The ring closed.

  Hundreds of challengers launched at Ziraiah in a blur of motion, their killing intent a crushing wave.

  Her flaming sword swept once—clean and sharp—and a crescent of fire roared outward, carving a path through the front line. She didn’t wait to see the damage. She surged forward, meeting the tide head-on.

  The first man raised his spear—too slow. Her blade bit through the shaft, then his arm, in one motion. A second came from her left; she caught his leg mid-leap and swung him like a hammer, his body a brutal weapon that smashed through three others, scattering them like broken dolls.

  Ziraiah’s movements were relentless. She deflected blades with the flat of her sword, redirected spears with her forearm, cut down limbs without hesitation. Her fighting style was a blend of raw physicality and martial precision—each step calculated, each strike placed to maim or kill.

  A shadow loomed in front of her—a female Leporid with eyes like burning coals. The hammerhead of her knee slammed into Ziraiah’s gut.

  Boom!

  The impact hurled her a hundred meters through the air. She landed in a low crouch, boots carving trenches into the dirt, and then—before the dust even settled—she launched forward again, closing the distance in a single, ground-shattering stride.

  She tore through the ranks like a storm given flesh. Arrows of hardened water hissed through the air toward her—she twisted between them, the droplets slicing past her hair. The ground beneath her flared red; a ball of fire swelled up from her spell.

  Without slowing, she pivoted, and kicked the ball of fire.

  The fireball shot forward with explosive force. It detonated mid-air, the shockwave carving a twenty-kilometre-wide crater into the battlefield.

  From its edges, survivors leapt at her, their silhouettes streaking like meteors.

  They met her blade.

  Sparks and flame burst in rapid succession as she parried at impossible speeds, each slash and counter a blur. At Mach 200, her movements were beyond sight—one instant she was in front of you, the next she was at your flank, her fist punching clean through a gut, her heel severing a leg.

  And still, they came.

  Only the Bravo users could match her pace, their bodies reinforced beyond mortal limits.

  One of them—a Reliard with orange skin and blue eyes—appeared in front of her and slammed a fist into her face.

  BOOOOM.

  The hit sent her hurtling through two mountains, rock splitting and collapsing in her wake, before she crashed to the ground hard enough to crater the earth.

  She staggered up, left eye swollen shut, blood streaking from her nose.

  The Reliard dropped from the sky like a falling star, his right fist cocked to shatter her skull. She rolled aside, the impact obliterating the ground where she had stood.

  He came at her again, and again, his blows relentless. Ziraiah was barely keeping ahead, her dodges growing narrower by the second.

  Then she saw him opening.

  Her blade sang through the air toward his chest—

  —And he caught it.

  With one hand.

  Ziraiah’s eyes widened.

  The man stood at 10 feet 8 inches, his presence heavy enough to smother the air. A cruel smirk split his face.

  “You’re good for a combat mage” he rumbled, his grip tightening on the flaming edge. “But you can’t compete with me. Surprised I can hold your flame?” His smirk widened into something mocking. “That’s the inferiority of you mana users.”

  ---

  The Reluard’s fingers curled like iron hooks against her chest.

  WHUMP!

  Ziraiah’s breath vanished in an instant. The crushing force sank deep, cracking bone, rupturing muscle. She coughed a mouthful of blood—and then she was gone, hurled backwards at impossible speed.

  For six hundred kilometres she tumbled, tearing through forests and plains, smashing straight through mountain after mountain until the land itself seemed to recoil from her.

  She hit the ground hard, a crater blooming beneath her, only to feel two massive legs slam down from above—driving her deep into the earth like a nail.

  Before she could even orient herself, hands like steel clamped onto her, ripping her out of the crater.

  WHIP!

  A slash of Bravo energy carved across her back. Pain tore a scream from her lungs, hot blood spraying into the air.

  The world darkened.

  A massive black cloud—three hundred kilometres wide—swirled into existence in the sky above, rumbling like the wrath of a god. Lightning speared down in countless strikes, splitting the land into molten seams.

  The Reliard dodged nimbly between them, some of the other challengers doing the same—those too slow were annihilated, bodies blasted to ash in the blinding glare.

  Still the Reliard closed in, step by step, his eyes locked on her.

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  Then the heavens split.

  The storm’s core shifted, shaping itself into a colossal face formed of cloud and shadow. Its gaze fixed downward, its mouth yawning open with a roar like the grinding of mountains.

  From its maw, the largest lightning bolt in the history of lightning was born—so bright the world turned white.

  It descended in a diagonal torrent, ripping the sky apart as it slammed into the Reluard.

  SKRAAAAAAAASH!

  The island screamed as a seven-hundred-kilometre trench was carved into its flesh, molten edges glowing as the earth tried to hold itself together. The lightning burst out of the buttom of the island into the ocean.

  When the smoke cleared, the Reliard emerged from the trench—skin blackened, armour slagged, eyes burning red, blood all over his body. He dragged each breath like it was made of fire.

  Ziraiah lay on the ground, chest heaving.

  “Damn it… that really drained my mana…” she muttered, her voice raw.

  She rolled her head to the side—her vision blurred. Above her, seventy-eight silhouettes streaked through the sky in perfect formation, every one of them a Bravo user. They came from the same direction, moving as one.

  She saw it in their eyes. They weren’t here to challenge her—they were here to erase her.

  “No… no, no, no…”

  Tears welled in her eyes. Her body refused to move, mana reserves gone, muscles torn.

  Then they struck.

  Seventy-eight weapons swung in unison, their combined Bravo erupting into a single, blinding wave. It wasn’t just an attack—it was an execution. The force behind it could have erased her from existence, reduced her to a smear in the dirt.

  She shut her eyes.

  I’m going to die.

  The air screamed—then stopped.

  When she opened her eyes, she wasn’t staring at death.

  She was staring at her brother’s back.

  Valerius stood between her and the oncoming cataclysm, his sword still sheathed in his left hand. He had intercepted the entire fused attack with a single motion, deflecting it aside. The redirected blast ploughed into the distant horizon, obliterating thirty-three mountains in a single chain of explosions.

  He didn’t turn.

  He didn’t need to.

  From the way his shoulders squared, from the weight in the air, Ziraiah could feel it—he had seen the deep wound carved into her back, had smelled her blood pouring out, had noticed the swollen shut of her left eye and the grinding protest of her broken bones.

  And Valerius was angry.

  Valerius’s hand tightened on the hilt of his sword.

  Steel whispered from its sheath—just enough for the light to catch—before his mother’s voice cut through the haze of rage.

  All life is precious.

  The memory struck hard. He saw Kintol again—the blood, the screams, the moment he had been forced to kill. His grip slackened. Slowly, deliberately, he slid the blade back into its sheath until it locked with a sharp click.

  He inhaled once, deep. Exhaled.

  Then, with a metallic ring, the flesh from his forearms to his fingertips instantly shifted to a deep, green.

  The Bravo users’ combined strikes landed against him in a storm of light and force… and did nothing. He simply stood there, arms at his sides, watching. The attackers faltered mid-flight, their disbelief palpable.

  Ziraiah, still on the ground, had never been happier to see him.

  The Reliard—charred from lightning, his ears gone, chest skin seared away to bare muscle, part of his jaw torn open to expose cracked teeth—landed a hundred meters ahead. His eyes burned with pure malice.

  “Give me the relics, Ziraiah,” Valerius said without looking at her.

  She tossed him her bag. He reached in, drew out the relics, and slipped them into his spatial bag along with the one he’d already claimed. The glowing aura from them vanished the instant the bag’s seal closed. He layered fortifications over it—no one was getting to them now.

  He turned back to her. “Can you still move?”

  The Reluard didn’t wait a second longer He launched himself forward in a blur of muscle and fury.

  Valerius’s right eye tracked him—then his fist shot out.

  CRACK!

  The Reliard’s face folded under the blow. Every tooth shattered. His jaw snapped clean off, his skull caved in, his neck breaking with an audible pop. Muscle tore, skin split, and the head dangled by strands of sinew before the force sent him rocketing into the clouds.

  The shockwave that followed carved a crater nearly fifteen kilometres wide, blasting the rest of the challengers away like leaves in a gale.

  And yet, within five meters of where Valerius stood and Ziraiah sat, the ground was untouched—a perfect column of earth plunging deep into the crust, surrounded by devastation.

  Ziraiah hadn’t so much as swayed in the blast. She stared at him, wide-eyed. Is this… really Val?

  But the other challengers were already regrouping, hurling themselves at him in a frenzy.

  Valerius leapt into the sky. In the blink of an eye, he was behind one, driving a punch into the gut so hard the man folded and vanished from sight. Another—punched across the face mid-turn. A third—kicked square in the temple, spinning away like a broken doll.

  One caught his punch and roared, trading blows in a blur of impacts before Valerius caught his forearms in both hands, crushing bone like dry twigs. He hurled the man downward, then moved on without pause.

  “Damn it, he’s too fast!” one challenger barked—just before Valerius’s elbow caved his jaw in.

  Another lunged. Valerius drew back a fist, stopping just short of the man’s nose—the wind pressure alone ripped the skin clean from his face.

  Five more came at once.

  He met them head-on—

  A kick under the chin.

  A backhand across another’s face.

  An elbow driven into a third’s ribs.

  A savage knee to the groin of the fourth.

  And a skull-cracking headbutt into the fifth.

  All in the same heartbeat.

  Bodies flew in every direction—slamming into mountains, splashing into rivers, vanishing in craters.

  Valerius hovered above them, the air warping around his green arms, his single eye cold and unblinking.

  One by one, Valerius broke them.

  All seventy-eight Bravo users—each strike, each throw, each shattered bone—fell into a brutal rhythm until none were left standing.

  He landed softly in front of Ziraiah, the dust still settling, and crouched down. His gaze lingered on her swollen eye.

  “You’re eye,” he muttered, brushing a finger just beneath it.

  Ziraiah wrinkled her nose and pushed his hand away. “Eeww. And mine’s doing a lot better than yours. What happened?”

  “I got hit,” he said flatly.

  “Sorry, Val. You’re gonna be one-eyed forever if you didn’t have me.” She smirked, and with a flick of her fingers, a small glass vial appeared between them.

  Valerius blinked. “Where’d that come from?”

  “Simple teleportation magic. Works on small objects. Here—pour this in your eye.”

  He eyed the vial suspiciously. “Shouldn’t you be taking it? You’re losing a lot of blood.”

  She grinned, raising her other hand. Another vial appeared between her fingers. “I’ve got another.”

  “Good, then.” He took the first vial, tilting it above his ruined eye. As the cool liquid slid in, he said, “Even without this, it would heal in two or three days. I told you—my healing is insane.”

  “Oh yeah,” she said casually, “while you were some guy’s lunch.”

  Valerius gave her a long, unamused stare.

  “Sorry, sorry,” she muttered quickly.

  His eye knit itself whole again, and he flexed the lid experimentally. “How many of these things do you have?”

  “A lot. Eryndor stacked a bunch in his room before we left.”

  “So you just… summon them when you need them?”

  She nodded, then glanced at him. “What happened to the relics? Why aren’t the lights shooting out of your head?”

  Valerius smiled and tapped the side of his bag. “Spatial bag. I can store anything in here—might as well be another dimension.”

  As she finished pouring her own elixir over her wounds, the injuries sealed shut. She snatched the bag from him and whistled. “Dang, Val—where’d you get this? This is an artifact. Expensive as hell.”

  “I know a guy. Also… didn’t know the lights wouldn’t beam out if I put the relics inside. If I did, I’d have done it way earlier.”

  He stood, glancing toward the horizon. “Let’s go. Eryndor’s waiting.”

  “I’m out of mana, Val. I can’t fly.”

  “Don’t you have a mana restoration potion?”

  “Weeeell…”

  “Well what?”

  “Eryndor didn’t buy any.”

  Valerius blinked at her. “Why?”

  “We didn’t think we’d actually run out of mana. It’s never happened before.”

  “Great. Just great. That elegant ass is also out of mana.”

  He crouched, back to her. “Hop on. Hurry, or I’ll leave you.”

  She rolled her eyes, but climbed on anyway.

  In the next heartbeat, Valerius launched into the sky—air splitting beneath his leap, the ruined battlefield vanishing far below.

  To Be Continued...