The crystal-clear waters of the sumptuous royal baths boiled.
The colossal impact of the fall had ruptured the geothermal stone pipes, filling the vast area of the castle with columns of suffocating steam and chalky dust.
The limpid, sacred water of the reflecting pool was now stained by dark clouds of blood.
Lucas emerged from the shallow waters with a bubbling roar, splashing boiling water everywhere.
The warrior was ruined.
His breathing was a wet wheeze; the muscles of his body trembled to the limit, his skin vibrating with a raw, irrational energy that refused to let him die.
On the other side of the thermal pool, the water's surface finally broke.
Suki emerged, pulling the scalding air into his lungs in a ragged gasp.
His trembling, slippery fingers groped blindly through the mist until they dug into the cracked stones at the pool's edge.
The deep gash running from his shoulder down to the center of his chest—courtesy of Lucas's blade in the hall below—pulsed in a rhythmic agony.
The hot water of the baths only worsened the wound, washing the open flesh and preventing any chance of coagulation.
Blood gushed continuously, flowing down the boy's torso and dyeing the clear water around him into a thick, dark cloud.
Suki rested his weight on his intact arm and tried to stand, but his left knee gave out.
Suki's vision darkened violently at the edges.
A nauseating vertigo made the underground cavern spin around him for an instant.
The ringing in his ears muffled the sound of the water; the massive blood loss had sucked almost all the oxygen and strength left in his bones.
He was plummeting toward total collapse.
Even so, gritting his red-stained teeth, Suki forced his ruined musculature to obey.
With a low groan, he used the stone edge to leverage his own weight, dragging his trembling body to the shallows until he came to a halt on his knees, panting and hunched over.
The crimson whirlwind that had previously orbited him was washed away, but the energy keeping him conscious was an act of pure autophagy.
The white marks on his skin didn't glow with serenity; they pulsed chaotically, burning his flesh.
They were unstable constellations moving in violent spirals across his arms, face, and chest, weaving threads of light that forced his bleeding, ruined body to keep fighting.
The boy's hair floated slowly, defying gravity and moisture.
There was a crushing silence before the storm.
Lucas dug his good hand into the pool's stone edge, panting, observing the divine figure.
The monumental impact of the fall and the boiling water served as a "reality check," bringing fragments of Lucas's lucidity back.
"You are... dying."
Lucas's raspy voice came out scratched, tearing his throat through gritted teeth, sounding strangely lucid amidst the rushing sound of the water.
Suki blinked heavily.
The hot spring water dripped from his chin, mixed with sweat and his own blood.
He clenched his teeth, pressing his slippery fingers against the stone edge to avoid collapsing, and forced his blurred vision to focus on the elf ahead.
*Is he talking?* he thought.
Confusion dragged through the boy's exhausted mind.
Just a few minutes ago, in the hall below, Lucas was nothing but an irrational aberration.
A rabid, frenzied hound snarling at ghosts and trying to rip flesh apart with his bare teeth.
But now, the empty abyss in his eyes had receded; the impact of shattering the castle floor with his own skull seemed to have forcefully dragged the warrior out of his psychotic break, returning a frigid, grim, and utterly ruined clarity to him.
The dark elf took a heavy step forward.
The submerged stone beneath his steel boot splintered, sending violent ripples through the blood-stained thermal pool.
"Burning away your own life... drying out your own veins for a crown that isn't even yours," Lucas continued.
The scalding water ran down his dark, defined body.
He tilted his head, observing Suki's chest rise and fall in agony.
"You are not an elf, boy. You owe nothing to Lavinsk, nothing to Sillys. So tell me... why bleed yourself to death for them?"
The wind began to swirl around Suki, sweeping the scalding steam away.
He didn't answer right away.
That white, humanity-devoid gaze harbored no hatred; it was serene, profound, and laden with a crushing sadness.
The thermal water rippled as the boy forced himself to stand, his legs trembling under the weight of his own wounded body.
"Someone very important to me..." Suki's voice sounded calm, echoing in multiple frequencies through the underground cavern, "...asked me to stand by Lavinsk's side, and I will keep that promise until the very end."
He raised his face, the unreal light from his eyes illuminating the darkness of the haze.
"But it's not just that I fight for, Lucas. Over these past months, Sillys bled by my side. She isn't my queen, Lucas, she is my friend. A true friendship."
The boy took a deep breath, the pain from the gash on his shoulder tugging at his voice.
"You believe that loyalty is only born from fear, despair, or utility. That is the only vision your world allowed you to have."
Suki took a slow step forward, the water's surface tension yielding around his knees.
The swirling wind illuminated the elf's grotesque, disfigured features.
"Not everything in life has to be driven by this pain of yours," Suki continued, his soft tone cutting through the hiss of the boiling water.
"I am a gentle man. And I can feel it in your soul, Lucas. Beneath all this armor, all this submission, and this blood... you are a gentle man, too."
"You just forgot what that means."
The word echoed in the dark elf's fragmented mind.
*Gentle.*
Lucas blinked.
The boiling water, the bloodstained stones, and Suki's blinding light simply vanished.
The suffocating hiss of the steam gave way to the soft sound of wind rustling through green leaves.
The elf looked down at his own body.
The black armor wasn't there; the scars of centuries of carnage were gone.
His arms were thin and slender; he was just a child again.
A sharp sting drew his attention downward; there was a scraped wound on his exposed knee, bleeding slightly onto the grass.
When he raised his head, the white light didn't belong to a boy with divine powers.
Yasmin stood in front of him.
Her smile was warm and luminous, her eyes carrying an innocent gratitude he had spent his entire life trying to bury.
"You are very kind, Lucas," her voice sounded like a distant melody, caressing his broken soul.
Lucas squeezed his eyes shut, drawing in air violently.
When his eyelids opened, the illusion shattered.
The green grass reverted to a crimson thermal pool; the girl's sweet face melted away, revealing the exhausted, illuminated figure of Suki twelve meters away.
Lucas's disfigured face contorted into a mask of blind fury and absolute denial.
"You don't know what you are talking about!" Lucas's roar tore through the hall, his voice cracking in aggressive despair.
The elf's body boiled.
With a guttural scream that made the thermal water erupt around him, the dark elf used his ruined legs as springs and ejected his own body.
He rocketed just above the water's surface like a missile of flesh and steel.
Suki didn't step back; he vanished in a swift flash of light.
The two collided a mere inch above the water's surface, right in the center of the baths.
KRAAASH!
The impact split the air into visible bands; it detonated the very physics of the room.
The colossal kinetic wave flattened the pool's surface, sweeping thousands of gallons of boiling water against the walls of the room in a tsunami of energy.
For a fraction of a second, the violence of the clash carved a perfectly dry crater on the stone floor beneath the feet of the two warriors locked in mid-air.
A second later, the waters crashed back down in a torrential rain of scalding steam and blood, swallowing the battle.
The boiling waters collapsed over them, but the collision didn't stop; the poetry of living smoke and divine aura was swallowed in a second by a brutal, dirty, and grotesque brawl.
Lucas sank his fist directly into the center of Suki's face; the wet snap of nose cartilage breaking echoed louder than the roar of the waterfall.
The boy stumbled backward, spitting out a thick jet of blood, and one of his teeth flew through the air, sinking into the thermal water.
A punch thrown with his entire body weight dug into the dark elf's jaw.
The impact whipped Lucas's head to the side, undoing whatever tie held his hair back.
The dark strands fell completely messy and plastered to the warrior's face, forming a grotesque mask of water and blood.
Ignoring his dislocated jaw, Lucas unleashed a guttural roar.
He grabbed Suki by the shoulders and, twisting his torso with the force of a rhino, hurled the boy away.
Suki flew backward, skipping violently across the water's surface like a skipped stone on a lake, until he finally dug his boots in and braked, raising a curtain of steam.
Without giving him a moment's rest, Lucas stabilized his stance; the warrior's hands moved in a precise blur.
He manipulated the room's very pressure; with a sharp forward motion, the atmosphere yielded.
The air hissed, condensing into a barrage of invisible, compressed blades fired directly at the boy's throat.
Suki didn't try to block; his body relaxed.
In a fluid, hypnotic motion, Suki glided across the warm water.
He leaned his torso back and twisted his shoulders, letting the lethal bursts pass millimeters from his skin.
The wind only clipped a few loose strands of his messy hair; it looked like a dangerous, rehearsed dance.
Using the momentum of the dodge, spinning on his own heels, Suki mirrored the technique.
The boy brought his palms together, condensed the scalding air, and fired his own storm of cutting winds at Lucas, much denser and illuminated by his white aura.
The ruined muscles in the elf's legs tore under extreme tension as he detonated a burst of brute speed.
The water beneath his boots evaporated; in the blink of an eye, Lucas tore through the air and closed the distance.
Suki barely had time to breathe.
The elf materialized right in front of him.
With surgical precision, Lucas stretched out his arms and smashed his own palms forcefully against the backs of Suki's extended hands.
The absurd clash redirected the vector of the entire energy; the cutting wind meant to tear Lucas's chest exploded to the sides, carving two colossal trenches in the pool and slicing the stone walls of the baths.
With his hands pinned to the sides, Suki's chest and face were left wide open.
Lucas took the final step forward; he pulled his head back and drove a brutal headbutt straight into the boy's already fractured nose.
CRACK!
Suki's vision spun.
His legs turned to jelly, his brain rattling inside his skull.
Capitalizing on the shock's paralysis, Lucas crouched rapidly.
He planted his own hips under Suki's center of gravity, grabbed the boy by the waist, and with a snarl of pure animal effort, executed a devastating suplex.
Suki was leveraged up, his back tearing through the air over the elf's shoulders, and he was hurled in a high, descending arc.
The impact was deafening.
Suki crashed back-first into the pool's warm water with the force of a meteorite, raising a fifteen-foot geyser and sinking violently into the boiling darkness of the baths.
Suki sank violently into the warm water, but he didn't have a single moment to seek oxygen.
Before the wave of his impact even settled, the mass of flesh and melted steel crashed down on him.
Lucas dove in and mounted Suki's chest.
The elf locked his knees onto the pool's stone floor, using his massive body's full weight to pin the boy in place.
The elf's left hand shot out like a claw, grabbing Suki by the throat and slamming the back of his head violently against the submerged stones, forcing him to swallow the red-stained thermal water.
Suki thrashed underwater, his hands groping at the elf's arms, but Lucas's right fist rose into the air and came down like a siege hammer directly onto his face.
CRACK!
Suki's cheek split open.
The impact made the water around them explode.
"YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND!" Lucas bellowed, the sound tearing through the waterfall's roar.
The veins in his neck popped under his skin, his bulging eyes dripping sweat and blood right onto the boy's illuminated face.
He yanked Suki up by his hair above the surface for a split second, just enough for the boy to draw a gasping breath of damp air, before delivering another brutal, downward punch.
BAM!
The blow dug into Suki's jaw, sinking his head back into the boiling water with a crash.
Air and blood bubbles escaped the boy's open lips as his glowing eyes tried to focus through asphyxiation and concussion.
"I FOUGHT FOR RESPECT!" Lucas screamed, his voice cracking in an aggressive despair as he slammed his fist repeatedly against the boy's crushed face underwater.
*Splash! Splash!*
With every strike, a spiral of water and blood sprayed out.
Lucas lowered his torso, his disfigured face inches from the bubbling water where Suki struggled to breathe, his fingers tightening even harder around his throat.
"YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW MUCH I SUFFERED TO BUILD WHAT I HAVE TODAY!"
Lucas's fury overflowed in tears that mingled with the hot water.
He wasn't just trying to kill the boy; he was trying to crush his own humiliation.
His own pain.
The white marks on Suki's body glowed intensely beneath the blood-stained water.
Not with the serenity of before, but with the blind fury of a star about to go supernova.
As Lucas's fist descended for another lethal blow, the physics around them collapsed.
The wind didn't need free oxygen to be born.
An explosion of compressed atmospheric pressure detonated underwater, directly from Suki's chest.
The vacuum bubble expanded violently, hurling a geyser of boiling water toward the ceiling.
The shockwave didn't hurt Lucas, but it ejected him half a meter into the air, breaking his relentless mount and tearing his fingers from the boy's throat.
Suki didn't waste the single moment the wind bought him.
Planting his hands on the pool's stone floor, the boy drew a desperate gasp of air and used the water itself as leverage.
He ejected his body upward and spun on his own axis, gliding through the air while Lucas was still falling.
The wind condensed instantly around Suki's leg into a blade of pure air.
In a perfectly circular horizontal motion, fast as breaking the sound barrier, Suki drove his heel with full force right into the side of Lucas's exposed neck.
BOOOM!
The sonic boom swept the haze from the room; the impact ejected him like an artillery shell.
Lucas had no time to react.
The dark elf's body glided inches above the pool's surface, tearing a wake in the thermal water until he collided violently against the far end of the hall.
The elf's back cracked the entire solid stone retaining wall; the wall yielded in a spiderweb of deep fractures.
Lucas slid down the ruined stone and collapsed to his knees in the shallow water, the masonry debris falling over his shoulders like a gray rain.
Suki landed lightly; the water's surface tension didn't break beneath his bare feet.
He panted, his chest rising and falling frantically, blood streaming from his nose and mouth, but his gaze remained locked on the fallen enemy.
"So..." Suki's voice sounded low, cutting through the hiss of the water falling from the debris.
"...why do you protect someone who treats you like a tool?"
The boiling water of the baths slowly calmed, the dense steam swirling around the ruins as surface tension swallowed the debris.
Lucas pressed his bare hands against the cracked wall and forced his body to stand.
The bloody water lapped at his waist.
The dark elf's face was completely disfigured, and his chest heaved in asphyxiating spasms of pure agony.
His lethal, blind gaze faltered.
And, behind all that uncontrollable rage, the beast retreated, revealing something pathetic, vulnerable, and profoundly human.
Lucas spat a thick clot of blood into the water.
"Because..." his voice failed, coming out as a broken whisper.
He raised his eyes to the destroyed ceiling, staring at the distant light of the throne room through the crater.
"Elfhing was the only one in this entire kingdom who looked at me and saw any use, after everything that happened."
The warrior lowered his face; his broad, ruined shoulders trembled beneath the melted plates of his armor.
"Even a monster needs a place to belong," Lucas continued, his voice drowned in resentment and sorrow.
"She made me her blade; she gave me a purpose when everyone treated me like trash."
Those words weren't a physical blow; they carried no energy or kinetic force.
But they tore into Suki deeper than any dark steel blade could.
For an instant, the white light orbiting the boy flickered.
The absolute wind calmed.
There was only the wet echo of a mirrored tragedy; the incalculable pain of a boy who had lost everything, reflected in the man who was willing to die because he never had anything.
And then...
*DONG.*
The deep, metallic sound descended through the crater in the ceiling, sending shivers across the boiling water of the baths.
The Sacred Bell had swung.
Up above, carnage took the skies.
The deity ascended, the floor at her feet erupting; hundreds of black roots, thick as ancient oak trunks, burst from the rubble and braided into a living spiral, hoisting the Queen like a monstrous pedestal toward the castle's ancestral beams.
The dead apathy in her eyes evaporated, replaced by a predatory bloodlust; the marble walls cracked and the pillars crumbled under the gravitational pressure of her energy, but the goddess didn't even blink.
The target hung at the top of the tower.
The bell.
The symbol of truth she would crush with her own hands.
Just below the botanical fury, the resistance fought against gravity.
Sillys shot vertically; the elf wasn't running, she was detonating the air beneath her boot soles, ejecting her own body from rubble to rubble.
Her spear shone in a blinding blue, the winds on her skin burning like red-hot iron.
With every sonic boost, crescents of compressed air severed the thorny roots trying to drag her into the abyss.
And at the base of that vine tower, Laura hunted.
The girl bled from dozens of open wounds, but the pain had been swallowed by a primal fury.
Her silver claws had elongated, tearing through the black wood in a deafening frenzy.
The stench of ozone and hot blood exuded from her pores as she climbed with the savagery of a panther, gutting the very living forest that dared cross her path.
"DON'T LET HER REACH THE TOP!"
Sillys's scream tore her lungs, firing a thick gust to open a path for her ally.
"I WILL BURY THIS DAMNED LEGACY WITH ME!"
Her voice wasn't a shout; it was a seismic roar that bent reality and made the roof groan.
Elfhing's elevation broke through the thick walls and ceilings of her hall, and now she walked in the skies.
Elfhing didn't need to climb the structure.
The goddess dragged the forest itself with her; a sea of black roots and colossal vines erupted from the ruins, braiding into a living, grotesque staircase that swallowed the towers and rose up, tearing through the atmosphere.
The deity ascended on the crest of this botanical tsunami, piercing the thick mantle of illuminated white clouds.
Above the storm, where the air was thin and the sun bathed everything in a frigid, unforgiving light, the colossal Sacred Bell hung from what remained of the main belfry, exposed to the high-altitude winds.
But down below, beneath the cloud layer, the castle's collapse was apocalyptic.
The Queen's ascension had imploded the foundations.
Marble blocks the size of houses, entire stained-glass windows, and iron beams rained over the battlefield like a meteor storm.
Mid-air, defying gravity and ruin, Kanzo was a lethal blur.
The steel of his blade hissed, drawing precise silver arcs that sliced three-ton boulders, reducing them to harmless gravel before they hit the troops.
Crisscrossing the airspace in nosedives, Vandashi intercepted the larger ruins.
His strikes pulverized the heavy masonry in mid-air, keeping the sky breathable amidst the chaos of falling debris.
On the ground, the rain of sharp shrapnel blanketed the earth, but the defense line didn't yield a single millimeter.
Odássio snarled, his musculature expanded to the limit, repelling with brute force and shields the debris that slipped past the aerial defense, intercepting death before it touched the wounded.
Beside him, Arthur was an unshakable monolith, walking in a tomb-like silence, his indecipherable green eyes locked on the destruction crashing from the sky. His imposing figure cast a long shadow that devoured the impact of the stones, erecting a blockade over the remaining warriors.
While the army fought not to be buried down below, the war's climax reached its peak above the clouds.
Sillys and Laura had kept up with the ascension.
The two stood side by side, panting, stepping onto the top of the root staircase suspended in the air.
The freezing high-altitude wind lashed their bloodied faces, and the Sacred Bell was right there in front of them, its dark bronze gleaming under the sun.
The Queen raised her pale hand.
The roots at the summit of the staircase contorted, instantly draining the sparse moisture from the air.
In a fraction of a second, the compressed wood cracked under crushing pressure, fusing in mid-air until it formed a massive siege lance, bristling with thorns the size of longswords.
The thin air vibrated, distorting space around the weapon.
And, with a mere curl of her fingers, the goddess fired the destructive tip straight at the ancestral chains supporting the bell.
The projectile swept through space, obliterating the atmosphere.
It was too fast for Sillys's eyes to even track the trajectory.
But Laura's body needed no thought, only instinct; at the exact moment the lance was fired, the muscles in the assassin's thighs exploded.
She abandoned the root tower, ejecting herself forward on a suicidal collision course.
A red vacuum marked her trajectory through the air as she threw her own chest directly into the deity's line of fire.
The explosion bathed the entire level in a blinding flash of green sap and blood.
Sillys roared in terror, channeling a compact wall of air behind her friend's back an instant before the clash, but it was like trying to stop a hurricane with paper.
The tip of the colossal lance sank into Laura's body; a sickening sound of pulverized ribs swallowed the noise of the castle.
The overwhelming kinetic force ejected her; Laura was ripped from the air like a ragdoll hit by a cannonball.
Her ruined body spun wildly, leaving a cloud of thick blood in the cold air, before violently colliding against the upper masonry and plummeting into the darkness of the destroyed hall below.
Sillys froze in mid-air.
Her blue eyes widened, the scream dying in her dust-choked throat.
Laura's butcher-like sacrifice found its mark.
Laura's body absorbed the annihilating energy of the projectile, deflecting the lance's trajectory millimeters downward.
The solid wood scraped past the supporting chains without shattering them.
All the overwhelming vibration and air displacement crashed directly against the solid bronze rim.
The Sacred Bell swung abruptly.
The ancestral metal creaked at the top of what remained of the tower, groaning under the force of gravity.
The colossal structure tilted against the open sky, the internal pendulum swinging dangerously close to the edge... but the impact never came.
It merely swung, plunged into an agonizing, suspended silence.
The freezing wind above the clouds suddenly died.
The lethal storm, for a single, solemn second, froze the air.
Sillys didn't look toward the dark abyss where Laura's broken body had plummeted.
The elf locked her jaw and tightened both hands around the shaft of her spear until her knuckles cracked.
Hot blood trickled from her torn shoulder, dripping onto the platform of living roots beneath her boots.
Meters away stood her greatest challenge.
Elfhing's face no longer held a single trace of apathy.
The millennial, unshakeable mask had shattered completely, revealing a killing intent so dense it made the thin air even more suffocating.
The fury of having her absolute strike deflected by a pest overflowed from her skin.
The Queen locked her eyes on the only invader left in her path.
Sillys raised her chin, blue energy crackling fiercely around her wounded body.
The elf's tempestuous, rage-filled gaze collided head-on with the deity's lethal void.
Above the clouds, under the unforgiving sun and the deafening silence of the bell, mother and daughter faced each other