The southern valley was looking like a canvas of pure, unadulterated catastrophe. With seven Demon Warlords engaging the mortal colosseum champions simultaneously, the fabric of the physical world began to tear. The bruised red sky above boiled with different temperatures. Massive shockwaves of fire, wind, and shattering earth echoed like continuous thunder, completely drowning out the screeching of the surviving demon horde.

On the right flank, the Dracortis brothers were learning exactly why the bloated abomination in front of them was named a Nightmare. Gourmandise, The Hunger, did not fight with a sword or with casting elegant spells. The massive, thirty-foot tall demon was a mountain of pale, bloated flesh wholly covered in a thousand gnashing, drooling mouths. It simply lumbered forward, its stomach dragging vehemently across the jagged volcanic rock, and it ate everything.

Stark Dracortis, the living boulder of the legendary siblings, slammed his heavy boots into the ash. He pulled deep from the earth’s crust, expeditiously ripping a massive, twenty-ton pillar of solid obsidian out of the ground. With a brutal roar, Stark threw the massive rock at the demon’s chest.

Gourmandise didn’t even try to dodge. The massive Warlord simply opened its arms. The hundreds of mouths on its torso unhinged, their jaws stretching to impossible, horrifying proportions. The twenty-ton obsidian pillar slammed into the demon, but it didn’t crush the flesh. The mouths clamped down on the stone, their jagged teeth chewing through the solid bedrock with sickening crunches. In less than three seconds, the massive boulder was swallowed completely.

BURP!

Gourmandise let out a wet, echoing burp. Its bloated body swelled, growing another two feet taller.

"It just ate a rock the size of a house!" Stark yelled over the chaos, entirely frustrated. "My earth magic is just feeding it!"

"Then we don’t feed it," Veldra Dracortis commanded calmly.

The oldest sibling twirled his heavy halberd. The weapon was wrapped in a swirling, hyper compressed torrent of deep blue water. Veldra didn’t throw a massive wave. He understood fluid dynamics perfectly. He pointed the tip of his halberd forward, firing a single, pressured jet of water. The water jet was as thin as a needle but moved with the speed of a bullet. It sliced through the air and hit the Warlord’s massive stomach, evading the snapping mouths and cutting a deep, precise surgical line right through the pale flesh, leaving a thin hole.

Thick, yellow blood spilled from the wound. But Gourmandise laughed. The yellow blood bubbling from the cut instantly coagulated. The flesh tore itself open from the inside out, and three smaller, vicious parasite demons ripped their way out of the Warlord’s stomach. They were made of teeth and claws, and they immediately lunged at Veldra, screeching wildly.

"It absorbs energy and spawns parasites when it bleeds," Veldra noted, cleanly stepping to the side and severing the heads of the three parasites with a swift swing of his halberd.

"How do you kill something that eats magic and weaponizes its own wounds?!" Stark grunted, punching another leaping parasite out of the air with a granite-coated fist.

"You can’t feed a glutton, Stark," Veldra’s eyes narrowed, locked on the tall warlord. "But if you force-feed it past its limit, the stomach eventually bursts. I need you to trap it. Do not let it expand outward."

Stark grinned a feral, brutal smile. "I can build a heavy box."

Stark abandoned his defensive stance. He ran toward the towering Warlord. Gourmandise roared, opening its thousand mouths to consume the mortal. Stark dropped to his knees right in front of the beast. He slammed both of his bare hands flat against the bedrock. He didn’t summon pillars or walls. He ripped the tectonic plate beneath the Warlord in half. The ground buckled. Two massive, large slabs of continental bedrock rigidly folded upward like the jaws of a giant vice. They slammed shut around Gourmandise, trapping the massive warlord between thousands of tons of pressurized stone.

The mouths on the demon’s skin frantically began to chew on the rock walls to free themselves.

"Now, Veldra!" Stark roared, his muscles bulging as he physically held the massive tectonic vice shut with his bare hands.

Veldra sprinted up the side of the towering rock slab. He reached the top, looking down into the narrow gap where the massive demon was pinned. Veldra didn’t fire a thin jet this time. He raised his halberd high into the burning sky. He pulled every single ounce of moisture from the humid, bleeding battlefield. A massive, swirling sphere of water formed above his head. He thrust his halberd downward.

He drove the weapon straight into the largest mouth on Gourmandise’s head.

"Eat this," Veldra whispered coldly.

Veldra violently lunged the massive, pressurized sphere of water down the demon’s throat, ignoring its outer skin and flooding its internal core. Gourmandise’s yellow eyes widened in terror. The water flooded its internal organs. Veldra didn’t stop. He pushed his internal mana to the limit, expanding the water pressure inside the Warlord’s stomach. The demon tried to grow. It tried to swell to accommodate the massive magic. But it couldn’t. Stark’s bedrock vice held the monster’s physical boundaries strictly in place. The demon could not expand outward.

The internal pressure reached its catastrophic limit.

BOOM!

The explosion was terrifyingly devastating. Gourmandise, The Hunger, detonated from the inside out. The sheer pressure shredded the Warlord’s internal organs, blowing its bloated body into millions of tiny, raining pieces of flesh. The heavy bedrock slabs cracked from the blast, but they held. Veldra dropped gracefully to the ground beside his brother.

"One nightmare down," Veldra breathed heavily, shaking the yellow slime from his halberd.

****

A mile away on the left flank, a different kind of disaster was unfolding. Surnavax, The Giant Serpent, was melting the valley. The hundred-foot-long, iron-scaled snake slithered across the jagged rocks, its massive fangs dripping boiling green acid. Every time the venom hit the ground, a thick cloud of highly toxic, suffocating green steam hissed into the air. Marin Valcoran coughed, dragging the collar of her tunic over her nose. The scarred champion spun her trident, desperately summoning a dome of fresh water just to keep the toxic air from melting her lungs.

"We can’t get close!" Marin yelled, stepping backward as Surnavax lunged forward, snapping its massive jaws. The serpent missed, but its iron scales scraped against a boulder, slicing the stone in half. "If that acid touches our skin, we will melt to the bone in seconds!"

Lucy Smith stood a few feet behind Marin. The quiet, unassuming girl didn’t carry a massive weapon. She didn’t wear heavy dragon-scale armor. But she had won the colosseum for a reason.

"Then we wash the acid away," Lucy said quietly. Her voice was soft, but it carried undeniable confidence.

Lucy closed her eyes. She placed her small, pale hands flat against the burning hot, dry volcanic ash. She didn’t pull water from the air. She reached miles beneath the dead earth, sensing the deep, ancient underground aquifers that had been buried for centuries.

"Marin," Lucy whispered, her eyes snapping open. They shimmered with an intense blue light. "Catch it."

Lucy pulled her hands upward. The dead earth ruptured, exploded. A massive, towering geyser of pure, freezing underground water erupted from the volcanic rock beneath Surnavax. It was an entire subterranean lake forcefully ripped to the surface. Millions of gallons of pressurized water launched the hundred-foot long serpent into the air.

SHRIEKKKKK!!

Surnavax shrieked, thrashing wildly in the sky. The boiling green acid dripping from its fangs was instantly diluted and washed away by the sheer, overwhelming volume of freezing water.

Marin Valcoran perfectly understood her partner’s terrifying setup. Marin slammed the butt of her heavy trident into the ground. She simply seized control of Lucy’s massive geyser.

"You don’t get to touch the ground again!" Marin roared, her scars stretching into a fierce grin.

Marin twisted her trident. The massive, towering geyser of water in the sky instantly bent to her will. The water coiled around the massive serpent, trapping the Warlord inside a gigantic, hovering sphere of liquid.

Surnavax thrashed inside the levitating ocean. It opened its massive jaws and spat a massive cloud of green venom into the water, trying to melt its way out.

"Spin it!" Lucy yelled, keeping her hands raised, fueling the massive water supply.

Marin gripped her trident with both hands and began to spin the weapon. The sphere of water reacted instantly. It began to vehemently rotate, turning into a massive, high-speed whirlpool suspended fifty feet in the air. The centrifugal force was catastrophic. The water spun so fast that it acted like a giant, industrial blender. The high-speed currents ripped against Surnavax’s iron scales.

The serpent shrieked in agony. The thick, unbreakable iron scales were forcefully ripped from its body by the sheer water pressure. Worse, the massive cloud of green acid the serpent had just spat into the water was caught in the spin. The highly toxic venom was churned back into the Warlord’s own open wounds.

Surnavax was actively drowning and melting in a vortex of its own diluted poison. Marin held the spin for a full, agonizing minute. Her muscles burned, and her trident groaned under the immense magical stress. Finally, the massive shadow thrashing inside the whirlpool stopped moving.

Marin dropped her trident, a loud clatter echoing across the area. The massive floating sphere of water lost its magical containment. Millions of gallons of freezing water crashed back down to the volcanic valley floor, creating a massive tidal wave that washed the toxic ash away.

BOOM!!

The giant, hundred-foot long corpse of Surnavax slammed into the wet bedrock. Its heavy iron scales were completely gone, its flesh melted to the bone by its own venom.

The Giant Serpent was dead. Lucy Smith dropped to her knees, breathing heavily, completely drenched in sweat and water. Marin walked over and offered the quiet girl a scarred, callused hand, pulling her back up to her feet.

"Good catch," Lucy whispered softly, offering a tiny, exhausted smile.

"Good throw," Marin grinned back, resting her trident on her shoulder.

Across the massive valley, Vaelistra the Widow and Yumekoro the Dream Tyrant were engaged in their own brutal wars against the remaining champions. The mortal elites were holding their own against the ancient legends, but at the bottom of the volcanic ridge, the true end of the southern war was quietly unfolding.

Kairos Vedaryan stood perfectly still. The roaring fires, the crashing water, and the deafening explosions of the massive battlefield around him had vanished. The air was suffocatingly dead. Azravel, The Howling Silence, had taken his first step, and the silence of the void had swallowed the Conqueror of Time.