Before John was about to commend them again the words died on his tongue as Mira closed her eyes and made a silent incantation.
Her lips moved without sound at first, the air around her growing thick and cold like winter fog rolling in off a river, carrying the faint metallic taste of old blood and grave soil that settled on every tongue.
"My life for his, oh goddess of death, I offer you my soul and his, queen of death, act on my prayer."
The moment the final word left her the change hit her body like a slow hammer.
She aged by a year every single second, skin tightening then loosening in visible waves, faint lines etching around her eyes and mouth while her shoulders sagged under an invisible weight that made her knees tremble.
Strength bled from her limbs in steady pulses, muscles softening, breath growing shallower, yet her eyes stayed locked forward with unbreakable resolve.
John felt it too, a cold draining pull that tugged at the core of his plasma form, siphoning power straight from the endless heat inside him.
His movements slowed by fractions, the constant hum of nuclear fury in his veins flickering like a candle in wind, and the sensation sent a strange thrill racing up his spine.
He grinned wide, the expression splitting his face as fresh bubbles of plasma rose and popped across his red skin.
"HOW NOBLE! HOW… PATHETIC!"
The words boomed across the lava field, carrying the full force of his voice that made the obsidian crackle underfoot.
He rocketed forward in a blur of raw speed, legs driving him across the broken ground faster than sound could follow, the air ripping past him in a screaming gale that tore small flames from the surrounding lava and left a trail of superheated wind in his wake.
His right hand flicked upward and pyrokinesis answered instantly, condensing balls of heat the size of fists that formed in midair and exploded outward like bombs the moment they left his palm.
Each detonation bloomed with white-hot force, shockwaves slamming into the earth and sending geysers of molten rock spraying high while the pressure wave flattened nearby trees into splintered pulp.
He closed the distance on Mira in less than a heartbeat and unleashed a point blank shot straight at her face.
The ball struck true, meant to blow her head smooth off in a spray of bone and brain, yet what emerged from the fireball was a determined charged woman with her skin essentially melted off.
Flesh hung in blackened sheets from her skull, one eye socket exposed and weeping, lips burned away to reveal teeth clenched in defiance, but she did not care.
Pain did not slow her.
She lunged through the lingering flames, charred fingers gripping a broken sword shard, and drove it straight into John's chest with every remaining ounce of strength her aging body could summon. The blade sank deep into plasma with a wet hiss, the metal glowing cherry red on contact, and she grinned through the ruin of her face.
"Its over, war."
John grinned back, the expression calm and almost playful even with the sword buried to the hilt in his core. "Nuh uh… WRATH OF 100 BOILING SUNS!"
The words left his mouth and one hundred individual orbs of condensed plasma flared into existence around him, each one a miniature sun the size of a large exercise ball, surfaces roiling with stellar heat and pressure that made the air itself scream. Before John died the orbs detonated all at once in a cataclysm of light and force that erased the battlefield in a single heartbeat.
Every fighter still standing vanished in the blast, bodies reduced to ash and vapor before they could even scream, the shockwave ripping outward in a perfect circle that flattened the surviving thousand knights and their mounts into scattered bone dust. Eighty percent of the kingdom beyond the field disappeared too, walls crumbling, towers melting, entire districts wiped clean as the energy release glassed the earth for miles and left a crater so vast the horizon itself seemed to sink. John felt the end come, his plasma form unraveling in the heart of the inferno, awareness fading into white nothing as the last of his strength burned away.
John woke up in his old fat body again, this time on the floor while Selio was on top of him, looking at him in a way that asked "what happened?"