Maélor did not immediately respond to Elystria's words.

His gaze remained riveted on Mordred, but the storm that rumbled within him seemed to gradually subside. The tension that contracted his muscles like steel cables relaxed millimeter by millimeter. His shoulders, broad as ramparts, imperceptibly sagged. His jaw, clenched to the point where one could hear his fangs grinding, loosened in a silent breath. His claws, which had furrowed the air with invisible grooves, slowly opened, revealing palms marked by the pressure of his own nails.

In a movement of calculated slowness, almost ceremonial, he lowered his right arm—that arm which seconds earlier had held death in suspension.

His voice, when it finally rose, carried the weight of centuries. Calm as the eye of a cyclone. Heavy as the marble of a royal tomb.

- "How did you awaken?"

Elystria remained frozen, her violet eyes widening in the golden penumbra that still bathed the palace ruins. The question had cracked in the air like a whip, unexpected, destabilizing. Perhaps even more so than the tone that sovereign coldness that transformed each syllable into judgment.

She breathed deeply, feeling her heart drumming against her ribs like a caged bird.

- "It's because of him," she murmured, her voice barely audible above the crackling of dying flames.

Slowly, as if drawn by a magnetic force she could not control, she turned her eyes toward Mordred. In that gaze, there was something new, something that had not existed before her forced slumber.

- "It's you... your cry, your energy, your presence... I cannot explain it, but something in me broke. As if my body refused to sleep while... you were still fighting. As if every fiber of my being protested against the idea of abandoning you in this battle."

A tremor ran through her, rising from her toes to the roots of her silver hair. Her cheeks took on a delicate redness, similar to dawn coloring mountain snow. A discreet red, almost imperceptible in the subdued light, but in the tense silence that enveloped all three... as obvious as a confession whispered in an empty cathedral.

Maélor saw it.

And what he saw transformed his blood into black ice.

He slowly turned his head toward her, each movement measured like that of a predator evaluating its prey. Then toward Mordred, whose silhouette stood out in the ghostly glow of the debris. His draconic eyes did not blink once, alternately fixing on the two protagonists of this revelation that had just changed everything.

- "You are in love with this human," he said simply.

The words fell like stones into a bottomless well. Elystria stepped back, her heels slipping slightly on the rubble that littered the ground. She resembled someone who had just received an invisible slap, eyes wide, mouth half-open on words that refused to be born. Too late. The truth had been spoken, and it now floated between them like an irrevocable sentence.

Maélor looked away, contemplating for a moment the devastated horizon where Paris agonized beneath the ashes.

- "It is regrettable. But understandable. We both have, Elystria and I, a conflict that transcends our personal interests."

His words, pronounced without the slightest trace of anger, carried the coldness of a freshly forged blade. The lucidity of a king accustomed to dissecting hearts as much as strategies. But behind this facade of royal marble, something had wavered. A minuscule crack, invisible to the naked eye, but real as a flaw in a diamond.

And Mordred had not looked away.

Not for a second. Not a blink of an eyelash.

He moved with the fluidity of water finding its slope.

- "Indeed."

These were the only words he spoke. His voice was neutral, almost detached, as if he were commenting on the weather.

Then, in a blinding flash, he leaped. It was not an impulse—it was a detonation of pure mana that made the air itself tremble.

His mana wings exploded from his back like crystallized lightning, propelling him through space with the violence of an unleashed comet. The air split around him in a sharp whistle, creating visible shock waves that made the surrounding flames dance.

Maélor understood too late. His millennial predator's brain analyzed the trajectory, calculated the angle of attack, anticipated the impact—but his muscles, still relaxed from the conversation, did not follow.

The blade pierced space like a ray of liquid light, fluid, surgical, cleaving the air in a crystalline metallic song. Mordred aimed low, with the precision of an anatomist. And struck true.

The right thigh. Between two scale plates, where the royal flesh was vulnerable.

A cry tore through the heavens, more powerful than thunder, more heart-rending than a storm. The king screamed in pain, and his blood, black as the ink of the abyss, spurted in thick jets that splashed the debris with a sinister baptism. The blow had been struck at a perfect angle, exploiting an anatomical flaw that only an exceptional warrior could know.

The wound was deep. So deep that one could glimpse the pearlescent bone at the bottom of the gash.

Maélor retreated in a furious wing beat that raised a cyclone of dust and debris. Pride lacerated as much as flesh, he straightened to his full imposing height.

- "TRAITOR...!" he roared, his voice making the air vibrate like a giant harp string.

He rose into the heavens in a tornado of pure energy, his wings beating so hard that the ground cracked under the colossal pressure, creating a perfect crater around the takeoff point.

But Mordred pursued him immediately.

His mana wings burst forth again in a lightning crack that briefly illuminated the ruins like a photographic flash.

And the combat resumed.

In the heavens.

The wind howled above the gutted rooftops of the palace, carrying with it the ashes of civilization. Maélor cleaved the clouds like a black arrow, his imposing body streaked with trails of blood that evaporated in his wake, his incandescent gaze riveted on the enemy who had dared wound him. Pain throbbed in his thigh like a second heart, but he rejected it as a personal failure. It was not the flesh that suffered, it was the millennial pride of a royal lineage that had never bent.

And behind him, like a predatory shadow, Mordred followed.

His mana wings beat in an almost supernatural silence, creating undulations in the air that distorted reality around him. His body hurtled at a speed so precise, so perfectly controlled, that he seemed to glide on invisible rails woven from compressed lightning and pure will.

Twenty meters from each other, they immobilized.

Hovering in the tortured heavens, above Paris which was no more than a smoking memory.

The city had ceased to exist. The world, at this vertiginous height, was nothing but gray ashes, gaping ruins, acrid smoke and dying light. And yet, this duel alone seemed to give meaning to this apocalypse. Two titanic forces suspended above the void, ready to unleash energies capable of rewriting history.

Maélor was the first to strike.

He crossed his arms before his scale-armored chest, concentrating in his throat the ancestral breath of his lineage. Then he unleashed a spray of black fire in a spiral—a draconic form so ancient it preceded the invention of writing, woven from pure magic and royal anger. The heat distorted the air to the point of creating dancing mirages, the clouds opened at the breath's passage like the Red Sea before Moses, revealing a tunnel of superheated vapor.

But Mordred... dove into it.

Head first, without hesitation, like a diver defying gravity.

One second. Two. An eternity in the hell of black flames.

And he emerged from the other side, his body smoking like a meteor, clothes charred in places revealing skin marked with superficial burns, his gaze still planted in that of his adversary with unshakeable intensity.

- "Not enough," he murmured.

His voice carried a terrifying tranquility, like that of a man who had just survived the impossible and found it disappointing.

Then he cleaved space. His blade traced a bluish trail with each movement, creating undulations in magic itself, as if reality bent to his will. He did not strike with rage, he struck with a knowledge of combat so profound it became pure art.

Lightning Kata.

A vertical movement, ascending, a spiral around his own axis that transformed his body into a tornado of steel and light. Maélor blocked it with a backhand of his forearm, but the impact's power made his guard retreat like a mountain shaken by an earthquake, breaking a plate-sized scale that fell toward earth spinning.

Then Mordred chained with the fluidity of a waterfall.

Elbow strike to the left flank, precise as a surgical scalpel.

Wings folded in an evasive movement so rapid they seemed to disappear, avoiding a counterattack from above.

Right knee extended toward the diaphragm, carried with a force capable of shattering granite.

Maélor lost his balance for an instant. A single instant in the eternity of combat.

But against Mordred, that was enough.

The human made a quarter backward rotation, his mana wings beating to stabilize his position, taking support on air solidified by his will and struck at the throat with the precision of a clockmaker.

The katana stopped a few centimeters from the scaled skin, so close that Maélor felt the cold of steel against his jugular.

In a growl of rage that shook the very foundations of Paris, the king seized the blade with his bare hand.

His fist immediately ignited in a shower of golden sparks. Filaments of pure light coursed through his scales like veins of molten lava ancient magic, hereditary, forgotten by all except the purest royal lineages.

- "You want to fly?" he roared, his voice resonating like a thousand war bells. "Then fall!"

And he struck him. Full force. With all the accumulated power of a thousand years of reign.

The fist struck Mordred's chest with the violence of a meteoritic impact that could have pulverized a fortress. His body flew through the clouds like an artillery projectile, breaking the vapor layer in an explosion of crystalline droplets, creating a perfect tunnel in the mist where superheated air swirled in hypnotic spirals.

The ground approached at deadly speed.

But Mordred did not fall.

Halfway between heaven and earth, in defiance of the laws of physics that would have made scientists weep, he slowed.

His mana wings, though undulating and trembling like mirages in the desert, reactivated in a bluish flash. He rebalanced with the grace of a dancer, defying gravity and logic.

And charged again.

A straight line. Pure. Perfect. Implacable as destiny.

Maélor widened eyes large as moons.

- "Again...?"

His voice carried for the first time a note of incredulity, as if the impossible had just risen before him.

And this time, Mordred aimed for the right flank, exactly where the thigh wound weakened his support and unbalanced the royal guard.

A flash. A blade strike. A ray of light faster than thought.

The flesh was cut, revealing a new wound that began bleeding profusely.

And the king roared again. A roar so powerful, so charged with mingled rage and pain, that the still miraculously intact stained glass windows of the palace all exploded simultaneously in a symphony of broken crystal, creating a multicolored rain that glittered an instant before crashing to the ground.

Elystria, below, watched the sky with a terror that froze the blood in her veins.

- "Stop..." she murmured, her voice lost in the din of the celestial battle. "You're going to kill each other..."

But the sky no longer listened to her. Up there, two titanic forces danced their ballet of death, indifferent to terrestrial pleas, carried away by a fury that surpassed human understanding