Let's rewind time—an hour before Nero's cataclysmic clash.
Over a hundred kilometers away, another battlefield was soaked in chaos and pressure—a duel where pride, instinct, and survival danced in deadly harmony.
Elreth faced an abomination like the other two: a demonized human scarab, his figure hunched beneath layers of pulsating earthen carapace, the armor jagged and grotesque like a nightmare birthed from the deepest crevices of the abyss. The exoskeletal shell shimmered like volcanic obsidian, shifting and reshaping as if alive, grinding with every motion like tectonic plates colliding. His very presence made the ground groan.
Crimson-red cracks pulsed along his back as he raised his massive stone saber, the air around it warping from the sheer density of earth-elemental prana. This was no mere brute. He wielded the Law of Earth—and worse, he'd merged it with the domain of gravity. The battlefield bowed beneath his will.
