Kalem stood alone amidst the corpses, the ground steaming beneath his boots, the stench of cooked flesh rising with the dawn light. The wind carried ash, yet the banners of the Blood Crusade still loomed, bold and unbroken.
He narrowed his eyes.
They were not moving.
Nor retreating.
"Do we have terms?" Kalem called again, louder this time, voice ringing clear through the still-burning plain. "This isn't a threat, I am asking seriously!"
No answer.
Only silence.
Then, a low roar—not from the heavens, but from brass wheels.
Ardra had not relented.
High upon his platform, blood crusted along his tusks, Ardra bellowed, "He is faltering! Push forward—crush him before he can breathe again!"
Trumpets of bone and iron wailed.
From behind the Blood Crusade came the thundering Brass Guard—sixty thousand strong, the elite of Ardra's legions. War chariots clad in barbed plating, drawn by armored beasts, charged forward in bladed formations. Axes mounted on wheels. Spikes along the yokes. Lances already dripping with poison and oil.
They were not coming to challenge.
They came to trample.
Kalem watched.
He exhaled slow.
"Persistent, they are," he muttered. "Then... 'Sol.'"
The golden spear answered.
It did not descend from the sky or rise from the earth. It appeared, as if memory were being remade. Tall and radiant, with a blade so polished it reflected the very sky, and at its base—a sun, carved and burning, locked in eternal flare.
Kalem gripped it with both hands.
It was light, but his muscles tensed as though lifting a tower.
He shifted into stance. His knees bent. His boots anchored.
Then the fire took him.
Sol flared.
A howl of ignition—Kalem blasted forward, carried not by legs but by wrathful combustion. Fire curled around him, searing the earth in a blazing trail. He streaked toward the charging cavalry, not a man, but a meteor.
The first line of chariots raised their shields.
Too late.
Kalem spun once—his spear traced an arc, a simple sideways sweep.
At first, it seemed the strike had missed.
But then—
A faint, golden crescent etched itself into the battlefield, wide and gleaming. Silence held for a breath.
Then—
The line exploded.
Flame surged like ocean tides, a wall of burning judgment. It swallowed steel. It roasted flesh. Chariots splintered like dry twigs. Screams came late and short as fire devoured oxygen. Riders were turned to ash in place, beasts boiled in their armor.
In a breath, ten thousand were gone.
In three, twenty thousand.
By the time the last scream ended, the line of cavalry had been erased.
Only Kalem remained, standing at the epicenter, Sol raised high, flames licking his armor, his face blank as stone.
He turned his gaze toward the Blood Crusade.
"Do we have terms?!!"
Far across the sea, in the Silver Library, Nara was screaming at her own crystal.
"JUST KILL THEM ALREADY, YOU MORON!!!" she shrieked, slamming her fists onto the oak table.
A startled apprentice beside her stammered, "He... he can't hear you, ma'am."
"I know that!!" Nara snapped, tears welling in her eyes, "But he'll listen. That idiot always listens."
In the starlit citadel of Isolde's hall, priests stood watching the flickering image on a mirrored basin.
Isolde, usually composed, had gone silent.
One of her aides whispered, "Is that... is that a relic he's using?"
"No," she said softly, "it's something worse. It's his own."
In the Everwood, the crystal dimmed for a moment, the image struggling to catch up.
Jhaeros rubbed his temples.
"That's not something a man should be able to do. Not repeatedly."
Lyra folded her arms, voice grim. "We never knew what he was working on after the Abyss... He wasn't just making weapons."
"He was forging self into storm," Jhaeros muttered.
Back at Redis, the battlefield smoldered.
The Blood Crusade was quiet.
Where once was pride, now there was hesitation. Soldiers no longer looked at Kalem. They looked to Ardra. Questioning. Waiting.
Ardra clenched his axes, their chains jingling as he stepped down from the platform.
His voice rumbled across the plain.
"Cowards."
He looked at his legions.
"You fear a single man?"
He pointed at Kalem.
"He is tired. Bleeding. Burning. And he is ALONE."
He raised his weapons high.
"I go myself. Those who follow—prove your blood is not wasted."
Then he leapt.
The chains of his axes unraveled as he landed on the red-soaked soil, stomping past shattered chariot wheels.
Behind him, a thousand of his blood-sworn followed.
Kalem watched.
He drew a breath.
And waited.