The silence was deafening.

At the heart of the charred ruins of the palace, where so much blood had already soaked into the millennial stone, Mordred faced Maelor. Like the child contemplating the storm that destroyed his home, but he was no longer a child. And this storm, now, bore a name. An end.

The dragon king towered over him with his colossal stature, impassive. His massive silhouette, wreathed in wisps of black energy that undulated like spectral serpents, seemed to defy light itself. Each beat of his wings raised whirlwinds of dust and millennial ashes, each step drove the broken slabs into the ground with the force of an earthquake. He had not yet drawn his weapon. He didn't need to. His existence was enough to bend space around him.

Mordred stood straight, inflexible. The wind whipped his leather tunic lacerated by a thousand battles. Dried blood still traced scarlet furrows on his angular jaw. But his gaze... that gaze burned with an intensity that even ancient dragons had learned to dread in their deepest nightmares.

A single word crossed his lips, calm as death.

- "Now."

And the universe plunged into chaos.

The shock was instantaneous, brutal, without warning. Mordred launched himself like a living projectile, his body taut like a blade forged in pure hatred, aiming directly at the royal sternum. The air tore along his path with a sharp whistle.

Maelor intercepted the assault with a backhand, but the impact made his draconic shoulder vibrate to the bone. A shockwave pulverized the ground in a star pattern around them. Mordred had transcended his former limits. Strength, precision, rage everything had evolved toward murderous perfection.

They separated in a flash, rebounding against each other like two fundamental forces of the universe. This time, Maelor retaliated a devastating horizontal strike, designed to crush a steel ribcage. Mordred liquefied beneath the movement, sliding with supernatural fluidity into the blind spot, and rose up in an explosive twist of the pelvis. His elbow struck the base of the draconic jaw.

Scale against bone. Will against will.

The dull sound resonated like a thunderclap in the frozen air.

Maelor stepped back. Just one step. But in this duel of titans, this step was worth the recognition of an equal.

He slowly turned his head, as if he had just discovered a fascinating anomaly in the world's order.

- "You strike like a pure-blood dragon," he growled, his voice rolling like an underground earthquake. "But you remain a bastard without lineage."

Mordred didn't respond. He pivoted with deadly grace, changed his guard, left hand forward, breathing already heavier but controlled. The electricity of adrenaline coursed through his nerves like lava. His skin was damp, the muscles in his arms strained by the power of his own blows. But his gaze remained unwavering.

They launched simultaneously.

This time, it was no longer an exchange it was miniaturized apocalypse. Maelor unleashed a torrent of black flames, an incandescent wave that instantly liquefied the ancient marble. The heat made the air undulate like a deadly mirage.

Mordred dove through the furnace, protected by the thermal resistance gained in the infernal caverns where he had forged his endurance. His skin sizzled, but his legs didn't give way. He emerged from the blaze like a vengeful demon, arms crossed in guard, and struck with the precision of a surgeon of death.

The fist sank between two scale plates, exactly under the floating ribs.

A cut breath. Then a bestial growl.

Maelor grabbed Mordred by the throat with a hand whose claws were sharp as blades.

They rose into the night sky.

The landscape tilted vertiginously around them. Mordred suffocated, suspended fifty meters above the smoking ruins. The wind howled in his eardrums like the cries of the damned. The royal grip crushed his cervical vertebrae one by one, with the meticulousness of an executioner. But he didn't release his grip on the draconic arm. On the contrary, he tightened his hold and planted his nails into the scaly flesh until blood flowed.

- "You think strength comes from your noble birth," he gasped between spasms. "But I was born in nothingness. Every power, every scar... I tore them from the darkness. And now, I've come to collect everything with interest."

Maelor narrowed his draconic pupils. For the first time in centuries, his mask of impassivity cracked.

Mordred, in a final surge, violently drove his knee against the royal flank. Then a second. A third. Each blow resonated like a hammer on an anvil, until the grip yielded.

They fell together in a spiral of destruction.

Two giants falling from the sky.

The ground welcomed them in a titanic crash that shook the foundations of Paris. The millennial stone cracked in a star pattern, the shockwave propagated through the palace's veins like poison. A gaping crater opened where their bodies had crashed, and for an eternal moment, only dust danced in the still air.

Then, slowly, inexorably, Mordred straightened up.

He had a broken nose, a dislocated shoulder, ragged breathing, and a mouth filled with the metallic taste of his own blood. But he stood. Unshakeable.

Maelor too.

The king rose with the millennial dignity of his lineage, shook his head to chase away the stars in his eyes, and wiped with the back of his hand the trickle of black blood pearling from his nostril. His gaze settled on his adversary. No more contempt. No more condescension. Just crystalline understanding. Deadly.

- "You are infinitely more dangerous than I would have supposed," he admitted with the coldness of a medical diagnosis. "But you will not leave this court alive."

"Perhaps," Mordred whispered, spitting a bloody clot. "But you're going to discover what it means to bleed for the first time in centuries."

He resumed his guard with murderous elegance.

For this combat was only revealing its first colors.

Silence fell again. Dense, saturated with residual mana, charged with centuries of history concentrated in a suspended heartbeat.

Face to face, two anomalies of creation.

Maelor absolute sovereign, undisputed master of draconic lineages, millennial incarnation of imperial order carved in the marble of eternity.

Mordred traitor to all established order, survivor of the unspeakable, bearer of unprecedented power in draconic annals. A being whose very essence escaped all known classification.

The atmosphere vibrated around them like a string stretched to breaking point. The rock beneath their feet was already cracking, unable to support the raw energy they emanated at rest.

The wind rose in disturbing spirals. Mordred closed his eyes for a second.

When he reopened them, two wings of crystalline mana burst from his back—semi-translucent, ethereal, traversed by filaments of golden energy that pulsed like veins of living lightning. They didn't beat. They simply existed, defying the laws of physics by their mere presence.

Maelor observed in silence, analyzing.

His slit pupils contracted imperceptibly. It wasn't surprise or fear. Pure evaluation. He catalogued every fluctuation of mana, every muscular tension, every variation of aura. He knew beings of power. But this one transcended all classifications.

Suddenly, without preamble.

Mordred attacked.

[Ogame Technique — School of Lightning: Narukami]

The ground exploded under the released pressure. Mordred's body volatilized in a trail of electric blue light, as if reality itself lost its grip on him. The air tore with a piercing whistle.

Maelor parried with perfect economy of movement.

With a millennial gesture, his left forearm armored with scales black as obsidian intercepted the lightning strike. The shock projected a devastating wave of mana in all directions, tearing the ground for a hundred meters, cracking the still-standing walls of the palace. The night sky trembled under the impact.

But Maelor had stepped back. A calculated step. Enough to express a glacial truth:

- "You don't come from nothing," he stated without emotion.

No arrogance. No provocation. A clinical diagnosis. An admission of professional interest.

Mordred reappeared ten meters away, crouched in combat position, his spectral katana lowered, his wings pulsing with hypnotic light.

- "That was just a warm-up," he murmured, a predatory smile on his lips.

[Ogame School — Ultimate Technique: Shidensen — Divine Strike]

And already, he was leaping again, his wings propelling his body in a movement that defied human limits.

The true dance of death had just begun.

A horizontal attack, fast, fluid, almost invisible. Mordred's body glided through the air as if it no longer had weight. His mana wings balanced him, his footing corrected with each micro-variation of the wind. Every gesture was the product of years of suffering, countless battles, a will honed to perfection.

Maelor bent his knees. The blade passed within centimeters of his throat.

He pivoted, then brought his arm down to the ground. A shockwave, purely physical, exploded under his feet, projecting pulverized rock in all directions. Mordred was unbalanced for a moment. Just one. Maelor struck.

The king's fist hit the katana's guard. The shock traveled up Mordred's arm like an internal detonation, but he didn't let go. He planted his feet in the stone, absorbed it. His mouth was bleeding. But his eyes...

His eyes burned.

And Maelor, in silence, understood.

He wouldn't stop.

Then came the tipping point.

Mordred concentrated his mana in his wings, contracted them, then deployed them in one motion. The magical wave struck Maelor full force, pushing him back with a leap. The dragon king narrowed his eyes. That blow... it wasn't to cause harm. It was to create distance. To prepare something else.

Something worse.

Mordred resumed position. One hand on the handle. One hand on the blade's back. Electricity already coursed through his arm. A blue mist rose from his shoulders.

The world contracted around him. His gaze saw only the center of Maelor's torso, his breathing matched his heartbeat, his entire body tensed.

He was about to strike.

And that's when she screamed.

- "STOP!"

The voice split the space with raw power, almost painful. The air trembled.

A silhouette landed between the two.

Elystria.

Her silver wings still deployed, her hair whipped by the wind, her face disfigured by panic. Her short breath betrayed the speed at which she had flown. And yet, standing between these two monsters, she didn't tremble.

- "Enough! Please... stop!"

The silence that followed her cry was even more terrifying than the combat itself.

Maelor stared at her, impassive.

Mordred, frozen, blade still in position, slowly blinked. One more heartbeat... and he would have struck.

- "Elystria??? You're awake?"