The mud outside the Whispering Hollows was boiling.
Ignis dragged his heavy boots through the bubbling slag, his chest heaving with every ragged breath.
His lungs felt like they were packed with hot ash.
"Die, Tamaskrit scum!" an Elven swordsman screamed, dropping from the high roots with his blade aimed directly at Ignis's neck.
Ignis didn't even look up.
He sidestepped with a sloppy, exhausted pivot.
He didn't swing the Crimson Blade. He simply raised his left gauntlet and grabbed the screaming Elf by the throat mid-air.
Sizzle.
The smell of cooking meat instantly choked the air.
The Elf didn't even have time to shriek as the superheated plasma radiating from Ignis's armor boiled his vocal cords.
Ignis tossed the smoking corpse into the mud like a discarded rag.
He gripped his katana with both hands, his crimson eyes burning through his cracked visor.
Dozens of Elven reinforcements were pouring out from the flanks, desperate to crush the Tamaskrit vanguard before they could regroup.
"Is that all you have?" Ignis rasped, his voice a low, mechanical growl.
He swept the Crimson Blade in a wide, horizontal arc.
A wave of superheated thermal energy tore across the wet earth, instantly vaporizing the rain and slicing through the front line of Elven shields.
Steel melted into slag. Bone turned to ash.
But there were too many.
An Elven spear managed to slip past his guard, the enchanted tip scraping violently against his ribs.
Ignis grunted, stumbling backward.
Before the spearman could pull back for a second thrust, the atmosphere around got veiled in absolute darkness.
The spearman froze.
The shadows clinging to the Elf's boots suddenly expanded, stretching upward like hungry, pitch-black tentacles.
They wrapped around the soldier's legs, pulling him violently downward into the solid earth.
The Elf shrieked, clawing at the mud, but he didn't sink into the ground. He sank into the void.
In two seconds, he was completely gone. Not a single drop of blood remained.
Ignis turned his head.
Malakor was walking onto the battlefield.
The Prince of Shadows was not running. He was not assuming a combat stance.
He was just walking.
Half of his face was veiled in a suffocating, light-eating darkness.
The Elven soldiers closest to him paused, their instincts screaming at them to run.
"Kill him!" a commander yelled, though his voice cracked with pure terror.
Five Elven infantrymen lunged at Malakor simultaneously, their spears thrusting directly at his chest.
Malakor didn't dodge.
The spears struck his dark armor and simply... disappeared.
The enchanted wood and steel didn't break. They were swallowed by the absolute void radiating from his body.
The Elves stumbled forward, off-balance from the lack of resistance.
Malakor reached out with his darkness-shrouded hand.
He grabbed the nearest Elf by the face.
There was no sound of cracking bone. There was no blood.
The Elf's head simply ceased to exist.
Malakor dropped the limp, headless body into the mud and kept walking toward the gates.
"What the hell is that?" an Elven archer gasped, completely dropping his bow.
"That's my brother," a raspy, exhausted voice called out from behind them.
The archers turned.
Valerius was standing on the edge of a crater, looking like he had been dragged through a meat grinder.
His armor was scorched black. He was leaning heavily on a discarded Elven spear just to stay upright.
He didn't have enough mana left in his core to cast a single spark.
"You look like hell, Prince," an Elven swordsman sneered, raising his blade to execute the defenseless boy.
Valerius flashed a bloody, bruised grin.
"You should see the other guy."
Valerius kicked the mud with his boot, unearthing a small, highly condensed cluster of dormant electro-mites he had dropped during his fight with Durok.
He slammed the butt of the stolen Elven spear directly onto the mites.
The kinetic impact triggered the dormant static charge.
BZZZZZT!
A violent, localized explosion of high-voltage electricity erupted directly beneath the Elven swordsman's feet.
The Elf was thrown ten feet into the air, his nervous system completely fried before he hit the ground.
Valerius coughed up a glob of blood, leaning back on the spear.
"I told you," Valerius muttered to himself. "I am a treacherous bastard."
Inside the Whispering Hollows, the massacre had escalated into a siege.
The grand causeway was slick with Elven blood.
Aurelius was a walking nightmare.
His dark mantle armor was drenched in crimson. His broadsword was coated in a thick, sticky layer of gore.
He had carved through three lines of the Elven vanguard, but the sheer numbers were beginning to compress the space around him.
"Bring down the beasts!" an Elven commander roared from a safe distance near the back.
The Elven infantry aggressively parted down the middle, scrambling over their own dead to clear a path.
The ground began to shake.
It wasn't a localized tremor. It was the heavy, rhythmic pounding of massive, iron-shod hooves.
Three colossal war rhinos charged down the polished marble causeway.
These weren't the grotesque flesh-amalgamations Melodius had created.
These were the pride of the Athervale military—beasts bred for centuries, standing fifteen feet tall at the shoulder, covered in thick plates of enchanted steel armor.
Their massive, jagged horns were leveled directly at Aurelius's chest.
They were a moving wall of absolute, unstoppable kinetic force.
Aurelius stopped walking.
He didn't retreat. He didn't look for cover.
He planted his heavy iron boots firmly on the slick, blood-stained marble.
He tightened his grip on his broadsword, bringing the massive weapon back over his right shoulder.
The first rhino closed the gap, lowering its head to impale him.
Aurelius didn't swing the sword.
He dropped his shoulder and launched his entire body weight forward, slamming his armored elbow directly into the side of the rhino's steel-plated head.
BANG!
The sound was like a cannon detonating inside a cavern.
The sheer kinetic mass of the Dark Mantle armor colliding with the charging beast instantly shattered the rhino's skull beneath its steel plating.
The massive beast's momentum carried it forward, but its legs collapsed, sending it sliding aggressively across the marble in a screech of tearing metal.
The second rhino was right behind it.
Aurelius pivoted on his heel, using the momentum of his previous strike to swing the heavy broadsword in a brutal, upward arc.
BANG!
The enchanted steel blade cleaved cleanly through the thick iron horn of the second rhino.
The blade didn't stop. It continued its upward trajectory, biting through the beast's thick hide and slicing directly into its brain.
Aurelius ripped the sword out, stepping to the side as the massive carcass crashed to the ground, shaking the very roots of the Hollows.
The third rhino hesitated.
The beast's animal instincts finally overrode its training. It skidded on the bloody marble, trying to turn away from the terrifying black knight.
Aurelius didn't let it.
He stepped forward, grabbing the thick, steel-plated reins attached to the rhino's jaw.
He yanked downward with terrifying, inhuman strength, forcing the beast's massive head to the floor.
He raised his heavy iron boot and brought it down directly onto the rhino's neck.
CRUNCH.
The spine snapped instantly.
Aurelius stood amidst the massive, twitching carcasses.
He was breathing heavily, his chest rising and falling beneath his dark armor.
"He... he stopped the rhinos..." an Elven mage whispered, dropping his staff in absolute, paralyzing disbelief. "He stopped a full charge."
Aurelius slowly lifted his golden eyes.
He looked over the remaining Elven defenders. They were trembling. Some were backing away.
At the far end of the courtyard, sitting on a chunk of obsidian rubble, Melodius was still playing his bone lyre.
Pluck. Thrum.
The sweet, melodic tune echoed over the corpses.
Melodius wasn't looking at the dead rhinos. He was staring directly at Aurelius, his void-like eyes completely empty of sanity, a wide, broken smile plastered across his face.
Aurelius gripped his broadsword.
He stepped over the massive corpse of the third rhino.
"Mages! Cast! Cast everything you have!" the commander screamed, his voice cracking hysterically.
Dozens of elite Elven mages raised their staffs simultaneously.
The air above the causeway warped and twisted.
A massive, hyper-condensed sphere of magical gravity materialized directly above Aurelius, pressing down with the weight of a mountain.
The marble beneath Aurelius's boots instantly shattered into dust.
He felt the crushing pressure force his shoulders down. His knees bent slightly under the impossible weight.
"Yes! Crush him!" the commander roared.
Aurelius gritted his teeth.
The Dark Mantle armor groaned, absorbing the crushing kinetic load of the gravity spell.
He slowly raised his head.
His golden eyes burned through the dark visor.
Aurelius didn't fall to his knees. He didn't collapse.
He forced his right leg up, the servos and enchanted metal screaming against the pressure.
He took a step forward.
The Elven mages gasped, their faces turning pale as they pushed every ounce of mana they had into the spell.
Aurelius took another step.
Clank.
He was walking through the gravity well.
He was slow, his movements heavy and deliberate, but he was completely unstoppable.
He dragged his broadsword behind him, carving a deep, jagged trench through the shattered marble.
SCREEEEECH.
The screeching sound of the steel drowned out the chanting of the mages.
Melodius stopped playing.
The bard lowered his bone lyre, his psychotic smile fading slightly into a look of genuine, childlike awe.
Aurelius cleared the gravity well.
"I hate mages".