A black arrow cut through the darkness, aimed straight at Eva's head. The mist around her failed to corrode the sinister projectile. Before it could blow her skull apart, I grabbed her by the waist and pulled her, spinning to the right.
My arm, however, entered the radius of her mist. The flesh peeled off in seconds, leaving it raw and bleeding.
"AGH…" I grunted, jerking my arm away immediately.
The sensation was horrific, as if my own prana had been pulverized into incandescent gas beneath my veins.
All around us, Alden began to raise four walls of water, forming a cage that shrank by the second, cutting down our space to move. My five lightning orbs bombarded the walls incessantly, delaying the completion of that liquid prison, but they weren't enough to stop his ability for long.
My body burst with electricity. Lightning crackled in every direction as I molded a spear of pure thunder in my hand. I hurled it with all the force I had.
Leon was about to drive his ghostly spear through Weel's neck. The ice reaper was advancing beside him, along with the competitor wielding twin blades of fire and frost flashing through the air.
Weel resisted with nothing but a whip made of her white aura, writhing like a living creature, but she was about to be overwhelmed.
My spear struck them by surprise. The impact deflected the killing blow and sent Leon crashing directly into the reaper. The two of them rolled across the ground in a storm of sparks and shattered ice, opening a path for Weel.
Without hesitation, I opened a rift and reappeared beside Waan.
He was cornered.
His body was covered in bruises and cuts, blood pouring from them, but he still held his ground against four opponents at once—Varetha, Samael, Tadeus, and Darius.
Tadeus conjured colossal fireballs, each the size of a water tank, vaporizing everything they touched. The steam cloaked the battlefield, blurring vision completely, giving Varetha and Samael perfect openings to strike.
Varetha's ring, inscribed with countless runes, moved on its own as if it were alive, trying to decapitate Waan. Each time my lightning hit it, the damned thing redirected the strikes back at us—a living weapon that completely nullified my offense.
Samael, on the other hand, was even worse.
His presence made the air thick and sticky, like some kind of viscous sludge clutching at us. With every step he took, time itself seemed to drag, as if the seconds were being pulled into an invisible swamp. Wherever his hands landed, deep craters formed, cracking the surface with a power far beyond what his movements suggested.
And even without carrying a weapon, he looked more dangerous than all the others combined.
In the distance, the archer resumed her harassment, her arrows slicing through the air at unpredictable intervals, each shot forcing us to break what little coordination we had left. Worse still was the sight of another competitor, motionless, pulling vials from his belt and mixing their contents with eerie calm—as if all the chaos around him was nothing more than a lab experiment.
For long seconds—or maybe minutes, it was impossible to tell—he didn't move. Then finally, the vial slipped from his hand.
"BOOOOOOOOM!"
The explosion released greenish flames that began to take shape. Before us, a colossal python rose, growing grotesquely, as though the fire itself had decided to imitate life. The creature slithered toward Eva, its spectral maw opening wide.
The mist around her exploded, answering with a piercing shriek that sounded more visceral than human. Eva counterattacked, her red fog lunging forward, trying to swallow the fiery serpent whole.
The impact was deafening.
"BOOOOOOOOOOM!"
The serpent's head disintegrated, melting like wax, but the shockwave hurled all of us backward. When the dust settled, the area of Eva's mist had shrunk drastically, reduced to a circle barely three meters wide.
She had won—but at a terrible cost.
There was no time to celebrate.
Out of the chaos, Von charged. A colossus over two meters tall, bursting straight into Eva's mist without hesitation.
"CRACK!"
His kick exploded against her chest. The sound of bones breaking froze our blood.
The three of us—Waan, Weel, and I—turned at once, just in time to see Eva fly like a leaf in the wind. Her body bounced across the dark, shallow waters, flung away from our formation with no control at all.
"Damn it, we have to do something!" shouted Weel, her voice trembling with panic.
"Nothing's working to bring them back…" I replied, breathless, my mind blank of solutions. "And honestly, it's impossible to win outnumbered."
I had already tried everything. Severe damage, electrocution, blunt trauma.
Even summoning my phoenix, hoping that the same roar that had freed me could shatter the illusion binding the others. But since the moment I entered the Pagoda, she had been trapped inside my inner world—sealed.
"Damn it…" growled Waan, clenching his fists, as Alden's water walls finally closed in around us. Living currents emerged from them like serpents of liquid, slithering toward us, ready to coil and crush us like prey in a nest.
**
Eva flew from the impact of the kick. She felt the dry crack of breaking bones, the metallic taste of blood flooding her mouth. Her body bounced along the ground like a ragdoll, and even dazed, she could already see from a distance the water chains closing in to trap Glenn, Waan, and Weel.
Her eyes turned cold as blades. The mist surrounding her—her mark, her shield—retracted completely, sucked back into her body as if it were part of the blood now pouring from her wounds.
She dropped to her knees with effort, digging both hands into the black water. She closed her eyes, forcing herself to ignore the chaos, the screams, the clash of battle around her. And amid the pain, she remembered those first oscillations they had heard upon entering the celestial pagoda—vibrations that seemed to indicate a path but turned out to be a deadly trap. They had simply failed to understand.
If she couldn't understand it… then she would destroy it.
A trembling, bitter smile crossed her cracked lips.
The Cuprium family had always been strange. Always wielded techniques that looked like impossible absurdities. Hers was one of those absurdities: vaporizing raw energy. That was what created her mist—not just water, but her own prana transformed into unstable, corrosive vapor, fused with her water affinity until it took on that bizarre form.
"If it can't be separated… then we'll vaporize the whole damn thing," she spat blood along with the words.
Her hands began to shimmer with an eerie hue—a deep, uneven red.
The thin sheet of water beneath her fingers reacted instantly, staining itself scarlet.
The contagion spread like a living disease—fast and merciless. Within seconds, the entire ground beneath us had turned into a pulsing red lake, saturated with her prana.
"Explode, you bastards!" she screamed, her voice slicing through the battlefield like a verdict.
The world ruptured.
A colossal column of vapor rose, devouring the water and spitting back abrasive mist, saturated with energy. The cycle fed on itself, evaporating everything around us and turning the liquid prison into a living furnace.
The heat erupted outward, tearing screams even from the controlled bodies.
Skin burned, flesh shrank, and even the puppets instinctively raised their arms to shield their faces.
"BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM"
The blast wave tore us apart, hurling everyone in random directions. When we fell, we hit dry black ground.
For the first time, our feet touched the floor of the pagoda. The illusion, the prison, the trap—everything shattered like broken glass.
The explosion reverberated like a bomb, sweeping everything in a blinding flash. But the spectacle was short-lived.
Eva's body couldn't sustain something so immense.
The cycle broke suddenly, snuffed out like a flame in the wind.
The puppets collapsed, unconscious, like stringless dolls.
We ourselves fell to our knees, exhausted, burned, in absolute silence.
Eva remained standing for a moment, her glassy eyes fixed on the aftermath—pale, drained, with nothing left to give.
"It's the damn water," she muttered in the end.
Then her body fell forward, hitting the black soil face-first, motionless.
**
Tadeus rose slowly, his whole body throbbing as if he were burning alive. The metallic taste of blood filled his mouth. His ears rang with a deafening buzz, and his vision was nothing but a trembling blur. He felt drained, as if he had poured an entire river of flames through himself—and in truth, that was exactly what had happened.
His prana was almost depleted.
Forcing his eyes to focus, he distinguished faint shapes in the distance.
Competitors lay scattered across the ground, some motionless, others writhing. Burns and scars deformed the skin of many. It looked as if a cataclysm had swept through them all, without mercy or exception.
Something shook him by the shoulders.
Pain shot through every bone, but it brought him back to awareness. In front of him, Glenn was speaking or at least, his lips were moving.
No words reached him, only the muffled echo inside his head. What he could see were Glenn's clothes, drenched in blood, and above him, a gigantic orb spitting continuous lightning like a deranged Tesla coil.
Tadeus tried to respond, but his body wouldn't move. Glenn noticed and simply gave up on him, turning toward another target.
Tadeus followed his gaze and saw then the misshapen figure of a fat demon struggling to stand. In his hand, an intricate staff of crystal and runes. On his body, luxurious blue-and-white robes with golden arabesques that looked completely out of place in that hell of ash and vapor.
Alden.
Glenn said something to him, helping him up.
The portly mage staggered, leaning on Glenn's shoulder as if it were his only anchor in the world. But the moment Alden was upright, something changed.
The black water beginning to spread again across the ground trembled—then froze in place, as if time itself had stopped its flow.
The thin layer of black water creeping toward the fallen bodies was halted.
Glenn, panting, kept the orb raised above his head.
Lightning exploded along the edge of the field, vaporizing the excess water before it could reach the wounded.
The sight was grotesque: rising steam, the stench of burnt flesh, and the heavy silence of dozens lying collapsed.
But there was something in Alden's simple gesture—and in Glenn's desperate effort—that seemed to hold the fragile balance between survival and total collapse.
"What the hell happened… I don't remember anything."
That sentence echoed from different points on the battlefield. One by one, the competitors regained awareness, staring at their own bruised, burned, bloodied bodies.
Their expressions wavered between confusion and horror as they realized Weel, Waan, and Eva lay on the ground, battered and spent. Waan and Weel were still breathing—conscious, though barely hanging on.
Eva, however, remained still, her skin pale and her body drenched in blood, as if she had already given more than she had to give.
Tadeus finally managed to stand.
His head spun, and every step was a struggle against imbalance, but he didn't stop until he reached the center of the group, where Glenn and Alden acted as a fragile anchor amid the chaos.
The two of them were doing their best to contain the thin film of water that still covered the ground. To untrained eyes, it might have seemed harmless, but all of us had already felt in our flesh that it was poison to the soul.
"What are you two… doing?" asked Tadeus, his voice hoarse.
Glenn turned to him and, for a moment, let out a breath of relief.
"Tadeus… we can't let this cursed water touch us. I need you and Alden to keep it back. Just that will give us a chance to breathe."
Tadeus narrowed his eyes, confused.
"What happened? Why is everyone like this?"
Glenn hesitated, as if even finding the words was difficult.
"You all went insane. It was like someone had taken control of your minds. Only me, Waan, Weel, and Eva managed to resist—and we spent the whole time trying to find a way out."
He gestured toward the wounded around them.
"That's why everyone's so wrecked… We tried to wake you by any means possible. Even, you know… by hitting hard."
A crooked smile crept over Tadeus's bloodstained lips.
Glenn smiled back, weary, showing the bruises and cuts that had left him almost unrecognizable.
"To be honest, I think we got beaten up more than we did the beating."
Clarity returned—fragile but real—to Tadeus's mind.
The ringing in his ears still tortured him, but he finally understood why Glenn had gone to him before anyone else.
"You want me to evaporate the water Alden's holding back?" he asked, voice rasping.
Glenn lifted his tired but serious gaze.
"If you want to stay inside the Celestial Pagoda, yes."
Tadeus took a deep breath and raised his hand.
A small flame was born in his palm—faint, but dense—illuminating the darkness with a reddish glow.
Then it flared with a crack, expanding into a ring of fire that raced around their perimeter. The flames danced in waves, licking the edges of the water circle that still tried to close in.
The reaction was immediate.
The contact between fire and water produced an ear-splitting hiss, and thick clouds of steam began to rise, engulfing everyone in a suffocating curtain.
For a brief moment, the battlefield stabilized.
The advance of the water stopped. Tadeus's ring of flames held the barrier, while Alden, panting, reinforced the containment with his intricate staff, beads of sweat sliding down his round, flushed face.
It was only a temporary relief but in that suffocating darkness, it already felt like a miracle.