The transition was instantaneous, the final thread of the duel snapping with the clean, terrible violence of a broken bowstring.
Illidan had been pressing the attack with the weight of a dying sun. He was a hurricane of jade steel and fel fire, throwing the full, desperate momentum of ten thousand years of hatred into every downward arc of his warglaives.
His chest heaved, his massive wings beat against the blizzard, and his demonic skin cracked under the strain. But the baseline arithmetic of the war had run dry. The Skull of Gul'dan was no longer an infinite well; its emerald light was sputtering, failing to compensate for the absolute exhaustion.
Arthas did not outrun the demon hunter's perception. He did not employ a clever feint or a mortal trick. Instead, he simply executed the cold, accumulated logic of an anvil waiting for the hammer to chip.
Illidan's next left-hand parry was precise. It was perfect. It was simply, by a fraction of a millisecond, too late. Frostmourne found the empty air beneath the jade crossguard.
The runeblade tore through the demon hunter's defense with the unmitigated velocity of a physical law. It wasn't a glancing blow. The etched sapphire runes along the steel flared with a blinding, predatory light as they bit deep into the center of Illidan's chest armor, the kinetic impact ringing out across the glacier shelf like a falling tower.
Illidan went down. He did not die—his demonic anatomy and the residual armor of the skull absorbed what would have cleaved a mortal man in two—but the catastrophe was total.
He hit the ice on one knee, his posture collapsing forward, his fingers locking onto the hilts of his warglaives through the sheer, involuntary reflex of a warrior who refused to disarm even while his consciousness slipped away.
Arthas did not hesitate. He stepped into the pocket of the fall, his cape snapping in the freezing wind as he raised Frostmourne over his head for the absolute execution strike.
Leylin had approximately two seconds to takeover the fight. He had been observing everything through the cold, whenever there would be an opening a blast of fire or a frozen spike would blast Arthas which in turn makes it easier for Illidan to manuever.
But the moment something broke, the background became the only thing that mattered. Two seconds was an impossible window for standard magic. It was not enough time to draw a formal circle, to tap the ley-lines, or to recite the long incantation protocols of the Kirin Tor.
It was exactly enough time to burn. Leylin didn't run; he exploded. The arcane energy within his core transformed into pure, forward acceleration, casting a brilliant violet trail across the permafrost as he crossed the forty-yard gulf before the wind could follow him.
The ice did not slow his boots. The gradient of the slope did not exist. He materialized in the narrow space between the descending runeblade and the fallen demon.
In the second half of that final second, his hands slammed together in front of his chest, his palms flat, his fingers spread wide to form an instantaneous kinetic shield.
Frostmourne met the wall. The impact was a concussive shockwave that blew the surrounding snowdrift into a whiteout circle fifty yards wide.
Through the translucent purple membrane of the barrier, Leylin felt the raw, physical frequency of the blade—an ancient, insatiable hunger that sought to drink the very concepts of heat and resistance out of his spirit.
The unholy pressure ground into his heels, driving his boots three inches deep into the solid saronite bedrock. His teeth ground together until they cracked, his vision blurring as he poured the entirety of his long-developed willpower into the barrier's edge, refusing to yield a single inch of the stone.
The blade stopped. The barrier held. "Go," Leylin spat, his voice a low, strangled rasp through the smoke. He did not turn his head. He could not afford to drop his gaze from the sapphire slits of the death knight.
Behind him, the sound of tearing leather signaled Illidan's recovery. It was a slow, agonizing process—the methodical, disciplined reset of a creature that had survived a hundred mortal wounds and knew exactly how to force broken bones to bear weight.
The demon hunter was out of the active bracket for the next minutes, but he was breathing. The distinction was everything.
Leylin shifted his weight, his hands dropping into a loose, fluid circle as he faced the Death Knight alone.
Arthas looked at him with the flat, emotionless evaluation of an executioner analyzing a new block. To the Prince, the human had been a marginal nuisance—an artillery piece firing from the safe distance of the rear.
Now, the artillery piece was standing in the center of the ring, controlling the space with a calm, analytical focus that matched his own.
The Death Knight took a step forward. Leylin took a step back. It was not a retreat; it was the rigid maintenance of the horizon. His working style demanded an exact, mathematical interval between his chest and the tip of that runeblade, and he measured that gap with every stride.
As Arthas advanced, Leylin glided backward at the exact same velocity, his fingers already spinning the air into a furnace. Because he had maintained the distance, he had the luxury of form.
He didn't rush the casting; he drew the fire from its deepest operational base, compounding the plasma until it was a dense, white-hot sphere that hissed with the weight of a real artillery shell. He launched it straight at the center of the dark plate armor.
Arthas didn't dodge. He brought Frostmourne up in a minimal, diagonal deflection. The runeblade drank the fire the way it drank everything, its unholy cold converting the heart of the thermal blast into a harmless cloud of gray steam.
But it couldn't consume the entirety of the mass. A residual, super-heated shockwave bypassed the blade's edge, slamming into Arthas's chest plate and scorching the silver crest into blackened iron.
The Death Knight's stride didn't stutter, but his boots accelerated. He recognized the pattern instantly: the human wanted a long-range war of attrition, and the only logical response was to close the gap and not give an advantage.
Leylin had already anticipated the charge. He dropped his right hand, his palm slapping the frozen ground with a sharp, concussive impact.
The permafrost between them did not merely crack; it erupted. A massive wall of compressed glacier ice and ancient saronite stone, three meters high and two meters thick, ripped upward from the floor directly across Arthas's sprint vector. It was a solid, structural impediment designed to force a detour.
Arthas did not detour. He went straight through the center. Frostmourne swung in a single, brutal horizontal arc, its unholy aura shattering the three-meter wall into a fountain of jagged debris.
The stones flew through the blizzard like shrapnel, and Arthas emerged from the cloud with the direct, terrifying momentum of a juggernaut that had encountered nothing more than a curtain.
But the wall had cost him exactly two seconds. And two seconds was all Leylin required to seed the floor.
The shattered fragments of the wall hadn't hit the ground before Leylin turned their thermal profile inside out. The moisture in the air instantly froze, a ring of jagged, crystalline ice spikes ripping upward from the stone to lock around Arthas's iron greaves.
The glacier itself became an active cell, the frozen earth biting into the Death Knight's knees, pinning his weight to the coordinates he had just claimed. The frost roots held for four seconds.
In those four seconds, Leylin didn't watch the lock. He utilized every frame of the interval to drift another twenty paces back, re-establishing the absolute distance he needed, his fingers already snapping in a rapid, rhythmic sequence.
He didn't fire a single, heavy spell. He unleashed three rapid, low-overhead heat spikes in a continuous, machine-gun cadence. The first hit Arthas's left shoulder as the Prince broke free of the ice roots; the second exploded against his throat guard; the third struck the hilt of Frostmourne itself.
Each individual strike was small, but they arrived before the prior impact had finished dispersing its energy, creating a cumulative thermal overload that forced the Death Knight to manage three distinct defensive equations simultaneously.
Arthas handled the sequence with the same dead, unchanging efficiency that characterized his entire existence.
There was no panic, no anger, no degradation of posture. Frostmourne deflected, the armor absorbed, the unholy aura neutralized.
He was not being broken in the mortal sense of the word—pain was a currency he no longer traded in. But the consumption was real.
Every deflection required the expenditure of the runeblade's internal reserves; every spell absorbed chipped away at the unholy lattice sustaining his heavy plate armor. The engine was massive, but it was still an engine, and it was being forced to run at maximum throttle just to keep the human from expanding the gap.
Then, the nature of the fire changed. Leylin did not draw the next spell from his own mana pools.
He reached into the environment itself, his perception mapping the thermal history of the apex. He gathered the residual, emerald heat that Illidan's three-day campaign had left cooking in the stones; he drew the boiling steam from his own previous explosions; he collected the static, electrical friction of the surrounding blizzard.
He pulled it all into a single, localized coordinate point directly behind the Prince's shoulder blades. The fire did not arrive from the front. It converged from four separate angles simultaneously, a massive, compressed conflagration that represented the absolute sum of every thermal event that had occurred on the spire since the siege began.
The explosion hit Arthas with the weight of a collapsing mine. The Death Knight staggered.
One heavy, iron-shod boot skidded backward across the wet stone. Then a second. His left arm dropped by a fraction of an inch, the flat, automated recovery system of his body immediately engaging to process the structural damage, but the tactical fact remained: he had been forced two steps back.
Two steps further from the path of the Frozen Throne. Behind Leylin, the dragging sound of jade steel against stone reached a sudden, sharp halt.
The green light of the fel fire flared once more, casting a long, horned shadow across the ruined apron. Illidan stood upright, his warglaives raised in a low cross, his blindfold dripping with fresh, dark blood but his torso locked into an offensive frame.
"My turn," the demon hunter growled, the voice rough with the absolute strain of a body that had refused to stay down.
Leylin did not drop his guard. He remained exactly where he was—the pivot point between the demon hunter's rage and the death knight's freeze—his hands already drawing the next circle of fire from the frozen wind, his eyes locked on the shattered left side of the Prince's shoulderguards.
Arthas looked at both of them. He looked at the magus who refused to be caught, who controlled the landscape and treated the battle like a mathematical equation; and he looked at the demon who had given everything to the blade and was ready to give the rest.
The Death Knight's face remained a mask of dead white stone. He raised Frostmourne, the sapphire light in his eye exploding into a blizzard of pure, unadulterated malice, and stepped forward into the final lane.