Moura ran. Each step was an explosion on the ground, a thunderclap that set the earth ablaze and scattered embers. His eyes burned, locked on the slender figure ahead.
Glenn.
A na that, to him, was nothing more than collective exaggeration. A rumor inflated by mouths that needed legends to bear the weight of their own weakness. Yes, he was skilled. Yes, he was fast—perhaps the quickest caster he had ever seen—and Moura had witnessed ancient monsters, war veterans, and mages who could shape entire cities with a gesture.
Still, anomalies always surfaced now and then. Variants. Aberrations. Three affinities? Nothing more than the mathematics of fate. Sooner or later, soone was bound to have them.
But the families didn’t see it that way.
Orders had been given: crush the boy. Neutralize his electricity. Shatter his fa before it could spread its wings.
"Two against one..." Moura clenched his teeth, fire consuming his legs. "That’s what dishonor truly looks like."
But orders were orders. And he was a simple demon.
Glenn, however, didn’t fit into simplicity.
Slippery, like a soaped-up fish slipping through hands. Creative, damned creative. Every spell, every rift opened, every gravitational wave was a deadly puzzle. And to make things worse, he closed in for close combat despite being a mage—that alone was the greatest divergence from anything Moura had ever seen. His combat left no room to breathe.
The weakness, however, was clear. Without his electricity, without the elent that truly wounded, his blows were nothing more than nuisances. Extraordinary, yes. Inventive, without question. But nuisances all the sa. Moura and Wagner took each impact like walls, suffering internal bruises, yes, but nothing they couldn’t endure.
His spatial affinity? Limited. Or so he believed. Short portals, shifts of a few ters. A tool for escape, not for slaughter. That’s what the books said. That’s what his experience confird.
And then the world collapsed.
His axe.
Hurled an absurd distance—one hundred ters of pure confidence, brute strength, prana exploding in his arms, flas devouring the blade. For soone at his level, a long-range strike this precise and fast was nothing new; he had perford many himself. Far beyond the reach of any dinsional portal to reflect. Not only that—they had considered the idea of Glenn reflecting attacks, but the probability was so low it had simply fled their minds as childish nonsense.
Certainty was his mage’s cloak:
’This forces him to flee. This gives the opening to crush him.’
But reality was a blade driven into flesh.
The portal opened. A transparent, hungry mouth in the fabric of space, like glass shattering to reveal the abyss. And as if mocking every law he knew, his axe erged in a completely different place.
Not behind the target. Not deflecting nearby.
But against Wagner, who was little more than three ters behind him. It burst from his flank like a bull trampling the earth.
The flaming blade collided with his partner’s torso, shattering armor and bone in a single brutal laugh from fate.
Wagner flew.
A cot of flesh and tal, spitting blood in jets that painted the forest leaves.
The impact shook the ground.
Moura’s eyes widened.
His mind scrambled for sense, but all it found was emptiness. That wasn’t in the books. It wasn’t in the records. It wasn’t anywhere.
"He..."
The flas on his legs faltered for an instant.
"He redirected it."
The surprise strike had given the opening I needed. Wagner still writhed on the ground, but I wasn’t fooled a heir, an overlord, wouldn’t fall so easily. Pain would enrage him, not silence him.
I exhaled, still leaning against the tree that had sheltered , and then let the world swallow whole. A portal opened under my feet. I slid into the darkness and reappeared far above, where the forest couldn’t hold .
Sowhere around two and a half kiloters in the air, above the treetops.
The thin air bit into my face, and for an instant I simply floated, stabilizing my body in zero gravity. There, suspended in the void, the world seed small, distant. The sounds of battle faded, replaced by a profound silence, broken only by the frantic thrum of my prana.
"This is the mont they lose sight of ..." I murmured to myself, a cold smile escaping.
"But not for long."
The veins in my arms lit up in electric lines, my energy vibrating like a thunderclap caged in flesh. From the very start of this fight, I had planted an idea in their heads: portals were short tricks, tools for escape or surprise. Breaking that dogma would crush their expectations with the weight of the impossible.
And that weight was ready.
My prana and mana surged violently through my channels as I drew on a massive amount to conjure a portal.
Below , the air began to twist. Space groaned, grinding like torn tal, until slowly, at a controlled pace, a rift opened. Horrid, colossal, far beyond what any book dared record.
From the tear ca not only darkness but sound.
The roar of land splitting. The groan of stone giving way.
The gaping portal began to reveal a monstrous block of rock, torn from so far-off place. Its shadow stretched wide, nacing, and if anyone below dared to look up, they would see their sentence about to fall.
I didn’t need to defeat them with speed or cunning alone.
I needed to crush their belief that they understood what it ant to fight .
And there, in the sky, suspended between silence and thunder, I raised the stone of judgnt over their heads.
I breathed. The portal beneath roared, unveiling the monolith.
A dull, tallic, formless, misshapen stone began to drop in free fall imdiately—with anchored to it by my feet.
I instantly charged the block with blue electricity until it crackled, and I drove the world one hundred tis heavier exactly where Wagner and Moura stood.
A deafening noise shook the forest. And everyone within a radius of several kiloters saw it fall from the sky.
The teor descended.
The instant I released the blue block, my mind leapt back to before the battle had even begun. standing still, organizing a crazy idea—but one that, if it worked, would be devastating. I laughed to myself like a lunatic just thinking about the possibility.
Standing before that colossal stone, my palm pressed against its cold surface, letting thought flow almost by instinct.
’Two tons, maybe a little more... If I drop this from about two kiloters up and multiply gravity a hundredfold... it’ll fall like a teor. I don’t need the exact math, but... nineteen hundred ters per second, maybe two thousand on impact? Absurd energy, several tis greater than a hundred kilos of TNT. Enough to carve a crater and wipe out an entire forest.’
Back then, my gaze had narrowed.
What really mattered wasn’t the destruction it was the fall ti. From up there to the ground, three, maybe four seconds at most. That’s what gave room to move, to set the stage, to let fear sink in before the thunder fell and I slipped away from the scene.
I had smiled to myself back then, already picturing it all in my mind.
**
Now, the world plumted.
Moura stood tense, muscles coiled, while Wagner tore pieces of armor from the open wounds in his body. Blood stread down, but he remained upright, his eyes blazing with rage.
"Where did he go?" Moura roared.
"Shh... do you hear that?" Wagner cut in.
"Hear what?"
"That..." His eyes slowly lifted. "A whistle. Sounds like sothing falling."
The forest’s silence shattered. The air vibrated with a deep hum, swelling like a drumbeat pounding against their chests. The temperature rose unnaturally, as though the sun itself had leaned closer to their patch of earth.
Then they saw it.
A blue block tore across the sky—small at a distance, but swelling larger with every fraction of a second.
The atmosphere ripped around it, supersonic rings bursting like thunderclaps. Blue lightning screeched through the sky like a flock of migrating birds.
Moura went pale. "That’s not what I think it is, right?"
"SHIT!!! RUN!!!" Wagner bellowed.
But it was already too late.
"BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM"
The impact shook the world. The stone struck with the force of a falling star, wrapped in the electricity I had stuffed into every fracture of its mass.
A blinding blue flash consud the horizon, and the shockwave ripped the forest apart as if it were made of paper.
Within kiloters, nothing survived. Trees turned to ash in a single breath. The ground lted and crystallized into steaming glass. Fiery fragnts sprayed in every direction, tearing through the world like a rain of secondary teors. Electricity coursed through the air in devastating surges, sparking from trunk to trunk, exploding anything alive in its path.
The silence that followed was unnatural. As if even Atlas himself had held his breath before the catastrophe.
**
** Four seconds to impact.
My hands and feet erupted in electricity, arcs dancing wildly across the block’s surface. Cold blue stone, but conductive—every crack turned into a natural wire, transforming the monolith into a celestial forge. Gravity, increased to the very limit my body could withstand, yanked the rock down as if trying to tear out Atlas’s heart.
And you might be wondering where I got this marvel. Well... they were fighting as a duo. I had a partner too. Norwenna, the fairy who needed no introduction. And guess who thought of handing a whole block of material perfect for conducting electricity?
** Three seconds to impact.
The air was no longer air. It was an invisible wall splintering before . The world blurred, and sound vanished, replaced by the shrill roar of supersonic speed. My arms burned as if thousands of molten needles pierced through them, and friction was already transforming the block into a flaming teor. But it was also roasting alive.
** Two seconds to impact.
My reserves of prana and mana drained without rcy. My energy channels scread under the manic rush coursing through them. A price I had accepted to deliver Moura and Wagner the greatest gift of their lives: the certainty they had underestimated the wrong prey.
Burns carved trails across my body.
I closed my eyes to keep my corneas from charring. Timing was everything.
** One second to impact.
Portal. A rift snapped open and I dove in as fast as I could, escaping three kiloters upward, far from the epicenter.
The world below was a blue maelstrom.
** Half a second to impact.
Another rift.
Three kiloters to the right, tearing reality as a final gasp of survival.
** Impact.
The instant the stone kissed the earth, I was swallowed by yet another portal, three kiloters farther still.
The world stopped.
For a breath of eternity, there was only silence. The blue block smashed into the ground, and the air swallowed the mont as if it lacked the courage to respond. And then...
BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!
The ground burst open in a blazing azure flash, light so intense it devoured the day and ripped color from the world. The forest, once alive, beca a sea of ashes and sparks, every tree shredded into fibers and dust.
The explosion wasn’t just sound—it was matter roaring, the planet itself crying out on impact.
Even the pocket world we were in vibrated with seismic instability.
The shockwave rolled outward in concentric rings of pure destruction, each layer lifting the ground, twisting stone, ripping roots, and hurling mountains of earth into the sky.
I watched the forest vanish for kiloters in every direction, the entire horizon dissolving into a whirlpool of blue and golden flas.
The air burned. Every molecule felt electrified, dancing in frenzy. Lightning writhed skyward, ripping apart clouds and painting the firmant in an impossible twilight: incandescent blues, blinding whites, and a deep crimson that resembled boiling blood.
At the heart of the crater, the impact left nothing but a flaming void.
It was as if a god had driven its fist into the forest’s chest.
The energy swelled, rose, and then birthed a colossal mushroom cloud—a column of plasma and dust that tore through the sky, devouring everything in its path.
Even after fleeing, I was flung through the air, the wind striking like liquid steel. Broken branches, loose stones, fragnts of creatures that would never exist again swirled around in the chaos. For an instant, I felt small—smaller than a grain of sand before the storm I had unleashed.
And yet... there was sothing subli.
To witness it—the forest unraveling into embers, the sky painted in lightning, the earth trembling beneath concentric waves of power—it was like glimpsing creation’s fury itself.
That was when delicate arms caught . Norwenna.
Carrying in her arms, as if death itself were chasing us. Her eyes reflected the blue mushroom cloud on the horizon, and in them I saw the reflection of a world that would never be the sa.
"You’re insane... you... you actually did it."
I smiled, even covered in blood, skin scorched, muscles screaming in agony. And when the blazing horizon lit our shadows racing through the forest, I could only quip:
"Guess I feel like a princess being saved by her prince."
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