The princess moved with unhurried confidence, each step deliberate and regal, while Lance and Rakh trailed far enough behind to speak freely.
Rakh leaned close, his voice barely above a whisper. "Is it really wise to trust this girl?"
"It's not about trust," Lance murmured back. "It's about utility. She'll serve as our guide to the kingdom — and from there, we might find a shorter route to the Floating Isles."
Rakh let out a quiet, sardonic laugh. "Fair enough.
Do as you please. We're the strongest ones here anyway."
The princess spun around, eyes blazing.
"Do you two genuinely believe I can't hear your whispering and your little jokes?" Her voice was sharp — the tone of someone who had never once been ignored without consequence.
Lance blinked at her with a perfectly crafted expression of innocent confusion. "I'm not sure what you're referring to. We're simply travelers who happen to be walking the same road."
Before she could fire back, the phoenix released a sound that cut through every other noise in the forest — not a battle cry, but something rawer. Pure, animal terror.
Rakh raised an eyebrow. "What's wrong with your bird? Has it lost its mind?"
He never finished the thought.
A roar detonated through the trees. Not sound — force. The shockwave hit the ground first, then everything standing on it. All three of them were thrown off their feet. Lance pushed himself upright and looked up.
What he saw made his blood run cold.
A Fire Lion. Massive — not in the way large predators were massive, but in the way natural disasters were massive. Its flames didn't flicker or dance. They melted the air itself, warping the space around the creature into shimmering, lethal heat.
Rakh didn't waste a breath. He snapped back to his full size and hurled a bolt of lightning directly at the beast.
The lion exhaled.
The collision between lightning and fire produced an explosion that sent a wall of scorching heat crashing outward in every direction.
"Lance!" Rakh roared through the scorching air. "Do something!"
Lance flung his chains forward, then his white binding threads — anything to pin the creature down. The result was immediate and humiliating. The moment his chains entered the lion's aura, they dissolved. No resistance, no impact. They simply ceased to exist before they could make contact.
"This fight is suicide," Lance thought, watching his weapon turn to ash in real time.
High above, the princess had mounted her phoenix and gained altitude. "RETREAT!" she screamed down at them. "This creature is beyond our reach — there's nothing to be gained from engaging it!"
Lance didn't move toward retreat.
"Rakh!" he bellowed. "Keep it distracted — hit it with everything you've got!"
As Rakh surged forward and unleashed a relentless barrage of lightning, Lance sprinted backward, summoning all three of his Mist Clones to encircle the beast. He pulled his black bow from nothing, and in a decision that sat somewhere between desperation and calculated risk, he made the call.
Sacrifice — Soul One.
He felt the soul's energy surge through his arm like a current — electric, consuming, alive. He shifted into the clone positioned on the lion's right flank and released the arrow. It had been charged with enough force to split a mountain.
The lion's hide registered it as a scratch.
Lance stared.
...A scratch?
The lion gave him no time to process the implications. It wheeled on him instantly, launching a sphere of roaring fire that crashed into Lance's position with the force of a collapsing wall. The impact hurled him through the air, trailing flame, and he hit the ground hard, burning, bleeding.
Rakh saw the blood from across the battlefield.
Something in him snapped.
He abandoned restraint entirely, letting his body expand with violent force back into his original form — King of Thunder, wounds be damned. The forest shook. The very sky above seemed to flinch as Rakh collided with the Fire Lion in a clash of raw, primal power — thunder against fire, neither giving an inch. The exchange shook the earth like two tectonic forces grinding against each other.
Then Rakh landed a blow that sent the lion skidding backward — and in that brief, precious window, he saw it.
A wound. Deep, ragged, and old. Unhealed flesh along the creature's underbelly that no fire could reach and no pride could conceal.
"GET UP, LANCE!" Rakh's voice split the air. "I FOUND THE WEAKNESS — THE KILL POINT!"
Lance dragged himself upright. Every bone in his body registered a complaint. Without hesitating, he sacrificed his second collected soul — channeling the energy into accelerating his body's recovery. It wasn't healing, not exactly, but it was enough to get him moving.
He pushed toward Rakh, breathless. "What's the plan?"
Rakh indicated with a sweep of his wing. "The belly. That old wound — it never closed. That's where you end this."
"Give me the opening," Lance said. "I'll handle the rest."
The battle resumed.
Rakh and the Fire Lion clashed again — a catastrophic, almost perfectly matched exchange that shook the canopy above into a storm of falling leaves and shattered branches. While they traded blows, Lance summoned two Mist Clones and shifted to the creature's left side. He sacrificed two more souls, funneling their power into his arrows' penetration, and opened up with a relentless long-range assault — not to wound, but to disorient. To scatter the lion's focus. To make it feel pressure from every direction while it watched for the killing blow from none of them.
The third clone, he held back. Hidden. Waiting.
Then — the moment arrived.
Rakh seized the Fire Lion by brute force and wrenched it off the ground. The creature thrashed wildly, half a mountain of fire and fury hanging suspended in the air.
"NOW!"
Lance's chains erupted from both hands and clamped around the lion's jaws — sealing them shut, cutting off any chance of a retaliatory fireball. In the same instant, he launched his third clone directly beneath the suspended beast.
He shifted into it.
His bow dissolved. His black flame sword materialized in its place.
Lance drove it upward — a single, committed stroke — and opened the Fire Lion's belly from end to end.
The weight of the creature came down with him.
Lance hit the ground and didn't get back up immediately. The Fire Lion crashed beside him, its fury extinguished — just an enormous, motionless mass of cooling fire.
Rakh shrank back to his smaller form, landing heavily, sides heaving. "We survived that hellscape by the skin of our teeth."
Lance laughed — a dry, humorless sound. "Hell? Hell hasn't started yet."
Rakh looked at him with open bewilderment. "You are genuinely cursed, you know that?" Then he noticed the direction of Lance's gaze. "...Why are you staring at the corpse like that?"
Something flickered in Lance's eyes. Dark. Calculating.
"Do you think this lion would make a good companion?"
Rakh's expression flatlined. "...You want to enslave its soul as well?"
Lance was already speaking the incantation.
"Between Worlds."
The gateway split open. He directed his chains to haul the massive carcass through. Rakh helped drag it, muttering under his breath the entire way. "Why are we bringing the body? You'll be facing its spirit on the other side regardless!"
Lance said nothing. His plan was operating on a level beyond the obvious.
They crossed into the strange world and, oppressive landscape. Within minutes, it worked — the Fire Lion's spirit materialized, twice as savage and twice as enormous as the creature had been in life, stripped of everything except pure, concentrated aggression.
What followed was an attrition war. Not a battle — a war of exhaustion, of grinding every last reserve down to nothing. Lance and Rakh threw everything they had at the spirit in relentless, overlapping waves. The Void's dark sky above them pulsed with the energy of the exchange.
But in the end, Lance broke it.
He didn't destroy it. He didn't scatter it.
He crushed its will — completely, irrevocably — and held the glowing, submissive soul in his trembling fist
.
Lance lay flat on the cold ground of the Void, utterly hollowed out. His hand shook around the captured soul.
"When," Rakh said, patience thoroughly depleted, "are we leaving this graveyard?"
Lance smiled. It was a strange smile — too calm for someone who had just fought a god.
"Not yet. I want to try one last thing." He paused. "I want to bring it back."
Rakh stared at him. Then stared harder. "You might be powerful, Lance, but resurrection is beyond the domain of the living. Don't toy with the laws of death."
Lance pulled up the System instead of arguing.
[ Resurrection System ]
Requirements: Target soul and significant sacrifice of collected souls and physical energy proportional to the creature's tier.
Warning: Failure may result in the user's soul fracturing.
Lance approached the lion's massive, silent form. He pressed his palm flat against the cold fur of its chest — and without ceremony, shattered every soul crystal he had left in reserve. All of them. Everything.
The effect was immediate and savage.
He felt it from the inside first — a sensation like his muscles being peeled from his bones in slow motion. His scream tore through the Void's heavy silence and didn't stop until it had nowhere left to go.
Rakh watched, jaw tight, as black spiritual energy poured from Lance's hand in molten rivers, flooding into the dead lion's body. The flow looked wrong — too much, too fast, the kind of expenditure that didn't leave room for survival.
Then the surge came.
An explosion of spiritual force detonated outward from the lion's chest, and the shockwave sent Lance flying. Rakh launched himself into the air and caught him before he could shatter against the rocks — and held him there, looking down at a face the color of bleached bone.
Lance was unconscious.
Rakh lowered him to the ground and turned to the carcass. Still. Silent. Unmoved.
He exhaled bitterly. All of that — for nothing. He nearly killed himself for nothing.
Then the lion opened its eyes.
Not amber. Not burning. Not furious.
Gold.
Quiet, deep, and utterly at peace.
The creature rose with the slow dignity of something ancient and unhurried. It crossed the space between them in three measured steps — and sat beside Lance's unconscious body.
Not as a predator. As a guardian.
Rakh understood then what Lance had actually done. He hadn't resurrected a monster.
He had created something loyal.
A long time passed before Lance's eyes opened.
The first thing he registered was warmth — the deep, radiating heat of the lion's fur pressed against his side. He reached out weakly and rested his hand on the creature's great head. The System responded:
[ Resurrection: 1 / 16 ]
"You're awake." Rakh's voice cut through his haze with pointed relief that barely disguised genuine alarm. "Do you have any idea how close to the edge you actually were, you reckless idiot?"
"Not interested in a lecture right now, Rakh," Lance rasped. His voice sounded like something dragged across gravel. "Let's just get out of here."
"Can you even walk?" Rakh asked — and for once, the sharp edges were gone from his tone.
Lance looked at the lion beside him.
"Walk?" The corner of his mouth curved upward despite everything. "I just built myself a mount that doesn't know the meaning of exhaustion."
He hauled himself onto the Fire Lion's back, and the beast rose without complaint — steady, powerful, and utterly silent. They passed back through the gateway into the living world.
Rakh landed beside them and immediately swept the surrounding area with his gaze. His expression shifted.
"That princess," he said flatly. "She bolted the moment the real fight started. I knew she was dead weight from the beginning."
Lance leaned against the lion's warm flank, eyes still half-closed. "It doesn't matter. Her abilities — and her phoenix's — revolve entirely around fire. Against that lion, she would have been a liability, not an asset. We're better positioned without her."
Rakh considered this. "So. Where to now?"
Lance exhaled slowly and let his eyes drift shut, beginning the quiet work of reclaiming what strength remained.
"We continue toward the kingdom. There have to be ogre populations somewhere along the route — I need to harvest souls. My reserves are empty and my core needs rebuilding from the ground up."
Rakh gave a single, resolute nod.
"Then the harvest begins."