Inside the collapsing, screaming mindscape, he moves through thought and memory, not like a creature, but like a tempest incarnate. He sees the corruption, the infestation that dares to claim the soul he has chosen to protect.
"You dare touch what is mine?"
The dragon's roar tears the void wide open. It is the sound of absolute, divine supremacy. Black fire boils up, flooding the entire world, a cleansing tide that devours the corruption's desperate voice and suffocates its insidious whispers. The ink-creature is not merely attacked; it is annihilated at the edges, its reality shrinking under the dragon's immense presence.
The creature retaliates with a wave of concentrated, sickening black despair. Its shadow tendrils lash forward, twisting like living snakes, biting into his colossal scales. Noctharion endures. His immense mind burns with searing, painful light as the corruption tries to inject its poison of doubt and fear, but the dragon's millennia of existence make him an unbreakable anchor of will.
He strikes—not with physical claws, which are useless here, but with the focused, terrifying power of pure thought. He does not waste energy.
A spear of concentrated will erupts from his essence and pierces the main tether tendril. The corruption screams—a sound that vibrates and shatters the entire mental plane—as the fragile connection it worked so hard to establish instantly begins to unravel and burn.
"Your control ends here," he states with the finality of a closing tomb.
The link that binds the commander and the Lava Giant shatters. The break is a colossal wound in the mindscape, with brilliant, purifying light spilling from it like golden blood. The entity convulses, its amorphous form writhing, desperately trying to reform the broken thread—but Noctharion does not stop. He gives it no quarter, no breath, no moment of respite.
He descends, seizes the tether itself—the broken remnant of control—and with a final, overwhelming exertion of force, he rips it utterly apart.
The mindscape, deprived of its anchor, its enemy destroyed, collapses into profound, echoing silence. The black, endless dark retreats, replaced by a sudden, jarring whiteness.
I fall—through shadow, through the cleansing fire, through the shattered fragments of my own painful memories. The journey is instantaneous and violent, a rapid re-entry into a body I barely recognize.
The world flashes: I see the commander's contorted face, the monster's final, silent scream, and Noctharion's burning silhouette, impossibly vast and victorious, before it all dissolves.
Then—
Light. Blinding, harsh, and utterly real.
My eyelids flutter open.
My body trembles, every nerve ending screaming as it adjusts to the reality of pain and physical existence. I am half-buried in ash and debris. My throat tastes of iron and dust. I cough uncontrollably, the raw air tearing at my lungs. I am alive. I am here.
The commander stands a few steps away, swaying dangerously. The unnatural blackness recedes from his veins, leaving only a sickly pallor.
He breathes—deeply, raggedly, the sound uneven and desperate as he reclaims control of his own body. He is back. His eyes are his own again—focused, sharp, and intensely present.
For a moment, he simply looks at the devastation, gathering his strength. Then, slowly, his gaze finds me. It is a look of absolute, terrifying clarity.
"Commander…" I croak, my voice breaking like shattered glass. I try to push myself up, reaching out.
He does not speak. His jaw clenches—a single, rigid muscle of pure determination. And then—
In a single, impossibly fast, and brutal movement—he snatches me by the collar of my tattered uniform and hurls me violently away from the immediate battlefield.
The air fractures.
A single heartbeat after the commander hurls Kael clear, the battlefield trembles beneath the weight of something immense—raw, unrestrained power begins to stir.
The Lava Giant bellows. Freed from the monster's control, its roar is not of rage but of primal instinct—pain, fury, confusion, all compressed into one terrible sound that shakes the molten horizon. Its molten lungs expand, spewing torrents of flame into the air, painting the dark sky crimson. Each step it takes splits the ground open; rivers of magma crawl through the cracks like veins of fire.
The commander straightens his stance.
His boots sink slightly into the blackened ash. His breath is heavy, labored—but his gaze is steady, unyielding. The remnants of corruption still cling to his veins like fading scars, but the will behind those eyes burns brighter than the inferno before him.
The Lava Giant lunges.
A mountain of living stone and molten fury, its hand crashes down, aiming to crush the man who dares stand before it. The air screams as it descends.
The commander moves—no hesitation, no wasted motion.
He pivots sharply, sliding past the incoming strike with lethal precision, his coat tearing from the heat that follows the creature's blow. The ground where he stood disintegrates into glowing fragments.
He exhales, steady and low. His right hand tightens around the hilt of his sword.
"Iron Tempest Style…"
His voice cuts through the roaring chaos, calm yet absolute—a tone that commands both sky and earth to listen.
"First Form—Steel Gale Slash."
He does not swing.
The world itself swings for him.
Aura floods from his body in a spiraling surge, gathering along the blade, compressing until it hums—a note too pure, too sharp for mortal senses. Then it bursts outward.
Thousands of invisible slashes explode into existence.
The space around him convulses. Air pressure collapses. Wind turns into blades, the ground into ribbons of ash. Everything—rock, flame, and smoke—is torn apart by a storm of cutting force so dense it resembles the inside of a hurricane made of steel.
The Lava Giant is caught mid-lunge.
For a moment, it looks almost frozen—its colossal frame suspended in the maelstrom. Then, piece by piece, line by glowing line, it begins to split apart.
A thousand cuts trace across its molten hide, carving through hardened magma like parchment. Light bursts from each wound. The creature's roar becomes fragmented, distorted, drowned beneath the howling winds of the commander's art.
The slashes expand outward, consuming everything in a dome of slicing energy. Trees at the crater's edge are shredded to powder. The molten earth is stripped bare, turned into streaks of glowing glass. The sky itself wavers, distorted by the pressure of the unleashed aura.
The commander's chest rises and falls in ragged intervals.
Each breath feels heavier than the last. His aura is thinning—flickering like the dying embers of a forge—but his eyes refuse to dim.
The battlefield still burns around him. The air is molten, trembling under the aftershock of his last strike. For a fleeting heartbeat, it seems as if the world itself goes still.
Then, a deep rumble.
The Lava Giant's scattered remains begin to move.
Chunks of molten rock, each glowing with inner fire, twitch and drag themselves back together. Rivers of lava crawl between them, stitching the broken form into something hideous and half-born. The creature's roar echoes from within the molten haze—a distorted, agonized sound that refuses to die.
And beneath the blackened earth, something else moves.
The real monster—the puppeteer, the one that had wrapped its tendrils through his mind—stirs once more. Its voice slithers through the cracks of his consciousness, cold and mocking.
"You… can't destroy what is beneath…"
His teeth grit. His heart thunders against his ribs, faster and faster, like a drum before the storm.
He can feel his aura reserves collapsing, draining at an unsustainable rate. The Steel Gale Slash pushes his body to its edge—every muscle screams, every nerve burns. But he cannot stop.
Stopping means death.
Stopping means Kael's death.
He tightens his grip on his sword. His knuckles turn white. Silver light begins to leak from his body—thin lines of radiant energy crawling across his skin like cracks in a vessel barely holding together.
"So be it," he whispers, voice low, trembling not with fear but with restraint.
A surge of power tears through the air.
Wind halts. Ash freezes midair. Even the molten rivers around his feet hesitate—as if reality itself senses what is about to be unleashed.
Then comes the roar.
Not from the monster. Not from the Lava Giant.
But from the commander's own aura—erupting outward in a blinding storm of silver-white radiance.
The ground splits apart beneath him, forming a crater that glows like a sun. His blade vibrates in his grasp, singing a single sharp tone that rises into an otherworldly hum.
That voice returns—the same corruption, screaming again, clawing desperately into his mind, trying to break him, to claim him once more. The sound is unbearable, a thousand knives of psychic agony.
Blood trickles down from his eyes. From his ears.
He can barely hear his own thoughts through the static and the pain.
But his will—unyielding, immovable—cuts through it all.
"I was controlled once," he growls, his voice cracking beneath the strain. "Never again."
And then—
He moves.
"Iron Tempest Style—"
The words fall like thunder.
"Fifth Form… Tyrant Tempest Annihilation!"
The explosion of aura that follows is indescribable.
The silver storm detonates from his body, engulfing everything within sight. His form becomes a blur of motion, his sword spinning in wide arcs that blend into the wind itself. Each swing creates a slash that multiplies into hundreds—each carrying the weight of destruction, each trailing silver lines that carve through space.
The air collapses into a spiraling vortex of light and steel.
The earth splits open, mountains of molten rock tearing apart like paper.
The Lava Giant, still half-reformed, is caught in the tempest. Its scream turns into a roar of disintegration as its molten body is torn apart again—this time beyond regeneration. Shards of glowing magma spiral upward like dying stars before being shredded into vapor.
And below, the creature hiding beneath the surface—the true controller—finally surfaces, dragged into the open by the force of the storm. Its form is shifting, grotesque, made of black tendrils and fractured bone, its many eyes burning with hatred.
But the commander does not even give it a chance to breathe.
His aura expands again—his final reserves unleashed in one last act of annihilation. The storm thickens, turning from wind into a spiraling inferno of silver and ash.
The monster screams—a sound so shrill it pierces through the soul. Its body disintegrates under the torrent of slashes, burned, sliced, and consumed all at once. Its voice dies mid-scream, snuffed out like a candle in a tempest.
For a moment, the entire world glows silver.
Then—silence.
The wind dies.
The light fades.
All that remains is destruction.
A vast crater where the battlefield once stood, its edges still molten, its center hollowed into a bottomless wound in the earth.
At the very heart of it, a single figure stands.
The commander.
His sword is buried into the cracked ground, trembling faintly. Steam rises from his shoulders. His armor is shredded, his skin cut and burned. Blood drips from his chin, but his eyes—those unwavering eyes—still burn with that same silver resolve.
He breathes heavily, every exhale a cloud of white mist against the heat.
His body sways—but he does not fall.
Not yet.
The storm he unleashed lingers in the air, faint whispers of power curling through the ruined battlefield like the ghost of a god's fury.
From the edge of the crater, Kael stares in awe.
He cannot move. He cannot even speak.
The sheer scale of destruction—the perfection of technique, the purity of will—makes his chest tighten painfully. The Iron Tempest Style that he only begins to understand… he now sees in its final, divine form.
And at its center stands the man who forged it.
Tired. Bloodied.
But unbroken.
A true storm given human shape.