His screams were inhuman—not from pain alone, but from the fundamental wrongness of what was happening to him. This wasn't evolution or transformation. This was a mutation, forced and brutal, turning him into something that biology never intended, that nature would have rejected as an abomination.

But it was effective.

When the transformation stabilized—if such a term could be applied to something so volatile—Caden stood changed. He'd gained another foot in height, his body now a mass of overdeveloped muscle that would have been comical if it weren't so terrifying. The purple energy radiated from his skin like heat shimmer, and the malicious power rolling off him was palpable, a pressure against reality itself.

Jorghan felt it through his senses, the toxic, corrupted power that existed in opposition to natural life.

Whatever that drug was, it didn't enhance so much as corrupt, taking Caden's existing capabilities and burning through them like fuel, creating temporary strength at the cost of permanent damage.

This wasn't someone trying to win.

This was someone trying to do maximum damage before dying.

Caden's head turned toward Jorghan with mechanical precision, his purple-glowing eyes fixing on the target, and when he moved, the speed was shocking.

He crossed fifty feet in a single leap, the ground cratering beneath his launch point, sand exploding outward from the force. His fist came at Jorghan's face with speed that exceeded what the siblings had demonstrated before, power that made their earlier attacks look restrained.

Jorghan barely got his arms up in time.

The impact drove him backward thirty feet, his feet carving trenches in the sand, his forearms—enhanced by his bloodline—feeling like they'd been hit by a siege weapon. Pain lanced through his bones, hairline fractures forming despite his supernatural durability.

He's stronger. Jorghan realized with cold clarity.

Significantly stronger. That drug—it's burning through his life force, converting everything he is into raw power.

Caden came again, not bothering with technique or strategy, just overwhelming force delivered through wild haymaker punches that would have pulverized stone.

Jorghan dodged one, two, three strikes, each one close enough that he felt the displaced air against his skin.

The fourth caught him in the ribs.

Something broke—multiple somethings—and Jorghan was thrown sideways, tumbling across the sand before catching himself with a burst of wind magic. He came up coughing blood, his regeneration already working but slower than before, his essence reserves depleted from the earlier battle.

I need to end this fast, he thought.

Before that drug burns him up completely, before he does damage I can't recover from.

Jorghan raised his hands, blood essence gathering in his palms. Not the controlled manifestations he'd been using, but concentrated power, compressed and volatile. He released it in a point-blank blast aimed at Caden's center mass.

The crimson explosion struck like a battering ram, a force that would have obliterated normal flesh and bone.

Caden walked through it.

The blood essence parted around him like water around a stone, the toxic purple energy radiating from his body disrupting the supernatural matter, preventing it from gaining purchase. His fist shot forward through the dissipating blast, catching Jorghan in the chest, lifting him off his feet, and throwing him backward.

Jorghan hit the ground hard, rolled, and came up already manifesting his next attack.

Fire this time—elemental fury that burned with white-hot intensity, a column of flame that would have melted steel.

Caden walked through that too, his skin blistering and charring but regenerating almost as fast, the toxic enhancement burning through his body's reserves to fuel impossible healing rates. The pain had to be excruciating, but either the drug was suppressing it or Caden simply didn't care anymore.

He's unstoppable in this state, Jorghan understood.

Not invincible, he's taking damage, accumulating it, but he doesn't stop. Doesn't slow down. Just keeps coming until one of us is dead.

Fine.

If conventional attacks weren't working, then he'd need something unconventional.

Jorghan's hands moved in complex patterns, blood essence and elemental magic weaving together, creating something he'd never attempted before: a fusion technique that combined his sorcerous abilities with his bloodline power.

Blood essence manifested as dozens of crimson strands, each one as thin as spider silk but as strong as steel cable. They shot out from his position, spreading across the battlefield, creating a web that crisscrossed the space between him and Caden.

Caden charged through them, his enhanced strength sufficient to break the individual strands, but the strands were connected, a network rather than separate constructs, and breaking one redistributed the tension to others.

More importantly, each strand he touched left traces of blood essence on his skin, marking him and creating connection points.

Jorghan's hands came together, and he pulled on all the strands simultaneously.

The blood essence wrapped around Caden from a hundred different angles, constricting, binding his limbs to his torso, limiting his movement.

He struggled, his enhanced strength tearing through dozens of strands, but more appeared to replace them, the web constantly regenerating as Jorghan poured essence into maintaining it.

With Caden temporarily restrained, Jorghan manifested his most powerful attack.

Above Caden's position, blood essence began to gather, not in small quantities, but in massive volume, tons of supernatural matter pulled from the ambient environment, from Jorghan's own reserves, and from the residual essence still lingering from the Haelve deaths.

It formed a pillar, a column of crimson power that extended hundreds of feet into the air, rotating slowly, building momentum and density with each passing second.

Jorghan's other hand gathered fire, not normal flames but a culmination of wind and fire compressed to its absolute limit, energy that existed at the temperature of dying stars, contained only by his will and the sorcerous formulae he was weaving.

He brought his hands together, wind, fire and blood merging, and released everything at once.

All of it combined into a pillar-like shape in the sky.

People who were watching were stunned and stood frozen in their place. It was ethereal and godlike; the pillar looked like some judgment from the gods.

The blood pillar came down like the hammer of an angry god, hundreds of tons of supernatural matter accelerating under both gravity and magical propulsion.

Simultaneously, the compressed fire erupted outward, creating an explosion that originated from Caden's exact position. Super fast wind was swirling around the pillar like real blades.

The two attacks met in a cataclysm of force and energy.

Fire and blood, matter and energy, natural law and supernatural power—all colliding in a space too small to contain them, resulting in devastation that exceeded the sum of its parts.

The explosion was apocalyptic.

BOOM!!!!

The elves have brought up a shield around the settlement, and the human army ran back to their ships.

While Constance was in the middle of the sandstorm, she shielded herself from the explosive energies.

A hemisphere of destruction expanded outward, sand turned to glass turned to vapor, and the ground itself cratered under forces that exceeded anything the desert had ever experienced.

The shockwave rippled across the battlefield, a physical wall of pressure that knocked soldiers off their feet miles away.

The blast wave reached the elf settlements, where Sarhita's hastily erected barriers held—barely—protecting the observers from the worst of the overpressure. Windows shattered, structures groaned, but the barriers held.

The explosion lasted for a full minute, not expanding that entire time, but sustaining, the energy continuously feeding itself as the magical components interacted in ways that transcended normal physics.

When it finally faded, a crater remained.

Two hundred feet across, fifty feet deep at its center, the walls were pure glass that reflected the morning sun in rainbow patterns.

Jorghan stood at its edge, his body steaming from the heat, his essence reserves at critical lows, barely able to remain standing. Every breath hurt, every movement threatened to send him collapsing, but he'd survived his own attack.

Had Caden?

He peered into the crater, searching for any sign of life, any indication that the drug-enhanced warrior had somehow withstood—

Movement.

At the crater's center, something stirred.

Not Caden walking out unscathed, but Constance, her own suit abandoned, her enhanced body pushed to its absolute limits as she dragged her brother's broken form across the glass.

Caden was alive—barely.

The Venomous Detri's purple glow was gone, burned away by the explosion. His body was charred, massive sections of skin simply missing, bones visible through torn flesh. One arm ended at the elbow, the forearm obliterated. His face was a ruin, one eye destroyed entirely, the other barely functional.

But his chest still rose and fell with ragged breaths. The drug's enhancement was still keeping him alive, though for how much longer was impossible to say.

Constance looked up at Jorghan, and in her eyes was something he recognized, not hatred, not revenge, but desperate love for her brother, the need to save him overriding everything else, including her own safety.

"All units!" she screamed into her suit's communication system, her voice breaking with emotion and exhaustion.

"Full assault! Kill the target! Anyone who retreats will be executed! This is your final order!"

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