Location: Black Peak Valley – Great Desert | Year 8002 A.A.
The desert groaned.
It was not the groan of shifting dunes, nor the sigh of a restless wind. It was deeper, older, the voice of the bones beneath the sand. A subterranean protest rising from the bedrock itself, as though the earth remembered all too clearly what titans had walked upon it in ages past—and feared that the same ruin was about to be repeated.
Every grain of sand seemed unsettled, whispering against its neighbors as the ground shifted, uneasy beneath the weight of what stood upon it. The silence between attacks was not peace but suspense, the taut stillness of a string pulled to its breaking point.
Above, the sky had soured. Smoke, dust, and the exhaust of magic churned together, staining the heavens a bruised, yellow pallor. The sun, once merciless in its clarity, now looked sickly and veiled, reduced to a dim, tarnished coin behind the ashen haze. The light that managed to reach the valley floor fell weak and distorted, stretching shadows into grotesque shapes that twitched and wavered as if eager to come alive.
At the heart of this distorted canvas stood Baraz of Carlon.
The Rhino General had become something more—and something less. His form was no longer merely flesh armored by shadow, but a colossus sheathed in corruption. The Whisper Spike pulsing in his chest glowed like a diseased star, its rhythm an unnatural parody of a heartbeat. Each throb pumped waves of viscous mana into his frame, swelling him, warping him, driving him beyond mortal measure.
The violet flames at his shoulders no longer danced with the chaotic glee of fire. They roared. Twin furnaces of arcane heat, they twisted the air into shimmering veils that blurred his outline into a mirage of living nightmare. His skin had changed, hardened into something glasslike and terrible—volcanic obsidian fused with hammered steel, plates of darkness overlapping in unnatural layers. He was fortress and furnace, beast and weapon, an edifice of ruin animated by will and Shadow.
Facing him stood Johan Fare.
The contrast was stark: Baraz, swollen with corruption, radiating heat and hunger; Johan, scarred, lean, and battered, held together by discipline and sheer defiance.
A cut on his brow bled steadily, warm rivulets running down his cheek to meet the dust that clung to his fur. His spear—his constant companion, his extension of will—felt heavier now, its familiar weight thickened into burden. His right shoulder trembled minutely, still jarred from the last concussive detonation. It was not fear that made it shake, but the rebellion of strained flesh forced past its limits.
Every breath came ragged, each inhalation dragging through lungs raw with dust and smoke, every exhalation edged with the copper tang of blood. His muscles screamed for release, for collapse. But his will denied them. He commanded his body as he commanded a battlefield: no retreat, no faltering step, no collapse permitted.
And his mind—always his greatest weapon—remained sharp.
'He's not just resisting the lightning… he's metabolizing it.'
The thought cut clean through the haze of pain. He had seen the tremors, the faltering moment when the current had run its course. But now he saw something more terrible: the Spike had not merely endured the storm—it had drunk of it, reshaped it, folded it into Baraz's strength.
"The last time I called on this…"
Baraz's voice rumbled through the basin, as if the cracked earth itself had learned to speak with a forge's breath. Each word hissed with escaping steam and violet mana, vented from his flared nostrils like the exhalations of some primeval engine. "…was to break into the Hazël Rank. To shatter the limits of my own body and claim my place."
He stepped forward, and the sound was no longer sand shifting beneath a soldier's tread—it was glass fracturing under impossible weight. Another step, another brittle crunch, and his voice dropped lower, heavy with promise:
"Now—I use it to keep a jumped-up rodent out."
He moved.
BOOOOOOM!!!
The desert floor liquefied under him, fusing into molten glass as combustion flung his massive frame forward. He did not cross the space with speed alone, but with inevitability—an avalanche, a comet, all-consuming force clothed in shrieking violet flame.
The first strike descended. Not a punch, but a falling mountain. A blow meant to erase.
Johan met it.
There was no time for elegance, only survival. His feet set like anchors, his spear rising into a two-handed brace. When the blow landed, sound was swallowed by pressure. The very air detonated outward, collapsing dunes and flattening the landscape into a lifeless plain.
The second strike followed without pause.
Baraz's other fist came like a thunderclap, smashing down on Johan's spear. The weapon screamed as if alive—the splintering cry of enchantment unraveling, of wood and steel breaking past their limits. Then came the crack. Final. Irreversible.
The spear was gone.
It did not snap cleanly, but exploded into fragments, its remnants flashing away like sparks. Johan's grip closed around the broken head, clinging to the blade as though clutching the last word of a prayer.
They rose skyward in a blur of color—Johan a flicker of disciplined blue, Baraz a storm of consuming violet. The valley floor vanished beneath them as they clashed among the winds. Steel sang, wind shrieked, and the sky itself seemed unwilling to draw too near.
Johan drew his short blade in a motion honed from countless drills, its edge flashing like a shard of frozen lightning. He ducked low, his body folding impossibly beneath a sweeping arm that could have torn him in two. The blade snapped upward in a clean arc, true and sharp as a geometric line.
The edge found Baraz's chin.
The result was not blood, but resistance—diamond-hard keratin resisting steel. Sparks spat from the contact, and the smell of scorched horn stung the air. But no wound followed. No victory.
And then—the horn pulsed.
Thu-THUMM—BOOOOM!!!
Annihilation bloomed point-blank.
Johan's world inverted. The blast caught him in its heart, flinging him through the air like a discarded scrap of parchment. Pain tore a cry from his ribs, sharp and white-hot, even as his armor disintegrated around him. His robe shredded into tatters, its protective wards expiring in bursts of futile light. Blood, wrenched from him by the violence, spun away in dark arcs across the sky, raining back into the desert as a crimson drizzle.
He struck the ground. Hard.
Sand gave way beneath him, scouring his skin as he rolled, tumbling end over end in a dizzying cycle of sky and grit and agony. Breath fled his lungs in a brutal rush, leaving him choking in silence as his body finally skidded to a halt.
For a moment—just a moment—the world narrowed to pain. Nothing but the shriek of nerves and the weight of his own brokenness.
But will commanded him again.
Legs trembled. Spine protested. Still, he rose.
Bent, bloodied, unsteady—yet upright.
And when he lifted his head, the shadow was already there. Baraz loomed, violet fires painting him monstrous, each step pounding a rhythm of doom into the sand.
'I can't keep taking these hits…'
The thought did not tremble. It was clear, clean, as if carved in glass. A statement of truth, not despair. His body could not weather the recoil, nor the whiplash of the blasts. He was breaking—not in spirit, but in flesh.
'It will kill me before his fists even land a clean blow.'
Even in the spiraling chaos of his fall, Johan's mind did not surrender. His body spun, battered and broken, but thought still cut through the storm. Pain is data. Momentum is a tool.
He seized what little remained within his control. Dust, rising from his own impact, became a cloak. The spin of his body—a ruin to most—he bent into a spring, a coil ready to release in desperate defiance.
Through the choking haze, his blade snapped outward, not to Baraz's armor-clad chest nor to the cursed horn. No—he aimed lower, sharper, searching along the ribs for the seam of vulnerability that must exist, however small. It was not hope that guided the strike, but calculation. Even fortresses, Johan knew, had cracks.
In his other hand, mana screamed to life. Two Spiral Spheres, smaller than those he had summoned before, compact and vicious, whirled into being. They shrieked at the threshold of hearing, high-pitched and piercing, weapons forged of pressure and distraction. They were not built to kill. They were built to force a flinch—to create the single heartbeat of hesitation he needed.
But Baraz did not flinch.
The rhino's advance was merciless. The blade bit, then slid away, a useless spark against the volcanic glass of his armor. The twin spheres cut the air, hissing past his head—but he did not even raise a hand. His stride never broke, his attention never wavered. He had read Johan's intent even before it was fully born.
And then came the sound.
The dreaded hum. Not far away. Not delayed. Right in front of Johan's face.
Thu-THUM—BOOM!
The world vanished.
There was no strike to deflect, no shield to raise. The detonation did not hit Johan—it consumed him. A blossom of violet annihilation burst at point-blank range, centered in his chest. The blast swallowed the desert itself in its hungry light.
For one terrible instant, the desert forgot its wind.
All sound fled. All motion ceased. There was only the expanding globe of shadowfire, devouring air and light alike. Then, slowly, silence deepened—so heavy it crushed the spirit more than any roar could.
When the world remembered itself, the aftermath was ash and ruin. Superheated sand hissed into cooling glass, whispering faintly like dying embers. Grey dust rose lazily from the impact's heart, curling skyward in fragile threads.
And at the crater's center, Johan lay broken.
His body was no longer the posture of a fighter, but the wreckage of defiance. His spear, the weapon that had borne his hopes, lay in shattered fragments, scattered like the remnants of a forgotten dream. His arm—the left—was gone, shorn brutally above the elbow. Blood seeped from the torn stump, painting the scorched sand with widening stains that glittered black where heat had fused them to glass.
His robes hung in tatters, smoking gently, the last defiant wards spent long ago. His chest heaved shallowly, ribs groaning with each breath, each rise and fall a cruel reminder that he yet lived in the shell of pain his body had become. His right hand still clutched the shard of his broken weapon, though its edge trembled weakly, not raised to strike, but clung to in sheer refusal to let go.
Baraz landed heavily at the crater's edge. His hooves split the glasslike surface, cracks webbing outward in jagged patterns beneath the weight of his inevitability.
He looked down.
The hatred that had burned so brightly in him before was absent now. In its place was something colder. Not joy. Not triumph. But the grave stillness of certainty fulfilled. The gaze of a judge watching a verdict carried out by the world itself.
"In the end," Baraz spoke, his voice stripped bare of boast or venom, "it ends as I foresaw."
His words did not rise above the moment. They carried no pride, no roar of victory, only the flat tonality of fact.
The Apex of the Özel lay in pieces before him.
The climb had been halted.
The door had not opened.
The Hazël remained closed.
Johan's chest rattled, each shallow breath a jagged rasp that felt more like tearing than living. His ribs screamed, his blood pooled, and his body—broken, half-ruined—looked every bit the corpse he ought to have been. Yet deep inside, in the dim furnace of his will, a spark refused to gutter out.
That ember flared, not as a blaze of triumph, but as a single, stubborn light that had not yet given way to the dark.
And then, impossibly, a smile found his lips. Cracked, bloodied, faint—but unmistakable.
It was not victory's smile. Nor survival's. It was the quiet, grim smile of a mathematician whose final proof had resolved.
"Checkmate," he whispered.
The sound was fragile, half-broken, but it carried into the dead hush of the battlefield like a ghost carried on the wind.
Baraz's brow furrowed. For the first time in the entire duel, confusion marred the certainty in his gaze. His mind rejected the word, its meaning, its possibility.
But instinct—primal and sharp—dragged his eyes upward.
Through the ragged shroud of smoke, through the bruised haze of dust, something descended.
What emerged was no ordinary Spiral.
This one did not carry the smooth geometry of control, nor the disciplined sphere of a craftsman. It was jagged, furious, its edges serrated with burning teeth of molten light. Each rotation screamed with soundless violence, its core a roiling tempest of crimson and blinding gold. Where it turned, the desert air itself warped into waves of shimmering heat, tasting of iron, of ash, of the forge.
The dunes blistered merely from its presence.
Baraz's eyes widened, disbelief carving cracks into the granite of his face. The certainty in his soul shattered, replaced with something rawer: shock. Then, beneath it, the twitch of fear.
"What—what in Ferez's name is that?" His voice stumbled, stripped of authority, ragged with the tremor of the unthinkable.
He scoured memory in a frenzy. When? When could he—?
And then, the terrible truth bloomed in him. The two small spirals. The harmless feints. The ones he had dismissed with contempt. They were not failures, not distractions. They had been scaffolding—mana woven behind his shoulder, out of sight. A ritual unfinished. A trap hidden in plain sight.
He had not ignored a weakness. He had ignored the birth of annihilation.
Johan's voice came, barely a thread of sound, yet it carried with the clarity of a bell rung in a tomb.
"PYRUS AFFINITY… CHO ŌDAMA KESIK SARMAL."
(Super Large Cutting Spiral.)
The words sealed the equation.
The Spiral fell—not as an attack, but as judgment incarnate. Its edges tore the very air into ribbons, ribbons that bled into molten streams devoured by its hungry core. It consumed as it descended, dragging the horizon itself toward its heart.
Baraz tried to move. Tried to summon flame, to step aside, to raise his will. But his body—spent, overdriven, corrupted—answered only with the stiffness of stone. The previous damage done by Johan has taken toll.
For the first time, Johan's surviving eye burned—not with calculation, but with flame. A terrible, beautiful flame of will stretched to its final limit.
The Spiral locked. A star had chosen its target.
"No—!" Baraz's denial broke from him, not as defiance, but as a roar of naked terror. The last sound of his life.
Impact.
The desert ceased to exist.
Light burst in a dome of incandescent fire, spiraling outward, tearing the world into unbeing. Sand did not melt; it vaporized. Dunes dissolved into nothing, erased in a single, devouring breath. Scarlet and gold painted the heavens, the sky itself bending under the force. Shockwaves raced outward in great, rippling walls, cracking the desert floor as though a continent's spine had been broken.
Cliff faces, miles distant, shuddered and shed cascades of stone. The sun's weak pallor warped, its light refracted through the living storm of annihilation.
The world burned.
And then, silence.
When the fire died, it left behind a basin of black glass, vast and smooth, glowing faintly with sullen red veins of heat. The desert was gone; in its place lay a wound upon the world, a scar that would never heal.
At its edge lay Johan Fare.
What remained of his mana flickered in the faintest barrier around him—a bubble of smoke and light that collapsed even as he drew breath. He was bare now, broken beyond measure, his body scarred and ruined. His chest rose shallowly, each breath a thread away from silence.
But still, he breathed.
Across from him, Baraz lay unmoving.
The mighty horn was gone, vaporized into nothing. His shoulders, once wreathed in violet flame, were cold. His massive chest—so proud, so unyielding—was split open, fissured with glowing cracks that hissed faint steam into the air. The smell of burnt flesh clung, heavy and thick. His fortress-hide had been undone from within.
And the Whisper Spike—the cursed shard at his chest—was gone. It lifted once, a black shard spinning slowly in the rising thermals, the last remnant of his corruption. Then, like ash in the wind, it dissolved into nothing, its tether to the Shadow severed.
Baraz's corpse stared skyward, but no light moved in his eyes.
The Rhino General of Carlon was dead.
Johan's breath shuddered, part sob, part sigh, part broken laugh. His body screamed, but his mind whispered one truth:
' It's Over.''
On his shoulder, the ink of his mark shimmered. The designation of Özel #1 unraveled in threads of blue light. It wove itself anew, reforming in darker, sharper strokes.
When it settled, the truth shone undeniable:
Hazël #20.
But even as the weight of victory and the immeasurable cost settled upon him like a funeral shroud, a new shadow fell over Johan Fare—cold, immense, sovereign.
Through the wavering haze of heat and smoke, his vision—flickering, broken—caught the descent of a figure from the sky. Not plummeting, not rushing with violence, but descending with a dreadful, unhurried grace.
A boar.
His bulk was encased in darkly gleaming armor, every plate wrought with cruel elegance. His tusks, long and polished like bone scythes, caught the last embers of the shattered sun. Crimson eyes, burning with a furnace-light colder than flame, swept the scorched basin below until they found the two broken figures at its heart.
Prince Erezhan.
He landed upon the glassed earth without sound. The fused surface, still glowing faintly with veins of red heat, did not dare to crack beneath his hooves. In one hand, with the carelessness of absolute mastery, he carried his spear—a weapon so refined, so lethally balanced, that it seemed more an extension of his will than a crafted tool.
Erezhan's gaze swept slowly across the devastation. His eyes lingered upon Baraz first—his once-mighty general, now reduced to a smoldering husk split by fissures of ruin. There was no flicker of grief, no wrath, no lamentation. Only a detached assessment, as though one were appraising a broken weapon.
Then he spoke.
"What a devastating attack." His voice was a low hum, resonant and deep, vibrating through the glass itself, carrying into Johan's bones like a slow earthquake. "Atomic-level mana razors, spiraled with catalytic flame… You didn't just cut him, Johan of ArchenLand. You unraveled him. Cooked him—inside and out I'm surprised anything is left of him at all.."
He spoke like a scholar admiring a forbidden theorem. Like a connoisseur beholding a painting of terrible beauty.
For the briefest heartbeat, something almost human flickered across his crimson eyes: respect. Not kindness, not mercy, but the acknowledgement of a warrior who had struck beyond the limits of mortal craft.
"You were worthy," he murmured. "A true warrior. I will remember you."
But as swiftly as it came, it died. Respect dissolved into pitiless finality. His gaze hardened, cold and inexorable as law. Almost with reverence, like a headsman performing his sacred duty, Erezhan lifted his spear and leveled its point at Johan's heart.
"Now—rest."
The spear descended, sharp as destiny.
A flash of gold cut the world.
It was not light. It was motion—a blur of striped fur, a crimson cape streaking like a comet's tail, a presence that tore through the space between death and life faster than thought itself.
CLANG! BOOOOOOOOM!
The collision shook the valley anew. The meeting of spear and blade did not sound like metal; it sounded like heaven and earth colliding, like a mountain refusing to yield to an avalanche. The shockwave ripped outward in a concentric blast, hurling glass-shards and molten sand into the air. A new crater carved itself into the already wounded desert, a scar upon a scar.
The spear had not pierced.
Another stood between Johan and death.
Kon Kaplan.
His golden eye blazed, a singular sun defying crimson hellfire. His muscles were coiled steel, every vein alive with the restrained force of a predator choosing to hold rather than to kill. His sword, braced in perfect symmetry against the boar prince's spear, shone with a cold, imperishable edge.
His golden ponytail, bound tight, streamed behind him like the banner of a conquering star. His crimson cape whipped in the force of the shockwave, a banner of defiance amid ruin.
But it was not sight alone that stilled the battlefield—it was presence.
The weight of him, the inexorable command of the Tiger Lord, Hazël #3, descended like a mountain upon all who beheld him. Soldiers on the ridges froze mid-breath. The winds themselves faltered. The very air seemed to bow beneath the iron will made flesh in that single, golden eye.
"Not today."