Kairos hit the ground like a falling meteor.

He didn’t use wind magic to cushion his landing. He relied on his base 82 Endurance and his travel boots. He smashed into the center of the lunging demon horde.

BOOMM!!

The sheer impact of his landing shattered the black volcanic rock beneath him, sending a shockwave of sharp stone flying into the faces of the closest monsters. Before the dust could even settle, Kairos moved. His Agility was 95. To the normal human eye, he was just a blur of dark motion. He gripped the leather hilt of Asteria with both hands and swung the dull, blackened silver blade in a brutal horizontal arc. The blade struck the crimson torso of a demon.

When Kairos fought the Black Mist Knights or the Aberrations, his holy sword would instantly melt their corrupted flesh, turning them into clean gray ash. Demons were different. The iron blade tore through the demon’s thick skin and snapped its ribs. The boiling black blood sprayed across the rocky ground. The demon let out a deafening, agonizing shriek, but it didn’t vanish into ash. It just bled.

It’s worse, the massive wound on its chest began to stitch itself back together. The demon’s flesh bubbled and hissed, regenerating the broken muscle. The demon raised a stone club, aiming to crush Kairos’ skull while it healed.

"They heal fast," Kairos noted, his glowing silver eyes not showing a single shred of panic. He simply triggered his harmonized law. A tight, ten foot bubble of gray, frozen space erupted around him. The demon’s stone club stopped mid air, frozen just two inches away from Kairos’ face. Kairos didn’t waste time attacking the chest again. He stepped inside the frozen monster’s guard, swung Asteria upward, and severed the demon’s ugly, horned head from its shoulders.

He dropped the time stop. The frozen gray bubble vanished. The massive headless body crashed to the dirt. The head rolled away. It tried to spasm, but without being attached to the core, the regeneration failed.

"Cut the heads or crush the cores!" Kairos shouted, his voice echoing with that divine resonance across the chaotic battlefield. "Do not let them heal!"

BAMM!!

Right next to him, the earth exploded. Karl Wade Vedaryan landed with a deafening roar. The old Zephyros General didn’t bother with precision. He brought his massive, iron broadsword crashing down onto the skull of a leaping demon. The weight of the strike pulverized the monster’s head, driving its broken body straight down into the volcanic rock.

Karl ripped the blade out of the dirt. The terrifying, dark red fire burning inside his internal core flowed down his arms and coated the massive sword. He swung the burning broadsword in a massive circle. The dark red fire acted like liquid napalm. It stuck to the demons. Five monsters caught in the fiery sweep shrieked in pure agony as the flames incinerated their flesh faster than they could possibly regenerate.

"The boy is right!" Karl roared, his lone dark eye with battle focus. "Turn them into charcoal! Break the bones!"

The Arena Champions crashed into the horde a second later. They didn’t fight like a messy, undisciplined mob. They were the absolute elites of the continent. They fought with perfect synergy.

Stark Dracortis slammed his boots into the dirt. He used his monstrous earth magic to violently raise two massive, parallel walls of solid rock right in the middle of the horde, creating a narrow tunnel.

"Push them in!" Stark yelled.

Aeryth Dracortis and the legendary wind mages, Idris and Darth Clover, hovered high above the battlefield. They didn’t cast gentle breezes. They unleashed a terrifying hurricane. The wind pressure physically picked up hundreds of screaming demons and threw them into Stark’s narrow rock tunnel.

At the very end of the tunnel stood Veldra and Pyrix Dracortis. Veldra thrust his halberd forward, unleashing a rushing current of water. Pyrix stepped right beside his brother and punched the air, firing a blast of explosive fire into the water stream.

The collision of intense heat water created a devastating explosion of superheated steam. The boiling steam shot through the narrow rock tunnel. The trapped demons didn’t even have time to scream. The sheer heat boiled their dark blood inside their veins and melted their flesh off their bones. Hundreds of demons were instantly cooked alive in a matter of seconds.

"Keep the flanks clear!" Luxara Dracortis shouted, spinning her shining staff. She fired searing rays of pure light magic into the horde, burning the eyes of any demon trying to climb over the rock walls.

A few yards away, Terravarous was fighting a different kind of war. The giant Solaris royal didn’t use a sword. He waded into the thickest part of the demon swarm. His massive fists were coated in jagged, unbreakable diamond.

A hulking demon brute swung a rusted iron axe at his chest. Terravarous didn’t even flinch. He let the axe strike his steel breastplate, ignoring the dent it left. He stepped forward and lunged his right diamond fist through the demon’s thick ribcage, crushing its dark core with a sickening crunch.

Terravarous ripped his bloody fist out and spun around, delivering a brutal backhand that shattered the jaw of a second demon. He was a walking siege engine.

"Don’t take all the big ones, Terra!" Ignis yelled, ducking under a spray of boiling hellfire.

Ignis was struggling. The thin, starved air made breathing difficult, let alone drawing enough atmospheric mana to cast spells. He had to rely on his own internal core, and he knew he would burn out quickly if he wasn’t careful. He held his plain iron broadsword. He compressed his magic, creating a single, sharp line of blue fire right along the dull metal edge.

A mutated, wolf-like demon lunged at him, its acidic saliva sizzling in the air. Ignis stepped smoothly to the side, swinging the sword. The blue fire was hotter than the normal flame. It sliced cleanly through the wolf demon’s thick neck, cauterizing the wound instantly so the beast couldn’t regenerate.

"You are thinking too much, Solaris!" a loud, arrogant voice laughed.

Daemon Sylphyros landed sideways with Ignis. The fiery forest warrior held his two curved scimitars. They were engulfed in roaring, wild orange fire. Daemon didn’t care about conserving energy. He was a berserker.

"These things heal if you don’t burn them fast enough," Daemon shouted over the deafening noise of the battle. "Stop trying to be surgical! Be destructive!"

Daemon crossed his scimitars and threw his arms outward. A massive tornado of orange fire erupted from his blades, engulfing a dozen demons. The monsters shrieked as their skin melted.

But Daemon’s wild fire wasn’t quite hot enough to kill the largest brutes. The biggest demons began to slowly push their way out of the fire tornado, their burned skin bubbling and trying to heal.

"Your fire is too messy, Sylphyros!" Ignis shot back, his pride flaring up. "They are walking right through it!"

"Then make it hotter, royal boy!" Daemon challenged.

Ignis grinned, dropping his iron broadsword into the dirt. Ignis held out his bare hands, pointing his palms at Daemon’s orange fire tornado. He reached out with his raw magical control and grabbed Daemon’s wild flames.

Ignis squeezed his hands together. He used his terrifying talent for compression to crush Daemon’s tornado.

The roaring orange fire shrank. It condensed from a thirty foot tornado into a tight, ten foot pillar. As the fire got tight, the color shifted from wild orange to an intense blue. The heat increased exponentially. The volcanic rock beneath the blue pillar melted into liquid magma.

The demons trapped inside the blue fire didn’t even have a chance to push their way out. They were instantly incinerated, leaving nothing behind but a few scattered piles of black bones.

"Now that is how you burn a dog," Ignis panted, dropping his hands to his knees. The combined spell had drained a chunk of his internal core, but the result was undeniable.

Daemon looked at the puddle of liquid magma, impressed. He lowered his curved scimitars. "I bring the fuel, you bring the pressure. I can work with that."

"Just don’t drain me," Ignis grumbled, picking his iron sword back up from the ground.

The Arena Champions and the Vanguard Generals were dominating the ground war. They were vastly outnumbered, but their power was intensely powerful. They carved a bloody circle of empty space in the center of the horde. Kairos fought silently. He moved with cold, brutal efficiency. He darted through the chaotic melee, a blur of dark clothes and a blackened silver sword.

Every single time a demon raised a weapon, Kairos froze time. A tiny gray bubble would briefly appear, halting the monster just enough for Kairos to sever its neck or crush its dark core. Then the bubble would vanish, and the demon would fall dead. He was dropping monsters faster than anyone else on the battlefield. But holding the Primordial Law inside his mortal veins was taking a physical toll.

Kairos wasn’t draining his life force, but the sheer stamina required to stop time over and over again was burning his muscles. His breathing grew vehement. Sweat poured down his face, mixing with the gray ash falling from the red sky.

A massive, skewering thick demon brute, holding an iron chain, suddenly obscured him. Kairos didn’t see it coming. He was focused on a group of crawling wolf demons in front of him. They attacked Kairos with a brutal strike at ribs.

Kairos didn’t have time to create a frozen bubble. He barely managed to raise Asteria to block.

CLANG!!

The iron chain wrapped around the dull silver blade. The sheer force of the blow threw Kairos off his feet. He skidded roughly across the jagged rock, tearing the fabric of his dark tunic and scraping his shoulder. The brute roared and yanked the chain, trying to rip Asteria out of Kairos’ hands.

Before the demon could pull, a shadow eclipsed it. Karl Wade Vedaryan stepped right over Kairos. The old man didn’t swing his broadsword. He simply dropped his shoulder and slammed his leather armored body into the brute’s chest like a lunging bull. The brute stumbled backward, stunned by the raw impact.

Karl didn’t give it a single second to recover. He gripped his massive broadsword with both hands, the dark red fire roaring along the metal. He drove the blade upward, impaling the brute through the stomach and tearing the sword straight up through its chest.

The demon gurgled, dropping the iron chain. Karl kicked the beast off his blade, letting the burning corpse fall to the ground. Karl didn’t look back. He just held his left hand out behind him. Kairos grabbed his father’s rough, callused hand. Karl pulled him effortlessly up from the dirt.

"You are relying too much on the trick, boy," Karl said gruffly, keeping his eye on the surrounding horde. "Your speed is magnificent, but your spatial awareness is sloppy. You are getting tunnel vision."

Kairos wiped a streak of sweat from his forehead. He gripped Asteria. "There are a lot of them."

"Numbers don’t matter," Karl grunted, swinging his heavy broadsword to knock away a leaping wolf demon. "Watch the hips. Demons always drop their hips entirely before they swing a heavy weapon. Use your eyes, not just your magic."

Kairos nodded slowly. It felt surreal. He was fighting in the middle of a world ending war against a horde of nightmares, and his farmer father was giving him sword lessons. They stood back-to-back. The young boy with the shimmering silver eyes and the old man with the red fire. They fell into a flawless rhythm. When a demon tried to rush Karl’s side, Kairos stepped in, freezing time for a single second to cleanly decapitate it. When a brute tried to overpower Kairos’ guard, Karl stepped forward, using his monstrous strength to crush the beast into the earth. They were a terrifying wall of iron and fire.

The human elites were winning the valley. The demon corpses were stacking up by the hundreds. The initial charge of the horde had been broken. But high above the bloody valley, on the distant volcanic ridge, the true threat was losing its patience.

The eight massive silhouettes watched the slaughter. They watched the Dracortis siblings burn their foot soldiers. They watched Terravarous crush skulls. They watched Karl and Kairos carve a bloody path through the center of the swarm.

Seven of the silhouettes remained still. They were indifferent to the loss of their lower tier dogs. But one of them was not. The largest silhouette, the hulking mountain of pure muscle holding the colossal greatsword, suddenly clenched its fist. It let out a low growl that vibrated through the valley.

The Vanguard Generals and the Champions were fighting well. But they had forgotten one crucial rule of the dark. You do not completely slaughter the vanguard without angering the General. The massive silhouette raised its colossal greatsword. It was done watching the game. It was ready to play.