He leapt.
So high that even the sky flinched.
Icariel soared above the battlefield, above the titanic trees that scraped the clouds, higher than even the gods dared to watch. His hair whipped violently, strands caught in a cyclone of mana and grief. The tears fell from his eyes like rain before a storm—silent, endless, shining with something more than sadness. They held purpose.
He should've died for this spell.
That's what the Voice had told him.
White Lightning.
It wasn't just forbidden. It was unprecedented—for someone like him to create it, to acquire it, to wield it, to survive it. But he had. And now, he was about to unleash it again.
Below, the battlefield held its breath.
Even Valier tilted his head skyward, his sneer warped with curiosity and mockery.
"What are you trying to do, boy? Play the hero now?" he spat, laughing. "You scum—I'll kill you with my own hands this time! You had the gall to come to me?"
But Lonor didn't laugh.
He froze.
Something in his beast blood screamed.
Every instinct howled like a wounded predator. His claws clenched, muscles locked.
RUN.
He didn't know what the boy was doing, but whatever it was—it wasn't magic.
It was calamity.
He turned from Valier, eyes wide in primal terror.
"RUN!" Lonor bellowed. "RUN AS FAR AS YOU CAN! NOW!"
Everyone around him stared, stunned. Virethiel. Tessara. Eldrin. Floon. The soldiers. Even Valier.
But Aelar understood.
He felt it.
The boy who once lived only to survive had broken something within himself. He had called himself trash. And now—he chose not to run.
Aelar's voice ripped through the battlefield.
"LEAVE THE FIGHTING AND RETREAT! THIS IS AN ORDER!"
Virethiel cast her telepathic call to all units. The command echoed across the minds of elves and soldiers alike. Confused, shaken, but trusting, they obeyed.
Calvin lifted Elena's broken body into his arms and ran, Elif sobbing into Aelar's shoulder as he carried her through the chaos. Everyone ran.
Everyone… except one.
Icariel.
Still suspended in the sky like a god abandoned by heaven.
His hair lifted unnaturally, gravity relinquishing its hold. A trembling light ignited around his body—a white more blinding than anything born of this world.
His right hand.
Pointed.
Not just at Valier.
At everything.
"White Lightning."
Valier laughed. "What is that?! Is that supposed to scare me? You weak little insect. Are you going to wait for me to pierce your stomach like I did to that elf?!"
But then it hit him.
The screams.
The soldiers retreating.
Lonor's panic.
The mana.
Something was wrong.
Horribly wrong.
And too late—he realized it.
The spell activated.
The Voice had once explained it to him—long before this moment.
There were two sources of mana:
Atmospheric, borrowed from the world.
Internal, born from within.
Spells cast using atmospheric mana were mere echoes—shadows of what they could be.
White Lightning, even at its weakest, fused with twenty-five black mana orbs had been a weapon of terror.
But now—
Now, it was fed not by the world, but by the storm inside Icariel.
By his own mana.
By the life he breathed, the pain he endured, the death he carried.
And when a spell like that—born from grief, forged in fury—was given true life?
It no longer resembled a spell.
It became something else entirely.
A disaster crafted by human hand.
Valier looked up—and saw the boy's eyes.
A flicker of red burned behind the black.
And just before the spell was released, Icariel spoke—his voice calm, deadly, and echoing the very words Valier had mocked him with:
"There is no heaven for those who run. No afterlife awaits a coward… only judgment, fucker."
Valier's expression shattered. Rage twisted to horror.
He turned to flee.
Too late.
FWOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMMMMM—
The heavens split open.
A shriek like a million dying stars tore through the sky.
BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM.
The earth convulsed, as if struck by the wrath of creation itself.
White Lightning descended.
No.
Not lightning.
It was not lightning.
It was judgment.
A divine pillar carved from the marrow of stars.
It wasn't white.
It was obliteration.
Valier vanished within it—body and soul.
The crogs tried to scream—but their voices were devoured by the thunder.
Their bodies ruptured in silence, overpowered by the howling roar of pure destruction.
The forest groaned like it had a soul. Wood cracked with deafening snaps before the trunks exploded into embers. The roots lifted, wrenched from the earth, torn apart by a sound deeper than magic—like the sky crying out in pain.
The earth cracked. Shattered. The sky screamed.
And still the spell grew.
Wider. Deeper. Hungrier.
A few elven soldiers, too slow to escape, were swallowed by it—vanished in the white void.
And those who looked up—those who bore witness—would never again call Icariel a boy.
They saw a god.
A god of wrath.
A god who wept.
A god forged in the crucible of loss—descending not with mercy, but with truth.
The battlefield was no longer earth.
It was the grave of everything that dared to make him abandon his life.
But such power never comes without consequence.
Even if the Voice inside him had fallen silent—choosing not to scold him for the decision he'd made—the boy knew.
Too well.
He could feel it.
He was vanishing.
As White Lightning continued to rain devastation, his body began to crack under its fury.
His skin peeled in sheets. His bones were visible.
And still—he stood.
Vital Surge.
A green glow wrapped around him, fighting to patch what the spell tried to destroy. He was healing and breaking at the same time. Each breath was a war. Each second, a miracle.
But inside the spell—inside the collapse of all things—
He saw stars.
Shattered, falling like snow.
He saw Elena's smile.
Fin's laughter.
Galien's final breath.
The children.
The dead.
The burned.
The forgotten.
All of them.
Watching him.
Not condemning.
Not praising.
Just… present.
Inside the storm, there was no light. No shadow.
Only memory.
A thousand moments folding into one: the scent of ash, the flicker of a village fire, the warmth of a hug that would never return.
And at the center of it—her name.
Whispered without lips.
Elena.
He wasn't sure if he was alive anymore.
Or if this was death dressed in silence.
But the lightning didn't stop.
He didn't know how to stop it.
The spell was beyond him now. Out of control. He couldn't recall the mana back into himself.
And the truth was cruel:
The spell only kept growing. Because he kept breathing.
Breathing replenished his mana. And as long as there was mana, the spell lived.
So, to stop it…
He had to stop breathing.
Then the Voice returned.
"You chose her," the Voice whispered. "Even if it costs everything."
Icariel's tear-filled eyes widened in silent reply.
—
Meanwhile, those who had fled stood in stunned silence at the edge of the ruin.
Behind them, the battlefield wasn't silent.
It howled.
A storm of sound—of cracking stone, screaming wind, and the shrill hiss of mana burning the sky—echoed through their bones.
None could speak.
Not Floon. Not Tessara. Not even Virethiel.
And certainly not Aelar.
The Warleader's lips parted, but no words came. His elven eyes saw what others didn't want to. The trees were gone. The land blackened. The white storm still grew.
And within its center—
He saw him.
The boy's skin torn, bones exposed, yet stitched back together by flickering green light.
Vital Surge.
Aelar clenched his jaw. "He's using Vital Surge… to keep himself alive."
"The lightning's expanding," Floon said grimly. "At this rate, the entire Western Forest will turn to ash."
Tessara's robe hid her expression as her emerald eyes gleamed. "Why isn't he stopping it?!"
"It doesn't make sense," Virethiel muttered. "I knew he was talented. I knew he was unique. But this? He had this inside him?"
She stared at the scorched earth where moments ago stood both the Godless Abyss operative and the horde of monsters—now nothing but vapor.
"But Tessara's right… why hasn't he stopped?"
Elif stepped forward from Aelar's arms.
The child stood, small and steady amidst the winds of destruction.
She looked at her mother's lifeless body.
Then at the boy.
"It's not that he doesn't want to stop," she said. "I don't think he can."
Everyone turned.
A hush fell—an unnatural quiet within the roaring storm.
"Elif?" Aelar said, his voice a whisper swallowed by thunder.
"Why do you say that?" Virethiel asked, leaning in. "If you understand something—anything—I can try to stop it."
Elif's voice cut through the sound like a knife: soft, clear, and far too wise.
"When I met him," Elif said, tears rolling, "he had a wound on his arm. I asked what it was. He said it was just an incident… but his eyes—they looked like someone who had met death."
She pointed at the storm.
"That arm—it's the same one he's using now."
The truth struck Aelar like a hammer.
"Of course."
"If that injury came from casting White Lightning… it meant the spell damaged the caster too."
"And him using Vital Surge… was the only reason he was still breathing."
"That's why he never used it before," Aelar said. "Because it doesn't just kill the enemy."
"It kills him," Virethiel finished softly.
"Why isn't he stopping it then?" Tessara demanded.
And Aelar's breath caught.
His mind pieced it together.
"The spell doesn't stop," he whispered. "Not until the caster runs out of mana."
Silence fell.
Then—
"But he never runs out."
Aelar's voice broke through the wind like lightning itself.
"HE NEVER RUNS OUT!" he roared, his words snatched by the screeching gale.
"HE ABSORBS MANA JUST BY BREATHING!"
A shiver ran down everyone's spine.
"The spell won't stop—until he dies," he added.
Shock hit them like a tidal wave.
Gasps. Horror. Even Lonor took a step back.
"That's why he didn't use it at the start," Floon said slowly. "It wasn't strategy."
"It was mercy," Tessara added. "For himself."
Eldrin shook his head. "What kind of monstrous spell is this? He learned your Vital Surge? What are you saying, Warleader?!"
"Who the hell is this human kid?"
Aelar's fists trembled. "Just go. Please."
"But—"
"Eldrin—take Elif. Royal Guard—take Elena's body. Go. Now."
"But what about you?!" Virethiel shouted.
"I'm staying."
A shadow stepped beside him.
Lonor.
"I'll help him," the jaguar said. "I can't let the only other outsider who bled beside us die for saving our tribe."
"She saved him. So now… I'll save her memory," Lonor thought.
"Lonor…" Aelar murmured.
Then nodded.
"…Let's go."