"Oh my head! I missed you so much! Where did you go?!"
Northern released his hold on the Chaos Prince, scowling.
"Stop yelling like I vanished for days."
Chaos Prince shook his head vigorously.
"One minute without you on this battlefield feels like ten days. Do you have any idea how much a mad punch hurts? It stretches your days, elongates the pain, and compresses it into one single moment. Northern, it takes an eternity to finish feeling the agony of one blow, I tell you!"
Northern forced a smile.
"Trust me. I know exactly what it feels like."
He shifted his gaze to Kryos, who stood motionless on the ground.
"So... discover anything useful while battling him?"
The Chaos Prince pondered for a moment or two, then suddenly his eyes widened.
"Yes! Apparently, he’s supposed to be weakened right now, but amazingly I haven’t been able to land a single hit."
Northern frowned.
"And that’s... useful how?"
The Chaos Prince shrugged.
"It suggests the wise decision would be to flee."
Northern’s frown deepened as he looked at Kryos, who was also watching him.
"I’m not running away."
The Chaos Prince hung his head like a sulking child.
"I know... you’re quite determined to die..."
The Chaos Prince suddenly narrowed his eyes and studied Northern.
"I don’t understand—why are you so desperate to protect a world that isn’t even real?"
Northern met his gaze, expression ice-cold.
"There are real people living in it. And some of those people are precious to me. I would burn the world for them... and I’ll save a burning world, as long as they’re in it."
The Chaos Prince’s eyes lit up as an idea struck him.
"Then we can just take them away! Right?!"
Northern kept his eyes fixed on the Origin of Chaos, answering with mild contempt.
"That would be... inconvenient."
The Chaos Prince shook his head and sighed.
"You’re a very peculiar and stubborn person."
He raised his fist for a bump.
"...well, here’s to getting our asses handed to us in the most gruesome manner possible."
Northern eyed the fist bump, his expression twisting in distaste.
"I’m not getting my ass handed to me. I’ll be doing the handing."
He ignored the Chaos Prince and plunged downward with lethal speed. The faster he descended, the more velocity he gained as he hurtled down at that terrifying pace. Simultaneously, thousands of comets bathed the entire atmosphere in their glow.
It resembled twilight.
Chaos Prince surveyed the scene with trembling lips. He could feel the searing heat embracing him like a second skin.
It was mesmerizing, he couldn’t deny—the sheer magnitude was enough to drown all of Stelia in disaster from which it might never recover.
The only thing sparing the small island continent was that none of this energy was flying around haphazardly; it was all focused on a single opponent who stood on the ground wearing a nonchalant expression.
The wind suddenly turned vicious and whipped forward. As it lashed out, the unconscious Terence was swept up and hurled through the air.
But the throw, while appearing catastrophic, was actually gentle and controlled, carrying her toward the group of people standing at the landscape’s edge—over three kilometers away—watching the unfolding disaster.
Even at that distance, Northern knew it wouldn’t save them from the collateral damage of what he was unleashing. He hoped they realized it too.
And finally Northern struck. His body like a living missile, shattered the sound barrier three times over before connecting with Kryos.
The ground didn’t just crack—it obliterated. A massive crater erupted outward from the point of impact, sending shockwaves that split the already battle-scarred plains into a spider web of fractures extending for miles in every direction.
But that was only the beginning.
The thousands of meteors followed milliseconds behind, each one a miniature star burning with the fury of creation itself. They hammered down in a relentless cascade, each impact magnifying the destruction exponentially. The stony ground, already weakened by their prolonged battle, couldn’t withstand the onslaught.
Where there had once been plains, now yawned a hellish landscape of molten glass and superheated rock.
The existing craters were swallowed whole, merged into one colossal wound in the earth that stretched nearly a mile across.
The valleys that had been carved by their earlier exchanges simply ceased to exist, filled with torrents of liquefied stone that glowed like rivers of liquid sunset.
The heat was so intense that the very air shimmered and warped, creating mirages that danced across the devastated terrain. Steam hissed violently where the molten rock met cooler stone, sending up curtains of scalding vapor that would have cooked any normal being alive.
Raven picked Terence up, and immediately flew away with terrible speed as she saw the entire landscape wrapped in maws of vicious burning heat and flames.
First Northern transformed the land to a snowscape, now it seemed that he was trying to make it into a hellscape.
Even Ellis watched with a terrified expression, he flapped his wings quickly, flying away from the destruction at great speed, all of them did. Albeit with a pale look on their face.
The amount of sheer devastation was enough to crush an entire nation to the ground, maybe not obliterate them completely. But it would make them suffer for twenty years to come, trying to stand back up and a nation.
Northern was a walking destruction! This guy was Chaos!
High above, the Chaos Prince shielded his eyes from the brilliant inferno below, feeling the heat even at his elevated position. The twilight atmosphere had turned into something resembling the surface of a dying star, painted in violent oranges and reds that pulsed with each new explosion.
When the bombardment finally ceased, an eerie silence fell over the transformed battlefield. Where solid ground had once stretched to the horizon, now lay a lunar landscape of glass, molten stone, and smoking craters within craters—a testament to the sheer destructive power that had been unleashed upon a single target.
The Chaos Prince sighed.
"That was..."
He froze mid sentence as an intense cold suddenly assaulted him.
He frowned slightly and looked up.
The sands that Northern had lifted up the ground earlier had been completely frozen. Now it was a large mountain of ice floating from above.
Chaos Prince’s eyes widened.
"Don’t tell me he’s gonna drop that..."
The clouds trembled greatly with a thunderous sound as the enormous ice like a frozen sky slowly drifted down.
Nobody told the Chaos Prince that he needed to vanish away from the ice’s path. He simply flew away with frightening speed.
The mountain of ice descended like the wrath of winter made manifest.
What had once been countless tons of sand, now frozen solid into a crystalline monolith the size of a small city, plummeted toward the already devastated landscape with inexorable force.
The air around it crackled and hissed as the extreme cold met the superheated atmosphere, creating violent thermal currents that sent shockwaves rippling outward.
The impact was beyond comprehension.
The frozen mass struck the molten hellscape with a sound like the world splitting in half—a deafening crack that echoed across continents.
The collision of absolute cold meeting liquefied stone created an explosion of steam so massive it blotted out the setting sun entirely, turning day into an apocalyptic twilight of billowing white clouds. This one, more vivid and lasting than the former.
The molten rivers of stone flash-froze instantly, creating twisted spires of black glass that jutted up like the skeletal remains of some primordial beast. The superheated air condensed so rapidly it fell as scalding rain across the transformed battlefield.
Where the ice touched the molten crater, the ground shattered like ceramic, sending massive chunks of frozen stone hurling in all directions.
The thermal shock was catastrophic. Cracks spread outward from the impact site like lightning frozen in stone, splitting the earth with such violence that new chasms opened up, swallowing the previous destruction whole.
The very bedrock groaned under the stress as layers of earth that had taken millennia to form were compressed, shattered, and reformed in mere seconds.
Steam continued to pour upward in towering columns, creating its own weather system—a localized storm of ice and fire that painted the sky in impossible colors. Hail began to fall, each stone the size of a man’s fist, as the conflicting temperatures created a meteorological nightmare.
Miles away, even the fleeing observers felt the ground buck beneath them like a living thing. Ellis’s wings faltered as the shockwave reached them, and Raven clutched Terence tighter as she fought to maintain altitude against the turbulent air currents.
The landscape that remained was alien—a patchwork of frozen wasteland and cooling glass, split by canyons that glowed with residual heat and crowned by jagged ice formations that defied gravity itself. It was as if the elements themselves had gone to war, and the earth had become their battlefield.
Through it all, at the epicenter of this elemental apocalypse, two figures still stood apart from each other seemingly untouched and unfazed by the devastation that was being wrought about them.