The elf's voice tore across the battlefield like a jagged blade, raw and unhinged, carrying every ounce of his fury on the wind.
"LADY MIRA! IL KILL YOU TO FUCKING DEMON SPAWN!"
The words slammed into the air, vibrating through the dust-choked field where the scent of scorched grass and melted steel still lingered heavy and acrid.
He dropped into a track position, knees bent low, one hand planted in the dirt that crumbled under his fingers, veins bulging thick and corded across his neck, arms, and temples like ropes ready to snap. His eyes locked onto his companion for a fraction of a second, breath coming in short, ragged bursts that misted faintly in the cooling evening air.
He prayed then, voice rising in desperate command. "OH GREAT LERETE, TAKE A CENTURY FROM MY PITIFUL LIFESPAN, AND GIVE ME THE SPEED TO KILL THIS BASTERD!" The words hung for a beat, then the air around him morphed, thickening and shimmering as kinetic energy built in his legs with a low, electric hum that John could feel in his own plasma bones.
The ground beneath the elf's feet began to glow red, faint at first, then brighter, heat radiating outward in visible waves that warped the light and sent tiny pebbles skittering away. The elf grinned, teeth flashing white against the strain on his face, and the bow grinned too in the chaos of the moment. "OH YEEAAA.. ITS COMING! GO AHEAD, WAR! IL GIVE YOU A RUNNING START."
John grinned back, the expression pulling tight across his features as the thrill of the challenge sharpened every sense. He raised both hands and built the first wide wall of fire fifty feet out, flames roaring up from the earth in a solid curtain of orange and white that sucked the oxygen from the air and filled the battlefield with the sharp crackle of superheated dirt
. Heat rolled across his skin in tangible waves, the smell of ozone and burning soil thick enough to taste. Then he layered the second wall twenty feet closer, even taller, the fire denser, roaring louder, the temperature spiking so high that the grass between the barriers blackened and curled instantly. Finally the third wall ten feet out, a final blazing barrier that danced and hissed, three concentric rings of pure inferno designed to slow anything that dared charge through. This should be enough to stop hi—
SLICE!
The sound cut the world in half before John's eyes could track it, a razor-sharp whisper of displaced air that sliced clean through all three walls at once.
The flames parted like silk, edges glowing molten before collapsing inward with a whoosh of collapsing heat. The elf was already five hundred feet behind him, a blurred streak that left a trench of scorched earth in his wake, the afterimage still burning in John's vision.
John dissipated his fire with a flick of thought, the walls winking out in puffs of superheated smoke that stung his nostrils and left the air hazy and bitter.
Confusion flooded him, cold and sharp, his plasma form humming with questions he couldn't voice fast enough. What had just happened? The speed, the cut, the way the barriers had simply opened like they were nothing—
Until he heard the elf's voice, calm and final, drifting from that impossible distance behind him. "Speed of light.. Blitz."
Before John could even comprehend what happened, his head was on the floor.