The battle was already a storm inside a storm.
Velgrynd cut blazing corridors over the Eastern Empire, turning enemy flocks into ash suns that burst harmlessly above rooftops. Velzard raised a white aurora over Dwargon, freezing shockwaves midair before they could shatter a single window. Guy folded artillery into tidy red shapes and filed them into the sea. Diablo judged horrors with a whisper and erased them clean. Testarossa stitched silver lines through the sky and clipped only the monsters that crossed them; Ultima's glittering "plague pearls" popped enemies like toy balloons. Carrera laughed, suplexed a rune-behemoth into bedrock, and redirected the blast into empty desert. Milim drew smile-shaped contrails while tackling sky tyrants away from trade roads.
Even so, cities trembled. Bells rang. Children cried. People ran for cellars and temples, faces pale, clutching each other as the heavens roared.
Then the world went colder than fear.
A pressure rolled across the land so heavy even Vorathis' monsters hesitated. They hung in the air, as if listening. The wind forgot how to blow. The thunder swallowed its own voice.
Not far from Veldora, the ground split with a sound like a swallowed scream. A new portal rose—tall and narrow, a black seam sewn with crooked, purple lightning. Mountains shuddered and leaned away. The portal didn't pour power; it drank it. Lightning bent toward it and vanished like rain down a drain.
Saiki hovered above, spoon paused over coffee jelly. "Yare yare," he murmured, eyes hooded. "Boss music."
The seam unzipped.
A figure stepped out—humanoid, Veldora's height, wrapped in a coat of obsidian plates that lapped over each other like shadow scales. Across his torso, thin silver scars formed a broken circle—the outline of a halo—scored into him like someone had branded silence onto his chest. His hair was a black stormfront, each strand tipped in cold blue. His eyes were not eyes; they were two slow spirals, like galaxies seen through ice, pulling everything in.
Around him crawled reversed lightning—ink-black bolts that ran backward from ground to sky. A thin, colorless blade rested in his hand; not steel, but a strip of vacuum that rippled the air. It hummed a note too quiet to hear and still made bones hurt.
Vorathis' voice spread across the sky, soft and cruel. "Storm King, here is my gift. Behold Varakiel, the Tempest-Eater."
The newcomer didn't glance at the chaos, the cities, the monsters. He only looked at Veldora.
"Veldora," Varakiel said. His voice wasn't deep or loud. It was… steady. Like calm right before the wave crushes the beach. "I was shaped to end you."
Veldora stood straight, cloak lifting in a wind that wasn't there. He smiled a little, not mocking—kinglike, warm. "Gifts from strangers are usually bills in disguise," he said. "If your maker sends you as tribute, what debt does he hope I'll pay?"
"The price is your crown," Varakiel replied. "And your storm."
Over the link, Guy hissed, "That aura—"
"I know," Velgrynd cut in, shielding another district with a flick of heat.
Velzard's tone stayed cool, but Veldora felt the worry thread it. "Brother. This one… eats movement."
Milim hovered, fists up, eyes wide. "Let me punch him!"
"Hold," Veldora ordered—gently but iron. His voice rang through each mind, steadying hands, slowing hearts. "Keep the cities safe. Do not approach this field."
Varakiel's empty blade twitched. The storm above them hiccuped and fell quiet, as if embarrassed.
Veldora's eyes narrowed. "You pull my thunder to silence. Clever. But storms have more than one voice."
All around, the fight surged again.
—In Falmuth, Guy snapped a finger; Regal Lattice reconfigured, catching a rain of bone javelins and stacking them into neat bundles that teleported to the deep ocean. "Do not take your eyes off him," he told Diablo.
"I have none to spare," Diablo said softly, snaring three winged titans in a Ninth Bench cage and sentencing them to nothingness.
—In the Eastern Empire, Velgrynd's Scarlet Maelstrom curved like a smile, scooping a flock of iron wyverns into a fiery whirl that blossomed into a sun high above the palace. "Stay home!" she barked to soldiers on the walls who'd started forward.
—Dwargon breathed easier as Velzard layered a second veil of Eternity Frost over the outer mines, turning falling debris into soft, quiet snow. She spared a glance toward the portal. "Veldora," she murmured, so low only he heard, "be careful."
He didn't look her way. He didn't have to. "Always," he sent back.
—Milim yo-yoed through a swarm, Scatterburst stars winking out threats in happy little pops. She paused midair to squint at Varakiel. "He's boring," she declared, then body-checked a siege moth into an uninhabited hill and exploded it like confetti.
—Testarossa traced a silver arc over Blumund. "Ultima, left flank."
"On it!" Ultima sang, Pandora Kiss turning a burrowing horror into harmless ribbons of light before it could break a road.
—Carrera stomped, laughing. "All of you line up! I have homework!" Railgun Cataclysm drilled a corridor through a charging herd, then bent ninety degrees to dump the shockwave into desert.
Citizens screamed, prayed, and clung to each other—but they saw the shields hold. They saw monsters fall upward, sideways, anywhere but on them. They dared to breathe.
Back at the portal, sand lifted around Veldora's boots and hung there, waiting to see which way the world would decide to fall.
"Varakiel," Veldora said, tone conversational, like they were meeting in a garden instead of the mouth of doom. "If your purpose is to end me, we should at least greet each other properly. I am Veldora, Storm King. I rule not by fear, but by promise. I protect, therefore I am."
Varakiel tilted his head. The reversed lightning around him crawled faster. "I had another name once," he said. "It was taken when my purpose was poured in. Only this one remains."
He lifted the vacuum blade.
The storm over them died utterly.
Even the illusion wind forgot to breathe.
Saiki slurped quietly. "Yare yare. He really is a storm mute button."
Veldora rolled his shoulders, unbothered. "A storm that needs no thunder can still rain, Tempest-Eater."
The air between them blurred.
Varakiel moved.
No scream, no flash. Just a blink and he was there, the Calmblade whispering for Veldora's throat.
Veldora's hand came up like the tide. Fingers closed on empty air—and the blade stopped, inches from his skin, a sheet of nothing trapped in firmer nothing.
"You'll have to do better," Veldora said softly.
Varakiel's eyes swirled. The blade shook. For a heartbeat the world tried to decide if it would keep existing.
It did. Veldora shoved.
Varakiel slid back a step, carving a line of silence in the ground that filled with black frost.
"Interesting," Varakiel murmured. "Your will does not echo. It anchors."
"Kings don't echo," Veldora said. "We carry."
He opened his palm. Invisible sigils bloomed across his skin—old storm letters, the kind you feel rather than see. Basilisk Array flexed across the whole false world. Every shield brightened. Every teammate felt their hands steady, their breaths come easier.
"Focus," he sent.
A thousand miles away, people who would never know his name stopped shaking.
Varakiel watched the ripples he couldn't quite eat. "Then let us see how much you can carry."
He vanished again—reappeared at Veldora's back—blade falling.
Veldora turned and caught it on two fingers.
"Enough," he said.
The ground thrummed.
The monsters, sensing their master's chosen duel, roared and rushed harder. The defenders answered with brighter fire, colder frost, sharper red, deeper black. The citizens kept running, kept praying, kept looking up—and saw that the sky, for all its screaming, still had guardians in it.
Above, alone in his invisible balcony, Saiki tapped his spoon on the cup and smiled. "Yare yare," he whispered. "Don't disappoint me, Storm King."
Veldora and Varakiel stood a breath apart. The next move would write the next chapter.
The storm waited to see who would own it.