High above, a trail of orange fire tore through the dark clouds like a living scar, pulling away at a speed that made the air shriek.
Vanki wasn't fleeing to save his own skin.
He flew to shatter years of planning, secrets, and manipulation.
The mask of indifference and arrogance that Arthur had worn for eons cracked and shattered all at once.
"NO!"
The scream tore raw from his throat, completely devoid of the divine calm he usually brandished.
It was the crude, desperate, and murderous sound of a man watching the future slip through his fingers.
The ground beneath his feet detonated.
Already-molten rock erupted in every direction, carving out a second, even deeper crater as Arthur launched himself into the air.
He didn't fly like Vanki, propelled by flames and sheer will; he used rapid bursts of kinetic energy beneath the soles of his boots, ricocheting through the empty space like a missile, tearing the sky apart in his wake.
The wind howled against his face, the atmospheric pressure crushing his nostrils and eyes, but he didn't so much as blink.
His gaze, cold and furious, was locked exclusively on the fading orange streak.
"You're not opening that mouth, you fucking animal! No one will know!"
Arthur extended his right arm, his fingers contorting into claws ready to grasp the world itself.
The space around his hand warped, light bending inward as if swallowed by an invisible vacuum.
*Morokian Technique: Gravitational Collapse.*
High above, hundreds of meters in the air, Vanki's flight abruptly halted, as if he had slammed into a wall of lead.
The air around him grew dense, suffocating, and impossible to traverse.
A colossal, unseen force enveloped him entirely—pinning his arms, compressing his chest, binding his legs—and dragged him downward with the violence of a meteor ripped from its orbit.
Vanki began to plummet.
Before he could even try to right himself, Arthur reached him in mid-air.
The impact of their collision was so tremendous it generated a concentric ring of pressure, shoving the clouds aside and wiping a patch of the dark sky totally clean.
Arthur dug his fingers into the general's muscular neck, pure hatred contorting his previously stoic features, and used Vanki's own body as a shield as they hurtled toward the earth.
They struck the arid soil on the outskirts of Ruitan with the sound of a mountain splitting apart.
The earth parted like churning water.
They plowed through the ground for nearly a hundred meters, uprooting dead trees, shattering boulders, and displacing tons of dirt until they finally came to a halt in the center of a fresh trench, choked with debris and dust.
The dust rose in thick columns, dyed in shades of gray and red.
Vanki rolled to the side, coughing up gouts of thick, dark blood.
His ribs were shattered, his left arm hung at a grotesque angle, and his face was a mangled mess of deep lacerations and bruises already swelling beneath the skin.
Yet he braced himself on his right arm, dug his fingers into the cold dirt, and began to push himself up.
Heavy and slow.
Every movement produced a dry, grating sound, like stones grinding together in a sack.
Arthur climbed out of the trench, walking slowly.
The friction burns from their descent had already vanished from his skin; his tissues stitched themselves back together with a rapid, wet sizzle, closing wounds as though they had never existed.
Vanki took a deep breath, and the air entered his lungs with a painful wheeze, whistling through torn fissures.
He opened his arms, stained with dirt and blood, and snarled.
The veins in his neck bulged and throbbed. His muscles expanded, stretching his skin to its absolute breaking point, forcing his body far beyond any mortal capacity.
The roar that followed cracked the ground around him.
Small chunks of rock floated in the air, levitated solely by the sheer vibration of his voice.
"You think merely knocking me down is enough to silence me, Arthur?" Vanki spat a puddle of blood that gleamed darkly on the soil.
His orange eyes burned like dying suns.
"All of Lavinsk will know that the silver-haired bastard's disciple is nothing but traitorous scum."
"I won't let you leave this place, General. Ruitan will be your tomb."
He stepped forward.
Every stride made the ground tremble, sending small shockwaves rippling through the dry gravel.
They clashed in the center of the ruined earth.
Vanki threw a brutal hook, putting every ounce of strength he could still muster into his bare arm.
Arthur didn't dodge; he countered with a straight punch wrapped in the exact same spatial distortion he fueled his techniques with.
The impact was so devastating that the sound lagged before reaching their ears.
The ground beneath them caved in ten meters all at once.
Vanki's arm snapped.
Bones splintered under the crushing pressure of the Morokian energy, but the general didn't scream.
He laughed—a hoarse, insane laugh belonging to a man who had already accepted he wasn't making it out alive.
He used the momentum of his own broken strike to twist his torso, slamming his forehead with full, unbridled force straight into Arthur's face.
The immortal's skull caved in slightly.
His nose was pulverized to dust.
He was launched backward, crashing right through the remains of an ancient stone wall, which promptly collapsed on top of him.
Arthur rolled across the ground, coming to a halt face-down.
His jaw was dislocated; blood streamed from his lips and nose.
He didn't even bother to stand up properly. Gripping his chin with both hands, he forcefully wrenched it back into place with a sickening, hollow pop.
In seconds, the bleeding stopped, the flesh realigned, and not a single scratch remained.
He rose like a cornered predator with absolutely nothing left to lose.
Vanki blasted toward the black sky once more, the trail of orange flames slashing through the clouds like an open wound.
But before he could gain enough altitude to escape, Arthur leaped with feral savagery—body hunched, arms outstretched—and dug his claw-like fingers into the back of the general's legs.
He yanked with all his might, like a man ripping a tree out by its roots.
Vanki was entirely powerless to fight against the immortal's raw strength.
He crashed back into the ground with the booming sound of a collapsing stone tower, sinking meters deep into the earth and kicking up a massive curtain of debris that blanketed everything.
Arthur didn't wait for the dust to settle.
Hovering directly above the crater, his fists glowing with a sickly green aura, he dropped into a striking stance.
"*Morokian Technique: Forty Hammers!*"
He brought down the first blow. Then the second. Then another, and another—a barrage so impossibly fast his fists blurred into a continuous storm of destruction.
Every punch was a direct hit, ruthlessly calculated to break and crush.
The first shattered his shins.
The second and third pulverized his femurs.
Twelve consecutive strikes rained down on his collarbones and shoulders, reducing the bone to powder.
And the final blows hammered his ribs, snapping, caving in, and sinking his chest deeper and deeper.
With every hit, Vanki sank further into the dirt. The ground around him cracked and gave way, ground down into fine sand beneath the overwhelming pressure.
And between each deafening boom, Arthur's voice echoed—hoarse and dripping with venom—screaming word by word.
"YOU... ARE... NOT... LEAVING... HERE... ALIVE!!!"
The final punch slammed into the center of the crater, sealing the bottom of the trench and leaving only a heavy silence and the coppery stench of milled earth and blood.
In a flash of martial instinct that would never abandon him, Vanki ignored the blows that had just dismantled his entire body, pushing his resilience and divine lineage to their absolute zenith.
Before Arthur could even raise his fist again, Vanki moved with a speed that defied logic for a vessel so thoroughly broken.
He shot upward, locking Arthur in a crushing bear hug from behind. His arms, like iron trunks, pinned the immortal's chest and arms, and then, he released everything.
All the incandescent energy, contained and suppressed for centuries, erupted from the general's core like a ruptured volcano.
The heat was so blindingly intense that the surrounding air instantly boiled into searing mist.
Arthur's skin glowed, bubbled, and melted off in layers, dripping away like hot wax before he could even process the pain.
Flesh vanished, muscles disintegrated, and within seconds, Vanki was no longer holding a man, but a smoking white skeleton, the bones gleaming fiercely under the orange glow of the flames.
Even reduced to mere bone, Arthur refused to fall silent.
As his vocal cords forcefully regenerated, layer by agonizing layer, his screams tore through the air, brimming with a fury not even hellfire could extinguish:
"YOU BASTARD!!!"
The ground beneath them finally gave way.
Solid rock turned to lava, the earth melting into incandescent pools, and the two sank together, descending toward the blazing heart of the planet, locked in an embrace in their own private hell.
Arthur felt the heat devouring whatever flesh struggled to reform, but his rage utterly eclipsed the agony.
In a brutal, desperate maneuver, he wrenched his neck around, sank his newly-formed teeth into Vanki's left arm, and bit down with everything he had.
He ripped out a massive chunk of meat in a single tear.
He bit down again, driving his teeth deeper, shredding skin, muscle, and veins, tearing and gnawing like a starved beast.
Boiling blood spilled over his maw, and Vanki's scream of agony echoed above the roaring flames. The pain was so sharp, so utterly unbearable, that the general convulsed, his death grip loosening for just a fraction of a second.
It was enough.
Arthur raised his arm—where the flesh had yet to fully return, leaving only hard, white bone exposed.
He drove a vicious, pinpoint elbow strike backward. The rigid bone punctured the general's hardened skin and buried itself deep into his chest.
Vanki gasped and staggered back, letting him go.
Arthur used the momentum to vault out of the pool of molten rock.
He landed on solid ground, rolled for a second to absorb the impact, and surged back to his feet.
Flesh cascaded over his bones like a tide of gray sludge, covering his wounds, sealing the charred remains, and completely reconstructing his body in a matter of seconds.
The ground within a twenty-meter radius was a lake of pure lava.
The kinetic energy swirling around him manifested visibly, flaring in a sickly, repulsive dark green.
The gravity beneath his feet magnified to such an extreme that the solid earth flattened like modeling clay.
*Morokian Technique: Absolute Rupture.*
He leaped, executing the strike from above, sending a massive construct of energy shaped exactly like his fist plummeting straight into the river of lava.
The sheer force dried up the riverbed in an instant, blasting all the molten rock skyward, and slammed dead-center into the general's hardened chest.
The thud was so profoundly deep it seemed to echo from the very bowels of the earth.
Arthur dropped to one knee, panting heavily.
Even totally exhausted, his muscles recovered at an absurd rate, fibers knitting back together as he glared at the billowing dust cloud.
The dust slowly began to settle.
And there, lying beneath the haze, Vanki remained crumpled on the ground. Still alive.
The two locked eyes in the oppressive silence that reclaimed the ruined valley.
Two ghosts. Two unbreakable wills.
Vanki spat out more blood, and a choked, bubbling laugh escaped his split lips.
"So... this is it?" he taunted, his voice terribly weak, yet his eyes burning as fiercely as ever.
"The fearsome General Vanki, falling to a kid with a suicide plan."
Arthur didn't answer immediately.
He started walking toward the general. Every step was deliberate and heavy, like an irreversible death sentence.
The space around him warped, the light bending away as if life itself were terrified to touch him.
He stopped in front of Vanki.
The colossus lacked the strength to even raise a hand.
Arthur reached down, grabbed Vanki by his thick, grime-matted hair, and yanked his head upward, exposing the throat marred by ancient battle scars.
He locked his green eyes directly into the unyielding orange gaze.
"I warned you," he whispered.
Suspended by his hair, his vision already darkening, Vanki forced his lips to move.
An almost inaudible murmur slipped out.
"...I... was... stronger... than... you..."
Arthur leaned in closer, pressing his mouth to the general's ear, and spoke softly, as if sharing an intimate secret.
"But in the end, I was the one who won."
He let go of Vanki's hair and took a short hop backward.
He focused every ounce of his remaining strength into his right fist.
The space around his knuckles turned pitch-black, devouring all the lingering afternoon light to form a sphere of pure kinetic energy. Absolute, concentrated destruction.
*Morokian Technique: Tyrant's Collapse.*
He brought the strike down.
The impact detonated into a catastrophic shockwave that obliterated everything within a multi-kilometer radius.
The dust was instantly vaporized.
Vanki's body—his hardened skin, his indomitable bones, his unbreakable will—was compressed until it ceased to exist, reduced to a fine crimson mist that scattered into the wind.
In the exact spot where he had lain, a brand-new crater opened up—perfectly circular, edges glass-smooth, plunging fifteen meters deep into the bedrock.
And then... silence. Absolute.
No wind, no sound, no life.
Arthur stood motionless at the bottom of the crater.
The tiny cut on his temple had already sealed shut.
"No one will know," he murmured to the void.
He turned his back on the Executioner's ashes.
His figure slowly dissolved, blending seamlessly into the spatial distortions and the black smoke still rising from the ruins of Ruitan.
The plan continued, and now, Arthur marched toward Laura.