They had been fighting for hours. The plain smelled of ozone and ash. Craters burned with slow embers. The white sky—torn, wrong—hung like a wound over the field. Bodies lay like broken toys; the air still carried the echoes of collisions that should never have happened.
Veldora breathed once and felt that thin, steady thing beneath all the noise: responsibility. He had led a kingdom. People still lived because he and his companions stood between them and annihilation. He could fight forever; he could bleed forever. But this had to end.
He looked at Vorathis—at the grin that had become a howl with every struck bone—and the choice was made.
"Enough," Veldora said, not loud but as if the world itself heard him. He planted both feet into the cracked earth like a king setting a seal.
Veldora's hands rose slowly. He did not shout; he pointed, soft and absolute. Where his fingers cut the air, the wind slowed and listened. Tiny storm sigils—runic, ancient—blinked awake along his arms and chest. The sound around them dwindled: the screaming gusts, the crack of shifting stone, the distant cries. All that remained was the breath of the storm answering a summons.
From the ground to the torn sky, lines of pressure began to gather. Not chaotic cyclones this time, but measured columns—ribbons of wind that braided with light and salt, with the memory of rain and the memory of thunder. Each ribbon pulsed to Veldora's heartbeat and brightened with white-gold lightning. The crown of the storm rose like a halo above him.
Saiki, floating unseen at the edge of the ring and still eating his coffee jelly, paused with spoon mid-air. He squinted up.
"Yare yare… that's not a party trick."
Vorathis' grin thinned as he felt the shift. The Juggernaut's gait changed—less playful, more cautious. He did the only thing a being like him could: he tested. He blinked, summoning the instinctive weave of void and shadow to probe Veldora's formation for gaps.
Veldora whispered an old thing—words whose grammar belonged to wind and ocean and kings. The sigils across his skin flared. He spoke no long speech; he only named what he would do.
"Sovereign Mandate — Storm's Crown."
It was both declaration and law. The halo above Veldora dropped down like a lid bound by command. Where it met the earth, the atmosphere itself leaned: gravity tightened a fraction; sound gained weight; light bent. The Mandate did not simply make wind; it drafted the cardinal world's own rules into service. Streams of stray magic, frayed curtains of reality—every rag of unnatural energy in the field answered the king's will and lined up behind him like soldiers.
For a flashing instant the whole battlefield seemed to take a single, synchronized breath. Even the collapsed roof of a far village quivered in a way that made the peasants set their hands upon it and pray.
Vorathis felt the Mandate strike him in the gut as a moral, then as a physical shove. His eyes widened—there was an unfamiliar weight folding into him, as if the world had pressed a hand onto his chest.
He tried the old tricks: vanish, fold, stride across seams of silence. He blinked out of place and slid like a darker thought. But the Sovereign Mandate had already sewn tethers into the seams he used.
Every teleport left a thin thread of storm behind it now, drawn by Veldora's command. Those threads tightened like ropes the instant Vorathis tried to pass. Movement that used to be breath-easy became a struggle—the wind snapped at his heels, the air itself tugged him back.
Vorathis snarled and forced another step— only to find that the world's reply had become an equal. Where he had planned to outrun consequence, consequence waited for him.
He spat, eyes burning. "You bind the world to your will, storm-king? How quaint."
Veldora's voice was a bell. "I bind it to protect the lives under it. Your tricks endanger them. That is not a game."
Vorathis lunged—but the very space he disappeared into clenched on him like a fist.
Veldora gathered more than wind. He drew on the four ways storms touch a world: wind, water, lightning, and weight. They did not rush him; they folded politely into a single compact column at his back. He bent his knees and released.
First came the Sovereign Draw—a pulse that reduced the volume of air around Vorathis in one tight breath. Compression that tastes like the vacuum before a storm's eye wrapped Vorathis in pressure. His chest heaved; the Juggernaut who had punched planetary breath back now coughed as if a giant hand had closed around his throat.
Then Veldora added texture: the Crown of Lightning threaded through the compressed air—thin, razor-fine lightning that sang the Mandate into the Juggernaut's marrow. Where it touched, inertia collapsed.
Vorathis one-shotted a teleport to escape. The tether caught him mid-fall and knotted. His wings tried to beat; each beat became heavier, as if the wind climbed his spine in chains.
Pain crawled across Vorathis' face, but not shock alone—something colder: surprise. For the first real time in the fight, he felt truly resisted, truly measured.
Veldora did not launch his storm as an outrage. He launched it as a sentence.
He stepped forward, cutting through the waiting air. The halo above him became a blade of pressure, thin and bright. He moved not like a dragon seeking to destroy, but like a king delivering a verdict—each motion precise; each contact intended.
Sovereign Mandate — King's Edict: a focused column of compounded elements that did one thing extremely well: remove the powers Vorathis used to hide inside the seams of space. It was not meant to scorch the field into ash; it was meant to peel away the Juggernaut's allowance to cheat reality.
The beam struck Vorathis not as a crush but as a scalpel. It traced along his aura and carved a line through the phantoms he had been riding—the mirrors, the rifts, the temporal slips. Each phantom sputtered and died where the Mandate's edge passed. The Juggernaut's afterimages collapsed like paper dolls.
Vorathis staggered. For the first time his face showed a small, honest flinch—an animal that had not expected the rope to tighten.
Pain is not only felt in flesh. It can be felt in a system—a pattern of thought and permission that supports a being. The Sovereign Mandate unpicked threads Vorathis had worn as armor for eons.
He gasped—a sound too human for a god-made thing—lungs burning under the compacted air. His six sigils, which had burned steady like braziers, flickered and dimmed. The Juggernaut's voice, when it came, had a thin edge to it.
"You… how—?" he rasped. He attempted to tear through the Mandate with a raw hammer of void-power. The hammer hit the halo and splintered. The Mandate didn't just block; it redirected, folding Vorathis' force into a tight, harmless ribbon and flinging it away like a snapped string.
Vorathis' face contorted: not just pain, but something close to fear. He had faced terror and wreckage and still grinned; this was not the same. This was a sovereign will made heavy and measured, and it choked his options.
Saiki, still invisible and as casual as a spectator in a cinema, finally put the spoon down. He looked up, eyes slightly wide.
"Yare yare… that's not neat. That's sovereign-level rude."
Vorathis fell to one knee. Not destroyed—this was not the end—but crooked under weight he had not felt in an age. His shadow quivered like a wounded thing.
Veldora did not roar or leap to finish him. He approached with the slow, undeniable step of someone who could end a life but instead chooses mercy because his people must live.
Around the ring, the field hummed. The tethered seams faltered and then closed like doors. The sky—still wrong and white—relaxed a little at the edges. The wind returned to its pitch. The world breathed out.
Distantly, on the ruined plain, faint signs of movement stirred: Velzard's fingers twitched; Milim coughed; Testarossa's chest rose shallowly. The Mandate did not harm what it meant to protect, and it left people alive to rebuild.
Vorathis' eyes found Veldora's. There was no mockery now. The Juggernaut's voice was low, spent, and almost curious.
"So this is the measure you keep hidden under the kingly mask."
Veldora's answer was quiet, but it carried like a verdict.
"It was never for me. It was for them."
The Juggernaut tried to stand—his limbs obeyed with stiffness. He straightened, wiped his lip with a clawed hand, then laughed once—short and ragged. Not the maniac laugh of earlier, but a ribbon of respect wrapped in bitterness.
"Then I will remember this weight," Vorathis said. "We are not finished."
He did not disappear in a flare. He simply—slowly—backed away, the Mandate humming like a book closing....