Sorry for the late release. With the end of the book drawing near, the chapters become harder to write, but I am going to do my best to ahere to the schedule.
“Even together, they couldn’t touch the dirt on my feet.”
Vulcanos’ voice boomed, his words clearly audible to everyone. It was blatant mockery.
The reaction was as expected.
Not only the face of their leader, but even those of the rank and file behind her turned ugly. When would these elites, led by a genuine Archmage powerhouse, have ever heard someone talk to them like this? Wherever they went, people would greet them with either fear or awe.
But, remembering how their leader had been repelled earlier, nobody dared to act recklessly. That was doubly true for the Archmage herself. Sneak attack or not, she knew best of all how formidable the strength of this newcomer was.
Zeke could see the gears turning behind those eyes as she stared at Vulcanos.
“I will give you a single chance, stranger,” the Archmage said coldly. “Step away, or face the full might of the Legion.”
He realized it then. The woman had not recognized Vulcanos.
It was no wonder. His appearance had changed far too drastically. Though he had already looked mostly human before, the only feature that had actually stayed the same was the color of his skin. Everything else, including the prominent fiery lines that had once been part of his body, was completely different now.
It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that he looked like a completely different person.
Even Zeke, who was extremely familiar with Vulcanos, had been surprised when he first saw him.
Vulcanos snorted, crossing his arms over his chest as he remained standing in front of Zeke like a bulwark.
“Make me.”
The Archmage held his gaze for a moment longer before suddenly bellowing a command.
“Sun Blast protocol. Full output.”
“Understood!”
The troops answered as one. Despite having lost almost half their numbers, their response rang out with even greater force than before.
In one smooth motion, every surviving Mage channeled their fire forward, gathering it over the head of the Archmage. Naturally, the woman didn’t stay idle either, adding even more of her own Magic than last time.
The air warped from the heat. The blood on the ground began to steam, and Zeke felt his half-regrown skin prickle painfully beneath the rising pressure.
But instead of growing larger, the sphere that emerged between her hands was smaller than before. Denser. More compressed.
Zeke’s eyes turned serious as he looked at the spell taking shape. Compared to the earlier attack that had almost taken Vulcanos’s life, this sphere held at least twice the amount of power. The Mages had clearly gone all out.
Zeke glanced at Vulcanos’s side profile, trying to gauge his reaction.
Vulcanos seemed utterly calm. His arms were crossed leisurely, and his face was decidedly unimpressed. It was almost as if he was getting impatient, waiting for his opponents to finally finish their preparations.
Wait.
Wasn’t that exactly what he was doing?
With the speed he had displayed earlier, Vulcanos could have stopped them. Even though the spell only took a few seconds to form, that was more than enough time for somebody of his strength to interrupt them.
Vulcanos was letting them finish on purpose.
Though whether that confidence was rooted in actual strength or merely backed by pride, Zeke couldn’t tell. He knew far too little about newly evolved Progenitors and how much of their power they could wield immediately after their transformation.
Even so, he chose to trust Vulcanos.
The Chimeroi had never let him down.
“Die!”
With a scream, the Archmage released the glowing sphere once more. It was so compressed that it now only had the size of a balled fist, but the light and heat radiating from it made it appear even more dazzling than the sun in the sky.
Vulcanos didn’t move.
He watched the projectile soaring toward him with the same attention one might pay a passing bird.
Only in the last moment, just before it struck his chest, did Vulcanos finally act.
Zeke couldn’t even follow the motion with his eyes. One moment, Vulcanos stood perfectly still. The next, his hand was extended, gripping the spell in midair.
“What…”
Zeke didn’t know who had cried out, but he couldn’t blame them.
The sight defied everything he knew about spellcraft.
Vulcanos, having stopped the spell with one hand, now held the glowing sphere in his palm as if it were nothing more than a candle flame. None of the destructive force within even dared to leak out. He had tamed it in an instant.
Then, as if he hadn’t shocked everybody enough, Vulcanos did something even more outrageous. He closed his hand around the sphere, making it completely disappear behind his clenched fingers.
When he opened his palm again, the sphere had shrunk to the size of a marble.
Vulcanos inspected it, seemingly satisfied with the result, before looking at the Archmage across the field.
The woman’s face had grown pale. When his gaze settled on her, she even flinched. Clearly, not even she was confident in blocking a flame compressed to that degree.
For the first time, Zeke saw the limit of [Feuerkranz].
But Vulcanos merely chuckled.
For a heartbeat, nobody moved.
Then, instead of throwing the spell back, he popped it into his mouth.
The light vanished behind his black teeth.
He chewed once, twice, before swallowing.
And then, nothing.
No explosion. No calamitous release of power. Nothing.
From all appearances, the spell Vulcanos just consumed might as well have been a grape.
For a moment, nobody moved. Nobody even seemed to breathe.
Then, as if he had truly just eaten a fulfilling meal, Vulcanos tilted his head back and let out a contented burp.
“Not bad,” he said, the same smile still tugging at his lips. “Not bad at all.”
“But…”
He allowed the word to hang in the air as he stared at his opponents. Zeke noticed how the light in his eyes changed. That amiable, almost bored expression gave way to something sharper.
The gaze of a predator.
There he was.
The Vulcanos Zeke remembered.
“…that’s far from enough to fill me up,” he continued.
The expressions of several Mages facing him changed. But before they could do anything else, Vulcanos vanished from his spot.
One blink, and he was gone.
The next, he appeared in front of the Archmage, looking down on her. The difference in their sizes made it look like an adult standing before a child.
The woman reacted instantly. Both her arms were already shooting out before her.
“Die, you monster!”
White flame gathered at the palms of her hands. It was the same attack she had attempted to use against Zeke earlier.
However, Vulcanos simply met her palm strikes with his own.
The flame fizzled out against his skin the moment their hands touched.
Vulcanos caught her hands easily, his fingers interlocking with hers like iron shackles.
Despite the precarious situation, there wasn’t a hint of fear on her face. A moment later, her hands simply turned to flames, slipping through Vulcanos’s grasp like water through a sieve. But before the flames could fully escape, Vulcanos’ hand lashed out once more, seemingly grasping at the empty air.
And though it seemed as if he hadn’t caught anything, a shrill scream resounded.
The Archmage materialized again a few steps away from him. And, for the first time since their fight had begun, she looked truly shaken.
“What… are you?” she whispered.
Vulcanos slowly rolled his shoulders, as if loosening stiff muscles. “Hungry.”
The word had barely left his mouth before he charged again.
This time, Zeke managed to catch a hint of movement. Not with his eyes, but with his spatial perception. A line of force moving through the world faster than his exhausted mind could properly follow.
The Archmage reacted instantly, turning half her body to flame. Vulcanos’s hand passed through her shoulder, but instead of emerging empty like before, his fingers closed around the burning substance itself.
The Archmage screamed.
It was the first time Zeke had heard true pain in her voice.
Vulcanos’s hand came away holding a mass of white flame. It writhed between his fingers like a living thing, struggling to return to its source. But Vulcanos simply clenched his fist, compressing it into a glowing ember.
Then he brought it to his mouth and bit down.
The Archmage staggered back.
A chunk of her shoulder was missing.
Not burned away. Not cut apart. Missing.
Even when she tried to reform, the flames refused to return. They were gone. Devoured. Consumed so thoroughly that even her [Feuerkranz] could not call them back.
Zeke felt his breath catch.
He understood then.
Elementalization did not make her invincible to Vulcanos. It made her edible.
Instead of retreating further or planning an attack, the Archmage stood frozen. Her vacant eyes drifted between her missing shoulder and the feasting abomination before her.
Vulcanos gave her no time to recover. The moment he digested the piece of living flame, he charged again. The woman didn’t resist. She only stared, as if her mind had been severed along with her arm.
Instead, the few men immediately behind her stepped forward. These must have been the remaining lieutenants of her squad, the cream of the crop.
“Commander!”
“Run!”
They charged before her, seemingly intending to block Vulcanos with their very bodies if they had to. A three-layered wall of flames sprang up, cutting off Zeke’s view.
But it posed no hindrance to Vulcanos. The moment the Chimeroi approached, the flames bent toward him before vanishing into his skin.
The three defenders came into view again, their faces twisted with shock and disbelief.
“Fuck off,” Vulcanos grunted, sweeping his leg out in a wide arc.
It looked like nothing more than a lazy kick.
The result was anything but.
The first defender burst apart the instant Vulcanos’s leg struck him. The second and third followed a heartbeat later, their bodies torn open by the force that passed through them. Blood and gore scattered across the stone in a grisly rain.
The Archmage, now once again standing completely alone, looked up at Vulcanos. Her eyes were hollow, and her lips kept moving.
“How could an… Why… Who…”
Vulcanos reached her before she could finish. Both his hands clamped around her face.
The mages behind her flinched, bracing themselves for the same violence they had just witnessed. But what followed was far less brutal to look at and far more terrifying to understand.
With a single glance from Vulcanos, her corporeal body burst into flame.
It was her fully elementalized form.
But this time, she had not chosen it.
Zeke understood that much immediately. She was not transforming to escape. Vulcanos was forcing her into the one state where she could no longer resist him at all.
Looking at the inferno before him, Vulcanos inhaled deeply.
The fiery outline of the woman began to unravel. From the crown of her head to the tips of her feet, her entire body flickered once before being drawn into him. By the end of it, not a single trace of the Archmage remained.
The remaining mages stared in silence.
Their lieutenants, elites among elites, had been killed with a single kick. And even their commander, an Archmage of the highest caliber, had been snuffed out like a flickering candle.
Klang.
The sound of metal striking stone rang out as one of the mages at the front dropped to his knees.
“I… I… surrender!”
As if it had been a signal, the others followed one by one. Cries of surrender echoed across the field as dozens of mages began to plead desperately.
Their will had been broken.