Now was the time to soar and save the day…

  [You were caught by the anti-cheat system. Please remain still. Investigation is in progress…]I wanted to create the most devastating spell ever created, but my body froze.

  Once again, a pleasant voice of a young man echoed in my mind: “God-level power reached. Reason for power: known. Solution: a warning. Charlie, please do not misuse the power.”

  In the next instant, control of my body returned.

  I pushed the spell again, buffing every attribute like I was pumping myself full of illegal confidence. With my mana pool now a bottomless pit of delicious, reckless potential, why not? I could cast it a hundred more times and still have enough left over to freeze the sun and set fire to the moon.

  So I did. Again.

  “Daughter,” Irwen said, and ice-freaking-blood god, she had that tone. Regal. Patient. The voice of someone who thinks they’re speaking sense while actively orchestrating war crimes. “I have promised not to lose here.”

  As if promising something to a demon army made you virtuous.

  She raised both hands, fingers dancing like a conductor high on martyrdom. A new spell bloomed between them, golden coils mixed with threads of shadow. “I promised the demons to bolster their numbers.”

  Of course she had.

  I clenched my jaw, then smirked, because defiance is Lisa’s brand and she borrowed me that power. I used the spell again, pushed even more power into myself. And that’s when I felt it.

  The frost wrapped around my ribs first, cold and ancient, not just temperature but memory. Like centuries of winter were threading through my veins. My breath came out in a plume that shimmered like diamond dust.

  But beneath it, fire sparked. Not the wild chaos of Lisa’s magic, but something more intimate. A steady burn coiling under my sternum, bolstering the ice instead of burning it away. Heat and cold didn’t csh; they competed. Each trying to define me. Each wanting to win.

  My muscles twitched. My fingertips ached. I felt like a frozen star wearing a crown of fme.

  I looked up at Irwen, who was slowly floating up above her army like a queen in a bedtime story right before the entire kingdom burns down.

  “Sorry,” I said, gncing sideways at her. “I promised to hold the line.”

  Then I smiled and unched myself skyward like a firework that resented gravity.

  Frost bloomed behind me in tight, curling ribbons, kissed at the edges with streaks of fire, like a comet that couldn’t decide whether to kill with cold or heat, so it chose both. Holding myself aloft like this cost more mana than several mages could pool together in an hour.

  Didn’t matter. I had no limits.

  So I cast again. More power. More ice. More fire.

  And I felt them war for space inside me, my own body a battlefield. The frost stiffened my spine; the fire loosened it. The ice whispered rules. The fme ughed at them.

  Below me, the world stretched out, a fractured board game of carnage.

  Tramar’s fire teams were active near the fort, helping the escape, burning down flying pests like they were roasting marshmallows at a funeral. Lunaris tried to help anyone she could.

  From up here, I saw how bad it still was. We hadn’t won. We were being overwhelmed. By whom?

  A tide of foot soldiers. Ghouls. Rabble. Thousands of them. Still alive. Still coming. Still breathing when they really shouldn’t be.

  Okay, no, for real, they were undead. How could they be breathing? Well, they were. But not for no long.

  I narrowed my eyes and tightened my grip on the magic pulsing in my core.

  I raised both hands to the sky. Mana surged, no, howled, inside me, a tidal swirl of impossible power just begging to be shaped. The ice was familiar, instinctive. It formed at a thought, eager. Now there was fire, too.

  New. Dangerous. Unapologetic.

  I took a breath that tasted like ash and frostbite, and shaped the storm.

  The first spear bloomed above me, taller than a man, its shaft gleaming blue-white like a gcier forged into a javelin. Fmes curled around the tip, restrained, like a not-a-dragon sleeping with one eye open. Then ten more formed.

  Then a hundred.

  Then a thousand.

  Three waves, each of them only a moment behind.

  Each one was anchored by ice, stable and enduring. But wrapped in that ice, woven like veins through bone, was fire. The kind of fire that didn’t just burn; it wanted. Wanted to destroy. To consume.

  And yet… they didn’t sh out.

  Because I tethered them. Fine threads of glowing mana stretched from my fingertips to every single spear, a deadly marionette web. Inefficient? Absolutely. Mana-inefficient to the point of irresponsibility.

  Didn’t care. I had more magic than sense right now.

  I clenched my fists, yanked down.

  The air screamed.

  The spears dropped like Patrick’s smming down a bottle, slicing through the air in unison. no wobbles, no hesitation, just terrifying velocity. Each left behind a rippling contrail of frost and heat, the kind that shattered air pressure and made the sky weep with steam.

  I was aiming for demons. But they hit a golden shield. Irwen’s spellwork shimmered into existence a moment before impact, a dome of radiant gold that bloomed over the army like mythic smugness made manifest. The first wave of spears exploded on contact, thunderous CRACKS, each like a continent colliding with reality.

  Frost burst. Fire fred. The shield held.

  For a second.

  Then came the second wave.

  And the third.

  It wasn’t a clean shatter. No cinematic slow-motion break. The shield splintered, fractures zigzagging across its surface like lightning scars. Gold fred against the blue. The air hissed and trembled.

  And then, teeth of ice tore through it. Dozens of spears punched through the weakening dome, trailing shrieks of fire behind them as if Lisa was having a party.

  Where they nded, they erupted.

  Not elegant explosions, brutal. Each impact sent frost ncing outward, fsh-freezing armor, flesh, whatever counted as muscle. A blink of an eye ter, fire surged from the core, expanding outward like a breath of not-a-dragon’s fury. It didn’t incinerate; it tore. It peeled. The demons caught in the bst were either unched backward in pieces or reduced to smoking heaps.

  Not one spear was a miracle. Each only dropped three, maybe five demons. But there were so many spears. Dozens of impacts. Scores of screams. A battlefield scattered with steaming craters and melting shadows.

  It wasn’t just magic; it was butchery. Stylish butchery. And this was only the opening salvo.

  I was already forming more spears, more frost-ced firebolts of overkill. For the next few minutes, the demons must’ve wished they’d invaded hell instead. Or at least somewhere with a decent dental pn and fewer incoming sky-spears.

  Irwen tried. She hurled spells, golden sigils screaming through the air like divine shields, walls of molten light, pulses meant to rip mana from the air. But even she hit a limit.

  I didn’t.

  It was the correct decision. Because the god’s well didn’t run dry. It howled. It dared her to keep going.

  And my spears? They weren’t aimed. They didn’t need to be. When you drop hundreds of thousands of them, you don’t need precision. You need gravity. Each cast came like a pulse. A beat that painted the battlefield with silence. Then shrieks. Then fire. Again and again.

  The invading army became a wastend. Craters smoked. Ice webs spiraled out across the broken ground. Even the sky seemed singed with frost and fme. [Blight Mages] disintegrated. [Bone Reavers] cracked in half, then shattered into a frozen ruin. [Wretched Ghouls] tried to climb over each other to flee and instead got skewered five-deep by the same spear.

  And when our forces were finally, roughly equal again, when the endless tide was finally pushed back into a battered, ragged cliff of what it once was, I stopped.

  The st salvo of spears rained down like closing punctuation. Each one drove home with a sharp CRACK, sending up a final cloud of steam and ash.

  Irwen nded.

  Amid the wreckage, she descended like a queen walking into her own funeral. The battlefield was scarred, cracked earth, broken weapons, frost still crawling like ivy across bckened stone. She moved through it all without a word, and then, slowly, she raised a hand.

  A signal. For me.

  I flew down, cloak trailing frozen air behind me. The moment my amazing heels touched the ground beside her, I bowed, not deep, not submissive. Just respectful.

  “I apologize,” I said, the words wreathed in white mist. “I had to borrow power to equal yours.”

  She smiled.

  Not that smug little curl she wore earlier when she thought she had me cornered. Not the diplomatic ‘I’m a queen and above all this’ smile, either. No, this was genuine. Small. Worn at the edges. Maybe even…proud. That was when the magic buffs left me. I was back from being the strongest on the battlefield to… Just me.

  “I thought that Twir had the power to rival gods,” she said softly. “I was mistaken. If only for a moment… my own daughter delivered the final blow. We lost.”

  I blinked. Nodded once. “Not really,” I replied. “You still have that reserve army.”

  She shook her head, and the motion was slow. Weighted. “No, you don’t understand,” she said. “We lost. I decre we’ve lost too much of our army. The risk is too high to continue.”

  My eyes widened. “You can’t—”

  “I request a temporary truce,” she said, and there it was again, that smile. The smile of a queen who’s just folded her cards, not out of fear… but because she knew continuing would cost everyone too much. “And before you decline,” she added, “you should know the details.”

  “I know them, Mom,” I said, already sighing. “You suffered catastrophic casualties, and under the God of War, you now have half the duration of our conflict to regroup.” She nodded, slowly. So I said, “to use eclipse.”

  Her mouth opened… then froze. For the first time in all this chaos, her regal mask cracked. “E-eclipse?” she repeated, and, wait. Was that a blush? “What is that?”

  I smirked. Couldn’t help it. “Mother, do you really think I wouldn’t know, not when I knew Duwin Ianlee’s name?”

  She blinked.

  I shrugged, brushing a smear of frost from my sleeve. “It worked out in the end. We held until the reinforcements. There’s still something you need to do.”

  Her gaze flicked, just once, to the tiara perched on my head. “No,” she said.

  Ft. Final.

  “You need to,” I said, softer now. Not pleading. Just… reminding.

  “No.” This time, it wasn’t just defiance in her voice. It was pain. “I won’t do it.”

  “And risk that all of this was for nothing?” I whispered. “When the empire arrives, they’ll say I was acting in your interest. As your princess. Maybe it’ll hold… maybe not. But if you take my title now?”

  “No,” she snapped again, but quieter. She looked away, out at the battlefield, at the shattered chunks of frost and golden scorch marks, at the torn banners and broken towers. Her voice was brittle as she said, “They’ll try. And they’ll fail. Because my daughter is a princess. The kingdom is yours to cim. Your birthright.”

  I ughed. I didn’t mean to, it just came out. “I’m not even a month old.”

  “I know it works differently in your world,” she murmured, her eyes distant, almost gssy. “But here…” She paused, voice trembling on the edge. “Seeing you up there. Alone. Soaring through our ranks, battering my army like a winter storm. I realized why family matters. What I kept fighting for.”

  The gold in her aura dimmed as she took a hesitant step forward. “So, no. I won’t put politics before family ever again.”

  “Even if it means your whole struggle—” my voice caught “—all the people, all the kingdom—”

  “Yes,” she interrupted, and that one word hit like a soft hammer to the ribs. “Because you proved me wrong.”

  Then she stepped in and hugged me. No shields. No aura. No queenly grandeur. Just warm arms, the scent of ash and roses clinging to her hair, the faint tremble of someone holding on for a second too long.

  “I’m sorry we can’t be together,” she said into my shoulder. “I have to go… but promise me. Contact me. Even if it’s just once in a while.”

  I choked on a ugh, of course she was asking me to call her. “Yeah,” I whispered, squeezing back. “I will.”