Kai’s eyes kept shifting between the path ahead and the giant moving through the earth plane in the distance.
Even now, part of him still found it hard to believe that Ignivar had answered the summon.
The creature was enormous, a fire giant in the truest sense, with flas leaking constantly from the pores of its body as though fire were not sothing it wielded but sothing it naturally bled into the world around it. Its fra was broad and towering, built like a moving catastrophe, and every motion carried the weight of a peak grade-eight existence. This was the first ti Kai had ever seen sothing like it in person, and under different circumstances he might have stopped to truly take it in.
But right now, he was simply grateful.
Anything weaker would not have created the sa effect.
In only two minutes after entering the realm, Ignivar had already burned through a significant portion of the earth plane. That was exactly the kind of disruption Kai had needed, the kind that could drag attention away from where it truly mattered. Even so, he took no satisfaction in it. He was not pleased by the destruction, nor by the knowledge that many spirits might get caught in the flas through no real fault of their own.
The guilt sat in him clearly enough, and he knew he would carry it for his entire life.
Still, the earth plane would recover. Most of the spirits were already fleeing as fast as they could, and the mana of this place was rich enough that ti would eventually swallow the scars left behind today. The forests would return. The damage would fade. This world would heal, even if not quickly.
What mattered now was sothing else. Kai had his own world to save.
So he forced himself to stay focused and kept driving through the air as fast as he could, weaving between the great trunks and branches with wind mana carrying him forward. Around him, spirits were fleeing in the opposite direction. Monkey-like spirits bounded wildly through the trees. Bird spirits cut frantically through the air. Smaller creatures, so no larger than squirrels, darted through roots and brushes with blind panic. The whole forest had fallen into chaos, and beneath it all the ground still trembled with each of Ignivar’s steps.
Through that confusion, Kai kept moving closer. The more he moved, the more the castle in the distance wasn’t just a shape on the horizon. It was becoming real, growing larger through the gaps in the trees as he pushed toward it.
Then a huge wave of mana slamd into him.
Kai’s body stiffened instinctively, his senses flaring at once. With the trees still blocking his line of sight, he could not actually see what had happened.
But he could guess.
The Spirit King Vaelthoros had finally entered the fight. Kai knew it before he saw anything.
A second later, the sounds reached him—shouting, screaming, and then a heavy impact loud enough to send vibrations rolling through the forest. Even the largest trees around him shuddered under it. Leaves ca loose overhead and rained down across his shoulders, but Kai never lifted himself higher to get a better look.
He kept moving.
Whatever was happening behind the wall of trees, curiosity was worthless compared to speed and discretion now. Ignivar was powerful—terrifyingly so—but Kai had no clear way of asuring that against Vaelthoros. Maybe the summoned giant would hold for two minutes. Maybe twenty. At this point, all of it had slipped into the hands of luck, and luck was not sothing Kai could shape any further.
So he flew.
He pushed through the air, weaving between trunks and branches, until at last he spotted them ahead.
Elias, Killian, and Veridia.
Veridia was carrying the other two through the air, dark tendrils jutting out from her back and holding them aloft as she forced them forward. Even from a distance, Kai could tell it was costing her a great deal of mana, but there was no better option. Crossing large stretches of the forest any other way would have wasted ti they no longer had.
Killian saw him first. “Lord Arzan, you’re finally here!”
Kai gave a quick nod as he closed the distance, and by then Elias and Veridia had turned toward him as well. While still moving, he ford another spell structure. A mont later, hands of wind unfolded from his back.
“I’ll take these two,” Kai said. “You just focus on speed.”
Veridia dipped her head once and imdiately let her dark tendrils dissolve away.
Kai’s wind-ford hands shot forward and caught Elias and Killian midair. Elias let out a low, unhappy sound at the sudden shift, but Kai ignored it. Once he felt the grip settle properly around both of them, he poured more mana into his legs and surged ahead through the trees.
Veridia pushed herself to keep pace with him, but even carrying the added burden, Kai remained fast.
The speed did not make the run feel any easier.
Every few seconds, fresh screams tore through the forest around them. The ground kept trembling with distant impacts, and now and then the noise of battle rolled through the trees hard enough to make the branches shiver overhead. Sowhere behind and around them, Ignivar and the spirit king were tearing through the plane, and the scale of it pressed itself into everything.
After one especially heavy tremor, Elias finally spoke. “Do you think that giant can actually kill the spirit king?”
Kai did not answer at once. For a few monts, he kept his eyes on the route ahead, before he finally said, “I honestly don’t know. What we can hope for is that it gives us as much ti as possible. Summoning sothing from the fire plane should be disruptive enough. That’s all we need.”
No one spoke after that.
Kai focused fully on reaching the castle.
But the closer they got, the harder the path beca. Vines began appearing everywhere ahead of them—not in the loose, natural way the forest had worn earlier, but in thick, crowded masses that seed almost deliberately placed to slow anything trying to pass through. They hung between trunks, wrapped around branches, crossed over one another, and closed off open routes so often that Kai had to keep swerving and searching for narrow gaps just to maintain their montum.
It cost too much ti.
He could not afford to rise above the trees and simply pass over the tangle either. The cover of the canopy still mattered too much.
When the vines ahead beca too dense and knotted to slip through cleanly, Veridia’s voice ca from behind him.
“I’ll clear it. Keep moving.”
The next mont, heat rolled over him.
Kai saw spheres of magma shoot past and detonate in quick bursts ahead of them, burning through the thickest clusters of vines. The tangled growth blackened at once, then broke apart and fell as ash and charred scraps, opening just enough space for them to keep advancing.
Fortunately, the forest was already shaking so violently with distant impacts and battle that Kai doubted those smaller blasts would attract much extra attention.
Kai drove them forward while Veridia called for him to move left or right whenever she sent another magma sphere ahead, clearing the path in pieces just large enough for them to pass. They kept up that rhythm, forcing their way through the last stretch of tangled forest until, at last, the great trees around them began to thin, and then they opened.
From there, they finally saw the full scale of the castle.
It rose higher even than the old royal castle of Lancephil, its walls broad and severe, its upper levels crowded with spirits already gathered along the balconies and terraces, all of them staring up into the sky.
Kai’s eyes followed their gaze. And for a few seconds, he stopped.
Above them, it looked less like a battle and more like two disasters had taken shape and turned on one another.
He had already seen Ignivar when it first entered the plane. A fire giant so imnse and destructive that, left alone long enough, it might really have burned through everything around it. But this was the first ti Kai was truly seeing Spirit King Vaelthoros, and even from a distance, it was enough to make his chest tighten.
The Spirit King was not as large as Ignivar—not even half its size—but size stopped mattering the mont Kai felt the mana coming off it.
It rolled out in waves so dense and violent that even from afar they made his heart shudder. Roots jutted from its legs as it moved through the sky, and its arms seed to stretch and lash like living whips. Kai saw those root-limbs snap outward and coil around Ignivar’s arms, binding them for a mont even as the fire giant opened its mouth and sent another torrent of fla crashing forward. Vaelthoros answered by raising a wall of vines around itself, the shield blackening under the fire before the spirit king shifted sideways in one fluid motion. More mana burst from it at once, and then it slamd into Ignivar with enough force to drive the giant back several steps through the air before it answered with a heavy sweep of one burning arm.
Kai tore his eyes away before he could lose more ti to it.
“We need to move,” Elias said sharply. Then the old Magus looked toward the castle and added, “We can force our way through the entrance.”
Kai nodded imdiately. He lowered all of them to the ground, then turned to Veridia.
“You and I clear the front,” he said. “Then we go in.”
After that, he looked at the others.
“Rember the layout I gave you. We don’t have ti to get lost. We get to the Elder Tree seed as fast as possible.”
They all nodded.
Killian and Elias both drew sharp breaths, the kind n took when they knew there was no more room left for hesitation. Veridia, though, looked as if she had already finished hardening herself for what ca next.
In the next second, she and Kai shot forward toward the castle.
At the wide entrance, figures were already waiting—wolf-like spirits, clearly guards, standing in formation beneath the archway. They saw the two of them coming, but Kai was faster.
Before they could properly react, he unleashed his spell.
The ground beneath the wolf spirits heated first, then cracked, and in the next heartbeat fire pushed through the breaks. One of the spirits cried out as flas caught in its fur, while the others tried to scatter, but Veridia was already moving. Shadow swords shot out from her side and pierced through them cleanly, dropping them before they could make more than a few steps.
Kai’s field of heat spread wider after that, rolling over the entrance and searing what remained of the guards until none of them posed any threat.
The castle gate itself was made of stone.
Kai created two wind hands at once and drove them forward against it. At first the heavy doors did not move. Then a low creak sounded out, and the gate shifted just enough to open a gap wide enough for them to force their way through.
By then Elias and Killian had already caught up.
Kai took the first step toward the opening, but before entering, he looked back once more toward the sky.
The battle above still seed locked in place. Neither Ignivar nor Vaelthoros had clearly gained the advantage yet. From Kai’s point of view, that was perfect. He did not need victory there. He only needed ti.
Then he turned and entered the castle with the others close behind him.
A broad stone hallway stretched before them.
Kai took the lead imdiately, guiding the group deeper inside. The earth sovereign had given him more detail about the castle than he could have hoped for. The place was laid out almost like a maze. One corridor branched into several more, and each of those led toward different sections of the castle. It was the sort of place a person could get lost in very easily if they did not already know the route.
Kai still had no idea why it had been built that way, but he knew enough to move through it.
Thanks to what the earth sovereign had told him, he had morized the path they needed. Whether mory alone would be enough to get them there in ti was another matter.
Under normal circumstances, he might have simply followed the densest concentration of mana, but inside the castle that was harder than expected. Sothing about the place made it difficult to spread his senses properly.
Apparently, it was the mountain itself that caused the problem. At least, that was what the earth sovereign had told him. The material running through the mountain interfered with mana senses and made it hard to stretch them too far.
So Kai did not waste ti trying. He and the others simply kept running.
They moved through one corridor after another.
But before long, their first real obstacle appeared. Dozens of spirits filled the next passage.
About half of them looked like gorillas—broad-shouldered and heavy-limbed, with dark stone-like fur and long arms that nearly dragged against the ground. Jagged ridges of crystal jutted from their backs and forearms, and their eyes glowed with a muddy yellow light that made them look far more aware than ordinary beasts.
The other half were boar spirits.
They were large enough that each one took up too much of the corridor on its own, with thick, bristled hides layered in rough plates of hardened earth. Their tusks curved upward like carved stone hooks, and bits of moss and root clung to their backs as if the forest itself had grown over them. So had cracks along their hides where faint brown light shone through whenever they moved.
They had likely been on their way out of the castle already. Even here, the fighting outside was strong enough that the walls gave the occasional shiver. But the mont they saw Kai and the others, the whole group of spirits stopped, though only for a second until the boars understood that they were intruders.
With grunts, they lowered their heads and charged forward.
Elias moved first.
A spell structure flared into existence, and in the next instant the floor beneath the boars shook violently. Large stone spikes burst upward from the ground. Half the boars were skewered on the spot, while the others crashed hard into the spikes or were thrown off balance and sent tumbling across the floor.
Veridia followed imdiately.
Spiked tendrils shot from her side and lashed through the corridor. The boars that had survived Elias’s first attack were struck again before they could recover. So were ripped open at the flanks, others pinned or crushed where they lay.
Then the gorilla spirits ca.
They let out sharp, furious cries and surged forward, their heavy bodies pounding through the corridor. So smashed straight through the stone spikes still jutting from the floor, breaking them apart with sheer force as they rushed in.
Kai moved to et them.
He ford a flaming spear in his hand, choosing that over a larger spell since he had no intention of blowing apart the corridor they were standing in. One of the gorilla spirits reached him first, roaring as it swung a massive fist toward his head.
The blow landed against his wind armor and was absorbed with a heavy thud.
He stepped in and slashed across the creature’s shoulder in one clean motion.
The spirit tried to pull back. Kai huffed as he drove more mana into the spear and thrust again.
The point punched through its chest, stopping it cold, but he didn’t pause to watch it fall. More gorilla spirits were already coming at him.
He twisted the spear and sent a wave of flas out from it.
The fire washed through the corridor and made the front line recoil just enough.
That opening was all Killian needed.
He stepped in with his shield first, slamming one of the gorillas hard enough to throw it sideways into one of the stone spikes still jutting from the floor. The impact drove the spirit straight through it. In the sa motion, Killian turned and cut across the neck of another. Lightning crackled around him as he moved, more than enough to deal with spirits of this level.
Kai kept moving too.
He crossed the corridor in quick steps, his flaming spear cutting through the gorillas one after another. One of the boars that had managed to get back up tried to rush him from behind, but Kai turned in ti and cut through it as well, flas spilling off the spear with every swing. Each strike left fire in its wake, and the spirits caught in it went down quickly.
By now his fire aspect was far stronger than it had been on the fourth circle, and against low-grade spirits like these, the difference was obvious.
The fight did not last long.
Within a minute, the corridor was full of bodies, with the last of the spirits either dead or still twitching on the floor. Kai had no intention of wasting another breath there.
“Let’s go.”
The others nodded at once.
They started moving again, following the route the earth sovereign had given him. Left, then right, then up a flight of stairs and into another corridor. Kai took the lead, pushing forward without slowing, but they had barely gone far when the whole castle shook.
A slab of stone tore loose from above and dropped straight onto him.
It struck his wind armor and bounced away, but the impact still broke their montum and forced Kai to stop.
The next second, the shaking grew worse. The floor trembled under their feet, and for a brief mont the whole party stood rooted where they were.
Beside him, Veridia started to say sothing.
Then the wall ahead of them split open.
Stone cracked apart in a roar, and the fire giant ca crashing through.
***
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