Ercale and Arkanis locked eyes, the space between them crackling with restrained violence. Arkanis tightened his grip on his staff, the twin-serpent head glowing faintly as layers of magic coiled within it, deliberately held back. Across from him, lightning arced between Ercale's fingers, snapping and hissing like living things.
"So it's to the death this time?" Arkanis asked evenly.
Ercale's eyes narrowed. "Yeah. It's to the death."
Clara and Amara glanced between the two of them, tension crawling up their spines.
*Who is he?* Amara wondered, studying Ercale more closely. *And why does he feel so… familiar?* Something about his presence scraped at the back of her mind.
*Is this person actually helping us?* Clara thought, tightening her grip on her fire spear. *And this power… it's almost like the Demon Lord's.*
"Hey, you two," Ercale called out without breaking eye contact with Arkanis.
Both of them snapped to attention.
"What?" Amara asked, already gathering heat, flames licking around her hand in preparation.
"Don't go thinking you can sit this one out," Ercale said, giving them a brief sideways glance before refocusing on Arkanis. "You're both helping me beat him."
"Yes?" Clara said reflexively, confused for half a second—then she shook her head hard. "I mean—yes! We will!" She shifted her stance, readying herself.
Amara let out a short sigh. "Yeah… yeah, fine." Despite the complaint, she was already braced to fight.
Arkanis regarded the three of them coolly. "You think they can help you?" he asked. "Two Fifth Generation fire mages?"
Ercale scoffed, lightning flaring brighter. "Don't look down on the younger generation, Arkanis. They've got things that'll surprise you!"
He moved first.
A lightning lance screamed from his hand, ripping through the air. Arkanis raised his staff to block—but Ercale was already gone, vanishing in a flash and reappearing beside him at lightning speed. A kick, charged with crackling energy, lashed out.
Arkanis snapped his staff up just in time. The impact sent him skidding back several steps, boots grinding against the stone.
By then, the two women had caught up with their movements.
With a sharp click of her tongue, Amara unleashed a roaring torrent of flame straight at Arkanis. At the same time, Clara charged through the fire without hesitation, fire spear raised, her immunity letting her cut straight through the inferno.
Arkanis reacted instantly. With his free hand, he raised a wall of ice from the street, thick and jagged, blocking the oncoming flames. His staff came up again to meet Clara's spear, the two weapons locking together in a grinding clash.
Pinned.
That was the opening.
Ercale condensed lightning into a marble-sized sphere between his palms and clapped his hands together. The sphere flattened, then erupted into a beam of pure plasma that tore toward Arkanis.
Arkanis stomped his foot.
Gravity folded inward, forming a dense orb that seized the beam and held it in place—but the effort forced him to spread his focus thinner and thinner as Ercale kept firing, Amara maintained the torrent, and Clara drove harder into the clash.
Then, from the rubble—
Annabel saw everything.
She didn't waste time asking questions.
"Can't get shown up now," she muttered.
Her hands moved in a wide, fluid arc. Wind surged—not pushing outward, but pulling inward, creating a localized low-pressure zone that dragged heat from Amara's flames and friction from Ercale's lightning into a tight, furious orbit around Arkanis. She crystallized the outer edge with ice, forming a jagged, reflective shell that bounced the raging energies back toward the center.
Her jaw clenched.
She forced fire into the frozen vortex.
The interior transformed into a screaming, pressurized steam chamber as heat and ice collided violently. Then she threaded lightning through the wind—not as bolts, but as thin, magnetic strands that wrapped around Arkanis's staff and limbs like electrified silk.
The final layer was sound.
Not an explosion—but a constant, high-frequency sonic oscillation that screamed through the ice shell. The piercing vibration rattled Arkanis's eardrums and shredded the mental precision required to stabilize his gravity magic.
Caught in the Pentagramic Maelstrom, the Demon Lord's focus fractured. Every attempt to assert control was met with interference—mana redirected, thoughts shaken, power turned inward just to keep his own body from being torn apart by the internal turbulence.
For the first time in the fight, his posture broke.
His knees buckled—just slightly—under the overwhelming sensory and magical pressure.
And then—
Samwell came back.
He tore through the air from where Arkanis had sent him flying, rage burning in his eyes. "I'm going to turn you into dust!" he roared.
Light flared in his right hand. Darkness pooled in his left.
The air warped and groaned as the two opposing forces screamed against one another. While Annabel's maelstrom drowned Arkanis's senses in noise and static, and Ercale's plasma beam ground relentlessly against the weakening gravity orb, Samwell slammed his hands together.
Light and shadow collided.
"Twilight Annihilation!"
A beam of shimmering gray-void energy erupted forward, slicing through the air with a hum that erased all other sound. Pinned by magnetic lightning and deafened by sonic interference, Arkanis couldn't teleport away.
The beam struck him square in the chest.
Arkanis let out a frustrated sigh as his staff finally dipped, the combined pressure of five mages forcing him to the absolute limit. The ground beneath his feet turned to powder. Annabel's ice shell shattered into a million glowing shards under the sheer force of the impact.
He wasn't defeated—no being like him would fall so easily—but for the first time, the calm expression on his face twisted into a grimace of genuine exertion.
And then the world screamed.