The wind howled through the abandoned cabins of Orin.
The silence of the empty village was punctuated only by a distant, constant cacophony: the heavy march of steel boots, the clinking of chainmail, and the muffled shouts of Tsukumo's troops as they relentlessly climbed the mountain slope.
At the epicenter of this brewing storm, two figures stood absolutely motionless, separated by mere steps in the dirt plaza.
Vanki's gaze dropped to Arthur.
"You really thought Tsukumo would bow down, didn't you?" Vanki's voice rumbled, deep and heavy like boulders rolling down a hill.
Arthur let out a sharp breath through his nose.
He released a nasal chuckle—a harsh, dry sound—and took a casual step forward, relaxing his posture.
"Vanki, Vanki..." Arthur sang, cracking his neck from side to side.
"There's no need to pretend I care about all this nonsense you're fighting for anymore."
Arthur's eyes took on a sickly, calculating gleam as they swept over the village ruins.
"Suki and Laura aren't here, and even if they were, it would be too late even for them."
"The plan is almost ready..." He closed his eyes for a brief second, taking a deep breath of the dusty air.
"Just a little longer... I can already feel them coming."
Vanki tilted his head, a low chuckle vibrating within the vastness of his broad chest.
"Still going on about this bullshit plan. I really want to kill you just to watch it all fall apart."
Arthur opened his eyes, his smile widening into something cruel.
"I'll finish you off quickly, Vanki. Then, that bitch of a friend. And Suki..." Arthur gestured vaguely toward the sky.
"...Suki will still be too busy serving as a distraction for Tsukumo. Everything is perfectly calculated."
Arthur dashed forward, and the ground beneath his feet simply detonated, kicking up a curtain of gravel.
He appeared in front of the general in the blink of an eye, his right fist raised and fired like a heavy artillery shell.
Vanki crossed his two massive forearms at face level.
The impact rang out like a church bell plummeting from a tower; the shockwave swept the dust from the plaza and tore fissures of raw energy into the earth around Vanki's boots.
Without breaking his flow, Arthur used the recoil of his own punch to rotate his torso.
The muscles in his back bulged beneath his clothes as he delivered a brutal left hook, burying the blow straight into his opponent's guard.
The colossal force launched the general through the air as if he weighed nothing.
The colossus's body smashed into the stone structure of a house, causing the entire wall to explode into an oppressive cloud of dust and rubble.
From amidst the wreckage, a bestial roar tore through the smoke.
Vanki emerged in a monumental leap, launching himself against gravity. With his arm outstretched, the air hummed violently as his gigantic axe flew toward him, answering its master's call.
Vanki gripped the handle mid-flight with a single hand.
The tendons in his arm popped, and he descended like a meteor, the blade parting the air with a deafening hiss, aimed straight for Arthur's center.
Arthur planted his feet in the dirt and raised his arms in an 'X'.
The axe's edge clashed against his forearms with a blinding flash of sparks. The crushing weight of the blow forced Arthur downward, the earth giving way as his feet sank knee-deep into the hard soil.
Metal tore through the skin, tendons, and muscles of Arthur's arms.
Hot blood spurted, splashing and running down his own face.
But as quickly as the deep gash opened, the flesh hissed, boiling and weaving back together; the fibers reconnected, closing the wound almost instantly.
Arthur smiled, his bloody fingers twitching to grip the axe blade and lock the weapon in place.
He prepared a counterattack, but the general's wartime instincts were faster.
Vanki let go of the handle with his left hand, swiveled his hips with terrifying power, and sank a clean, bare-knuckle punch straight into Arthur's unprotected ribs.
The dull thud of cracking bones echoed across the battlefield, and the sheer force of the punch sent Arthur flying like a ragdoll.
Arthur flew, tearing up the earth, bouncing and shattering rocks in his wake.
He didn't stop until he collided head-on with the vanguard of Tsukumo's troops, who had just marched over the ridge.
The impact was a grotesque display of kinetic force; Arthur's body turned the vanguard into an instant slaughterhouse.
Armor strapped to human bodies crumpled like paper. Severed limbs, viscera, and twisted metal splashed all over the slope, painting the gray stones a dark crimson.
The dust settled slowly, and at the epicenter of the crater of carnage, Arthur stirred.
He rested his palms on what remained of an imperial soldier's torso, which had been nearly split in half.
The man was still convulsing, his eyes wide beneath his helmet, his body pulsing in spasms of extreme agony while blood bubbled from his mouth in wet, desperate gurgles.
Arthur used the man's mutilated chest as leverage to stand up, the sound of the soldier's ribs caving under the pressure of his hands muffled by the groans.
He stared down at the dying man's face with pure disgust, gathered spit, and hocked it right into the center of the blood-cracked visor.
"Trash."
He began to walk out of the ditch of mangled bodies.
Suddenly, the atmospheric pressure plummeted; the ground beneath his boots vibrated at a mind-bending frequency.
A deafening explosion went off far below, to the extreme left of the mountain.
Arthur raised his eyes to the sky, and like a ballistic missile breaching the stratosphere, he saw Suki's silhouette launched into the heavens, tearing through the air at an impossible speed.
Seconds later, the shockwave and secondary wind swept through Orin.
The gust was so violent it whipped Arthur's hair wildly and made the capes of the dead soldiers snap in the air like torn flags.
The sickly smile returned.
He tracked Suki's trajectory as it disappeared into the purple clouds.
"Keep it up, hero," he murmured, his voice dripping with unbridled irony.
Just as he moved to turn back, the sound of boots scraping against stone alerted his senses.
Before he could even turn his head, a long, serrated spear shot out from his blind spot.
The steel pierced Arthur's right cheek, tore his tongue in half, shattered his molars, and exploded out his left cheek, locking his jaw at a repulsive angle.
The soldier responsible trembled from head to toe. He held the spear shaft with both hands, his eyes wide with terror and rage beneath his bloodstained visor.
"Die, you... you worm!" the man stammered, his hot breath visible in the cold air.
"By the command of Lord Tsukumo, I, Private Hank—"
The sentence was never finished.
Arthur's hand shot up in an imperceptible blur, his fingers gripping the soldier's steel helmet as if the armor were made of wet clay.
With a brutal, sluggish squeeze, the metal gave way, and the skull beneath the helmet was crushed with a wet, sharp, nauseating crunch.
Blood, brain matter, and bone splinters spurted violently through the armor's gaps, splattering against Arthur's neck and staining the dirt at his feet.
The lifeless body of the soldier dropped like a sack of rocks.
Arthur shifted his gaze toward the slope; the rest of the platoon, dazed by the crash, were beginning to get back to their feet, their trembling hands gripping twisted swords.
Without any sense of urgency, Arthur grabbed the wooden shaft of the spear impaled through his face.
With a sharp yank, he ripped the bloody blade out from between his own teeth.
The gaping wound smoked.
Before the horrified eyes of the survivors, the muscle fibers in Arthur's face writhed like worms, stitching the flesh together, reconstituting his cheeks and skin in mere seconds.
He spat out a clot of blood, his voice sounding flawless, without the slightest hint of pain.
"You mortals... insignificant, crawling, ugly beings compared to true gods."
His aura began to pulse, distorting the gravity around him.
"You don't even deserve to breathe the same air as us."
Arthur bent his knees, his leg muscles coiling like springs, ready to initiate a one-sided bloodbath.
But the heavens burned.
An incandescent, furious orange trail cut through the atmosphere from the mountain's peak, descending at a direct angle.
It was Vanki.
"WE'RE NOT FINISHED YET, ARE WE, IMMORTAL!!!??"
Vanki's deafening roar descended from the skies, tearing through the very sound of the wind.
When the general slammed into the mountain, it was a seismic event.
The structure of Orin groaned under the impact.
Massive blocks of rock were torn loose and hurled into the air by the force of the collision; a thick wave of dust, tinted by the orange of his crushing energy, swallowed everything.
And, slicing through that dense dust like a colossal predator, Vanki's silhouette advanced with earth-shattering strides.
With every footstep, the ground moaned, boulders reduced to powder beneath the weight of his fury.
His axe was raised high above his head, the blade bathed in the boiling orange aura that surrounded the general, ready to execute his sentence.
With a guttural roar that made the foundations of Orin vibrate, Vanki brought the axe down in a devastating diagonal arc.
The weapon tore through the air with a sharp whistle, carrying enough kinetic force to cleave the mountain slope in half.
The immortal tilted his neck and shifted his shoulders a split second before impact. The cold steel of the blade passed mere millimeters from his nose; the aerodynamic pressure of the swing was enough to slice a thin gash into Arthur's cheek, which sealed shut before the first drop of blood could even form.
The axe buried itself into the soil beside him, detonating the bedrock and sending stone shrapnel flying in all directions.
Seizing the lethal window created by the weapon's inertia, Arthur's right arm shot forward.
The concentrated raw power was so immense that the light and air around his fist bent, creating a spiral-shaped visual distortion that sucked the sound right out of the environment.
"Morokian Technique: Six Hammers."
Six strikes landed in a succession so absurdly furious they sounded like the continuous firing of heavy artillery.
The first and second sank deep into Vanki's abdomen.
The impact knocked the air from the giant's lungs in a violent choke, and the shockwaves of sheer brute force bled out through the general's back, exploding the rocks behind him.
Vanki tried to use his free hand to grab his attacker, but the third and fourth punches collided like living anvils directly against the center of his armored chest.
The sound of ribs as thick as steel trunks cracking echoed loudly.
The colossus's broad chest caved under the pressure, his feet pushed backward, carving two shallow trenches into the hard earth.
The fifth strike was a brutal left hook that found the right side of Vanki's jaw.
The general's head whipped to the side with a nauseating snap, and a spiral of thick blood mixed with spit flew into the air.
His eyes lost focus for a critical second.
Before Vanki's massive frame could topple over, the sixth and final blow found its mark.
Arthur swiveled his hips, planted his boot into the crumbling stone, and launched a devastating uppercut right under the general's chin.
The kinetic energy transfer was so absolute that it lifted Vanki—over ten feet and half a ton of muscle—off the ground, hurling him vertically into the sky like a runaway missile.
The rock beneath Arthur's boots sank into a spiderweb of cracks as he bent his knees and leaped, pursuing his prey.
He closed the distance mid-air in the blink of an eye, overtaking the ascent of Vanki's inert body.
At the apex of the jump, with the dark storm and chaotic sky of Ruitan serving as a grim backdrop for his static figure, Arthur raised his right fist high above his head.
His arm muscles swelled, veins popping and throbbing beneath pale skin, loaded with the promise of total destruction.
Vanki, regaining consciousness in mid-freefall, widened his eyes. With no foothold to dodge, he growled through bloody teeth, crossing his axe over his face and chest in a desperate iron guard, condensing every last drop of his orange aura into a thick shield.
Arthur brought the punch down.
The impact shattered the silence of the battlefield.
When Arthur's pale fist collided with Vanki's axe, time seemed to freeze.
A fraction of a second later, a perfect ring of pure, concussive energy violently expanded from the point of contact, slicing through the clouds above and instantly dissipating all the smoke and dust covering Orin for miles.
Vanki's guard didn't break, but his body couldn't withstand the pressure; he was catapulted back down to the earth.
The general crashed into the ground with the violence of an asteroid, carving out a crater forty meters in diameter.
The mountain rippled like water before completely shattering, swallowing the colossus's body in a sea of pulverized rock and scorched earth.
Arthur landed smoothly on the edge of the newly created abyss without making a single sound, his cold eyes surveying the pit of destruction.
Arthur could still feel Vanki's aura.
*He's still alive. I don't have time for you, bastard.*
Deep down below, the dust took its time to settle, but the debris soon began to shift.
Boulders the size of wagons slid aside, and a colossal hand—trembling but firm—dug its fingers into the fractured stone.
The general stood up, shoving tons of rubble off himself.
Vanki's thick, impenetrable skin now bore deep gashes along his forearms, shoulders, and chest.
Dense, pitch-black, and steaming blood leaked freely from these cracks, staining his musculature and dripping onto the ruined earth with muffled sizzles.
He panted, his chest rising and falling with the harsh wheeze of a damaged bellows.
Vanki raised his blood-soaked face toward the edge of the crater, locking his sights onto Arthur.
"Give up and die, Vanki. Nothing you do is going to help you."
The words had barely left Arthur's mouth when the air inside the crater shifted; the ground began to quake.
An infernal heat suddenly rose, as if Hell itself had opened its maw.
From the center of the depression, a violent column of orange energy erupted skyward, shredding the clouds.
At the crater's edges, solid stone bubbled and melted like wax, running off in incandescent rivers of magma.
The air shivered and warped from the unbearable heat.
In the middle of that inferno, Vanki stood tall, his war axe resting firmly in his right hand.
With a slow, deliberate movement of his hands, incandescent sparks danced around him, swirling and condensing until they formed a new blade—a colossal axe made of pure, orange flame, pulsating with living fury.
"Let me use you one more time, Draekmor," Vanki murmured, his deep voice echoing like an awakening volcano.
At the edge of the crater, Arthur watched in silence.
His body already in high-speed regeneration, he was burning and melting away.
What remained was a tall, skeletal figure, standing still like a statue of death.
The flesh of his face had been completely consumed by Vanki's fire; only a smooth, white skull remained, tilted downward, hollow and motionless.
No eyes. No eyelids.
Only two deep, pitch-black sockets that seemed to suck away all surrounding light.
A slightly parted jaw revealed rows of perfect teeth, gleaming with the reflection of the distant flames.
Even so, Arthur watched.
The tilted skull tracked Vanki's every movement down below, while the hot wind made tiny ashes dance around the exposed bone.
The fire reflected off the smooth surfaces of the bone, casting dancing shadows inside the empty sockets.
There was no expression, just that cold, silent, and relentless presence of a skull observing from atop the melted rim, like a reaper waiting for the perfect moment.
The oppressive heat vanished with a dry crack, as if the world had lost its breath.
Vanki spun both axes in a synchronized motion, a technique and maneuver that severed the energy pillar, dissipating his orange aura and swallowing the flames into a sudden vacuum.
The silence that returned to the crater was absolute, broken only by the sizzling of burnt flesh on Vanki's right hand, where faint spirals of smoke drifted upward, betraying the cost of that invocation.
Up above, time seemed to bend to accommodate the return of Arthur's form.
The skull began to fill with a macabre dance of regenerative tissues and fluids.
Red muscle fibers rapidly wove themselves over the exposed bone, pulsating at a feverish rhythm, while the skin stretched and sealed, healing as if it had never been scythed away.
The fibers of his clothing manifested out of thin air, weaving over his body as he regained volume, shape, and ultimately, the semblance of life.
Vanki kept his eyes locked on the silhouette knitting itself back together.
The smoke still escaping from his hand was the only remaining trace of the fury that had just consumed the terrain, drawing a static contrast between the exhausted destroyer and the immortal who, right before his eyes, was rewriting himself for the next assault.