Raghor Bloodbrand had heard the screams of dying demons before, war was the lody of his existence but never like this.
One mont he stood near the heart of the encampnt, listening to reports from two of his Dreadlords about positioning and scouting. The next, the sky split with a screams of elental violence. The very ground beneath them cracked, hissed, and groaned as jagged spikes of molted earth erupted through flesh and steel alike. Tents started to burn, bursting into fla as lightning struck their iron bound poles. The stench of seared flesh filled the air like a choking fog.
A tremor surged through the legions. The air turned sharp with ozone. Torrents of lightning surged across the lines, reducing entire squads of Hellborn and Infernal Warriors into twitching husks. Flakin scattered like leaves before a hurricane as fires not of their own making incinerated them mid charge. Those Emberborne unlucky enough to be struck by the cascading firestorm ignited from the inside out, their runes glowing for a mont in defiance before their bodies exploded like ruptured forge kettles.
Abyssal Champions howled in vain, summoning brimstone shields that shattered under waves of frost and lightning. The ground itself buckled beneath elental upheaval. Even the basalt beneath their feet glowed red with magical strain.
Raghor spun on his heel, nostrils flaring wide. He reached with his mind into the chaotic swirl of Aether now ripping through his legions. As a Demon Lord, his magical might was equal to a Planarch. His senses were honed beyond mortal comprehension, he could read the Aether like script on stone, every line of power a signature waiting to be traced.
There, on the western rise.
A hill stood black against the boiling sky. And atop it...
An Elf.
Raghor’s breath caught in his massive chest. An Elf.
Of all the cursed races and their foul branches, it had to be an Elf.
This one was tall, broader in the shoulders than most elves had any right to be. His build was closer to that of a champion of Feralis than a pointy eared spellcaster. Long white silver hair was tied back in a warrior’s knot, and bluish gray eyes glinted under a faint glow of summoned magic. His cloak whipped in the storm winds, billowing behind dark armor woven with starlight threads and runes that shimred with restrained destruction.
Then the Elf smiled.
And Raghor felt it.
A sudden pressure blood in his skull, intense, searing, invasive. A psychic intrusion, unmistakably Elven. But not like the others he had slain before. This was not a whisper or a dagger of ntal energy. This was a battering ram.
It felt like a platoon of Archmaguses hamring his mind with synchronized precision. His vision swam with spectral symbols and mory threads not his own.
"So," Raghor growled through clenched fangs, tightening his grip on his great axe, "the Synod sends wolves now. Good."
He roared, a deep, shattering sound that cracked the basalt ground beneath him and launched himself forward.
The camp fell away behind him in blurred chaos. Demons scread and scattered. Fire and lightning churned the sky. Yet the Elf, did not move. He simply tilted his head, amusent flickering in his storm glow eyes.
The mont Raghor reached him, the Demon Lord raised his axe in a blur of motion and brought it down with the weight of a falling mountain.
Corvin raised a conjured blade, shimring and crackling, conjured from pure lightning. The axe t the blade with a shockwave that flattened the earth behind the ridge and sent a pulse through the ground that cracked stone.
Raghor pressed harder, flas and magma erupting from beneath his feet. The hill boiled with rising heat, the earth around them groaning and turning to slag. The Demon Lord’s attacks ca fast, brutal cleaves of fire etched steel, each swing backed by the weight of centuries.
The elf danced around him.
He spun, deflected, parried. The lightning blade shimred with every contact, releasing arcs of electricity that snapped against Raghor’s armor. His form blurred with every sidestep, a shadow wrapped in elental light.
Raghor snarled and slamd the ground with his foot. A wall of magma exploded upward in a tidal wave, sweeping toward Corvin with molten hunger.
Corvin responded with a gust of sub zero wind, freezing the lava mid air. The frozen wave shattered under its own weight and collapsed into shards of steaming black crystal.
Raghor roared again, this ti infusing his axe with tal affinity, causing it to sprout serrated ridges that shimred with cutting enchantnts. He lunged, aiming for Corvin’s midsection.
Corvin’s counterstrike ca from above, his blade shifting mid swing into a spear of solid gravity, crashing down and forcing Raghor to one knee. The impact drove a crater into the hilltop. The pulse of gravitational pressure radiated outward, flattening everything within thirty paces.
The Demon Lord rose, his breath steaming with fury. "You mock , Elf."
"You’re strong," Corvin said coolly. "But you’re not enough."
He extended one hand. Aether bled from his palm like mist, wrapping around Raghor’s fra and beginning to constrict. Threads of golden and violet energy weaved together, binding muscle and soul alike.
In that mont, as the magic surrounded him, Raghor’s eyes widened. He tried to wrench himself free, but the spell gripped his essence.
"Impossible..." he rasped.
Corvin’s smile deepened. Roghar’s main affinities were Magma and tal. His weak ones however.. "Death affinity," he said, tilting his head slightly. "How... quaint."
He scanned the demon again, layers of Aetheric sight and psychic probing unfolding like pages in a book.
Corvin saw it all, every battle, every pact, every secret Raghor had buried beneath layers of centuries.
"You’ll make a fine test case," Corvin whispered.
The air thickened. Gravity shifted.
And with that, the second phase of the duel began, one where survival depended not on might, but on whose soul burned brighter. And Raghor, for all his wrath, had never fought a storm that could think.
--
The wind howled around them, laden with the scent of scorched sulfur and ruptured ley lines. The sky above boiled with chaotic aether, thick with the residue of broken enchantnts and unleashed destruction. Raghor bellowed, his voice a thunderous growl of defiance, as his molten axe whirled through the air again, fueled by magma and rage. A burning arc of annihilation. Corvin’s lightning forged blade intercepted it with another concussive clash, a thunderclap that cracked the distant cliffs and sent shockwaves spiraling through the battlefield.
But Corvin was done asuring.
He vanished in a blink, reappearing directly above the demon’s head in a twist of space magic. Raghor barely managed to raise his arms before a hamr of condensed gravity slamd into his shoulders from above, driving him into the broken obsidian stone with a quake that uprooted blackened stone, creating new hills with jagged edges and sent flaming debris cartwheeling across the blood soaked field.
Before the demon could recover, Corvin landed, boots crunching against the molten ground. The air shimred around him, charged with elental fury. With a single, rciless motion, he reached out and grabbed Raghor by both horns, thick with ash, bone, and runes carved in lifeblood. Then, with brutal strength honed by madness and ticulous training, he yanked.
The Demon Lord scread, a visceral, bone splitting scream that tore across the valley.
Raghor stumbled, his massive knees slamming into the earth, bleeding from his mouth. "You dare.."
"I do," Corvin replied with razor calm, eyes aglow with terrible promise.
He didn’t wait.
Corvin’s body erupted with threads of Telekinesis and Gravity, threads weaving. The air trembled. Then...
The absorption began.
Raghor howled as his very essence was torn from him, not flesh first, but soul. Ribbons of energy, red hot and black edged, began to rip from his chest, his limbs, even from the marrow in his bones. Infernal power, molten, ancient, and defiant was drawn in like solar flares collapsing into a singularity at the heart of Corvin’s chest.
The ground split beneath them. Cracks fanned outward as raw aether twisted violently, creating a vortex of light and shadow. Raghor flailed against the telekinetic hold with monstrous force, his fists hamring against Corvin’s ribs, denting armor, displacing earth. But the pull was relentless.
He scread.
Fire burst from his eyes, smoke poured from his nostrils. He willed magma and tal into violent storms around him, unleashing whirlwinds of molten razors but the force dragging at him was not of this realm.
"You... will not... kill !" Raghor roared, voice ragged, lips torn from the strain. He refused to get killed by an Elf. He was a Demon Lord, if he willed he could have beca an Archdemon. Yet here he was.
Corvin didn’t flinch. He rely lifted a hand.
Lightning.
Arcs of blinding energy surged from his fingers, slamming into Raghor’s chest. The demon’s torso jerked back violently, skin cracking open to expose raw light. The lightning spread across him like vines, anchoring the extraction process. With each jolt, more of Raghor’s essence peeled away.
The Demon Lord shrieked.
Not a roar. Not a battle cry.
A shriek, raw, bestial, horrifically painful.
It tore through the air like a dying beast, echoing over the broken terrain. His limbs flailed in panic, his voice cracked and sputtered into sobbing gasps. Steam poured from his throat. His form began to shimr, destabilizing.
"You were powerful," Corvin said, voice low and unwavering. "But your rage was unfocused. Your will was loud. Mine... is precise."
With a twist of his wrist, Corvin unleashed another surge of absorbtion power, this ti binding the demon’s soul more tightly.
Raghor’s skin began to atomize.
It started at the edges, his fingers disintegrating into motes of light, his horns splintering into streams of floating runes. His muscles unraveled like threads torn from a tapestry.
He tried to speak. No words ca.
Only pain.
Only agony.
The final resistance shattered as his spine arched unnaturally. The core of his being, a pulsing orb of molten soul was pulled loose with a deafening pulse.
It tore through the air, trailing streaks of dying fla and mory.
Corvin stood motionless, breathing slowly, as the essence of Raghor twisted into a pure stream and vanished into his chest.
The scream of a Demon Lord being erased echoed for several more seconds before silence claid the battlefield.
Where Raghor once stood, there was only scorched obsidian and smoldering air.
Corvin rolled his shoulders, adjusting his cloak. The threads of his conjured blade flickered, then faded.
"One down," he murmured. His gaze sharpened, turning to the east where deeper flows of Aether swirled on the horizon. "Two to go."
His voice was calm.
But the skies above Nefrath would rember it like a promise of ruin.
Nurrak would know.
--
Corvin stood alone atop the shattered ridge, the last threads of Aether still shimring faintly in the air around him. Below, the battlefield smoldered with silence. Raghor’s ashes had long since dispersed into the winds of Nefrath.
He closed his eyes and breathed in deeply.
The fight had been... illuminating.
Physically, they were nearly equal. Each of Raghor’s blows had landed like the collapse of a mountain, a force of nature born from wrath and fire. If not for his mastery of gravity and enhancents, Corvin might’ve suffered worse than bruised ribs and scorched armor. The Demon Lord’s sheer physicality had been monstrous, but manageable.
Magically, however, Corvin had held the upper hand from the first instant.
Where Raghor wielded magma and tal with brutish strength, Corvin wielded the full spectrum of Primary and Secondary elents with artistry and precision. Fire, Water, Earth, Air, Ice, Lightning, Plant, tal and Psychic, each one interwoven, layered in combat with strategic finesse.
And now, thanks to Raghor, Corvin possessed sothing new: Death affinity.
He could feel it lingering, cold and subtle within him. It was barely a whisper compared to his mastery of Lightning or Ice, ranked a ager E, nearly the lowest tier in the affinity structure. But it was there. And more importantly, it was his.
The hierarchy of elental affinity was familiar to him now: F, E, D, C, B, A... then S, and S . His Space and Aether affinities sat at the highest known level. After absorbing Raghor his Magma and tal reached S as well. Death, however, would need shaping, refining.
But it was progress.
Corvin opened his hand, a faint glimr of black violet energy curling around his palm. It felt different from Shadow. It was colder, less deceptive, more final.
He would not give this kind of opportunity to the others. The remaining Demon Lords would not get the luxury of a duel.
He had tested what he ca to test.
The duel with Raghor had served its purpose. The integration of Planarch level control against a peer opponent.
All had passed. With flying colors.
He tilted his head toward the scorched horizon. His smile returned, faint and predatory.
"No more tests," he murmured. "From now on, it’s just elimination."
And with that, the Planarch of Raven’s Nest stepped off the ridge, already seeking his next prey.
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