The banners of Originis had not flown in thirty million years.
Now, six standards fluttered under one sigil—woven anew: a spiraling glyph of layered threads entwining an ancient rune that predated the System itself. The battlefield stretched across the Ashvale Expanse, a borderland burned from countless skirmishes. This time, they weren't skirmishing.
This was declaration.
Ari stood at the head of the army.
He wore no crown. No royal robes. Just a coat of interwoven glyphsteel and a simple sash marked by the threads of all six lineages.
Beside him stood:
Cerys Aetherrose, with the winds of Aetherthread swirling like a silent storm.
Eluin, her Dreamscript veil shimmering with alternate futures.
Primira, Luxthread gleaming like dawn.
Kael Duskreign, cloaked in shadows and layered illusions.
Thalen Obelmar, a silent mountain in armor, his weapon forged from petrified sigilstone.
Lysira, reluctantly armored, but her sigils woven from radiant fury.
"This will be the first battle we write," Ari said, eyes scanning the far horizon where Aurelion's red-armored forces gathered in formation.
"Not the System. Not the six Houses. Us."
The soldiers behind them weren't just nobles. They were Probationaries, Scrapborn, former Unbound, and hybrid threads.
For the first time, everyone had a place.
And their faith was in him.
A horn cried out from the Aurelion front.
Fire leapt skyward.
Then—
War began.
Cerys launched first, a sonic pulse of compressed wind slamming through enemy barriers. A moment later, Thalen punched into the ground, raising a wall of armored earth to shield their advancing infantry.
Ari closed his eyes.
His glyphs burned silently across the inside of his skin. The System still tried to "correct" him—but he had long since stopped asking permission.
"Signum Prime. Override. Cast: Threadweave — Recursive Pulse."
A glyph lattice unrolled mid-air, ancient and wrong by current magical laws—and yet it worked.
Whrrrrrrm.
Reality vibrated.
An area-wide nullzone spread, canceling all System-verified spells from the Aurelion side.
Their magic broke mid-cast.
"How—?!" one Aurelion war-mage cried. "Their scripts—don't have validation keys!"
"Because we don't need them," Eluin whispered, her Dreamscript fanning behind her like wings. "We write our own."
Kael swept into enemy lines through folds of dimensional cloth, striking with phantasms and blade illusions.
Primira's radiant glyphs shielded fallen allies while burning foes with photon-pure magic.
And Lysira, despite her grumbling, floated midair like a queen of lightning, her spells a mix of Vastelune formality and personal chaos.
At the center of it all, Ari moved like a singularity—not the strongest, not the fastest—but utterly unstoppable. Every move bent around intention, not power. Every cast layered reality like stacked programming logic.
The enemy faltered.
They were being rewritten.
By nightfall, the field was theirs.
The Aurelion battalion had retreated, their command force routed, their siege lines broken.
Casualties on Ari's side: low.
Morale: immeasurable.
But something still lingered in the dusk mist.
Ari stood alone, looking toward the distant mountain where the main Aurelion stronghold loomed.
A whisper echoed.
"You've begun the recursion," said a voice he knew but didn't recognize.
He turned—no one was there.
"The First Loop has ended."
"Now we begin again."
That night, around a quiet campfire, the core companions sat together for the first time since their childhood years at Sanctum.
Primira poked the fire. "...I still can't believe we just did that."
Kael smirked. "Let them rewrite the archives."
Eluin leaned toward Ari. "Did you hear the voice again?"
He nodded once. "It knows I've reactivated something buried."
Lysira huffed, arms crossed. "Next time, warn us before you cast a spell that eats the battlefield."
Cerys smiled gently, her head resting on her knees. "Next time, he'll do it with us."
Ari looked at them—his friends, his first family, his rewritten world.
"There's no going back now," he said.
"Originis has returned."