The moment the flame appeared, something fundamental broke.
It did not break loudly. There was no explosion, no grand declaration. Reality simply failed to explain what it was witnessing.
Every doctrine ever taught to knights, mages, scholars, and tacticians depended on limits—on the idea that power obeyed structure, that regeneration was absolute when properly fueled, that time-ranked demons could not be erased by mortal hands. Those principles were not questioned lightly. They were the foundation of civilization's understanding of survival.
And yet, the flame did not burn.
It latched.
It consumed inward, ignoring mass, ignoring resistance, ignoring the very premise that something had a right to continue existing. Regeneration activated and failed. Activated again and failed again. Not through overwhelming force, but through denial.
The world hesitated.
For those watching from the outskirts, trained eyes strained to reconcile what they knew with what they saw. Dragons were bound by scale. Fire by heat. Mana by flow. Nothing in any record described a flame that devoured priority—that consumed not flesh, not mana, but the claim to persistence itself.
This was not a battlefield.
It was a boundary being crossed.
Knees weakened not from fear, but from the collapse of certainty. If this was possible, then the world they had studied was already outdated. If impossibility could manifest before their eyes, then the only remaining choice was not to deny it—but to become something capable of standing beside it.
High above, unmoving, the throne did not tremble.
Observation confirmed theory. Structure collapsed exactly where predicted. The flame did not draw from the environment. It did not obey elemental hierarchy. It ignored regeneration protocols and temporal recursion alike. This was not growth within the system.
It was divergence.
Preparation had accounted for escalation. It had not accounted for transcendence manifesting so early.
Still, there was no shock.
Only confirmation.
Those witnessing this moment were not merely learning what strength looked like—they were being redefined by it. Their future opponents would still fight within rules. Their teachers, their kings, their gods would cling to assumptions.
That was why they would lose.
The system itself responded—not with command, but with recalibration.
Unauthorized evolution was detected. Analysis failed. Retried. Failed again.
Reclassification became necessary.
The flame was identified not as an element, but as an outcome.
The All-Devouring Flame.
A divine flame exclusive to Omega Dragons at the end of worlds. A phenomenon with no historical occurrence. A manifestation that violated balance parameters by consuming existence priority—overriding regeneration, time authority, and divine resistance by denying the right to persist.
The probability of future world-scale conflict increased.
This conclusion was not alarming.
It was inevitable.
Outside, silence followed the demon's erasure. Not the silence of relief, but the silence of understanding settling into place. Somewhere in the distance, legends were being born—not through songs or declarations, but through quiet realization.
Something ancient had awakened.
Not in rage.
Not in hunger.
But in recognition.
And the world, bound by rules it no longer fully understood, continued forward—unaware that it had already fallen behind.