The flower field smelled of smoke and honey. Red petals trembled in a wind that tasted faintly of ash; every so often a blossom flared and spat a tongue of flame toward the sky. In the center of that sea of red stood a single tree forty meters tall, its bark blackened and ancient, a single crimson fruit hanging like a sun caught in branches.
Vasuki settled in a patch of grass the flowers would not touch and opened the seam to his pocket long enough to let Helios, Dionysus, and Indra step through. He scanned the field with a slow, careful hunger. He had tasted this place before—felt the residue of fire and flame—and he had come looking for heat that would feed a Phoenix and for the kind of wild energy that would temper the soul.
Helios inhaled and the fire in him answered. The Phoenix's feathers brightened, red and gold catching the afternoon light. He rose and circled, wings cutting the air with a sound like distant bells. Below, the field pulsed with life: flowers that spat flame, a tree that drank those flames, and two guardians perched on opposite limbs—a Tier‑8 Flaming Tongue Frog and a Tier‑8 Crimson Flame Iguana. The frog's tongue coiled like a rope of living fire; the iguana's tail burned with a crimson flame that left black rings in the air.
Vasuki watched Helios with the patient amusement of a teacher. "The fruit of ten thousand flames," he said. "It will change you if you let it. But first—prove you deserve it."
Helios did not need the command twice. He rose higher, letting the Solar Halo form behind him, and he called it into being with intent. He drew a slow breath and reached up with the part of him that had always answered the sun. The Solar Halo did not simply glow by accident; he willed it into being: a ring of molten light that spun up from the air, drawing warmth and focus from the sun itself until it hung behind his shoulders like a second, burning heart. The halo hummed and fed him; his feathers brightened, red and gold flaring as if a parent had laid a palm on his head.
The frog and the iguana looked up and saw a Phoenix crowned in sunlight. Helios wasted no time. He spoke the first words of his chain and the air tightened: "Flame Suppression." The guardians' flames dimmed, sputtering as if a gust had been sucked from them. Then he layered "Fire Manipulation" and, with a shout, "Inferno Chains." Black, burning chains erupted from the ground and wrapped around both beasts, dragging them from the branches and smashing them into the scarred earth.
A bathtub‑sized fireball smashed into the fallen pair. When the ash cleared both still lived, wounded and furious. They exchanged a look and, with the terrible calm of predators, prepared to fight as one.
The iguana began filling the sky with floating crimson spheres, each with a black, death‑tinted core. The frog answered with long, sickly green lances of flame that hissed like poison. Helios tried to pick them off with ranged fire, but the frog's lances cut through his bolts and the iguana's bombs hung like sky mines. He dove to close the distance, talons and beak ready, but one of the iguana's bombs detonated near his wing and a black dot bloomed across a feather — a spreading stain of death energy that crawled along vane and bone. Another lance found his other wing. The halo sputtered; his feathers smoked.
He fought through the pain. He slashed the iguana's flank and left a steaming gash, but the frog's tongue lashed out and wrapped around his leg. With a brutal yank the frog slammed him into the ground again and again, the iguana adding its floating bombs to the rhythm. Helios tasted iron and ash and felt the slow slide toward defeat.
Cornered and bleeding, Helios made a decision born of desperation and training. He spun the Solar Halo faster, letting it draw deeper from the sun until it became a wheel of concentrated flame. Then, with a cry that split the field, he invoked a skill he had practiced but never fully mastered in combat: Flame Gate. The halo widened into a flaming portal behind him — a circular gate of sunfire that opened like a wound in the sky.
He dove through the gate beak‑first and reappeared as a spear of sun inside the frog's chest. The Flaming Tongue Frog did not have time to scream; the Solar Gate drove through it, tearing organs and molten flesh into the clearing air. Blood and steaming guts sprayed the field; the frog's body collapsed in a smoking heap. The iguana, startled and enraged, turned to face him, but Helios had already reentered the gate and burst back into the sky.
The iguana gathered its remaining bombs into one monstrous sphere and hurled it like a comet. Helios, exhausted and wounded, felt the halo flicker low. He closed his eyes and reached deeper — not just to the halo but to the lineage that fed phoenixes. He called on the sun itself, letting the Solar Halo swell until it was a blazing disc nearly twenty meters across. Warmth, old and patient, poured into him and burned the death stain into ash.
Then, with a calm voice that was almost a whisper, he intoned the final invocation: "Celestial Aria, Flame Sword." A golden blade descended from the heavens — a holy thing fifty meters long, seven meters wide, runes burning along its edge. It cleaved the death‑filled fireball into nothing and then fell through the iguana, searing it into a smoking ruin. The ground where the iguana had stood was a black scar; the lingering heat flowed up into the tree and into the single crimson fruit, which pulsed brighter as it drank.
Helios collapsed where he landed, feathers singed but the death magic burned away by the halo's holy heat. He lay on the scorched earth and felt the torrent of energy inside him like a river that could drown or carry him.
Vasuki moved with a small, almost tender motion. He plucked the Ten‑Thousand‑Flames fruit from the branch with a flick of his tail and offered it to Helios. "Eat," he said. "Enter my space. Let it settle."
Helios took the fruit with trembling talons. The flesh was warm and tasted of flame and old suns. He bit and the world folded. The pocket inside Vasuki opened like a throat and Helios stepped through, carrying the fruit's heat into the serpent's private wasteland. He did not come back out for a long time.
When he finally emerged he was different. The torrent of energy had settled into him like a river finding a bed. He slept immediately, a deep, dreamless sleep that hummed with power. Dionysus watched him and asked, voice small and curious, "Will he be stronger than me now?"
Vasuki's laugh was a low ripple. "You each have your own paths," he said. "Comparing them is a waste. Strength is not a single road."
He turned to Indra then, eyes bright with a serpent's amusement. "Are you ready?" he asked.
Indra's nod was a small, fierce thing. The cub's chest puffed with a determination that made Vasuki's mouth curve. The serpent chuckled and the sound was almost fond.
Sam felt it like a tremor under his skin. He was in the throne room when the first wave of energy hit—an odd, electric pressure that made his teeth hum and his vision swim at the edges. He had been trying to catalog the day's tasks, to set patrols and check convoy routes, when the surge rolled through him. The system's HUD flickered with incoming updates—bond gains, XP tallies, a dozen small notifications that together read like a storm. He could feel the numbers stacking in his bones. Dionysus and Helios—each had pushed through a crucible and returned changed.
Sam closed his eyes and tried to steady himself. He had felt this before—growth that came too fast could be a blade as much as a shield. If the bonds kept leveling at this rate, if the domain's fights continued to feed them in such concentrated bursts, he would cross thresholds he had not planned for. Tier‑8 loomed like a horizon he had not expected to reach so soon.
He rose from the throne and walked to the window. Outside, the field of red flowers glowed like embers. Above the castle, a dark shape coiled and watched the horizon. The week was still young, and the world was already answering.