Ercale fractured into streaks of lightning, blinking from surface to surface in erratic bursts that left afterimages scorched into stone. Arkanis tracked him without turning his head, magenta eyes calculating trajectories faster than thought.
The astral blade extended from the Demon Lord's staff in a single, seamless extrusion.
Ercale reappeared sideways along the vertical face of a building, boots magnetized to stone by crackling arcs of lightning. The blade swept.
He vanished an instant before impact.
The building did not.
The cut passed through it without resistance. The upper half slid free in eerie silence before gravity reclaimed it, the structure collapsing in a deafening roar behind him.
Ercale reappeared at street level, already moving.
Arkanis pivoted smoothly and opened his palm.
Space compressed.
The cobblestone beneath Ercale imploded inward, crushed into a jagged crater as if struck by an invisible hammer. Ercale had already launched upward in a violent surge of lightning, his ascent snapping the air like thunder as the ground folded in on itself where he had stood.
Arkanis tilted his staff toward the sky.
Seven pillars of fire erupted in perfect formation, spearing upward in a widening cage. They tore through cloud cover and kept climbing, splitting the upper atmosphere apart. The sky rippled around them, a vast shimmering distortion spreading outward as compressed air warped light into fractured patterns, as though the world had been struck and cracked.
Ercale drew breath mid-flight.
Blitzkrieg.
He became a line.
He threaded between the pillars at impossible angles, lightning ricocheting off their edges without touching flame, each step bending momentum rather than obeying it. In a blink he was inside the formation, inside Arkanis's reach.
His fists detonated against the Demon Lord's torso in a storm of close-quarters strikes—solar plexus, ribs, sternum, collar—each impact chaining lightning across etched sigils that flared and recalculated under stress.
He slipped past Arkanis's flank and landed behind him.
"What is the point of this?" Arkanis asked, turning with unhurried precision.
The astral blade reformed from the staff's tip and carved backward in a horizontal sweep.
Ercale bent into a backflip, the edge passing a hair beneath him before cleaving into the street. The stone split open in a glowing trench that extended for dozens of meters, molten edges hissing.
He landed hard, boots skidding.
"The point of this is to beat you, end the fight from before, and not have to hear the ape yelling at me for letting people die," Ercale snapped, breath roughening.
The lightning around him flickered unevenly.
*This is going on for too long...*
The rubble to Arkanis's right exploded outward.
Clara burst free, encased head to toe in roaring armor of flame. Plates of condensed fire overlapped across her frame, chains of incandescent links trailing behind her as propulsion. A halberd formed in her grasp—its blade a dense crescent of white-hot ignition.
She drove forward low, halberd angled for a rising cleave toward Arkanis's centerline.
Across the battlefield, Amara clicked her tongue.
"I can do better."
She brought her hands together sharply and inhaled.
The ground before her ruptured.
A towering giant of fire clawed its way upward, fifteen feet of compressed inferno given shape. Its surface churned like a furnace core, features barely defined beneath violent heat shimmer. With a roar that bent the air, it raised both massive fists and brought them down toward Arkanis in a double hammer blow.
Through a shattered wall, Samwell extended his arm, frost crawling along his sleeve.
A wide, shimmering wave of icy mist surged forward, dense with crystallized mana. The temperature plummeted in its wake, moisture freezing midair as the wave raced to engulf the Demon Lord from the flank.
For a fraction of a second, Arkanis stood at the convergence point—assaulted from front, side, and sky.
In his previous form, that convergence would have mattered.
Now—
He released his staff.
It spun before him without touch.
A barrier unfolded outward in a smooth spherical expansion, not flaring, not straining—simply manifesting as layered astral geometry.
Clara's halberd struck first.
The impact rebounded through her entirely. She was hurled backward as though she had charged a fortress wall, chains of flame lashing out from her armor to anchor her mid-flight. They bit into surrounding structures and dragged her to a grinding halt.
The fire giant's fists descended.
They did not shatter the barrier.
They liquefied.
The construct's arms thinned and sloughed away on contact, melting into cascading sheets that splashed harmlessly aside. The recoil blasted the giant backward into Amara, who dispelled it instantly with a sharp glare before it could collapse onto her.
Samwell's freezing wave rolled over the barrier last.
Frost formed along its surface for a heartbeat—then slid off, sublimating into harmless vapor. The mist dispersed as if it had struck polished glass.
Ercale exhaled slowly.
"Of course it did nothing," he muttered, lightning crackling weakly around his fists. "Even with their high affinities, he's too far above all of them to affect…"
Arkanis closed his fingers around his staff once more. The rotating barrier dissolved into drifting motes of astral residue that evaporated before they touched the ground.
He regarded them without urgency.
"Which is why it would be optimal for you to concede," he said evenly. "I will end it with a single astral beam to the brain. You will not feel pain. You will not even register that you have died."
Amara straightened despite the soot streaking her face. Heat began gathering between her palms, coiling inward instead of flaring outward this time—compression rather than spectacle.
"What do I look like?" she shot back. "Some kind of loser? Maybe you've got that mentality. I don't."
The fireball in her hands condensed further, shrinking while its density multiplied, surface turning white at the core.
Clara stepped forward, halberd lowering into a direct line with Arkanis's chest. The fiery armor plating her body flared brighter along the seams, chains dragging across the ground with a metallic hiss.
"I promised everyone we would stop you," she said, voice steady despite the cracks in her stance. "Breaking promises is a bad thing to do. So I won't."
Samwell forced himself upright behind the fractured wall, frost crawling once more across his forearm as he steadied his breathing.
"The Mathers family never give up," he began, and for a fleeting second, his thoughts flashed to Even. "Even the trash of our family knows that!"
Annabel was the only one not advancing. She leaned heavily against a splintered wall, one hand braced to keep herself standing, the other pressed to her ribs as she fought to steady her breathing. Mana exhaustion tremored through her limbs.
"Just—" she exhaled, forcing a crooked half-smile. "Let me catch my breath. Then I'll grab a fire poker or something and get back to attacking you."
Ercale rolled his shoulders, lightning crawling faintly across his skin despite the fatigue weighing on him. He tilted his head toward Arkanis, grin sharp and unrepentant.
"Well, Arkanis, none of them are giving up. So unless you're trying to talk me and them to death, I recommend you just shut the fuck up."
A pause.
Arkanis studied them in silence. Then he exhaled softly.
"Fine."
He raised his staff high above his head. The sigils etched into his pale skin shifted in synchronized patterns, recalculating. The rotating crown above his horns accelerated almost imperceptibly, and the astral saturation in the air thickened to a suffocating density—
Before he could bring it down—
A blinding light flared and it swallowed the city whole.