The King of the Black Mist could not move his sword. He could not step backward. For a creature forged in the ancient, infinite void, the feeling of physical restriction was alien. The tall commander pulled with all of his monstrous, twelve-foot strength, flexing the dark muscle underneath his midnight black armor. He tried to rip his broadsword away from Luna’s head. But the blade was completely locked in empty space.

"What is this?" the King demanded, his echoing voice betraying a sliver of genuine, undeniable terror.

Luna didn’t answer immediately. He couldn’t. His mortal brain was melting. The single drop of infinite, primordial mana he had just let slip through the First Cosmic Lock was overwhelming his nervous system, his left eye radiating a terrifying beam of pure silver starlight that scorched the dead gray ash around him.

"I told you," Luna whispered, his voice vibrating the tectonic plates deeply buried beneath the plains. "I am done playing your game."

Luna kept his left hand raised, his pale index finger pointing at the center of the King’s breastplate. He didn’t cast a wave of heavy gravity to push the Warlord away.

He vehemently focused all of the unlocked cosmic energy into a single point between his fingertip and the King’s chest.

"Collapse," Luna commanded softly.

The air in the clearing expeditiously shattered inward.

A tiny, pitch-black sphere appeared in front of the warlord. It was no larger than a small marble, but it was not made of dark magic or rotting mist. It was a stabilized singularity.

A small black hole. The moment the singularity formed, all light in the clearing was instantly devoured. The dark red hue of the bruised sky vehemently bent around the tiny black sphere, creating a terrifying, shimmering accretion disk of stolen light and atmospheric dust. The King of the Black Mist gasped. The skewering warlord instantly felt the insurmountable, crushing weight of a dying star pulling at his armor.

"No!" the King roared vehemently.

He abandoned his massive black broadsword, letting go of the hilt to desperately push himself backward. But he couldn’t take a single step. The gravitational pull of the singularity was so dense that it locked the King’s massive boots to the space he occupied. The massive black broadsword hovering in the air was sucked into the tiny marble. The colossal iron weapon didn’t even make a sound. The moment it touched the black hole, the massive sword was crushed into fundamental atoms, erased from existence in a fraction of a second.

The King of the Black Mist watched his unbreakable weapon vanish. The primal panic flooded the ancient warlord. He pushed his internal core to its maximum limit. Massive waves of pure dark magic erupted from the King’s body, desperately trying to blast the singularity away or push Luna back, but it was useless.

Dark magic was still just energy, and a black hole eats everything. The massive waves of dark magic were sucked into the tiny singularity, feeding its density.

"You are mad!" the King shrieked, his towering, twelve-foot body being dragged forward, inch by inch, toward the tiny black marble. "You cannot control a singularity! It will devour this entire continent! It will devour you!"

"I don’t need to control it forever," Luna gritted his teeth, completely ignoring the silver blood boiling out of his eye socket. "I just need to hold it long enough to crush your crown."

The King’s midnight-black armor, forged in the deepest pits of the ancient void to be unbreakable, began to loudly groan. The Warlord’s chest plate vehemently buckled inward. The sheer, terrifying gravitational pull of the black hole was tearing the King’s physical form apart.

"Stop!" the King screamed in pure agony as his right arm was pulled off its socket and sucked into the singularity, vanishing into the crushing dark.

Luna didn’t stop. If he lost focus for a single second, the singularity would expand and consume Velanor, Catherine, Soltheia, and the entire Solaris army holding the wall behind him. Luna pushed the last remaining ounce of his mortal willpower into the cosmic lock, stabilizing the tiny black hole. The gravitational pull reached its terrifying peak. The King of the Black Mist, a nightmare of physical domination, was pulled off his feet.

The Warlord was dragged, screaming wildly, into the tiny black marble. The horrific, deafening sound of thick dark iron, ancient bone, and compressed midnight folding in on itself echoed across the dead plains. The King was crushed, his twelve-foot body pinned with unimaginable violence. The jagged, dark iron crown resting on his head shattered, the shards instantly sucked into the event horizon. 𝒻𝑟𝘦𝘦𝘸ℯ𝒷𝑛𝘰𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝘤𝘰𝘮

In less than three seconds, the towering King of the Black Mist was gone. He wasn’t turned to ash. He was compressed into a dense ball of scrap metal and dead matter no larger than a human fist. Luna didn’t hesitate. The second the King was pinned, Luna slammed the First Cosmic Lock perfectly shut again. The tiny drop of infinite mana stopped flowing into his brain.

Luna violently clenched his left hand into a tight fist. The singularity instantly collapsed in on itself. The black hole vanished with a loud, sharp pop that violently rushed the air back into the empty space. The blinding red light of the sky returned to the clearing.

Luna stood perfectly still in the dead gray ash. A heavy, perfectly round sphere of ultra-dense, crushed black iron dropped from the empty air. It hit the dirt with a solid sound, instantly sinking two feet into the bedrock from its sheer density.

THUD!

It was the crushed remains of the King. The Eastern Front was suddenly quiet. Out on the dead plains, the massive army of thousands of Black Mist Knights froze, petrified. They had lost Jack, and lost the Queen. But the death of their King shattered their ancient hive mind. Without their supreme Commanders to tether their dark magic to the mortal world, the massive rigid formations of shadows simply began to blow away.

Thousands of ancient executioners vanished into harmless black smoke, scattering wildly on the freezing wind. The towering, hundred-foot tidal wave of toxic mist rapidly dissipated, leaving nothing but the empty, ruined eastern plains behind.

The shadow army was defeated, behind the massive granite wall, the ten thousand Solaris infantry and Sylphyros rangers didn’t immediately cheer. They were completely stunned into silence. They had watched a mortal boy summon a black hole and crush an ancient warlord into a tiny ball of scrap.

Luna stared blankly at the dense iron ball in the dirt. He had won. He had held the line. Slowly, the terrifying silver supernova burning in his left eye faded back to a faint, swirling cosmic glow. The moment the cosmic pressure left his brain, the brutal, devastating physical toll of opening the lock crashed into him.

Luna’s eyes rolled back into his head. He simply collapsed forward like a cut puppet, face planting heavily into the dead gray ash.

"Luna!" Velanor Banner completely ignored the burning poison lingering in his veins. The young Zephyros General vaulted over his own granite barricade and sprinted across the fifty yards of empty, ruined plains. He slid entirely into the dirt beside the Night Emperor.

Velanor carefully rolled Luna over onto his back. Luna was unconscious. His stark white hair was soaked in dirt and dark red blood. But the most terrifying sight was his face. A thick stream of silver tears leaked from his closed left eye, slowly pooling on the gray ash. His breathing was terrifyingly shallow. His pulse was barely there. He had pushed his mortal brain to the breaking point.

Soltheia ran across the battlefield, ignoring her own total magical exhaustion. The younger Princess dropped to her knees in the ash, her ocean-blue eyes wide with panic. She slammed her blistered, burned hands onto Luna’s chest. She pushed the final, remaining drop of her internal core into him. A tiny, desperate spark of golden-green purifying water flowed into his heart, entirely fighting to keep the silver cosmic energy from burning out his nervous system.

"Don’t you entirely dare die on me," Soltheia sobbed completely, her tears falling onto his pale, bloody face. "You promised me, Luna. You promised me."

Catherine Sylphyros walked slowly up behind them. She clutched her decaying, ruined left arm tightly against her chest. She looked down at the unconscious, broken boy who had just saved them all.

"He is alive, Soltheia," Catherine whispered softly, looking closely at Luna’s faint, shallow breaths. "He held the lock shut at the last possible second."

Velanor let out a massive, shuddering breath of relief, dropping backward to sit heavily in the dirt. He wiped the sweat and blood from his own eyes.

"The three Warlords are dead," Velanor panted, looking out at the empty, mist-free eastern horizon. "We held the east."

Catherine didn’t completely smile. She turned her head, looking out past the empty plains, staring deeply at the distant, jagged mountains at the edge of the continent. The Black Mist Knights were completely gone. The toxic wall of mist was shattered, but the sky above the distant mountains was not red. It was not gray. It was entirely pitch black.

A massive shadow was slowly stretching entirely across the distant horizon. It didn’t feel like the three Warlords. It felt older. It felt infinitely heavier. Catherine’s silver-blue eyes narrowed. A cold shiver crawled down on her spine.

"We held the vanguard, Velanor," Catherine whispered, clutching her ruined arm tighter. "But the war is far from over."

Deep in the distant dark, the ancient master of the shadows felt his three supreme warlords die. The Fallen Monarch was finally preparing to march himself.