The eerie silence radiating from Azravel was a terrifying anomaly, but it had not yet swallowed the entire valley. Just a few hundred yards away from where Kairos stood frozen in the quiet void, the rest of the battlefield was a deafening, catastrophic symphony of war.

Hovering gracefully through the falling gray ash was Vaelistra, The Widow of Strings. The slender, six-armed warlord did not touch the jagged volcanic rock. She hovered like a dark ghost, her long, elegant fingers twitching in a complex, sickening rhythm.

Aeryth Dracortis, Luxara Dracortis, and Darth Clover lunged through the air to intercept her, riding fierce currents of wind and light. But Vaelistra didn’t even look at the three champions. She simply cast her six hands outward, her long fingers pointing at a battalion of Solaris infantry that had pushed too far into the valley.

"Aeryth, wait!" Luxara yelled, her glowing staff pulsing brightly. "Look at the soldiers!"

Down on the ash, a hundred seasoned Solaris guards suddenly stopped marching. Their bodies aggressively jerked backward at unnatural, bone-breaking angles. Their eyes rolled back into their heads, turning a sickening, cloudy black.

Vaelistra flicked her wrists. The possessed soldiers shrieked in agonizing pain. Their own bodies were no longer their own. The warlord forced them to turn around, raise their iron spears, and hurl them up at the flying champions.

Darth Clover cursed, swiping his hands to create a thick wall of wind that deflected the iron spears harmlessly away. "She’s using them as meat shields! If we attack her with wide-area spells, we kill our own men!"

Vaelistra laughed. It was a soft, cruel sound that fluttered like silk in the wind. "Mortal attachments are such fragile, heavy chains. Let us see if you have the dare to butcher your own kin."

She twitched her middle fingers. Below, the possessed soldiers drew their short swords and began to sprint up the jagged rocks, ready to throw themselves into the champions’ blades. Some of the soldiers were weeping blood from their black eyes, their minds fully awake while their bodies were puppeteered to their deaths.

"We don’t need to hurt them," Luxara said, her voice calm despite the horror. The youngest Dracortis sister hovered in the center of the wind mages. "She is using physical dark magic to control them. I just have to burn the strings."

Luxara gripped her beautiful, glowing staff with both hands. She closed her eyes, tapping into her monstrous internal core. "Light Shift: The Revealing Halo!"

Luxara unleashed a massive, obscuring bright halo of pure, concentrated holy light that expanded outward like a blooming sun. The moment the light washed over the battlefield, the invisible became visible. Thousands of thin, razor-sharp strings of dark magic were instantly illuminated in the air. They looked like a massive, terrifying spiderweb connecting Vaelistra’s six fingertips to the spines of the Solaris soldiers.

"I see them!" Aeryth yelled, his eyes locking onto the dark tethers.

Luxara spun her staff, narrowing the wide halo into a tightly focused, burning laser of pure light. She swept the beam across the battlefield in a clean, horizontal arc. The concentrated light acted like a holy torch. The moment the beam touched the dark magic strings, they instantly caught fire and snapped. The black tethers dissolved into harmless smoke.

Down in the dirt, the hundred Solaris soldiers collapsed, gasping for air as control of their bodies was vehemently returned to them. The black clouds faded from their eyes.

Vaelistra shrieked in genuine fury, her six hands recoiling as the burning light singed her dark magic. "You miserable little glowworm!"

"She’s disconnected!" Luxara shouted, her light fading as she dropped back to catch her breath. "Shred her!"

Aeryth and Darth Clover didn’t need to be told twice. The two legendary wind mages flanked the Warlord with terrifying, synchronized speed. They didn’t throw blasts of air. They used the pinnacle of their elemental mastery. "Wind Shift: The Vacuum Guillotine."

Aeryth and Darth swung their arms in perfect, overlapping arcs. They pulled all the oxygen and atmospheric pressure out of the air surrounding Vaelistra. They created two massive, invisible blades of pure vacuum. Without air pressure to hold the space together, reality itself forcefully collapsed inward to fill the void.

The two vacuum blades intersected over the Widow of Strings. Vaelistra didn’t even have time to scream. The sheer, devastating atmospheric pressure crushed her slender body, while the vacuum blades flawlessly sheared through her dark armor and six arms.

The Warlord was instantly pulled apart, her body reduced to a spray of dark blood and raining ash. Aeryth and Darth floated down, landing smoothly beside Luxara.

"Three Nightmares down," Darth Clover exhaled, the wind settling calmly around his boots.

****

A quarter-mile away, Idris Avelar and Pyrix Dracortis were entirely blind. They had charged into the thick, shifting dark mist of Yumekoro, The Dream Tyrant. But the moment they crossed the threshold of the fog, the burning red sky, the volcanic rock, and the deafening noise of the war vanished. Idris found himself standing in the center of the grand Solaris Colosseum. The stands were empty. The sky was pitch black. Slowly, figures began to rise from the bloody sand. They were the champions he had defeated in the past. Warriors with crushed chests and severed limbs. They slowly limped toward him, their dead eyes accusing him of their murders.

"You survived, Idris," a rotting corpse whispered, grabbing the wind mage’s ankle. "Why do you get to breathe while we rot?"

Idris gasped, desperately throwing a wind blade. The blade passed through the corpse, doing no damage. The dead warrior just laughed, its grip tightening like cold iron. A few yards away, Pyrix Dracortis was entirely trapped in his own hell. Pyrix was standing on the edge of a massive cliff. Hanging over the edge, desperately clinging to the crumbling rock with bloody fingers, were his brothers and sisters. Veldra, Aeryth, Stark, Luxara. They were all screaming for his help.

Pyrix ran forward, reaching out to grab Veldra’s hand, but as his fingers brushed his brother’s armor, Veldra’s face twisted into a demonic, mocking smile. Veldra let go of the cliff and pulled Pyrix down with him. Pyrix plummeted into the dark abyss, the wind roaring in his ears. He tried to ignite his fire to fly, but his internal core felt frozen. Yumekoro’s mist wasn’t just showing them bad dreams, it was actively feeding on their despair, using their own psychological terror to physically drain their magical energy.

"Your minds are so delightfully fragile," Yumekoro’s voice echoed from the infinite dark surrounding them. "You fight with iron and fire, but you break so easily in the dark."

Pyrix hit the bottom of the abyss. He just stood up in the pitch-black void, his breath hitching. The illusions of his dead siblings slowly surrounded him, their voices turning into a chorus of agonizing screams.

Idris, trapped in his own nightmare, was being buried under a mountain of rotting corpses. His wind magic was failing, but Pyrix Dracortis was a Colosseum Champion. He hadn’t survived the brutal arenas by having a fragile mind.

Pyrix closed his eyes. He stopped looking at the illusions of his dead family. He stopped listening to the screaming.

"You’re right," Pyrix whispered into the dark. "My mind is a mess. I’m arrogant, I’m loud, and I have a terrible temper."

He clenched his fists. Deep inside his chest, his monstrous internal core began to vibrate. 𝘧𝓇ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝘣𝓃ℴ𝓋𝑒𝑙.𝑐𝘰𝑚

"But you made a massive mistake, Warlord," Pyrix growled, opening his eyes. They weren’t filled with fear. They burned with unhinged fury. "You dragged a fire mage into a confined space."

Pyrix knew illusions didn’t have physical mass, but the Warlord generating them had to be nearby. Pyrix dropped all of his defensive barriers. He entirely pulled the raw, explosive fire magic deep into his own heart, compressing it past the point of stability. "Fire Shift: The Blind Supernova!"

Pyrix threw his arms wide open and detonated his internal core in a single, massive, omnidirectional explosion. He turned his own body into a literal bomb. A terrifying sphere of pure, white-hot fire erupted outward. The sheer, devastating heat instantly vaporized the dark mist. The waking nightmare dimension shattered like thin, fragile glass. The grand colosseum and the dark abyss melted away, replaced by the burning volcanic valley.

Idris Avelar was thrown backward by the shockwave, gasping loudly as the rotting corpses vanished into thin air.

In the center of the blast crater, Pyrix stood covered in soot, his dragon-scale armor smoking heavily. Fifty feet away, Yumekoro, The Dream Tyrant, lay burning in the ash. The Warlord’s physical body, which had been hiding inside the illusionary mist, was exposed and caught in the epicenter of the supernova.

The Warlord shrieked as the white-hot fire melted his dark flesh, burning away his mist and reducing his ancient bones to brittle charcoal.

"Nightmares," Pyrix spat, wiping a streak of soot from his forehead, "burn just like everything else."

Idris slowly stood up, using his wind magic to cool the boiling air around them. He looked at the incinerated remains of the Dream Warlord, then looked at Pyrix with awe.

"You almost blew us both up, you lunatic," Idris coughed.

"But you’re awake, aren’t you?" Pyrix grinned fiercely, though his legs trembled vehemently from the massive energy drain.

Four Nightmares were dead. The Colosseum Champions had executed their targets with flawless, brutal efficiency. They had proven that the mortal world was no longer helpless against the ancient dark, but as the smoke from the supernova cleared, the battlefield did not grow quiet.

On the right flank, the air was visually rippling from heat so intense that the ground was turning into liquid magma. Ignar, The Raging Fire, had not been ambushed. The walking cataclysm stood still, his body radiating a dark red inferno that ate the atmospheric oxygen.

Standing thirty yards away from the Cataclysm were Ignis Solaris, Daemon Sylphyros, and Karl Wade Vedaryan. The three strongest fire mages on the continent held their burning swords.

"He’s made of fire," Ignis muttered, his compressed blue flame jumping wildly across his knuckles. "How do we burn something that is already burning?"

"We don’t," Karl Wade grunted, his veteran eye locked on the walking disaster. The old general raised his heavy, canvas-wrapped broadsword. "We put him out."