The air in Osoroshi was no longer gas; it was a screaming battlefield of thermodynamic extremes.
While the two sovereigns of the Allied Nations squared off, the carnage behind them reached its crescendo. Vane the Alchemist and the Iron Lich Malphas stared at the glittering shards of Elara, their sister-in-arms, with a horror that transcended their alchemical conditioning.
"Mother..." Vane whimpered, his plague mask rattling.
Mikaela did not give them time to mourn. In the Elemental State, she was no longer the girl who loved Kael or the Vice Commander of Forgemire. She was a biological machine of utter annihilation, her mind a cold algorithm of slaughter. Seeing the two masters lag in their grief, she struck.
She moved like a jagged flash of light. With a flick of her translucent wrist, the ruby-stained ice pillars on the field shattered into millions of micro-shards. She didn't throw them; she commanded the air to carry them in a localized cyclone. Vane tried to reach for a vial of restorative tonic, but his fingers were severed by a passing blade of ice before he could even register the pain. Mikaela closed in, her eyes glowing with a numb, cobalt void, her objective clear: the complete erasure of the Osoroshi line.
Kael watched the light around Harold intensify, feeling the Supreme Commander's mana crushing the very oxygen out of the atmosphere. He knew the Emperor State—the golden aura he had relied on for years—would be like a paper shield against a hurricane.
"You want to see a monster, Harold?" Kael growled.
He reached deep into his core, past the learned magic and the royal duty, into the primal furnace of his lineage. With a roar that shook the valley, Kael's body was consumed. His flesh didn't just ignite; it became the fuel. He entered the Elemental State.
Kael's skin became a surface of churning, white-hot plasma. His hair turned into dancing tongues of solar fire, and his eyes became two miniature stars. The ground beneath his feet didn't just crack—it surrendered. The grey mud of Osoroshi instantly liquefied into a swirling pool of orange lava, bubbling and hissing as Kael's temperature continued to climb toward the impossible.
Harold's eyes widened, a rare crack appearing in his stoic composure. "Impressive. You have mastered the Elemental State... as has Mikaela, I presume." He glanced toward the ruby-ice carnage. "So, you think that is enough against me, boy? You think becoming a campfire makes you a god?"
Kael felt the pressure around Harold double. It was like standing at the bottom of a leaden ocean. "I am levels above you, boy," Harold whispered, his voice resonating through Kael's very skull.
Kael didn't wait for the pressure to crush him. Harnessing the explosive expansion of his heat, he moved with a speed that blurred reality. In a fraction of a second, he was behind Harold. The heat radiating from Kael's fist was enough to melt steel at a distance of ten paces. He swung, a fiery blow aimed at the back of Harold's head that should have ended the war then and there.
The fist connected—but only with the air.
Harold's image flickered like a dying candle and vanished from Kael's eyesight. Kael's eyes went wide. No one was that fast.
"I am faster," a voice whispered directly into his ear.
Before Kael could even rotate his head, a strike hit his abdomen. It wasn't just a punch; it was a concentrated beam of kinetic energy delivered with the mass of a falling moon.
The Elemental flames surrounding Kael's body flickered and sputtered. The impact was so deep it bypassed his external defenses, rupturing the internal vessels of his stomach. Kael's head snapped forward, and a gout of dark, steaming blood erupted from his mouth, sizzling as it hit the lava at his feet.
He stumbled, the white-hot plasma of his form dimming into a dull, pained orange. Harold stood there, a few paces away, his hand casually glowing with a soft, solar light. He hadn't even broken a sweat. The gap between them wasn't a crack; it was a canyon.
"You've climbed a mountain, Kael," Harold said, looking down at the coughing Sovereign. "But I am the sky above it."