The battlefield still smoked from the ruin of Sol's earlier strike. Kalem stood alone again, the embers at his feet glowing like a ring of forgotten suns.
From across the scorched field, Ardra came—a mountain of brass and rage. Behind him stormed a thousand elite guards, each clad in layered mail etched with blood runes, blades raised high and howling oaths of death.
Kalem narrowed his eyes.
He took Sol in both hands and charged it, channeling more than flame now—he fed it with the heat of his will, the gravity of weariness, the burden of every moment he had not raised his blade in hatred.
Then, with a flick of his wrist, he let go.
Sol launched forth like a falling star, a comet wrapped in fury. Its scream tore through the air.
Ardra saw it.
He leapt—not out of fear, but rage—soared clean over it, his body glowing crimson as his mana flared.
But his guard?
Sol sliced through them like cloth. Men were tossed, chariots split, shields turned to molten plates. Where the golden line passed, only ruin remained—six hundred dead in a blink, the rest thrown aside like broken dolls.
Ardra landed with a quake.
"So, one-on-one, it is," Kalem muttered as he stepped back from a vicious axe swing.
"Draw your weapon!!" Ardra roared, the veins in his neck rising like coiled serpents.
Kalem didn't flinch.
"Can't you just retreat?" he asked calmly, voice almost tired. "Take your men and go."
"Retreat? Terms?" Ardra snarled, eyes wild. "Why do you want to end the battle?! You got some whore waiting in your tent?!"
Kalem blinked slowly.
"No," he said. "I just recently had an idea I want to work on."
"An idea?" Ardra nearly laughed, though the sound was closer to bark. "You want to end a war... to chase a thought? If I had your strength, I would plunge the world into blood and chain its gods to the Maw!"
Kalem stared at him, voice flat: "I am not you."
That was when Ardra's body surged.
A crack of energy, red and thick, burst from his back like wings made of fire. His body expanded, muscles tightening like iron bands, veins turning black as tar.
"Warrior's Madness," Garrick whispered from his place far beyond the field, watching through his own crystal. "The unbridled rage of the orc bloodline. No fear. No thought. Only violence."
In distant halls and towers, others whispered too. Nara leaned closer to her crystal. Isolde held her breath. Lyra's eyes narrowed. Jhaeros tensed, saying nothing.
On the field, Ardra charged.
His twin axes spun wide, the chains a blur.
"This just got interesting," Kalem said as he watched the war-beast hurtle toward him.
Then he sighed.
"Nah," he said.
Warhawk appeared in his hand.
He stepped forward—once.
Then the axe came swinging.
Kalem moved.
In a motion smoother than a falling leaf, he sidestepped and spun, Warhawk flashing in a clean diagonal arc.
A sound like snapping bark.
Then silence.
Ardra's momentum carried his body forward another ten steps before the head finally tumbled from his shoulders, eyes wide with disbelief, still faintly glowing.
Kalem sheathed Warhawk into the air—it vanished like mist returning to cloud.
"I don't know why I even ask anymore."
He turned around, voice rising not in rage, but in weary command.
"Just go back. I won't chase."
Sol flew back to his hand, slow and obedient, then vanished as well.
The battlefield fell still.
The Blood Crusade—now decapitated, in truth—stood for a time, waiting for an order that would never come. Their war drums had stopped. Their chains hung loose. Many looked to the scorched line where the elite had fallen. Others looked to the broken body of their lord.
Then, in silence, they turned.
One by one.
Ten by ten.
A hundred by hundred.
They left.
No wails. No mourning. No threats.
The bodies of their dead were left behind, as their doctrine demanded. The slain are sacrifices to the Maw. To touch their remains would be heresy.
Kalem didn't watch them leave.
He had already turned toward the horizon.
That night, long after the blood had cooled and the fireflies danced above the corpses, a figure moved alone.
She walked without armor.
Her robes were dark, stitched with bone-thread and rune-lace. Her eyes glowed faint violet beneath a veil. Her hands were gloved in silver skin. She hummed as she approached the corpse of Ardra, still where it had fallen, head beside body.
"My, my," she whispered, kneeling. "What a body indeed."
From a pouch at her side, she drew forth a small vial. The fluid inside pulsed like a heart, thick and syrup-dark, glinting with slivers of metal.
She poured it gently over Ardra's corpse.
It flowed like blood—but faster, more eager.
Within moments, the body was encased, a hardened, amber-like shell forming around it. Transparent. Preserving.
Then came the gust.
A shadow passed overhead, then wings as wide as a siege tower.
A beast descended—claws curved like scythes, eyes burning with brand-fire. Its scales were steel. Its breath, ash.
The woman looked up and smiled.
"Come now. We have work to do."
She climbed atop the beast's back as it clasped the body in its talons.
Then, with a roar, it soared into the night, vanishing into the smoke-veiled sky.
Elsewhere, in many places, the news was spreading.
Some whispered it as legend already.
Others feared.
And a few… sharpened their own blades.