I limped toward Kent.

Not walked.

Not ran.

Limped.

One leg dragged just enough to remind me that bones, no matter how stubbornly healed, remembered being broken. Every step sent a dull ache up my spine, a quiet protest from muscles that had done far more than they were designed to do today.

Kent was still pinned to the tree.

Both legs skewered by splintered trunk, bark soaked dark with blood, frost still clinging to his skin like a mocking reminder of how hard he'd pushed himself. His chest rose. Fell.

Barely.

I dropped to my knees beside him, ignoring the ice biting into my skin.

"Hey," I muttered, pressing a trembling hand against his shoulder. "Don't die."

No response.

I leaned closer, voice low, rough. "Because if you do, I swear to whatever cosmic idiot is running this place, I'll kill you myself."

That got a reaction.

A faint, pained twitch of his jaw. A breath that hitched just slightly harder.

Good.

Warm white light bloomed from my palm, soft and steady, the familiar comfort of life mana spilling into his broken body. It soaked into torn muscle, seeped into shattered tissue, coaxed blood vessels to knit and nerves to calm.

The wood began to crack.

Not from force, but from rejection.

Life mana didn't like foreign objects. Especially not objects that were skewered into your body like a glorified shish kabob.

The splintered trunk slowly pushed itself out of Kent's legs as flesh regenerated beneath it, bone reforging with a sickening, wet crunch. He groaned, head lolling slightly to the side, but color began creeping back into his face.

Unfortunately, I didn't have a camera on me, because otherwise I was going to take dozens of pictures, for the memories ofcourse.

His breathing steadied.

That was enough.

The instant I saw the wounds start to close, I turned my head.

Because the battlefield wasn't done with us.

The golem was still standing.

Barely, but standing.

Half its face was gone, its mouth warped and melted into something asymmetrical and wrong. Cracks of blue light pulsed along its body as it gathered what little coherence it had left, dualflow energy condensing around its head in spiraling currents.

Oh.

Oh no.

Its chest expanded.

The temperature plummeted.

I felt frost creep across my boots, across the ground, across the air itself. Ice crystallized mid-breath, my exhale turning into glittering mist that fell and shattered before it hit the ground.

The golem tilted its head back.

And inhaled.

"Yeah," I muttered, pushing myself halfway to my feet. "That tracks."

Great, I used one of the strongest attacks I could muster and that thing just shakes it off, and starts cosplaying as a dragon.

Truly fucking great.

Energy gathered in its ruined mouth, compressing into a blinding core of absolute cold.

Not ice.

Not frost.

Stillness.

The kind that killed motion. The kind that erased heat not by opposing it, but by declaring it irrelevant.

The breath attack fired.

A beam of annihilating cold tore from its mouth, ripping across the battlefield in a straight, merciless line.

Imagine a shooting star streaking through the sky parting clouds in its wake.

Now imagine that shooting star a few hundred meters from you, speeding towards your only salvation, yeah not the best miracle.

It didn't aim at me.

It aimed at the sky.

At the meteor.

The beam struck the flaming rock head-on.

For a split second, just the one, the world balanced on a knife's edge.

Fire met ice.

Heat met negation.

The meteor's flames dimmed as frost raced across its surface, the blazing plasma sputtering under the assault. Steam erupted in titanic clouds, pressure screaming as the air itself struggled to decide what state it should exist in.

The golem roared, pouring everything it had into freezing the impossible.

And then...

It failed.

The meteor didn't stop.

It punched through the freezing beam like it wasn't even there, heat roaring back with violent defiance. The ice coating shattered instantly, flung away in glowing shards that vaporized before hitting the ground.

The golem froze.

Not literally.

It hesitated.

The meteor hit.

Space debris slammed into the battlefield with the weight of a small god falling out of the sky. The impact was catastrophic, a shockwave that flattened everything within miles, ice exploding outward in a tidal wave of destruction.

The golem didn't scream.

It didn't have time.

Its massive body was crushed under the descending mass, dualflow constructs shattering as reality itself rejected the strain. Ice fractured, imploded, and collapsed inward as the its core was driven straight into the ground.

Then...

Silence.

When the dust cleared, there was no towering monster.

Just a vast sea of shattered ice.

A frozen ocean stretching across the battlefield, cracked and uneven, steam rising from fractures where molten rock still bled heat beneath the surface.

I stood there, chest heaving, staring.

Kent coughed weakly behind me.

"Did… did we win?" he rasped.

I didn't answer.

Because something else was happening.

The sky shifted.

Wind swept across the ice, sharp and clean, carrying with it a pressure that made my instincts scream attention. I looked up just in time to see a figure descending from above—not falling, not flying, but arriving, as if gravity itself had decided to behave for her convenience.

She landed atop the frozen sea.

No explosion.

No dramatic crater.

Just a soft crunch of boots against ice.

The world seemed to quiet around her.

Long white hair cascaded down her back, untouched by ash or frost, moving gently despite the still air. Her eyes, icy blue, sharp and luminous swept across the battlefield with calm, assessing precision.

Power rolled off her in controlled waves.

Not wild.

Not loud.

The kind of presence that didn't need to announce itself because everything already felt it.

Nora von Velkaris stood there.

Alive.

Unharmed.

Absolutely aura farming.

She was almost as good as me in that regard.

I stared.

She didn't say anything.

Didn't need to.

She just stood atop the ruins of a fallen calamity, ice reflecting her silhouette like the world itself had paused to admire the view.

And somehow, despite the pain, the exhaustion, the blood drying on my skin.

I smiled.

Because finally.

Reinforcements had arrived.

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