Ugh!
Valerius let out a guttural, wet groan as the air was violently forced from his lungs.
Durok's massive fist buried itself deep into the young Prince's stomach, lifting him inches off the mud.
Smack!
Durok drove a second, punishing blow across Valerius's jaw.
The Prince gasped, choking on his own saliva before violently vomiting a mixture of bile and dark blood onto the trampled earth.
His violet visor flickered erratically, mirroring the erratic, panicked beating of his heart.
"Such a filthy little Prince of Thunder?" Durok mocked, a twisted, feral grin exposing his rotting teeth.
His massive, calloused hand wrapped around the reinforced steel of Valerius's helmet, squeezing with bone-crushing force.
"More like the Prince of Clownery."
Valerius wailed in pure, blinding agony as the metal began to groan and buckle against his temples.
With a brutal twist, Durok wrenched Valerius's head to the side, forcing him to look out over the burning, chaotic battlefield.
"Look at them. Look at your pathetic, filthy humans," Durok sneered, his hot, putrid breath fogging Valerius's cracked visor.
"These are merely puppets controlled by your father—or whoever the lowlife your current emperor is."
Durok's eyes, devoid of any humanity, burned with ancient hatred.
"I always warned my cohort that we should have enslaved you humans thousands of years ago. You were weak. Inferior to us Elves."
"Your ancestors were mere insects who sought our alliance to protect themselves from the savage demi-humans and the Demon Lord who ravaged your lands."
Durok tightened his grip, the metal of the helmet whining.
"And now, you gremlins have the audacity to attack us on our sacred lunar night? When we renew our souls and are completely defenseless?"
"Yet you failed miserably. Look at how pathetic your steel is against our magic. Look at how insignificant human lives are."
To emphasize his point, Durok casually reached out his free hand.
He grabbed a Tamaskritian soldier—who was desperately fighting an Elven vanguard—by the back of the neck.
CRACK.
With a sickening, casual flick of his wrist, Durok snapped the soldier's neck like a dry twig.
He tossed the limp, lifeless body into the mud as if disposing of worthless trash.
"You... you bastard," Valerius spat. Blood bubbled between his gritted teeth.
Sparks of violent, untamed electricity began to hiss and pop across his dented armor.
His violet eyes pierced through the cracked visor, meeting Durok's gaze with a defiant, unbreakable smirk.
"You are the one to tell us that we are puppets?" Valerius coughed, a bloody laugh escaping his chest.
"Meanwhile, you, the mighty Unseen Four, were kept hidden deep within the roots of the Whispering Hollow."
"Hidden from the eyes of the very kingdom you laid the foundation for thousands of years ago."
Valerius's voice rose, vibrating with raw, electric defiance.
"You four became ghosts while still alive. You were kept in suspended animation, locked away in cryo-chambers near absolute zero."
"You were treated like liabilities, forced into isolation, just to be woken up millennia later to fight for an empire that doesn't even recognize you anymore!"
"We might be insignificant to you in strength, but at least we fight for an empire that remembers us as its heroes!"
"If we die, we die immortalized as martyrs. But you? You were forgotten by the very people you sacrificed everything for!"
Durok froze.
For a fraction of a second, the brute's feral rage faltered, replaced by a deep, hollow ripple of doubt.
The truth hit harder than a physical blow.
"You brat!" Durok roared, his fury erupting to mask his insecurity.
He tossed Valerius like a broken ragdoll.
Valerius skipped across the churned earth, slamming spine-first into a thick, petrified canopy root.
The sheer force of the impact caused the massive root to splinter and collapse, burying the Prince in debris.
"Ouch... that hurt like hell," Valerius groaned.
His entire skeleton felt as though it had been violently vibrated apart.
His helmet, completely ruined by Durok's grip, fell away into the mud.
Valerius's pale face was exposed to the biting wind—bruised, bloodied, and battered.
Blood trickled steadily from his nose, and his left eye was visibly swollen shut from the concussive trauma.
Coughing, he forced himself up to one knee, hurling three high-voltage orbs of pure electricity directly at the approaching giant.
BZZZT!
The orbs struck Durok's chest, but the massive Half-Ape, Half-Elf hybrid didn't even flinch.
His thick, earthen aura grounded the violent currents instantly.
Durok swatted the remaining electrical arcs away as if they were annoying mosquitoes.
The deflected voltage slammed into the mud, violently electrocuting soldiers from both armies who were unfortunate enough to be standing nearby.
Durok kept walking, his heavy footfalls shaking the earth.
His inhuman eyes locked onto the slumped form of Valerius.
The giant towered over the young Prince, clasping both of his massive, boulder-like fists together and raising them high into the rain-soaked sky, preparing to flatten Valerius into a bloody paste.
"...Oh shit," Valerius cursed, his remaining eye widening.
BOOM!!!
A deafening sonic boom ruptured the air a few hundred yards away, generating a shockwave so powerful it knocked the surrounding soldiers clean off their feet.
Aurelius and Vaelin clashed.
Vaelin, manipulating the kinetic density of the air itself, made fighting him a physical nightmare.
For Aurelius, every swing of his massive broadsword felt like trying to cleave through an ocean of thick, suffocating syrup.
Clank!
The tip of Vaelin's ethereal blade scraped violently across the breastplate of Aurelius's Dark Mantle armor, emitting a screeching, ear-splitting slide of metal on metal.
"Oh my, oh my," Vaelin mocked, floating inches above the ground.
"The Crown Prince of Tamaskrit can't even land a hit on an old man like me? Not so proud now, huh?"
Vaelin was actively trying to evoke a reaction, to find a crack in the Crown Prince's legendary stoicism.
But Aurelius remained a fortress of absolute calm, completely ignoring the taunts.
Frustrated by the silence, Vaelin's eyes grew wild and fanatic.
He lunged forward, his strikes becoming erratic and lightning-fast as he used his authority over kinetic density to multiply his own physical speed.
"You Tamaskritian curs! Blood-sucking leeches of the wasteland!" Vaelin screamed, his maniacal laughter piercing the din of battle.
Aurelius held his ground, shifting his broadsword defensively to absorb the brunt of the storm, allowing Vaelin to tire himself out.
"Pathetic! You are all pathetic losers!" Vaelin spat, his red eyes burning with madness as he drove a heavy strike into Aurelius's shoulder guard, denting the black metal.
"Nothing more than roaches! Just like thousands of years ago when our foolish Emperor took pity on you locusts and formed an alliance!"
"He chose humans above his best warriors! He froze us in the depths of the Whispering Hollow, and now you humans show your true colors!"
"You ungrateful vermin!"
They disengaged for a split second, circling one another like apex predators in the blood-soaked mud.
Then, Aurelius stopped.
He opened his gauntleted hands.
THUD.
The heavy, legendary broadsword hit the earth, sinking inches into the mud.
Vaelin paused, hovering in mid-air, entirely thrown off by the gesture.
"Aww... is the Crown Prince finally going to surrender?" Vaelin purred mockingly, though a sliver of unease crept into his voice.
Aurelius remained perfectly silent.
He reached up, grasped the sides of his dark, horned helm, and pulled it completely off his head.
For the first time on this battlefield, his face was bathed in the pale light of the broken sky.
The cold moonlight illuminated his pale face and the sharp jawline of his cold, aristocratic features.
But it was his eyes that made Vaelin's breath catch in his throat.
They were a brilliant, piercing gold, shining with a strange, terrifying intensity that seemed to promise absolute, inescapable death.
"Oh... what is this?" Vaelin forced a laugh, masking the sudden chill running down his spine.
"A trick to persuade me with your handsome face? Well, I am not interested in men."
Aurelius didn't blink.
He simply began to walk forward.
Slow, calm, measured steps directly toward the floating Elven warlord.
"Are you out of your mind, you insolent fool?!" Vaelin shrieked, his unease morphing into genuine panic.
"I can literally slice your face off without your helmet!"
Aurelius didn't flinch. He didn't break stride.
Infuriated and terrified by the Crown Prince's utter lack of fear, Vaelin charged.
He funneled all his kinetic authority into a single, blindingly fast horizontal slash aimed directly at Aurelius's exposed neck.
He fell right into the trap.
As the blade closed the final inch, Aurelius leaned forward.
With a sickening, metallic crunch, Aurelius caught the ethereal blade directly between his teeth.
Vaelin's eyes blew wide in absolute shock.
He tried to pull the sword back, but Aurelius bit down with the force of a hydraulic press, shattering the mystical blade into a shower of harmless, glowing crumbs.
Vaelin had made a fatal miscalculation.
By increasing the kinetic density around Aurelius to slow him down, he had inadvertently made the Crown Prince's body virtually indestructible—slow, but carrying the immovable mass of a mountain.
Defenseless and completely off-balance, Vaelin staggered backward.
Aurelius didn't use a weapon.
He simply reached out with one massive, armored hand.
A horrific, wet tearing sound echoed over the chaotic battlefield, followed immediately by the desperate, bubbling screams of the Elven warlord.
Aurelius, his golden eyes completely dead and apathetic, coldly and cleanly tore Vaelin's head from his shoulders with his bare hands.
A fountain of hot, crimson blood erupted from the stump, splashing across the mud and painting the pale, aristocratic face of the Crown Prince.
Aurelius dropped the severed head into the dirt, not even bothering to wipe the blood from his cheek.
WHACK!
Durok's fists slammed into the earth with the force of a meteor, sending a localized earthquake rippling through the roots.
Valerius rolled desperately to the side, mud splashing across his face as he narrowly escaped being flattened into a human pancake.
"Come here, you little brat!" Durok roared, turning his massive bulk as Valerius used a burst of his unnatural speed to blur right through the giant's legs.
But this time, Valerius wasn't just running blindly.
He was laying a trap.
Valerius funneled a massive portion of his remaining mana into his boots, becoming a streak of violet light.
He zipped around Durok in erratic, jagged patterns, intentionally making the giant thrash, stomp, and pound the ground in a blind, furious rage.
Valerius had learned a painful lesson while being beaten half to death: Durok was heavily armored with obsidian earth, but his massive, apelike palms and the soles of his feet were completely exposed flesh.
As Valerius blurred past, he casually dropped hundreds of tiny, highly condensed "electro-mites"—microscopic charges of static electricity—across the mud.
Every time Durok stomped or slammed his fists down, the mites clung to his bare skin like invisible, parasitic ticks.
When Durok finally paused, his chest heaving with exhaustion from chasing the lightning-fast Prince, Valerius skidded to a halt.
"Checkmate."
Valerius snapped his fingers.
AHHHHH!!!
Durok let out a deafening, agonizing groan as thousands of electro-mites detonated simultaneously.
A high-voltage web of violet electricity surged directly into the exposed nerve endings of the giant's palms and soles, bypassing his earthen armor completely.
"What... what did you do, you little—"
Before Durok could finish, Valerius spiked the voltage.
Durok shrieked an inhuman wail, his massive muscles locking up entirely.
The brute fell to his knees, completely paralyzed by the localized electrical overload.
"Fight with honor... not with tricks... you brat!" Durok spat, his jaw trembling violently from the current.
Valerius stood up straight, wiping a mix of blood and mud from his chin.
A wicked, arrogant laugh escaped his lips, echoing sharply across the battlefield.
"Well, I would have fought fairly as a Prince," Valerius said, a feral, blood-stained grin stretching across his bruised face.
"But sadly, I am a treacherous bastard."
Valerius closed his remaining eye.
He dug deep into his core, tapping into the very last, dangerous reserves of his mana.
His body began to glow.
Violent, blinding currents of violet electricity whipped around him, turning the immediate atmosphere into a localized thunderstorm.
The air smelled sharply of ozone and burning oxygen.
When Valerius opened his eyes, they were no longer just violet—they were emanating pure, crackling Tesla coils of energy.
The ground beneath his boots shattered as he launched himself forward.
His usual unnatural speed looked like a casual stroll compared to this.
He was a living lightning bolt.
He closed the distance in a microsecond, launching himself high into the air above the paralyzed giant, pulling his glowing, overcharged fist back.
Durok's inhuman eyes widened in absolute, paralyzing terror as the sky above him turned a blinding, apocalyptic purple.
"ZEUS..." Valerius screamed, his voice harmonizing with the deafening crack of a thunderbolt.
"SMASSH!!!!!"