Kai was living through the worst outco he had allowed for when making the plan.
Fighting Spirit King Vaelthoros directly.
A part of him had always known it might co to this. The fire giant was never going to hold the spirit king forever, and the delay in finding the seeds had only made things worse. Even so, Kai had hoped that, at worst, Vaelthoros would only catch sight of him while he was already running for the ritual circle. A chase, then escape. That had been the version he preferred.
Instead, he was in the middle of a real fight.
And it only took one glance at the vines coming for him to know that a single mistake here might end with his heart being ripped out of his chest before he even had ti to understand how he had failed. That was not an exaggeration. The speed of the spirit king’s attacks left him no room to think otherwise.
That was why he had ford the sixth-circle [Dragon's Vesta] spell the mont Vaelthoros locked onto him.
Without it, he would never have been able to keep his speed and maintain any real protection around himself at the sa ti. Even with the spell, though, survival was not easy. Kai cut through the air in hard, uneven zig-zag patterns, shifting direction again and again to keep from being boxed in, but the spirit king adapted quickly.
Vaelthoros moved its vines once more. Then seeds burst out of them.
They exploded in the air all around him. Each released a thin, almost invisible gas that spread through the sky. Kai felt the effect of it almost imdiately. It interfered with the mana around it, making his spells harder to move cleanly through the air. He was not completely sure what else it did, but he could already tell that touching it directly might disrupt the spell structures he tried to build as well.
He had no idea how the spirit king even possessed an attack like that. But in the end, understanding it did not matter right now.
All he could do was widen the distance between them as much as possible, but even that was difficult.
Vaelthoros moved too quickly for that, and what made it worse was the sense that the spirit king was not truly pressing him. It did not feel like a desperate battle on its side. It felt like patience. Like it was content to let him spend himself down bit by bit until escape stopped being possible.
Kai drove himself higher into the sky and glanced back just long enough to send a stream of molten fire toward the vines reaching for him. The flas roared through the air, but Vaelthoros only shifted the vines aside and let the attack rush past harmlessly.
“I’ll tell you again, human,” the spirit king said, its voice carrying through the heat and smoke with maddening calm. “Give up. Surrender your life to . Tell what you stole from my castle, and how you brought that fire giant into my realm, and I may grant you an easier death.”
Kai did not answer. He only pushed himself farther, trying to gain more sky, more room, anything.
Vaelthoros followed without effort.
It stepped forward once, then again, its legs made of thick, living vines that covered absurd distances each ti they touched down. The gap Kai had just forced open vanished almost imdiately. Then the spirit king moved its arms, and the vines lashed out again, stretching farther still as they went for the head of the fire dragon wrapped around him.
Kai saw at once that simply outrunning them was not going to work.
Another spell structure blood in front of him, and a pair of giant wind hands ford in the air to catch the incoming vines. For a mont, they held. Then the pressure running through the spirit king’s attack crushed them apart. The hands ca undone in seconds.
But seconds were still sothing.
He twisted away just before the vines could reach him and forced more distance open again. Part of him considered diving back toward the burning forest below and using the chaos there as cover.
He discarded the idea almost as soon as it ca.
From everything he had seen, Vaelthoros was tied too closely to the land around the castle, especially the forest. The trees, the roots, the vines—too much of it answered to the spirit king in one way or another. Trying to hide there would not be clever. It would only an dying close to the ground.
He had to stay in the air.
That much was obvious now. Up here, the spirit king could see him clearly, but there was still open space to move through. Down in the forest, he would only die faster.
But one question kept circling through his mind with growing urgency.
How was he supposed to shake Vaelthoros off his trail?
He did not need long. A minute would have been enough. No—even thirty seconds would do. It was all he needed to break away, reach the ritual circle, and get out of the plane.
The problem was getting those seconds.
So far, Vaelthoros had been almost restrained in the way it tried to kill him. Not gentle, never that, but asured. The spirit king clearly wanted answers first. It wanted to know what Kai had stolen and how he had managed to bring a fire giant into its realm, and because of that, it had not yet committed fully to tearing him apart.
He knew that would not last.
Sooner or later, the spirit king’s patience would run out. Once that happened, the fight would stop being a chase and beco an execution. And Kai doubted that would take more than a few seconds.
Ahead of him, Vaelthoros took another step and lifted one arm. Dozens of vines burst out from it at once, all reaching for Kai in a tightening spread.
Kai pushed more soul-mana through himself imdiately, and the flas around him shifted, deepening into gold. At the sa ti, with his other hand, he ford one of the fifth-circle ice spells he had learned not long ago.
A great cloud of white mist burst outward.
It rushed through the air and struck the vines head-on, frosting over them so quickly that even their movent stuttered. Kai used that brief hesitation at once, driving himself higher while Vaelthoros moved below, its outline turning hazy through the spreading white as it tried to sweep the freezing smoke aside.
Then Kai attacked.
He turned the golden fire through the dragon around him and sent it roaring from its mouth, straight at the spirit king’s body.
Vaelthoros saw the attack a heartbeat too late.
The golden flas poured over it in a bright rush, washing across bark, root, and vine, but no scream followed. The spirit king was only driven a little lower in the air before it steadied itself again.
Kai grimaced. That kind of attack would have crippled most of the enemies he had fought before. Against Vaelthoros, it barely seed to matter.
What spell was actually going to work here?
His mind raced through one possibility after another, sorting through different bindings, different bursts of force, different ways of trying to pin the spirit king down even for a few breaths. But one after another, the answers turned hollow in his head. Most of them might annoy Vaelthoros. Very few looked capable of stopping it.
And that was hardly surprising.
It was a ninth-grade being.
Kai had only just reached the sixth circle. He had not even been there for a full hour yet.
The gap between them was absurd. It was the kind of difference that made the whole fight feel wrong on its face, like watching a First-Circle Mage throw himself at a Magus and expecting anything but death to co of it.
Still, Kai did not need to win. He only needed thirty seconds.
There had to be so way to force them out of the spirit king. So he kept fighting.
Spell after spell rained down from him while he moved through the sky, each one aid at tearing through Vaelthoros’s body, burning away bark, breaking roots. Flas crawled over, ice struck and burst. Wind hamred against it in cutting arcs and crushing bursts. None of it was useless, not entirely. He could see pieces of the spirit king’s body blacken, split, or break apart before new growth pushed over the damage.
And while he fought, he kept thinking.
There has to be one spell. One answer that should stop this madness once and for all.
He was sending out a [Wind Lance] when the answer struck him.
A sixth-circle spell, one that he didn’t like nor wanted to use. But one that might actually hurt Vaelthoros enough to buy the ti he needed.
Kai did not cast it imdiately. He knew too well what it would cost. Spells that could hurt a ninth grade being always had a backlash, and this one was no exception.
The problem was that he could no longer think of anything else that had any real chance of saving him. But while Kai was still weighing the cost of that spell, the spirit king changed tactics.
Vaelthoros thrust its vines forward and wrapped them into a broad shield in front of its face, letting Kai’s attacks crash against it one after another. Fire spread across the outer layers. Wind tore strips from it. Parts of the shield burned away or were sliced apart, but every ti that happened, the spirit king simply fed more power into it and rebuilt the vines faster than Kai could destroy them.
In the end, Kai had to stop. The mont the bombardnt ceased, the vines opened.
The spirit king looked at him through the gaps and said, “Human, you are nowhere near strong enough to have summoned that giant through ordinary ans. That makes you more interesting than before. Who are you, exactly?”
Kai frowned. “My na is Kai. That’s all you’re getting.”
That almost drew a smile from Vaelthoros.
“I doubt that very much,” it said. “Once I take you, I’ll learn everything.” Then it added, “You can’t keep flying like this forever.”
As soon as the words left it, the spirit king rose higher into the sky. Its body swelled larger as it climbed, and then it moved.
This ti the speed was much faster than before and Kai barely had ti to react.
The vines reached him in a blur, and before they could close around him, panic flashed through him hard enough that he dumped more soul-mana into the dragon surrounding his body. The flas deepened toward gold again, enough to burn the first wave of vines away before they could make proper contact, and Kai used that tiny opening to force himself clear.
While he did that, he began building the spell—The one he had been trying not to use.
Unfortunately, there was no comfort in that choice. Kai had never cast it before. It relied heavily on soul-mana as its main core, and with everything he had already spent, barely half of that reserve remained. He did not know if it would be enough.
But there was no better option left.
So he started pushing everything he had into it anyway.
The spell took shape in front of his hands, its outline widening and growing more complete with every pulse of soul-mana he fed into it. But keeping the structure stable was becoming harder by the second.
Vaelthoros stayed too close. Kai had to keep twisting through the air in jagged movents, dropping and rising, cutting left and right to avoid the vines that kept snapping at him.
The pattern behind those attacks had already started changing too.
The spirit king was losing patience. Kai could feel it in the speed of the pursuit, in the violence behind every lash.
He only needed twenty seconds and then, he could—
A blast tore through the sky.
The sound hit hard enough to pull Kai’s focus away from the forming spell. His concentration slipped for a fraction of a second as he looked up, and what he saw nearly stopped him cold.
Above him, huge masses of earth and vines were bursting apart in the open air.
Every explosion threw out more spikes—hundreds of them—each one wrapped in what looked like poisonous vines. They spread across the sky so thickly that for a mont Kai saw no clean path at all, only a wide killing field closing over him.
He knew that kind of strategy imdiately.
Area denial.
He had spells built on the sa principle, but this was on another scale entirely.
The spikes were everywhere.
His mind caught for one dangerous instant, trying to find a direction, any direction, and in the end only one answer made sense. He didn’t drive or drop toward the forest below. That would only have given the descending spikes more speed, more force.
So Kai drove himself upward instead.
Even while holding the soul spell together, he forced mana from his other circles into the dragon wrapped around him and sent a burst of fire upward from its head. The flas crashed into the falling spikes and the vines around them, but they did almost nothing. A few blackened. A few split. Most did not even slow.
They hit the dragon’s head with a sound like thunder.
Kai still tried to push higher, but each impact knocked him back. Then the poison started spreading.
Wherever the spikes struck, the vines around them burst apart into gas, and that foul mist bled through the dragon’s fire, spreading wider and wider around him.
Under the barrage, parts of the dragon spell began to tear away.
Chunks of burning form broke off where the spikes struck hardest, scattering into ash and embers in the air. Kai imdiately sealed his mouth and nostrils with mana, cutting himself off from the poison as best as he could, but even while doing that he knew it might not matter. If the poison moved through flesh rather than breath, then that defense would only delay the problem, not stop it.
Still, delay was all he had.
So he kept climbing.
The sky around him beca a storm of shattered fla, falling earth, and spreading gas. Every impact sent a fresh shudder through the remains of the dragon around him. The poison left a sting wherever it brushed exposed skin. His robes had already started to feel wrong too—slick in places, almost slimy, as if sothing corrosive had soaked into the fabric and was slowly eating its way deeper. Even the air felt foul now, heavy with the residue of the spirit king’s attack.
By the ti Kai finally forced himself above the worst of the falling spikes, half the dragon was gone.
Still, he kept his mind on the soul spell. Not on healing, not on the pain, not on the poison beginning to work its way into him but only on finishing it.
Then Vaelthoros spoke again from below.
“Give up, human. You cannot change anything now.”
Kai turned his head, even while the spell was still forming in his hands.
The spirit king did not look worried in the slightest. It watched him with cold, patient eyes, vines already spread around it in a loose ring as if preparing to end things whenever it pleased.
Kai let out a breath.
A dozen different outcos flashed through his mind in those few seconds, none of them good, but he kept pouring mana into the spell anyway and said, “I’m still free.”
That made Vaelthoros laugh.
“You will die either way,” it said. “You are not free. You are only living through the last monts of your life.”
And then it attacked.
This ti there was no pause, no warning. The vines shot forward all at once, aid to tear through the dragon and seize Kai’s actual body.
But in that sa instant, Kai finished the spell.
The last wisps of soul-mana left him and the spell released. It did not beco an attack. It did not raise so final barrier around him. Instead, it sank inward.
Straight into his core.
Pain tore through him as though his whole body had been struck by lightning from the inside. For one horrible mont, everything seed to tilt and spin, and then it happened.
His soul ripped free of his body.
Kai saw it all in the next breath: the vines punching through what remained of the dragon, shredding more of it to pieces, then reaching his body and closing around it.
But before the spirit king could do anything more, Kai moved.
In soul form, with every fragnt of life-force he could gather drawn into a single point, he prepared one attack.
***
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