Jacob could feel the mana pulsing faintly within his chest, a sluggish, half-awake force that seemed more annoyed than obedient, reluctant to stir from its dormancy no matter how forcefully he tried to draw it forth. Every part of his body, every trembling muscle and aching nerve, was devoted to the task of guiding that stubborn stream of energy into his right hand, where the beginnings of a rune were slowly starting to take shape, uneven, flickering, and unsteady, like a spark struggling to survive in the wind.

Naturally, the mage noticed.

He let out a sharp laugh, one devoid of mirth, a bark of mockery that echoed off the broken stones and cold silence of the chamber. His eyes narrowed as he took in the sight of Jacob's clenched jaw, sweat trailing down his temples, his lips barely moving in focus.

"So… you can use magic," he said, voice dripping with disdain. "A blasphemous sinner, clutching at power he was never meant to touch. Very well. If you insist on crawling into the light, I'll show you how useless that spark becomes before the fire of true faith."

The mage stepped forward slowly, each footfall deliberate, the corners of his mouth lifted in a smile that seemed to stretch just a little too far.

"Religion was never yours, was it? Not that I can blame you. You grew up in this festering wound of a kingdom, where temples are shuttered, gods forgotten, and sin dressed up as reason. This place… this whole land is a sewer that stinks of heresy. Nearly every soul here is already lost, already damned on a straight path to hell, where the demons are sharpening their claws in anticipation."

He came to a halt, close enough that Jacob could see the flecks of spittle at the corner of his mouth, could smell the bitterness on his breath as he leaned in and hissed, "And that includes you. You, who dared to covet divine authority. You, whose brother already burns beneath the gaze of a God he dared to defy. I'll send you to join him. You'll both rot together."

Jacob opened his eyes, not wide with rage or fear, but narrow with a strange sort of calm. He looked at the mage, then raised his hand, palm up, and activated what little mana he had left. The rune sparked faintly, its outline flickering with a weak white light, a single thread of smoke curling upward. For a moment, it held.

Then it sputtered out, vanishing like mist caught in sunlight.

The mage grinned, already turning his face in triumph, but Jacob didn't stop to consider failure. His body moved with instinct honed by pain and desperation. With a sudden pivot, he swung his sword toward the mage's wrist, not with the power of a master swordsman, but with the raw, reckless speed of someone who knew it was now or never.

Steel met flesh.

The blade sliced cleanly through the mage's right hand, severing it at the wrist. Blood sprayed forward in a wide arc, coating Jacob's now-flickering barrier with a sticky red sheen.

"Fuck!" the mage howled, stumbling back, clutching the ruined stump, crimson streaming between his fingers.

But Jacob wasn't done.

He rushed forward again, the taste of smoke and copper thick in his mouth, his sword raised high to strike once more. He didn't hesitate, until the mage looked up and hissed, teeth bared like an animal cornered, "Fucking sinner. Rot in hell."

And then it happened.

A pulse of crimson light burst from the mage's body, covering him from head to toe in a ghostly red glow. Even his eyes shone with that same sickly light as he lifted his remaining hand and whispered something low, the words too ancient or too fast to catch.

Five runes, deep red, perfectly formed appeared in the air before Jacob, crackling with heat.

He had no time to react.

The fireballs struck him almost simultaneously, a brutal sequence of blasts that lifted him off his feet and hurled him backward. His body slammed into the stone wall behind him with a sickening crunch, the old masonry giving way beneath the force. Chunks of rock rained down as the wall crumbled, burying him beneath a heap of rubble.

Dust filled his lungs. Pain danced across his skin. He gasped for air that wouldn't come.

And then he looked at his hand, the artefact still there, but the rune etched into its surface no longer responded. The protective barrier it had conjured was gone, shattered beneath the weight of five divine flames.

It hadn't been enough. Not this time.

He could tell, even without moving, that several of his bones were fractured, sharp, radiating pain bloomed through his ribs and shoulder whenever he shifted his breath just slightly, and his skin, blistered and scorched in places, clung painfully to the fabric of his torn clothes.

Blood trickled steadily from his mouth and nose, metallic and warm, mixing with dust and soot. His fingers, trembling and weak, still managed to clutch the artefact, more out of instinct than strength but his sword had been thrown from his grasp and lay somewhere amid the rubble.

Jacob remained where he was, seated awkwardly against the broken wall, spine crooked and arms shaking under the weight of his own body. Movement was possible, but it promised nothing but pain, deep, grinding pain that reminded him all too vividly why he had always loathed it. The sensation was neither romantic nor cathartic, just raw and unwelcome.

He kept his eyes on the mage, unmoving, and watched in silence as the man stepped across the ruined ground, blood dripping from his sleeve, until he reached the severed hand that lay curled on the floor like a discarded tool. With practiced ease, he bent down, picked it up, and pressed it against the open wound on his wrist.

A red light shimmered faintly around the contact point. Slowly, the severed flesh knit back together, tendons connecting, skin sealing, bone fusing beneath that crimson glow until the hand flexed once, twice, as if nothing had ever happened.

"Faith," the mage said softly, reverently, his voice echoing with certainty, "is what separates the chosen from the heretics. Look closely. See how my god heals me perfectly. Is that not divine? Is he not worthy of your awe, your surrender?"

He spread his arms as if preparing to receive a blessing, and as he did, a circle of runes spun slowly behind his shoulders, ornate and symmetrical, etched in firelight, while his gaze turned solemn, devout, and strangely gentle.

"I offer you this once more," he said. "Repent, abandon your sins, and worship him. Do so, and you will be saved."

Jacob responded with a soft cough. Then another, harsher this time, rattling through his chest and bringing up more blood. Slowly, he pushed himself up from the rubble, arms quivering beneath him as he forced his battered body upright. The process was halting, but when he stood, he stood tall his posture steady despite the bruises, his breathing rough but controlled.

There was no anger in his eyes, no panic, no trembling beneath the weight of divine pressure. Just calm. Cold, calculating calm, the kind that emerged from someone that felt no emotion. Just like Jacob was right now.

He wasn't thinking about surrender. He wasn't even thinking about the pain. He was thinking about why the rune had failed.

If there had been no reaction at all, he might have dismissed the entire theory as a desperate miscalculation, a grasp at shadows. But there had been a reaction, the rune had flickered, had started to take form, had tasted reality for a moment before sputtering out like a candle in the wind.

There was a reason for that. There had to be.

A possibility lingered in his mind, slowly taking shape. What if the rune he'd seen was genuine in origin, but altered? What if the mage's own mana, twisted by his blind devotion and shaped by warped faith had corrupted the true form of the fire rune? That would explain the brief resonance. He hadn't been wrong in what he sought… only in what he found.

But that answer only led to more questions, heavier and more urgent. If what he saw was a corrupted true rune, then where, how would he find the pure one?

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The mage shifted impatiently, watching Jacob with narrowing eyes. "You are taking an awfully long time to consider a very simple offer," he said, the pretence of patience beginning to fray.

Jacob didn't answer. His eyes moved across the battlefield, taking in the wreckage, the shattered stones, the scattered bodies, the flickering shadows of firelight. They were winning, just barely. More of their fighters were still standing, though not by many. Most of both sides were dead or dying, the marble ground covered in blood.

And Olivia… she still hadn't returned.

If the man she fought had defeated her, then all of this, the pain, the endurance, the runes and the resistance would mean nothing. But if she won, there was still hope.

All he had to do now was survive.

Just a little longer.

The most rational course of action, the one that any tactician, any survivor, would've taken was to feign submission, to nod and pretend, to mouth the words of repentance until the right moment arrived, until help came or a weakness revealed itself.

He could have murmured some half-hearted prayer, bowed his head in false reverence, and lived long enough to strike back. And yet, Jacob found himself shaking his head, not from pride, not from some suicidal defiance, but from something deeper, something colder and more instinctive than even logic could explain.

"The influence is too deep," he muttered to himself, his voice low and dry, as if the words were merely an observation, not a confession.

This aversion, this visceral resistance to worship had been carved into him over a lifetime. His family, his teachers, the kingdom itself, they had all buried the same lesson into his mind and the minds of every child raised within Eterna: that the worship of gods was not just foolish, but corrupting, degrading, a return to the very ignorance they had cast off generations ago. Even now, with death hovering close, that belief refused to leave him.

"I have a question," Jacob said, his voice steady despite the blood at the corner of his mouth.

The mage's face brightened, his posture relaxing as though he believed he had finally broken through. "Of course you do," he replied warmly, almost patronizing in his kindness. "Questions are good. They mean you're beginning to consider. That you're opening your heart, yes?"

But the hope in his voice faltered when Jacob spoke again.

"Your god, Hevri, he's not the only one, is he? If I remember correctly, he's just one among hundreds. And not even the strongest, if we're being honest. So, let me ask you this, when so many exist, when they're fragmented and competing and bound by their own domains, isn't it more reasonable to think of them not as divine beings, but simply as another race? Powerful, yes but no more deserving of worship than dragons, elves, or anything else that walks this world?"

The change in the mage was immediate and total.

His expression, once serene, twisted into something darker, the lines of his face hardening with fury. The red light around him, already present, deepened in colour, pulsing like a living thing. His jaw clenched. The runes behind him began to tremble.

"You dare…" he whispered, barely able to contain the venom in his voice. "You dare blaspheme the gods in my presence… you dare insult the great Hevri by comparing him to beasts and mortals? Now I see you clearly. You are no lost soul. You are a heretic by nature, a corrupted wretch who seeks to steal what he does not understand, groping in the dark after the divine like a blind dog. Your soul is already damned. There is no repentance for you. No salvation. Only death… and eternal torment in the pits of hell."

As he spoke, the red aura surged, as though the god himself had chosen to pour his attention into the mage, amplifying his rage and power. The runes spinning around him grew larger, brighter, their edges sharp with flame, and the heat in the air thickened until it became hard to breathe.

Still, Jacob stood, unmoving.

"How should I try to survive this?" he asked aloud, more to himself than to the mage. "Should I pray, perhaps? Surely one of your gods would take pity on me if I asked earnestly enough. They're all-forgiving, aren't they?"

The mage gritted his teeth, the muscles in his jaw twitching. The runes around him began to crackle, the very pressure of them enough to freeze Jacob in place. But he didn't stop.

"You speak of strength," Jacob continued. "Of divine might. But wasn't a god killed by Akashic, with his own hands? A mortal, ending the life of a so-called higher being. If your gods can die by human hands, what exactly makes them different from us? Immortality? Power? Those aren't divinity. Those are just… advantages."

The silence between them turned electric, the air vibrating with tension.

Then, at last, the mage's voice broke through, low and controlled, like fire burning beneath the surface of calm water.

"They can die by the hands of men," he said, "but you will not live long enough to test that out, because here, and now, I will reduce you to nothing but ash."

All at once, the runes suspended in the air burst into flames, vast, swollen with heat, and pulsing with the violent energy of raw magic. They hovered there, unmoving but alive, held aloft by the mage's will, and it was clear now that the cost of such power was beginning to show.

Blood streamed from the mage's eyes, his ears, and from both nostrils in thick, steady rivulets, but he seemed oblivious to the damage, or perhaps simply beyond the point of caring. His face had contorted into something unrecognizable, part fury, part zealotry as he thrust both hands toward Jacob.

"Rot in hell!" he screamed.

The fireballs surged forward in unison, the air warping around them with heat, their glow flickering across the ruins like miniature suns. But Jacob didn't flinch.

Instead, he stepped forward, steady despite the injuries still pulsing through his body, and raised his hand, his expression shifting not with fear but with something closer to satisfaction, a faint smile curving across his face.

"I can see it," he said softly, as though speaking more to himself than to the mage.

And he could. Clearer than before.

He could see the underlying structure within each fireball, the hidden runes swirling in them, not just a symbol but a signature, a precise pattern that allowed the spell to take shape and hold its form. Every fireball had a true rune embedded at its core, and while each was slightly different, twisted here or reinforced there, those differences were subtle, likely shaped by the mage's intent, his faith, and the influence of his corrupted mana.

Jacob didn't waste time.

He drew mana from his chest again, ignoring the pain and strain as he forced it toward his hand. In his mind, runes appeared and vanished in rapid succession, half-finished, broken, incorrect until he began to assemble them like pieces of a fragmented design. He compared one against another, isolated the flaws, discarded the corrupted shapes, and reconstructed what he believed to be something new, not a copy of any single rune he'd seen, but a corrected version. A cleaner one. A true one.

And though by all reason he should have been unsure, should have hesitated, should have doubted, the certainty came to him like a whisper at the edge of thought. He didn't know how, but he knew he was right.

The rune appeared fully formed in his palm just as the fireballs closed the final distance, so near now that his hair singed in the heat and patches of skin along his arm began to blister and peel.

He didn't shout. He didn't chant. He didn't gesture wildly or call upon any divine name. He simply raised his hand and pointed it forward, as the first fireball grazed across his palm.

Then he activated the rune.

There was no sound.

No explosion. No blinding flash of light. Just silence.

The fire scorched his hand, and yet he didn't pull away, didn't cry out. He only smiled faintly and whispered, "Success."

And then it happened.

All around him, the mana in the air vanished, not burned or destroyed, but drawn inward, as if the rune in his hand had become a kind of void, a singularity that pulled every strand of energy into itself. The fireballs stopped mid-flight, freezing in the air with a soft hiss as if confused by their own sudden inertia. Deprived of the mana that sustained them, they flickered and cracked at the edges.

Then, like the strike of flint against steel followed by oil suddenly catching fire, the rune in Jacob's hand ignited, not in a flicker or a spark, but in a violent, uncontained burst of flame. A torrent surged outward from his palm, rushing forward in a blinding arc of heat and light, consuming the space between him and the incoming fireballs with astonishing speed.

The flames he produced were not merely hotter or brighter, they were purer, unburdened by corrupted faith or twisting ideology and even mana. This was fire as it should have been, elemental, direct, alive with clarity of purpose. It struck the mage's fireballs head-on, not pausing or slowing, but tearing through them with absolute force. The mage's spells unravelled instantly, undone by the superior construction of the rune Jacob had formed.

The torrent didn't stop.

The flames pressed onward, pushed forward by momentum and will, now racing across the broken earth toward the mage himself.

Caught off guard by the power and speed of the counterattack, the mage threw up shield after shield in front of himself, desperate, layered defences constructed out of raw mana and panic. For a brief moment, they held. The flames struck them with a hiss like steam meeting molten iron, and the barriers shimmered under the pressure.

But then the cracks appeared.

One by one, the shields splintered under the heat, unable to bear the force of flame that was no longer merely magical but fundamental. Before the mage could summon another defence or even reposition himself, the fire broke through completely and surged into him, swallowing his entire form in a wave of orange and white.

His scream was sharp at first, piercing, human, but quickly lost its strength as the fire did its work. He tried to move, to flee, but his legs were gone, burned away in seconds. His arms flailed briefly before they, too, were consumed. His chest collapsed, scorched and blackened, and then the screaming stopped altogether as his head was reduced to ash.

Even that ash didn't last.

The fire lingered long enough to erase what little remained of him, every trace, every ember, before finally dying down.

And then, as if the pressure of the spell had been holding everything in suspension, the vacuum it had created drew in the surrounding mana all at once. The air filled again with energy, the world seeming to exhale as equilibrium returned.

Jacob looked down at his hand. The skin was blackened, charred so deeply that the flesh beneath seemed hollowed out. He couldn't move his fingers. He doubted they were even intact. A breeze might have shattered it completely, and yet he remained still, staring at it in quiet contemplation.

When he finally looked up, his eyes met Jessica's.

She stood some distance away, frozen, staring at him not with fear, but with something closer to disbelief, a kind of stunned silence that said more than words could have. He offered her a smile, not wide, not theatrical, but warm in its own quiet way, as warm as he could manage with what little strength remained in him.

Then his body swayed.

His knees gave out, and he pitched forward slowly, falling toward the ground without even lifting his arms to catch himself. His head struck the earth with a dull thud, and the last thing he heard before everything went black was the faint rustle of wind returning to stillness.

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