Tissaia could barely stand, supported by the sorcerers beside her.
Her casting of Alzur's Thunderstorm had obliterated nearly all of Nilfgaard's mages. For the first time in a century, the world had witnessed the full fury of the greatest female sorceress alive.
Even Eredin's Wild Hunt was struggling to stay afloat. They conjured shields of frost and wind, but casualties still piled up.
As Eredin stared down at his fallen, twitching kin—bodies lying still in the snow—his fists clenched.
"Enough, Francesca! I'm done with your war against the humans."
"Tell me—where is the Elder Blood?! That's all I want!"
But before she could respond, a voice boomed so loud it drowned out Eredin's rage:
"MY—GOD!!!!"
The surrounding blizzard suddenly turned violent.
The Wild Hunt sorcerers looked down at their staves in confusion—the ice and snow were no longer under their control!
Then, as if the earth itself began to quake, the entire foundation of the castle trembled—and collapsed with a thunderous crash.
[Crack—]
"Aaaah—ROOOAAAR!!"
Before the Wild Hunt could react, it felt like an ancient bell had rung directly in their ears. Then, through the storm, a wave of flame exploded toward them—accompanied by two titanic black shadows.
In the blink of an eye, their entire formation was torn apart.
Chunks of stone, clouds of smoke, shattered pillars, and splintered walls flew through the air and rained back down again.
Aretuza Palace was no more.
Only a wasteland remained.
...
The ice giant stood tall upon the earth, swinging its anchor-like weapon as if it were a windmill. The ancient, savage power it carried rampaged through the lower levels of the castle, tearing apart every wall and pillar in its path.
The collapse of Aretuza — a palace that had stood for centuries — had begun.
And yet, the mages found themselves oddly grateful to the giant. The unexpected change of terrain shattered the Wild Hunt's formation, plunging everyone into a chaos of indiscriminate destruction.
Ironically, it was the Wild Hunt — despite their intact formation — that suffered the heaviest casualties in the collapse.
Eredin staggered to his feet, dazed. Around him, his once-organized guard lay in ruins, scattered and broken.
He grabbed Francesca, who was wobbling beside him, his fury barely held back — when suddenly, a shadow burst from the smoke and dust nearby.
"Wild Hunt! In the name of Grandmaster Ivar Evil-Eye! In the name of the School of the Viper!"
The figure was built like a bear yet moved with the lethal grace of a viper. With a slash of his serpent-headed sword, he tore through the armor of the Wild Hunt soldiers using brute force. And just as he inflicted the wounds—he turned and disappeared.
Before the stunned warriors could even feel relieved, the color drained from their faces beneath their helmets. One by one, they collapsed, twitching violently.
Letho was killing with maximum efficiency.
"Red Riders, ambush!!"
The nearby Wild Hunt hounds charged toward Letho, only to be forced back by a torrent of flame erupting like a volcanic blast. Shielded by fire and searing heat, a man surged forth, shrouded in a protective aura of dark gold.
Gerd paid no heed to the claws slashing around him. With fervor in his voice, he shouted, "Well done, Letho!"
He crashed into the enemy ranks like a battering ram — BOOM! — and the mangled remains of the Wild Hunt's beasts scattered in all directions.
A short distance away, Kiyan danced nimbly through the crowd. These heavily armored knights were ill-suited to his fighting style.
So he pulled out a cluster of dimeritium bombs.
[Boom—Boom—Boom!]
The Wild Hunt sorcerers staggered, dazed. The red-eyed cat tore through the smoke, his slender weapon slipping effortlessly through the gaps in their armor.
Suddenly, a burst of wind scattered the dimeritium fog. A blast of energy struck Kiyan mid-air, sending him flying — though it did, by chance, help him avoid a barrage of incoming arrows.
Twenty paces away, Coën lowered his left hand, feeling the biting chill of his magic. "I can do it too… a Sign laced with frost."
Beside him, Regis flapped his wings and shifted back into his humanoid form, pointing toward Vilgefortz in the distance.
"Feel like going another round? Together?"
"Of course." Coën touched his knee briefly, expression cold as steel.
…
Geralt flung a shard of rubble aside, pulling a trapped sorceress free. As a Wild Hunt warrior's cleaving strike bore down on them, he raised his sword to parry. In the next instant, his body flared with glimmering emerald light — a radiance like the sun in the midst of shadow.
And then, someone even more dazzling than the sun appeared beside him.
The witchers disengaged from the fray and instinctively regrouped at his side.
"Everyone found their dance partner?" Lann flicked the blood from his longsword. He had just finished a brutal sweep through the nearby ranks.
He glanced left to right: Gerd, Letho, himself, Geralt, Coën, Kiyan.
"Just getting warmed up. Waiting for your word," someone muttered with a wry grin.
In the distance, torchlight flickered — it looked like the delegates from the other nations were arriving with reinforcements.
Lann smiled. "Then let's begin. Don't let anyone steal your prey!"
As soon as the words left his lips, he charged forward.
Standing in his path were a panicked Francesca and a grim-faced Eredin.
"That's him — the child of the Elder Blood, descendant of Lara Dorren: Lann Lannister!"
The elven sorceress didn't need to say more. The surging chaos energy from Lann's body — that unique, volatile aura — relentlessly set the Wild Hunt's nerves on edge.
"Seize him!" Eredin roared in fury.
The remaining Wild Hunt mages raised their staffs in unison, their oversized magic crystals glowing fiercely. The blizzard above twisted into a conscious force, funneling down toward the battlefield.
The temperature dropped rapidly. Even the Wild Hunt's hounds, forged from elemental snowrock, were flash-frozen into statues.
And still, Lann stood unmoved.
He inhaled deeply and raised his left hand.
The power of countless potion effects converged at his fingertips — the force of Euphoria, extracted from toxins, combined with the enhancement of Conductors of Magic.
While sorcerers had to extract chaos energy from their surroundings, Lann simply had to unleash what was already within.
[Aard Sign - Piercing Cold - Mana Burst - Euphoria - Conductors of Magic]!
For a moment, all that anyone could see was white.
A primordial glacier descended upon the world. It devoured warmth with greedy hunger — buildings cracked open, the air turned to crystal. The storm unleashed by the Wild Hunt mages was effortlessly swallowed, only to whip around and consume the casters themselves.
Can ice freeze ice? Could such an absurd thing truly happen?
Eredin muttered to himself, "The White Frost… has it come?"
Armor, flesh, staves, magic crystals — all were made equal in that instant. Transformed into glittering shards, then imploded inward and burst apart into splinters of ice.
Before Lann lay a corridor of pure white vacuum. The air had reached an absolute freeze. After a brief collapse inward, the temperature of the entire Isle of Thanedd plummeted toward this tunnel — as if to patch the void with warmth. But instead, the palace, the surrounding islands, even the waves beyond the shore, were all sealed in sculpted ice.
…
Gors Velen.
The dwarven banker's fingers danced across the table, flipping through stacks of draft paper filled with calculations.
Suddenly, he shivered. Confused, he looked around.
He pushed open the window and stared up at the sky, watching frost-laced snowflakes drift gently down.
"Snow? Already?"
…
The surviving Brotherhood sorcerers stared in stunned silence, momentarily forgetting how to speak.
They were sorcerers — and what they had just witnessed came from a witcher.
"What… what kind of magic was that?" someone whispered.
"That's not magic," said Tissaia, her face pale — from the exertion of casting Alzur's Thunder just moments before, and now, from the sheer scale of what she had just witnessed.
"That was a Sign — a witcher's Sign. The Sign of the Lion of Cintra…"
…
Lann slowly lowered his left hand.
A single strike — his Sign had pushed back against more than ten high-ranking Wild Hunt mages and annihilated them all.
A single strike — and even the aftershock had altered the very aura of Thanedd Isle, along with the climate of the nearby port city.
A single strike — and the battle's outcome was no longer in doubt.
Even Lann himself was startled by the magnitude of his power. A lion spares no effort, even against a hare. He had summoned a dragon and an ice giant to secure the battlefield for dealing with Wild Hunt remnants — but in hindsight, none of it had been necessary.
Now, he even worried that some of the sorcerers he hoped to win over might have been accidentally killed by his Sign.
Suddenly, he looked up, as if sensing something.
Above, Eredin clutched Francesca tightly as his skeletal warhorse galloped through the air, its hooves striking crystalline frost in mid-flight.
"Hurry — open your portal to Tir ná Lia!" the elven sorceress shrieked hysterically. "I don't care if you have to draw on the power of the White Frost or commune with the Sages — just open the gate now!"
The remaining Wild Hunt mages shielded them as Francesca, at the very last second, managed to open a portal. Eredin forced her through it, barely escaping the deadliest surge of the icy blast.
Even as they fled, Francesca continued opening short-range portals in rapid succession to keep pushing the distance between them and Lann.
"Faster! Faster! Go!!" the Valley Daisy screamed in panic.
And in that short time, they had already escaped far from Thanedd Isle — becoming nothing more than a distant speck in the sky.
Lann's expression remained unreadable. He drew his longsword and made a quick gesture, measuring the distance.
In the next moment, brilliant emerald light flashed across his body. Time seemed to slow down before him.
[Blink.]
The distance of an entire island was erased in an instant — any point within his line of sight could be reached in a flash of light.
A portal of sapphire blue had already been summoned midair — a surge of frigid wind pouring out from within. The commander of the Wild Hunt, with the Valley Daisy in tow, was just about to step through it.
Under the effects of Blink, Lann still had a few seconds to think through his next move.
A Sign? No — he had already used that.
Then… how about testing the power of his enhanced physique?
So Lann swung his sword.
[Whoosh—CRACK—]
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