The snow boiled against the broken earth, torn apart by fire, blood, and rage.
The battlefield lay silent.
Only the hissing wind, the crackle of broken magic, and the slow, ragged breathing of the victors remained.
Vinea staggered to a halt beside Lumina, her molten blade dragging a thin line of fire through the slush. Levia leaned heavily on her tower shield, its surface cracked and blackened. Asmodea sat half-collapsed against a shattered pillar of ice, her crimson hair matted with blood.
They had won.
Barely.
But the silence was wrong... strange. It was a little too still, too sharp.
The weight came first, pressing down against the air, slow and suffocating. Then the sound — boots crunching across the frozen ruins, steady, deliberate, inevitable.
A figure emerged through the drifting mist.
Massive.
Solid.
Four arms crossed over a barrel chest, skin like burnished bronze veined with black fissures.
A brand — the number "1" — scorched across his left cheek.
