### Chapter: The Price of Transmogrified Shadows
The dust and high-pressure steam hung thick in the crater left behind by the Grand Archmage's divine strike. Searing white-hot currents churned violently through the dark ocean, cooking the sea kelp into black slime and turning the surrounding basalt floor into smooth, glassy slag.
Vane coughed violently, his hand pressing hard against his scorched breastplate. The black-purple residual embers of Kyle's **Dark Flames** were still clinging to his silver robes, greedily devouring the residual light-mana stored within his divine ward circuits.
"You... insolent demon," Vane spat, his teeth stained with blood as he forced his body up against a fallen basalt block. He looked up at Kyle, his scrying iris working overtime to process the black-and-purple energy coiling around the youth's right arm. "That flame... it doesn't just burn. It's an elemental parasite!"
