The Jack of the Black Mist did not bleed. When Velanor’s raw, granite-coated uppercut launched the Warlord across the dead plains, the dark assassin hit the ash with a sickening crunch. His spine bent at an unnatural, fatal angle, but Jack just laughed. It was a high-pitched, erratic sound that scraped against the eardrums like rusted iron.

Velanor stood firm on the ground, breathing heavily. He watched in disgust as Jack’s broken spine snapped back into place. The Warlord slowly stood up. His hunched posture returned. The boiling black poison dripping from his dual serrated daggers hissed as it hit the dirt, melting the ash into a bubbling puddle of toxic sludge.

"You hit hard, little mountain boy," Jack twitched expeditiously, his head snapping to the side in a jerky motion. "But you are too slow. You fight like a falling rock. I am the shadow that cuts the rope."

Jack didn’t run. He looked like an obscured motion. One second before he was standing fifty yards away. The next second, the space where he stood simply folded, and he appeared in mid-air behind Velanor’s left shoulder.

Velanor’s combat instincts saved his life. He didn’t have time to turn around. He vehemently threw himself forward into the dirt. The two poisoned daggers sheared through the empty air where Velanor’s neck had just been, but the Warlord was fast. Before Velanor even hit the ground, the Jack flickered again. He appeared underneath Velanor, aiming both daggers straight up to gut the earth mage in mid air.

"Earth Shift: Diamond Core!" Velanor couldn’t harden his whole body like Terravarous, but he pushed his magic into his stomach, turning the skin into dense bedrock.

CLANG!

The serrated daggers struck Velanor’s hardened stomach. The dense earth blocked the physical blades, but the toxic black poison went to work. The poison actively ate magical energy. Velanor screamed as the bedrock armor vanished, the boiling acid burning straight through his leather tunic and searing his skin.

Velanor vehemently twisted his hips, kicking out with his boot. He caught Jack in the chest, launching himself backward to create distance. He landed rigidly, clutching his bleeding stomach. The poison was trying to dig into his internal core. He gritted his teeth, forcibly shedding the outer layer of his own skin with earth magic to purge the acid before it reached his veins.

"You cannot block it!" Jack cackled wildly, appearing on top of a jagged rock ten feet away. "My venom eats the very mana in your blood! It rots the earth! You are obsolete, stone-thrower!"

Jack disappeared again.

Velanor slammed his hands into the ground. "Stone Forest!"

Hundreds of jagged rock pillars instantly erupted from the ground in a circle around him, creating an impenetrable maze of stone. If Jack tried to teleport near him, he would be impaled, but Jack didn’t teleport into the maze. He teleported above it.

The Warlord fell from the red sky, spinning like a poisoned sawblade. He slashed his daggers outward, unleashing a volley of boiling black acid rain. The acid hit Velanor’s stone pillars. The solid rock began to melt, turning into useless, hissing sludge. The Jack dropped through the melting ceiling, landing on a vanishing pillar. He lunged forward, slicing his dagger across Velanor’s right shoulder.

Velanor grunted in sheer agony. He swung a granite coated backhand, but his fist passed through empty air. The Jack had already glitched away, reappearing twenty feet to the left, laughing maniacally.

Velanor was lost. He was bleeding from two burning cuts. His breathing was ragged. Out in the open plains, fighting a Warlord who could teleport and possessed magic eating poison was a death sentence. Jack liked playing with his food.

He is too fast, Velanor thought, his eyes darting frantically across the empty air, trying to track the glitches. I can’t hit what I can’t touch. If I raise a wall, he teleports behind it. If I build a shield, his poison melts it.

Fifty yards away, Luna was locked in a terrifying battle of gravity against the skewering King of the Black Mist. Catherine and Soltheia were desperately holding the line against the Queen’s rotting curses.

Velanor was on his own. The young Zephyros General slowly wiped the toxic blood from his shoulder. He looked down at his boots, stomped firmly on the dead gray ash.

He remembered Terravarous holding the line against fifty aberrations with a single shield. He remembered Kairos swinging an iron sword until his hands bled to master the control.

Velanor realized his massive mistake. He was fighting Jack’s war. He was reacting to the teleportation.

You are an earth mage, Velanor reminded himself fiercely. You do not react to the world. You make the world react to you.

Jack spasmed, his poisoned daggers dripping. "Are you done, little boy? Are you ready to melt?"

The assassin vanished. He appeared instantly behind Velanor, raising both daggers for a lethal execution strike to the back of the neck. Velanor dropped to his knees and slammed both of his bare hands flat against the dead earth. He ignored the poisoned daggers descending toward his spine. He pushed his internal core past its mortal limit, driving his magic hundreds of feet straight down into the ancient bedrock of the continent.

"Earth Shift," Velanor roared, his voice carrying the heavy, ancient weight of the high mountains. "The Tartarus Vault!"

The ground ruptured. Before Jack’s daggers could touch Velanor’s neck, the earth exploded outward. Four massive, thick walls of bedrock erupted from the ground in a square, enclosing Velanor and the Jack.

Jack gasped, his teleportation momentum broken by the sudden shift in the terrain. Before the assassin could glitch away, a solid ceiling of black stone slammed shut over them. The entire battlefield vanished. The red sky was gone. The noise of the clashing armies was silenced. Velanor had trapped them both inside a precise, fifty foot sealed cube of dense, pressurized bedrock. It was completely black. There was not a single ounce of light inside the vault.

Jack stumbled backward, his daggers raised defensively. "A box? You trapped yourself in a dark box with an assassin? You are insane!"

The Warlord attempted to teleport. He focused his dark magic, trying to fold space and glitch outside the vault.

THUD!

Jack reappeared just two feet away, slamming his own face into the dense black stone wall. He shrieked in confusion. He tried to teleport upward.

THUD!

He hit the low ceiling.

"Teleportation requires an exit," Velanor’s voice echoed from the pitch-black darkness. The voice seemed to come from every single direction at once. "You fold space to move. But there is no empty space here, assassin. These walls are forged from continental plates. They are ten feet thick. Your connection was completely cut off from the outside world."

Jack panicked. He slashed his poisoned daggers wildly in the dark, throwing boiling acid against the walls. The poison hissed, trying to eat the stone.

"It won’t work," Velanor’s voice echoed again, calm and cold. "Your poison eats mana. But this isn’t a magical shield. It is just dead rock. By the time your acid melts through ten feet of solid bedrock, you will be dead."

Jack twitched, his shimmering purple eyes darting around the dark. He couldn’t see Velanor, his greatest weapon was neutralized.

"You can’t see me either!" Jack shrieked, throwing a poisoned dagger into the dark. It clattered harmlessly against a stone wall. "We are both blind! You are just delaying your own death!"

"I am an earth mage standing barefoot in a sealed box of stone," Velanor whispered.

Velanor was standing still in the center of the vault. He didn’t need his eyes. He closed them. He felt the minute vibrations on the floor. He could feel the exact weight and location of Jack’s boots shifting nervously on the rock.

Velanor simply clenched his right fist. The solid stone floor beneath Jack’s boots instantly turned into liquid quicksand. The Warlord shrieked as he sank up to his knees.

Before Jack could pull himself out, Velanor snapped his fingers. The quicksand instantly hardened into solid, dense diamond rock. Jack’s legs were trapped in the floor. The bones in his shins shattered audibly from the sheer crushing pressure of the hardening stone.

The Warlord screamed, a horrific, echoing sound of agony. He wildly slashed his remaining dagger at his own trapped legs, desperately trying to use the poison to melt the floor and free himself.

Velanor raised both of his hands high into the pitch-black air. He felt the Tartarus Vault’s heavy ceiling.

"You fight like a falling rock," Velanor echoed the Warlord’s own insult, his voice devoid of mercy.

Velanor brought both hands crashing down. A massive stalactite of pure black bedrock detached from the ceiling of the vault. It weighed over ten tons. It fell with terrifying speed toward the trapped Warlord.

Jack looked up, his glowing purple eyes wide with terror as the massive shadow descended.

BOOM!

The impact was utterly devastating. The massive stone pillar crushed the Jack of the Black Mist. The Warlord’s dark leather armor, his erratic magic, and his poisoned bones were pulverized into a flat, bloody paste against the floor of the vault.

The darkness fell silent again. Velanor stood alone in the Tartarus Vault. He was breathing vehemently, his chest heaving. His internal core was almost drained from the exertion of creating and holding the dense bedrock cube. The poison cuts on his shoulder and stomach burned with agonizing pain.

He slowly lowered his hands. With a grinding groan, the four walls of the Tartarus Vault slowly split apart, falling backward into the dirt like the blooming petals of a giant, black stone flower. The red light of the bruised sky rushed back in. The deafening noise of the clashing armies washed over him.

Velanor Banner stood in the center of the broken stone petals. In front of him, crushed beneath a ten-ton pillar of black bedrock, was the dead remains of Jack. A massive pool of toxic blood slowly seeped into gray ash.

Out on the battlefield, the thousands of Black Mist Knights paused. They felt the sudden severing of their hive mind. One of their three supreme commanders was dead. The ten thousand Solaris infantry and Sylphyros rangers erupted into a deafening, thunderous roar of victory, clashing their spears against their iron shields.

Luna still locked in his gravity duel with the King, didn’t turn his head. But the Night Emperor’s bloody, arrogant smirk grew wider.

Velanor stumbled slightly, dropping to one knee. He clutched his bleeding stomach, coughing. He had successfully killed a Warlord, but the poison was still burning in his veins.

Instantly, Soltheia was there. The young princess slid into the ground beside him, ignoring the toxic blood on the ground. Her hands flared with golden green water magic. She pressed her glowing hands over Velanor’s poisoned wounds.

"You did it, Velanor," Soltheia whispered, tears of relief filling her eyes as she purged the boiling black acid from his blood. "You killed him."

Velanor offered a weak, exhausted grin, looking up at the tall form of the Black Mist King in the distance.

"One down," Velanor panted, the pain slowly fading under Soltheia’s divine healing. "Two to go. Let’s finish this."