arthur will have to abandon his domination operation to defend his beloved mortals from the things that crawl up from below. The world will burn, yes — but it will buy us the time we need. Solarus will arrive before Arthur can recover."
The chamber went very quiet.
Mikael's jaw worked. He looked, briefly, sick.
"It will kill innocents," he said. "Including Solarus's own faithful."
The angel across the table did not blink. "Then the faithful will be martyrs."
Philip Grain stared at the table for a long, long moment.
Then he raised his head.
"We open the Anus Gate. We will release the Nether Realm. Make the preparations."
The Solarus Faction exhaled as one, a thin, unhealthy relief settling across the table.
Mikael did not exhale with them. He looked down at his own clenched hands, and something behind his eyes flickered uneasily.
The faithful, he thought, deserved better than to be martyred for the convenience of a Sun that had not bothered to be present for them in two centuries.
He said nothing.
But the thought stayed with him, lodged in his chest like a small, sharp splinter.
---
What none of them knew — what Arthur had been careful to ensure none of them could possibly know — was that he was, at that exact moment, already inside the Nether Realm.
The Nether was vast. Impossibly vast. Larger than the surface of any of the worlds Arthur had walked, made of black plains, jagged sky-canyons, rivers of ash, and miles of dead light that did not seem to have a single source. To search it alone would have taken millennia.
He had not come alone.
A thousand shadow clones moved through the Nether at once — each one cast from his Authority of Entertainment, woven through the silver-and-violet threads of his soul, each one bearing a fraction of his perception. They drifted through the canyons, peered into the broken fortresses of forgotten ages, scanned the riverbeds for sealed sigils.
He was looking for the locked-up deities. The ones the Three Known Gods had once cast down here in secret, when the world above had been quieter. The ones who, if freed, would owe him.
It was not as simple as he had hoped.
Many of the deities his clones found had already been gone for centuries. Bodies dissolved. Souls dispersed. Only the slow, patient consciousnesses of the Nether itself — the ancient nurturing beings that maintained the realm — remained where divine prisoners had once knelt.
But not all.
Three days into the search, one of his clones surfaced in a deep cave system that descended further than any of the others. The cave was old. Older than the Nether's outer crust. The walls ran with a faintly silver mineral that did not exist in the world above. The deeper it went, the more carefully it had been carved.
When the clone reached the floor of the deepest chamber, Arthur shifted his consciousness into it fully.
He stood in front of an altar.
And on the altar — laid out as if in honored sleep, hands folded across her chest — was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.
Her hair spilled in soft platinum waves across the stone. Her skin held the faintest blue-silver flush of divine residue. Her divine essence was being slowly, steadily drawn out of her by the altar she lay on, siphoned into channels carved through the chamber's stone floor. She had been here a long time. Centuries, perhaps. Maybe longer.
Beside her, seated cross-legged on a low stone shelf at the altar's edge, was a teenager.
A boy. Maybe sixteen by appearance, though Arthur knew better than to read divine ages from divine faces. His eyes were closed. His hands rested on his knees. His breath moved at a slow, disciplined pace, the rhythm of something that had been guarding this altar for so long that the act of guarding had become the act of breathing.
A guardian.
Arthur tilted his head, studying both figures.
"The deepest cave in all of the Nether," he murmured to himself, glancing back at the path that had taken three days for even his shadow clones to navigate. "Buried this far down, sealed this carefully... someone went to a great deal of trouble to make sure nothing ever found her."
He looked back at the woman.
"And it seems," he said softly, "that the trip down was worth it."
The teenager's eyes opened.
They were a flat, cold gold. Not the gold of Solarus's authority. Something older. Something that had been waiting.
The boy turned his head and looked at Arthur with a perfectly indifferent stare.
"Intrud—"
Arthur was already there.
A clean strike. No flourish. No build-up. Arthur's hand passed across the space between them faster than the boy's mouth could finish the word, and the guardian's awareness simply stopped.
The body slumped sideways against the stone shelf, eyes still half-open, the unfinished syllable still hanging on his lips.
The chamber was quiet again.
And the woman on the altar continued to sleep, undisturbed, while her divine essence continued to bleed slowly into the channels in the floor.
Arthur looked down at her, and the corner of his mouth lifted into a small, considering smile.