With a sharp, dismissive flick of his wrist, Magnus tossed the arrow onto the frozen ground, letting it clatter away into the snow. The casual desecration of the weapon caused Leiko’s smirk to falter for a fleeting second, his eyes flinching at the waste of such a finely crafted tool.

Looking at Leiko and the target who was now nothing more than a fading dot on the horizon, Magnus let out a cold, sharp laugh. "If you were truly as strong as you claim, why haven’t you caught and taken down the target yet?"

Before Leiko could form his retort, Magnus cut him off, his voice dripping with mockery. "I forgot. You can’t even close the distance to him."

Leiko’s expression darkened, his smirk tightening into a snarl. "I wasn’t serious," he snapped, his voice clear with annoyance. "Unlike someone who has been wasting their fancy toothpicks and has yet to actually hit something."

"I would have succeeded," Magnus retorted, his eyes flashing with lethal intent, "if you hadn’t interfered."

The two princes stepped into each other’s personal space, their foreheads clashing together in a raw display of hostility. The cold wind howled around them, ignored entirely as the tension between them burned far hotter than the frozen air. They stood locked in a stalemate of ego and rage, each clearly pushed to the brink by the other’s presence.

The sound of a heavy, rhythmic thud broke the tension as the paws of a massive beast interrupted their standoff.

Lunara emerged from the swirling snow, perched atop her gargantuan wolf, Nova. She sat with an effortless, regal grace, her figure fitting with the desolate white.

"While you two idiots are busy clashing heads, he is about to cross the boundary," she said. Her voice was melodic and sweet, yet it carried a sharp annoyance at their antics.

The two princes stiffened, the sudden shift in atmosphere drawing their gaze away from each other and toward her. As their eyes landed on her, the tension of their rivalry seemed to vanish, replaced by a sudden, frantic rhythm in their chests. They lingered on her for a heartbeat too long before tearing their gazes away, finally looking back toward the target.

"He is elusive," Magnus muttered, his tone uncharacteristically heavy and laced with frustration.

Leiko didn’t mock him this time. His brow was furrowed, his eyes tracking the distant, fleeing figure with a newfound focus. "His domain seems quite annoying too," he grunted, his arrogance forgone by the reality of the situation. "No wonder he has been able to survive this long."

They exchanged a single, sharp look. Pride barred them from admitting the necessity of cooperation, but years of rivalry had bred a silent, dangerous understanding between them. Without a word, they surged forward in perfect, competitive synchronicity.

Magnus and Leiko tore across the frozen expanse, each pushing their limits, their movements a blur of desperation. Even as they united in their goal, the race between them remained the true objective.

Magnus began to chant, his voice rising above the howling gale in a rhythmic, ancient cadence. "Lady of the Silver Veil, whose light governs the quiet hours, I stand amidst the shadows that obscure my way. Cast your pale radiance upon this path, that I may walk with certainty, guided by your gentle, unerring glow. Shine forth, O Moon Mother, and turn this darkness into a road I can follow."

As the final syllable left his lips, a spectral, lunar brilliance erupted from him. His form seemed to dissolve into starlight, and he vanished from thin air.

Leiko’s eyes narrowed as he watched the prince vanish. He didn’t break stride, instead, he pushed his own essence to the surface. A violent, suffocating shroud of steam began to coil around his body, his skin glowing with a feverish intensity. The ambient temperature around him plummeted as the moisture in the air was flash-boiled into a thick, obscuring fog, and he ignited his own momentum.

Leiko’s feet became the source of a blistering inferno. Flames coalesced into dense, pressurized thrusters beneath his soles, and with a thunderous crack that echoed across the land, he erupted into the air. He vaulted, performing a mid-air sequence of explosive bursts that propelled him upward and forward, soaring over the terrain like a streak of falling fire.

The scaled figure was mere arms length from the boundary when the roar of the blast hit its ears. It risked a glance backward, its eyes widening as it saw the crimson-cloaked prince closing the distance with predatory speed, a comet of rage tearing through the frozen sky.

At that critical moment, the chaotic clouds above gave way to a singular, piercing ray of lunar light. It struck the ground like a spotlight, illuminating the invisible line that marked the boundary. Standing directly within that ethereal glow was Magnus. He had calculated the trajectory perfectly, his bow was drawn taut, the string singing as he released the arrow.

The projectile streaked toward the scaled figure who realized instantly that its current momentum was a death trap, it was moving too fast to dodge, and the arrow was too precise to miss. With a desperate, feral flex of its will, it hammered its feet against the ice.

A massive pillar of frozen ice surged from the ground in a fraction of a second. The force of the sudden growth caught the scaled figure, launching it violently into the air.

The silver arrow tore through the thick pillar of ice as it shattered, pulverizing the obstacle into a cloud of deadly shrapnel. Magnus seized the opening, his very presence distorting the reality around him. The space at his feet began to fray and unspool, a vacuum of lunar influence expanding rapidly to engulf both himself and his target.

The scaled figure, sensing the encroaching trap, desperately clawed at the fabric of reality, beginning to unravel its own domain to counter Magnus’s binding pressure.

But they were not alone.

Leiko, seeing the two entangled in their clash of will, swung his sword in a wide, vicious arc. A razor-thin blade of hyper-compressed air hissed across the landscape from the sky, forcing both Magnus and the scaled figure to break their focus and recoil to avoid being cleaved in two. This split-second of hesitation was all Leiko needed.

He didn’t hesitate. He thrust his sword between his teeth, hands-free as he turned his back to the sky. He slammed his palms together, gathering the ambient heat of the atmosphere into his fists until the flames turned a blinding, white-hot blue. With a violent shove, he detonated the energy behind him, catapulting his body downward like a falling star.

As he plummeted, he unleashed his own domain.

The collision of three distinct, powerful wills created a shocking rift. Magnus’s lunar presence, the scaled figure’s icy resilience, and Leiko’s fiery pressure slammed into one another, tearing the world apart. The air screamed as the surroundings were violently overwritten. In a flash of warping light and soundless distortion, the three figures vanished, yanked from the frozen world and pulled into the volatile, shifting space of their overlapping domains.

Silence reclaimed the landscape, leaving only a lingering haze of smoke and the faint, fading imprint of where they had stood.

The three of them stood suspended in the pocket reality they had forged, a volatile collision of conflicting domain.

To one side, Magnus stood upon the Domain of Umbral Refraction. Above him, a bloated, silver moon hung in a sky of velvet black, casting a cold, liquid light down onto a shimmering pool of water that acted as the floor of his domain.

Directly opposite him, the ground fractured. Leiko stood on a hellscape of scorched earth and tectonic cracks, where the very air rippled and warped, distorting the surrounding with a haze of unbearable heat.

Between them, the environment was a landscape of geometry. The target’s domain had asserted itself like a malignant growth. It looked as if the surrounding space had been shattered into many razor-sharp shards, with pieces of a distorted mirror fused directly into the fabric of space. Thousands of slivers floated in the void, each one catching a different angle of Magnus and Leiko, turning them into a kaleidoscope of reflections. 𝒻𝘳ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝒷𝘯ℴ𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝑐ℴ𝑚

Yet, the scaled figure of the beast king was invisible. He had merged himself into the cracks of his own shattered domain, becoming a ghost within the glass of the Multiplex domain.

Magnus stood rigid, his hand hovering over his bowstring, his eyes scanning the fractured reflections for a shift in movement. Leiko, chest heaving, his skin flushed with the intensity of his own heat, gripped his sword so tightly his knuckles crackled.

The silence was loud, broken only by the faint, dissonant humming of the mirror-shards.

Leiko finally broke the tension, his voice dripping with pure irritation. He didn’t even look at Magnus, his gaze locked on a thousand versions of himself shimmering in the glass.

"I hate hunting beast-kings," Leiko spat, the air around him crackling as he fought the urge to simply incinerate everything in sight even when knowing it won’t work. "They always come with an annoying ability"