In the hierarchy of Tellurian power, the Elemental State was more than a mere evolution—it was a biological rewrite.
While the Emperor and Saint States were akin to overlocking a machine until the gears smoked and seized from exhaustion, the Elemental State turned the machine into the energy itself. It was the bridge between the mortal and the divine.
Kael knelt in the bubbling lava, his hand clutched over the crater in his abdomen where Harold's strike had landed. Internal organs had been pulverized, and his ribs were little more than white-hot powder. Yet, beneath the surface of his plasma-flesh, the heat began to stitch him back together. The wound hissed, steam pouring from the gash as molten mana acted as a cauterizing thread, rebuilding muscle and bone in seconds.
Kael stood up, his movements fluid and terrifyingly fast. He wiped a smear of blood from his chin, his golden-brown eyes dancing with a manic, crystalline light. The adrenaline of the near-death blow had triggered something primal.
"I must say, Harold," Kael rasped, his voice vibrating with the hum of a thousand hornets. "That was quite the punch. I would've passed out—maybe even died—if I wasn't an Elemental right now. But the fire doesn't stay broken for long."
Harold narrowed his eyes, his solar aura tightening. He saw the "bliss of craziness" in the boy's eyes. It was the look of a man who had realized he could no longer be killed by conventional means.
While the gods of fire and light debated the nature of power, Mikaela moved to end the Osoroshi legacy.
Vane the Alchemist and the Iron Lich Malphas were no longer fighting a woman; they were fighting a terminal event. Vane, desperate, threw his final masterpiece: a "Void-Acid" flask designed to dissolve the soul itself.
Mikaela didn't dodge. She stepped into the splash.
The acid hit her crystalline form and slid off like water on glass, but as it touched the ground, she triggered her most skeptic and creative maneuver yet. She didn't just freeze the acid; she transmuted the vibration of its molecular bond.
"Entropy," Mikaela's voice echoed, hollow and cold.
She plunged her frozen hands into the mud of Osoroshi, sending a pulse of absolute-zero energy through the subterranean mana-veins. Instead of a pillar of ice rising up, the ground beneath Vane and Malphas became a Superfluid.
The laws of friction vanished. Vane stumbled, but because there was no resistance, he couldn't regain his footing; he began to spin with increasing, violent velocity. Malphas, weighted by his rusted armor, began to sink into the earth as if it were water, his heavy plate offering no buoyancy.
As Malphas sank to his waist, Mikaela appeared before him, her eyes two voids of cobalt. She didn't strike him with a blade. She leaned in and whispered into the iron of his helmet, a sound frequency that reached the resonant pitch of his ancient, rusted armor.
CRACK.
Mikaela didn't hit him; she shattered the "idea" of his defense. The Iron Lich's plate exploded outward, not from force, but from a total structural collapse.
Vane, still spinning uncontrollably in the frictionless void, was caught in the shrapnel of the Lich's armor. Mikaela raised her hand, and the superfluid beneath them instantly snapped into Solid Nitrogen Ice.
The transition happened in a microsecond. The expansion of the sudden freezing caused a localized pressure blast. Vane and Malphas weren't just killed; they were integrated into a massive, jagged mountain of ruby-tinted crystal that erupted from the epicenter. Their atoms were crushed into the lattice of the ice, becoming permanent, frozen ornaments in Mikaela's garden of slaughter.
The "Military" of Osoroshi was gone. Only the red silence remained.
Mikaela turned her head toward Kael and Harold, her form flickering with a chilling, blue radiance. Her objective was complete. Now, she looked at the Supreme Commander, and for the first time, a spark of human recognition returned to her cold eyes—not of love, but of a shared, impending doom.
"The rogue nation is silent, Harold," Mikaela said, her voice a chilling breeze that swept across the lava. "Who is next?"