The grip of a demon Warlord was supposed to be strong. Dyrroth could crush solid volcanic boulders into fine dust with a simple squeeze of his fist, but as the warlord tightened his massive, dark gray fingers around Kairos’ throat, something impossible happened. His fingers simply stopped moving.

It wasn’t a physical resistance. The space occupying Kairos’ skin had become a fixed, immovable point in reality. Dyrroth grunted, his massive bicep bulging with terrifying effort. He poured his raw dark magic into his hand, trying to snap the human boy’s neck.

Nothing happened. Kairos’ neck felt like it was forged from the bedrock of the universe itself. Kairos hung in the air, looking into the Warlord’s shimmering yellow eyes. The silver light burning in Kairos’ irises was no longer a gentle, divine glow. It was an intense storm.

He had stopped trying to cast his magic outward. He wasn’t projecting a ten-foot bubble of frozen time to trap his enemy. He had turned the Dominion inward. He had locked his own physical body into an accelerated timeline. He was existing a fraction of a second ahead of the rest of the world.

Dyrroth couldn’t crush him because he was trying to crush a boy who was technically no longer there. Kairos slowly raised his right hand. He calmly reached up and grabbed the Warlord’s thick, armored thumb.

"Let go," Kairos whispered.

His voice didn’t echo loudly across the valley, but the dual resonance hit Dyrroth’s ears with the force of a hammer. Kairos bent the demon’s thumb backward.

SNAP!

Thick bones shattered like dry glass. Dyrroth let out a deafening, roaring shriek of agony. The Warlord’s hand recoiled, dropping Kairos to the ground. Kairos landed smoothly on his feet. The broken rib in his chest still throbbed, but the pain was distant, pushed away by the authority of the Primordial Law rushing through his blood. He looked down at the ash. He kicked the leather hilt of Asteria with the toe of his boot, popping the dull silver sword into the air, and caught it in his right hand.

Dyrroth backed away, clutching his shattered thumb. The demon general stared at his hand in shock. His rapid regeneration kicked in. The dark flesh hissed and bubbled, trying to stitch the broken bone back together, but the healing failed.

The shattered bone refused to mend. The flesh refused to close. The wound was locked in the state it had been broken.

"What did you do to me?" Dyrroth snarled, his yellow eyes wide with a sudden, alien emotion. "Why won’t it heal?"

"Because your flesh answers to a dark god," Kairos stated, taking a slow step forward. He pointed the dull tip of Asteria at the monster. "But time answers to me, and I said your hand is broken."

He hadn’t just snapped the bone. By concentrating the Primordial Law into his strike, Kairos had frozen the wound itself. The cells were locked in a temporal stasis. Dyrroth could never heal that injury, no matter how much dark magic he pumped into it. Dyrroth realized he was in genuine danger. The Warlord let out a furious, rumbling roar that shook the red sky. He grabbed the cursed greatsword, Darkikor, with his good hand. He pushed his terrifying internal core to its limit.

The toxic black mist erupted from Dyrroth’s body. The dark magic swirled around the black blade of his sword, creating a massive hurricane of pure destruction. The air grew so heavy that the jagged rocks on the ground began to crack and turn to dust under the pressure.

"I will consume your law!" Dyrroth screamed, lunging forward like a runaway mountain.

He swung Darkikor in a devastating overhead chop. The wave of dark magic trailing the blade was so dense it looked like a solid wall of black iron falling from the sky.

Fifty yards away, Karl held his breath, his lone eye wide. Even the old Zephyros General knew he could not block an attack of that magnitude. It was the raw power of a true nightmare.

Kairos didn’t raise his sword to block. He simply stepped forward. To Dyrroth, and to everyone watching from the edges of the battlefield, Kairos disappeared. There was no blur of motion. There was no gust of wind. He simply ceased to exist in the space he had just occupied.bThe colossal black greatsword crashed into the dirt. The impact triggered a shockwave of dark magic that carved a fifty foot canyon into the valley floor. Red magma hissed and bubbled up from the crack.

Dyrroth stood at the edge of the newly formed crater, breathing vehemently. He looked down, expecting to see the bloody remains of the mortal boy, but the crater was empty.

"You swing too wide," a calm voice whispered into Dyrroth’s right ear.

The Warlord flinched, trying to spin around. But Kairos was already there. He was standing on the jagged iron plating of Dyrroth’s massive shoulder. He had evaded the massive dark magic blast by accelerating his physical timeline, simply stepping through the gaps in reality before the explosion even occurred.

Kairos swung Asteria, channeling the pure weight of the time lock. The dull silver metal rippled with a strange visual effect, like looking through the warped glass. The blade struck the back of Dyrroth’s neck.

It sliced cleanly through the gray flesh and bit into the Warlord’s spine. Dyrroth roared in agony, thrashing his body to throw the boy off. He swung a backhand toward his own shoulder. Kairos casually hopped backward, flipping off the demon’s armor and landing on the rocky ground twenty feet away.

Dyrroth stumbled forward, clutching the back of his neck. Thick, boiling blood crawled freely down his spiked spine. He desperately pushed his dark magic into the wound, commanding his cells to regenerate.

Once again, the healing magic failed. The wound remained wide open, pouring his lifeblood onto the ash.

"You cannot beat me, beast," Kairos said, standing relaxed, his sword resting at his side. The silver light in his eyes burned fiercely. "Your sword eats magic. It eats light, but it cannot eat time. You are fighting the fundamental rule of the universe."

Dyrroth’s vision blurred from the sudden blood loss. The Rumbling Beast, a monster who had slaughtered kingdoms during the Void Era, felt a cold shiver run down his spine.

He was outmatched. The mortal boy was not casting spells. The mortal boy had become a walking, breathing anomaly.

"I am a General of Malgreth!" Dyrroth shrieked, his voice losing its rumbling confidence, replaced by panic. "I will not lose to fragile meat!"

Dyrroth abandoned his sword techniques. He abandoned his pride. He resorted to chaotic destruction. He drove the tip of Darkikor into the rock floor. He poured every ounce of his remaining dark magic into the earth.

The valley floor buckled. The jagged spikes of solid dark magic erupted from the ground, shooting up into the red sky like a moving forest of black glass. The spikes exploded outward in every direction, seeking the heat of living blood.

Hundreds of surviving demons in the background were impaled by their own General’s desperate attack, shrieking as the dark glass tore through their bodies.

"Shields up!" Veldra Dracortis yelled, slamming his halberd into the dirt to create a wall of ice to protect the human champions.

The dark spikes shot toward Kairos in a chaotic tidal wave of jagged death. He broke into a dead sprint, running toward the Warlord. The deadly dark spikes erupted from the ground right under his boots, aiming to impale him. But every single time a spike threatened to touch his skin, Kairos simply flickered. He skipped a fraction of a second, moving his physical body ahead of the danger.

To Dyrroth, it looked like the boy was an untouchable ghost. The dark spikes passed through his afterimages, shattering against each other. Kairos ran precisely through the center of the chaotic attack without a single scratch on his dark tunic.

Dyrroth panicked. He pulled Darkikor out of the ground, raising the black blade to defend himself. Kairos closed the distance instantly. He swung at the cursed weapon. Asteria crashed into the side of Darkikor.

The temporal distortion coating the dull silver blade clashed with the darkness of the cursed iron. For a single, terrifying second, the two ancient forces fought for dominance. The air in the valley screamed, an ear-piercing whine that shattered the eardrums of every demon left standing.

But Kairos was not holding back. He pushed the full weight of his dominion into his arms.

CRACK!!

A jagged fissure appeared in the center of the pitch-black blade. Dyrroth stared at his weapon in horror. Darkikor was forged from the bedrock of the underworld. It was supposed to be unbreakable.

"Your era is over," Kairos whispered.

Kairos twisted his wrists and struck the black sword a second time. The cursed weapon shattered. Thousands of shards exploded into the air, raining down onto the gray ash. The dark magic holding the sword together dissipated, leaving Dyrroth holding nothing but a broken hilt.

The demon Warlord stumbled backward, defenseless. His primary weapon was destroyed. His regeneration was neutralized. His massive army was slaughtered. Dyrroth looked down at the tiny mortal boy standing before him. The shining silver eyes looked back, devoid of mercy.

Kairos gripped Asteria tightly. He pulled the sword back, taking a slow, steady breath. He focused the Primordial Law into the dull edge of the blade, wrapping it in an accurate temporal field, and lunged forward. He moved so fast that the air didn’t even have time to part. It simply broke.

Kairos swung the sword in a brutal, horizontal arc, aiming for the Warlord’s thick, spiked neck. The blade completely severed the monster’s connection to the physical world. The strike passed through dark iron plating, gray muscle, and ancient bone without a single ounce of resistance.

Kairos stopped behind the Warlord, slowly lowering his sword. For three long seconds, nothing happened. Dyrroth remained standing, his hands reaching up toward his throat.

Then, the Warlord’s terrifying twelve-foot body shuddered. A line of silver light appeared across Dyrroth’s neck. The massive, horned head slowly slid off his broad shoulders. It hit the rock with a wet thud.

The headless body swayed for a moment, black blood spraying weakly into the air. Then, the mountain of dark muscle collapsed backward, crashing into the ground and shaking the valley one final time.

Dyrroth, the Rumbling Beast, was dead.

Kairos stood still, his chest heaving slightly as he allowed his timeline to slowly match the normal speed of the world again. The dull silver blade of Asteria rested at his side, dripping with the Warlord’s dark blood.

He looked up at the distant ridge. The red sky was still burning, but up on the high cliff, the remaining seven silhouettes were no longer standing still. They were backing away into the shadows.

The Warlords of Malgreth had watched their equal get destroyed and executed in single combat by a human boy. They had watched a fragile mortal bend the laws of time and shatter an unbreakable cursed sword.

They turned around and disappeared into the dark smoke, abandoning the ruined valley and pulling back toward the deep southern craters. The Southern Front had been held. Kairos let out a long exhale. The silver light in his eyes slowly faded back to his normal, dark brown irises. The adrenaline suddenly crashed, and the brutal, agonizing pain of his broken rib flared back to life. 𝒻𝓇𝑒𝘦𝘸𝑒𝒷𝓃ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝒸ℴ𝘮

He stumbled slightly, using Asteria like a walking cane to keep himself upright.

"Kairos!" Seyana was the first to reach him. The Crown Princess ran across the broken, bloody rocks, ignoring the scattered demon corpses. She grabbed his arm, wrapping it over her shoulder to support his weight. The warm golden light radiating from her skin instantly washed over him, dulling the pain in his chest.

Karl walked up a second later, dragging his broadsword. The old man looked at the headless corpse of the demon general, then looked at his son. A proud grin broke through his messy beard.

"You stopped playing with the trick," Karl said roughly, clapping a hand on Kairos’ uninjured shoulder. "That was a good swing, boy."

Ignis and Terravarous jogged over, followed by the exhausted, battered Arena Champions. They looked around the valley. Ten thousand demons lay dead in the ash, and a warlord was executed.

"We won," Ignis panted, leaning on his plain iron sword. He looked up at the empty ridge. "They ran away."

"They are regrouping," Terravarous rumbled, his diamond fists turning back to normal dark skin. "Malgreth still wants the Princess. This was just the opening battle."

Kairos nodded slowly, leaning against Seyana. His body felt like lead. He had successfully become the system, but holding the law in his mortal blood was taxing. He was a god for a few minutes, but he was still human underneath.

"The south is safe for today," Kairos whispered, his voice hoarse.

He turned his head, looking toward the unseen eastern horizon. The sky in that direction was still a solid wall of suffocating black.

"But the war isn’t over," Kairos added quietly. "Luna and Velanor are still fighting in the dark."

The victory in the ash was remaining, but as the Vanguard Generals gathered around the fallen beast, they all knew the true nightmare was still waiting in the shadows.