Kai had only fought a Storm Mage once before, and he had to admit—they were a pain to deal with. Wind to stay airborne, lightning to fry anything with a pulse, water to mend wounds and keep the mana flowing smooth. Stack them all together and you got the kind of annoyance who could drown an army in rain and then torch whatever floated. Vhailor couldn’t do that, he wasn’t capable enough. Probably never would be. But throwing him into a Mage array with a bunch of idiots acting as living mana batteries? Yeah, it was bound to become a big headache to deal with.

In the open sky, Vhailor didn't give him a breath. Bolts snapped upward, sharp and rapid—nothing like Veridia’s wide-arc thunder lashes.

These were compact, needle-thin shots of lightning, tearing through air faster than sound. They contained too much mana for their own good and Kai didn't even bother testing his wind shield against them.

He twisted off-line, letting one bolt whip past him by a hair. Then another. And another. Vhailor wasn't fast—thank the ancestors—but he was juicing every cast hard enough that even a half-second glance at the structure told Kai everything he needed.

The first bolt detonated behind him. There was a crack as if the sky was tearing and then heat ripped open the sky, a sudden surge of flame and wind that slapped at his back like a tantrum. The blast wave shoved him slightly forward, hair flicked over his brow, robe edges snapping. A second explosion followed to his left, then a third below.

Despite the explosions, Kai felt like smirking mockingly at the display of spell structures. The fool was drowning his own patterns. He was creating basic spell structures that were force-fed mana until they warped under pressure. The man hadn’t even thought to modify his structures for the additional mana he was adding to amplify them. At least not to a suitable degree.

Kai angled higher. The array below pulsed, threads of mana feeding into Vhailor, the prince’s eyes glowing like someone had stored a storm inside of them. And the others? They stood there stiff and proud, thinking they were doing something noble, when in truth they were nothing but fancy batteries on legs.

If they’d been competent, this might’ve gone differently. He might’ve broken a sweat.

Kai rolled his shoulders as another bolt screamed up. He again slid past it by inches, letting it cook the air where he'd been a heartbeat ago. Then the detonation rippled heat across his face, and he snorted.

If you’re going to flood your spell with mana, he thought, maybe adjust the lattice so it doesn’t detonate like an apprentice’s first enchantment experiment.

Vhailor had brute-forced the spell, muscled it into a “stronger” form, and technically it hit harder than the base version.

Problem was, forcing that much mana through a core pattern without rewriting it didn’t make it impressive. It made it a grenade. Vhailor, of course, looked thrilled about it. Some people saw unstable spellcraft and thought it was okay since in the end, it was doing damage.

The sky popped with more bolts, sparks flaring into brutal little suns, each bolt flaring out before it even got close to Kai. Explosions after explosions lit the air like someone had replaced clouds with landmines.

Instead of fighting the blast waves, Kai leaned into them. He let the shock force shove him, let the pressure redirect his glide path. To an outsider, it looked chaotic, but to him, it felt clean. Every explosion tossed him further, pulling him outside the ideal strike arc of Vhailor’s lightning.

“Stop running away!” Vhailor’s voice tore up from below. “I thought you were an honourable Mage, not a coward who only knows how to flee!”

Kai didn't reply.

Below him, Vhailor tried closing distance, but the man's flight speed was dragged down by the array’s tether, four extra Mages needing to keep up with him.

That gave him a few seconds to look down at the battlefield.

He saw arrows cutting lines in the air, spells colliding and detonating in mid-sky like angry fireworks. Mana cannons fired beams at the ward, but it held without a crack. Mages on both sides did their best to get an advantage over the other.

His side Mages raised giant walls to counter any spells that weren't stopped in the sky. The siege breaker and the drones loomed idle in the back ranks. No point in using them so early in the battle.

Focused as he was, a flicker of motion caught him at the edge of vision. Vhailor had finally clawed up enough altitude to use his spell again as blades of wind snapped toward him, thin and vicious. He moved to dodge, but they were faster than what he had expected.

One wind blade almost grazed his sides, only getting deflected by his wind armor.

They weren’t blades anymore. The wind spells spun like saw wheels, teeth whirring, each one sharper than the last. More of them came at him and one managed to clip across his shoulder, scraping his armor hard enough to crack it.

Kai shifted through the air, letting the next wave of wind saws pass close, a breath from cutting into him. The array’s pattern was clear now. Vhailor’s power wasn’t neat—it was raw, forced, and unstable, but backed by too much mana to ignore.

More saws tore toward him, fast enough that every dodge needed precision. One slip and they’d cut right through his armour.

He took a sharp breath and decided it was time to stop being on the defensive.

Mana curled around his fingertips into a sprawling stricture. He moved as he shaped it, never letting a single wind saw touch the forming spell. Two more whirled past; he slid between them, letting them miss by inches.

The spiral thickened and pressure built in his spell structure. A thin whine cut the air.

Once it was finally ready, he released it.

A tornado tore forward immediately, ripping the air open. Vhailor’s voice came from below, but the storm swallowed the sound. The prince tried to break away, sending more saws and snapping bolts upwards. Lightning flared against the sky, another explosion lighting the battlefield, but the saws didn’t escape.

They were pulled in by the tornado. Caught inside the storm, then flung back out with twice the momentum.

They slammed into the array before anyone inside had time to react. A sharp crack rang out, and the whole formation jolted back, forced toward Fort Valemount’s ward. Whatever spell Vhailor had been building collapsed instantly, snapped apart by the hit.

The tornado didn’t stop. It rolled into the barrier, battering it again and again, pressing from every side.

Shouts broke inside the array—all he heard were urgent screams, straining and scrambling to reinforce what was left of their structure.

Kai cut low, slipping into the gap where the winds eased for a heartbeat. He saw a clean opening and took it.

Mana spread from his hands, threads whipping outward, locking into place. A net fell over the array, sealing it inside the storm.

Immediately, they were caged.

In seconds, all the information he had already guessed got confirmed and he decided it was time to go out in an all out assault.

Two spell structures locked into his palms and he pushed mana till they came true and drove them together, heat surging hard enough to sting his skin.

A solid beam of flame ripped from his hands. It cut through the edge of his own tornado without slowing and slammed into the array. The formation tumbled, smashed back into Fort Valemount’s ward; ripples chased themselves across it as the beam kept eating at their shell.

Mana poured out of him in droves. His heart throbbed with the pull. He held the cast anyway, shaving the beam along the array’s rim to scrape at every weak line he could find.

And on the inside of the array, voices broke—high, clipped, losing shape under stress. For a breath, Vhailor’s command vanished in the noise.

Then the array snapped sideways.

It tore free like it had been yanked by a hook, burst-accelerating out of the beam’s path. One instant it was under his fire, the next it streaked across the sky at a speed it hadn’t shown before.

Kai cut the cast clean before it bled him more.

Another spell slid over his vision—[Sight Augmentation]—and the world sharpened. Thin silver lines marked air distortion. Speed trails drew bright scratches across the sky. Every jitter in their movement became readable.

And then he finally understood what was going on.

All four supports were Wind Mages. Third-circle ones. He should’ve caught it earlier. He’d been wondering how they were throwing so much mana into flight while still feeding Vhailor. They were all dual casters and knew how to link their spells together. They’d stripped the array’s defenses and pushed everything into speed. Not the best strategy, but Kai wasn't complaining.

He realised that this was the window to hit them.

But tracking them wasn’t the same as hitting them. Even with his eyes following the arc perfectly, the array jerked and snapped directions too fast to predict cleanly. Every time he lined a spell up, the angle shifted again. He started reshaping a structure in his hand, adjusting for the aim and moving target—

Vhailor moved then.

Lightning flooded the entire array suddenly, covering the formation in a crackling shell, and then they dove at him.

Kai dropped the half-formed spell on instinct and pushed everything into raw movement. Wind ripped beneath him as he cut sideways sharply. At this point, he had no strategy or counter spell—his goal was to just stay ahead of the charge. Or he would find his shield falling apart.

Vhailor’s laughter hit him a second later, and the array closed distance faster than before. Faster than he could create space between them.

He realised he won't be able to dodge it and changed his strategy.

Wind armor around him thickened. A second layer of ice formed around him as Kai paused in the air, and braced.

The lightning array hit like an orc’s hammer. His mana armour cracked in multiple places. His chest seized, breath torn out. The blast flung him backward and every rib felt like it had been kicked in. For a moment, the world spun sideways.

He forced mana back into his armor lines before they split, stabilizing mid-tumble. A few more seconds of shock and he would’ve dropped, and if he wasn't fighting an overconfident Mage with borrowed power, that would have cost him dearly.

Kai somehow managed to steady himself in the air and looked. The lightning cloak around the array faded. A thin fracture crawled along one section of the barrier due to the impact. It was small, but he was certain that it was there.

Vhailor also noticed it and inside, the support Mages were already shoving mana into it, trying to patch the crack before it spread.

Kai watched them, counting the seconds it took them and he began to form another spell.

Wind coiled at his fingertips again, but this time he fed heat into it from the start. Flames threaded into the forming vortex, pressure spiking until the air around him shimmered. Heat bled into the sky, pushing against his skin.

He didn’t hold it long.

The flaming tornado ripped forward the moment it formed, tearing a burning line across the air as it surged toward the array.

Vhailor shouted something through the heat, but the roar drowned it out. Kai didn’t slow. He drove the firestorm forward, pushing it straight at the array.

A ring of water burst outward from Vhailor in response, rushing to smother the flames. Steam exploded across the sky when they met, but the core of the vortex kept burning, still driving forward. The array darted back, pulled hard by the Mages inside as they tried to pull away and spin the storm off course.

It turned into a chase—the firestorm pressing in, the array dodging and weaving through the sky. Vhailor shouted inside the array, clearly frustrated by the events.

From the way he scrambled, Kai doubted he had ever needed to run poor this. The array had always been his shield. With it cracked, the man didn’t look practiced at staying alive.

Kai layered more pressure into the chase. Magma orbs spun from his left hand, wind constructs from his right. He didn’t flood them all at once; he staggered them, timing each cast so the array couldn’t settle or hold still. The sky shook as the spells struck in waves.

Vhailor countered what he could—lightning speared through wind blades, water slammed into molten stone, and each collision burst into a blast of steam or sparks. The firestorm chasing the array started to thin, its heat bleeding out, but he kept driving it forward, forcing the array to keep running in the sky.

He already knew brute force alone wouldn’t break the array. Every time a crack appeared, the support Mages moved to seal it before it spread. It was frustrating, but their formation work was tight, and they were trained to keep the barrier intact.

Meanwhile Vhailor hurled enough destructive power to match Kai strike for strike, using his borrowed strength to overpower him.

Explosions thudded through the sky in steady rhythm, shockwaves rolling across them. The air stank of scorched mana. Even from a distance, the blasts rattled Kai’s bones.

On the other hand, his heart burned hot—mana draining fast, too fast. Every cast took more effort than the last. He kept breathing steady, kept his movements sharp, but he felt the weight building.

Every time he cut across the array’s path, his eyes met Vhailor’s through the flicker of spells. The prince grinned back each time—confident, and almost excited. He looked like someone watching a game go exactly how he’d imagined.

He thought he had time on his side.

He couldn’t be more wrong.

Vhailor snapped a chain lightning across the sky and wiped out the last of Kai’s wind constructs. The two of them hung in the air, facing each other with the battlefield boiling below.

“It’s been a good fight,” Vhailor said. “Your reserves won’t hold. Stop parading as a king and surrender, so I don’t have to kill you.”

“You won’t be killing me,” Kai replied. “Not today. Not any day. You won’t live that long.”

Vhailor laughed. “So confident. You sound like a Magus I crushed in Alparca.”

“With borrowed power,” Kai said.

“Power is power.”

“True,” Kai said. “And till now, you haven't really seen my true power.”

As he said that, a structure bloomed right on his palms and flames gathered in front of him, wild at first, then shaping scale and spine. A serpent of fire coiled and grew, longer with each breath. Gasps rose from inside the array.

Vhailor didn’t flinch—mana spun along his forearm as he built another structure.

“Another construct that dies,” he said.

Kai didn't reply and released the serpent. It lunged straight for the array.

A massive wave of lightning burst from Vhailor’s hands. It slammed into the serpent. The construct opened its jaws into the blast and then got torn apart in seconds, breaking into embers.

“I told y—” Vhailor began.

Something came out of the dying fire.

A pair of flaming hands shot forward, too fast to counter. They struck the array’s side and split a crack along the already weakened barrier. Vhailor scrambled a fresh bolt to smash them, but the impact detonated first, throwing the whole formation backward.

Kai didn’t chase. He watched the fire spread.

The hands broke apart mid-air, threads of flame sliding into the widening fracture and locking together. The Mages moved to seal it apart, but they were too slow.

The threads sharpened and crossed the gap in a blink. The next second, it hit Vhailor right in the throat.

***

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