And worse—Alix doesn't just wield them. He's about to combine them.

Velkain's eyes widen, his breath caught in his throat. The Eternal Tempest had consumed all of him… yet before him now is a truth so far beyond his comprehension it shatters the foundations of everything he believes.

"You… what are you…?" he rasps.

Alix's expression doesn't change. His voice is calm, inevitable, and final.

"Your end."

The three Tier 6 formations spin, their energies converging. Flame, frost, and thunder—clashing elements that should never harmonize—bend to Alix's will. They collide, not in chaos, but in perfect balance, fusing into something greater.

The heavens shake. The battlefield quakes.

The sky itself groans as though it cannot contain what is being born.

And then the world sees it—an attack not meant for mortals, a miracle stitched from impossible laws.

Velkain, his clan, even the monster watching—all of them realize in the same breath.

This is no longer a fight. This is a revelation.

The three circles blaze behind Alix, each vast enough to cover the sky. Fire, frost, and lightning. Opposites by nature. Enemies to one another. Yet here they exist at once, thrumming with raw, unrestrained force.

Velkain stares, sweat dripping down his temples. His lips part, words spilling without thought.

"Three Tier 6 … you're fusing them? No… no, that's not possible."

On the wall, the Ashedge warriors stagger. One drops his spear outright. Another grabs his head as if to force sense into what he's seeing.

"That's suicide!" Muv cries. "The elements will rip each other apart!"

But they don't.

Alix raises his hand, and the circles shift. Slowly, deliberately, he draws them inward, forcing them to overlap. The very air screams at the act, reality twisting, the sky cracking as if it wants to reject this impossibility.

The fire circle pulses, its runes burning brighter. The frost circle lashes out, shards breaking off and dissolving into vapor as it presses against flame. The lightning circle convulses, thunder booming in protest.

Velkain's knees nearly buckle. "He's… he's combining them?!"

Muv's voice breaks, trembling. "That's… that's madness! No one could survive that clash!"

The overlapping edges of the circles spark violently, elements gnashing at each other like beasts locked in a cage. Fire roars, ice hisses, lightning cracks—each trying to consume the others. For an instant, it looks as if the world itself will detonate.

But then—

Alix speaks, his voice quiet, commanding, as if he were addressing the very laws of existence.

"Submit."

The runes obey.

The chaos stills. The three circles stop fighting, their patterns aligning into a single rhythm, as though they had always been fragments of one greater design waiting to be united.

The battlefield shakes violently. A pressure rolls out, so heavy the warriors can't even stand. One by one, they fall to their knees, gasping for breath, their bodies instinctively bowing to the weight of a higher order.

Velkain stares, horror in his eyes. "No… no one can force harmony between three Tier 6 skills…!"

Alix's expression doesn't change. He closes his fist, and the three circles collapse inward, fusing. A new circle appears—black-rimmed, luminous, its runes alien and unreadable.

From its heart, energy begins to condense. Fire spirals into a molten core. Frost coils around it, shaping and binding it. Lightning races across the form, charging it with unbearable power.

The shape grows, elongates—until it becomes a colossal spear, humming like the end of the world.

Alix lowers his hand, his tone as steady as if he were announcing simple fact.

"This is a path none of you will ever reach. A path you cannot even name."

Gasps ripple across the walls. The tier 6 next to Muv, his voice cracks as he stammers, "He… he just threw away everything we know about elements…!"

Muv grips the stone parapet so hard blood drips from her palms. Her eyes widen, fear and awe tangled together. "That… that's not Tier 6 anymore…"

Velkain can only whisper, barely able to hold the relic sword in his hands.

"What… are you?"

Alix meets his gaze, eyes cold, resolute.

"The end."

The fused spear thrums, space warping around it, the battlefield waiting to be rewritten by its strike.

The fused spear quivers in the air behind Alix, larger than a siege tower, its shaft woven from flame, its edge honed in frost, its body crackling with violet lightning. Every heartbeat it exists, the sky darkens, the earth trembles, and the battlefield feels as though it teeters on the brink of collapse.

Velkain's grip on the relic sword tightens until his knuckles bleed. His wings flare, tattered but defiant, and he raises the blade above his head. His voice is hoarse, cracked, but he still roars.

"If I am to die, then I will die as the leader of Ashedge! COME, ALIX!"

Alix's eyes narrow. He doesn't speak. He doesn't need to.

With a single motion, smooth and inevitable, he hurls the spear.

The world breaks.

The spear leaves his hand like a star falling from heaven, ripping through the sky with a scream that is neither thunder nor wind but the tearing of reality itself. The air ignites around it, frost erupts in its wake, and lightning lashes out in jagged veins across the heavens.

The impact is instantaneous.

Velkain swings the relic sword down to meet it. The Eternal Tempest flares weakly, a last desperate surge of wind spiraling outward.

An explosion of fire that blossoms into a sun, of ice that splinters into glaciers, of lightning that shreds the sky into ribbons. The battlefield is drowned in light.

The shockwave rips across the city, pulverizing stone, toppling towers, tearing banners to ash. Warriors are thrown from the walls like leaves before a hurricane, their screams swallowed by the roar.

For the briefest instant, spear and storm clash—an eye-blink of resistance.

Velkain's scream cuts through it, raw and defiant, until it's silenced by the blast. His silhouette burns away in the storm of elements, wings torn to fragments, body consumed in light and lightning.

The relic sword shatters into shards of useless steel, its tempest ripped apart like mist in the sun. Velkain vanishes in the brilliance—no body, no bone, not even ash. He is gone before his final scream can leave his throat.

The spear doesn't stop at Velkain. The fused spear rages onward.

It streaks past the city, tearing through the distant mountain range. And then—impact.

The world convulses.

A sound like the cracking of the heavens itself splits the air. The mountains do not fall—they are unmade, ripped from existence as if erased by the hand of a god. The ground lurches, buckles, and then collapses into a vast wound.

When the light clears, the stronghold's defenders can only gape.

Before them lies a crater—no, a scar across the world—so vast it dwarfs their city. Its rim glows red with rivers of molten rock, heat rippling into the sky like a furnace. At its center, frost glitters like diamond, an impossible mirror of frozen death locking the heart of the destruction in ice. Lightning crawls endlessly through the ruin, coiling, striking, never fading, as if the spear's fury refuses to die.

The mountains are gone. Entire peaks, ridges, forests—all annihilated.

Velkain, leader of the Ashedge clan, is nothing. Not a fragment. Not even ash.

Silence falls.

Muv's hands tremble as she grips the wall, her voice hoarse, thin, barely human.

"He… he erased the mountains…"

Another warrior stumbles back, face pale, eyes wide with terror.

"Not even the quasi-tier 7 relic could stop it…"

The silence after the cataclysm lingers, broken only by the crackle of lingering lightning in the ruin beyond the walls.

Alix descends slowly, the dust and heat parting around him as though they dare not touch him. His boots strike the stone wall with steady rhythm, until he comes to stand before the battered defenders.

Every warrior there shrinks back under his gaze. Their weapons feel like twigs, their courage like smoke. None dare speak.

Alix turns his eyes—not on them—but on Velira.

Her face is streaked with tears, her chest rising and falling unevenly. She doesn't look like the proud warrior she was hours ago. She looks hollow, torn between grief and disbelief.

Alix's voice is calm, unshaken.

"What now? Do you want to avenge your father… or uphold the deal?"

Velira's lips part, but no sound comes. Her eyes are red, swollen, wet. Yet beneath the tears, Alix can see it—the light inside her is dimming, retreating into something emptier.

She whispers, her voice breaking, her body trembling as though even standing is unbearable.

"Alix… are you really this cruel? Was everything you did for my clan… for me… just an act?"

Her words cut, not because of their sharpness, but because of their helplessness. She is not only mourning her father—Velkain, proud and defiant to the end—but also mourning her own illusions. Her first love, the man she thought she knew, is a monster in human skin. Worse still, that monster is the one who ended her father's life.