Aston held up a hand, signaling a sharp halt just beneath the low-hanging, frost-covered branches of the old-growth pines. The flickering mana residue from Xavier's distant signal still lingered in the air like static electricity, pulsing with the faint echoes of high-tier combat.
"Listen closely," Aston said, his voice dropping to a harsh, controlled whisper as he turned to face Luke and Valen. His green eyes darted across the fractured terrain ahead, tracking the invisible, creeping currents of hostile mana. "Xavier's relay just came through with an urgent update. Kyle managed to track down the source of the spatial distortion, but he's walked straight into a nightmare—he's currently locked in a brutal three-way battle against a high-ranking demon prince named Vilthrax and an unknown, highly dangerous masked shadow. He's fighting them entirely alone out there, and if we don't move fast, he's going to get overwhelmed."
Valen offered a cold, indifferent smirk, adjusting the cuff of his immaculate black coat. "A demon prince and a masked interloper? How delightfully messy. It seems our resident troublemaker has bitten off more than he can chew this time."
Before Aston could issue a tactical formation to rush to Kyle's aid, the air above the northern canopy did not merely move—it fractured with the sound of breaking glass.
The ambient mana didn't just thicken; it grew greasy, heavy, and sickeningly sweet, smelling faintly of ancient coin, scorched gold, and rotting opulence. Reality ripped open a hundred yards ahead of them, bleeding dark spatial distortion into their path.
A towering figure stepped out of the bleeding rift, blocking their way with suffocating arrogance. He was an apex monster of terrifying proportions—a Monarch-tier lieutenant serving directly under the Sin of Greed. His skin was the color of tarnished gold leaf, stretched tightly over a skeletal frame, and from his back sprouted six jagged, metallic wings that hummed with a bone-rattling frequency. Flanking him in a semi-circle were seven elite arch-mages, their robes embroidered with cursed runes, their staves pulsing with volatile, multi-colored devastation.
The golden-skinned lieutenant raised his head, his hollow eyes burning with sickening vanity as his voice reverberated across the trembling earth. "I am Malakor, Herald of the Golden Hoard, executioner of the Sin of Greed! Tremble, mortals, for your pathetic march ends—"
Valen didn't even let him finish the sentence.
With a lazy flick of his wrist, the sub-zero temperature dropped so violently that the ambient moisture crystallized instantly into a blinding wall of diamond dust. A cruel, razor-thin smile touched Valen's lips as he cut the monologue short.
"I don't care," Valen murmured coldly.
With a deafening *CRACK*, Valen vanished, materializing dead-center in front of the lieutenant. Before Malakor could draw another breath, a colossal dome of absolute-zero ice exploded outward, swallowing both titans in a swirling vortex of blue light and instantly silencing the self-important lieutenant forever.
"Leave the master of ice to his work," Aston commanded sharply, drawing his twin Dao swords as they hummed with a high-frequency cyan shriek. "Kyle doesn't have much time. We need to carve through these seven obstacles right now."
Luke didn't hesitate. With a fierce battle cry, his platinum-white hair whipped wildly as he surged forward, invoking "Athelgard's Mantle" to its absolute limit, desperate to clear the path so they could back up his cousin. Behind him, Ingis materialized in a flash of crimson steel, her massive rune-carved greatsword materializing in her grip with a heavy, earth-shaking thud.
The battle erupted with a cataclysmic shockwave that flattened every tree within a fifty-meter radius.
The seven arch-mages moved as a singular, terrifying hive mind. With a synchronized sweep of their staves, a torrential storm of overlapping high-circle spells—infernal pillars, lightning lattices, and void-shards—rained down upon Luke and Aston. The sheer kinetic and thermal output was overwhelming; the ground instantly melted into bubbling glass and black slag, sending toxic plumes of smoke into the sky.
Luke grunted, crossing his blade to catch a cascading wave of dark fire. The sheer impact drove him sliding backward through the molten earth, his boots carving deep trenches into the stone beneath the slag. His arms trembled under the crushing weight, the heat scorching the skin of his face.
*Kyle is out there facing a prince and that shadow alone,* Luke realized, his teeth gritting so hard a drop of blood rolled down his chin. *I have to break through this now!*
"Ingis!" Luke shouted over the roaring thunder of spells.
Ingis didn't reply with words. She roared, leaping skyward through the storm of magic. Channeling her raw, berserker thermal output, she brought her greatsword down in a vertical cleave meant to split a mountain. Three of the arch-mages raised a joint barrier of compacted spatial mana to block her, but the sheer kinetic violence of her strike shattered their barrier into a million glowing shards, sending the three mages crashing violently into the dirt, coughing blood.
While the arch-mages scrambled to recover their formation, Aston became a phantom of emerald light. Moving too fast for human eyes to track, he wove through the blistering crossfire of remaining spells. A lightning bolt grazed his shoulder, tearing his armor and scorching his skin, but he didn't falter. He slid beneath an arch-mage's defensive ward, his twin Dao swords singing an ear-splitting song as they sheared clean through the mage's staff and armor.
The remaining arch-mages panicked, desperately chanting a high-tier forbidden incantation, their eyes glowing with wild, erratic mana. A sphere of compressed, multi-colored destruction swelled in the center of the clearing, threatening to obliterate everything left standing.
"Not on my watch," Aston breathed coldly.
Channeling the absolute peak of his elven blessing, Aston spun in mid-air, hurling his twin blades forward like spinning wheels of high-frequency energy. The blades cut through the cascading spells with surgical perfection, piercing directly through the casters' chests and pinning them to the earth.
As the final arch-mage collapsed into the ash, the suffocating mana barrier holding the clearing together snapped.
A few hundred yards away, with a final, earth-shattering detonation of blue light, the colossal dome of absolute-zero ice shattered into dust. The self-proclaimed Herald Malakor stood frozen in a massive pillar of blue crystal, his golden frame completely encapsulated, his mouth still slightly open in the middle of his cut-off speech.
Valen stepped out from the frost, brushing a speck of ice from his immaculate black coat. He glanced over at Aston and Luke, who stood panting amidst the melted, smoking wasteland of the clearing.
"Took you long enough," Valen remarked smoothly.
Without wasting a single second, Aston turned his gaze toward the deeper woods where Kyle was fighting for his life. "Let's move. Kyle needs our help."