The silence from the antechamber was a heavy, pregnant thing, broken only by the slow, deliberate crunch of footsteps on rubble. Anastasia emerged from the dust-clouded hole in the wall, his fine robes torn and smeared with soot and grime. A thin trickle of blood traced a path from his temple down his cheek. The calm, mocking intellectual was gone, stripped away by Shiro's kick and the Queen's Piercing Mana, replaced by a visage of raw, unvarnished hatred. His eyes, burning with violent violet hellfire, swept the room before locking onto Shiro with the focus of a predator sighting its prey.
"You," he hissed, the single word sizzling with malevolent energy that seemed to curdle the air between them. "You insignificant, chaotic ember. You are a variable I should have incinerated from the start." From within his robes, he produced a pulsating purple crystal that seemed to drink the light from the room—the Luminous, a cursed artifact of immense power. "But I've learned from our previous encounters. Your fire is too... potent to simply extinguish. It must be repurposed. Soul-Siphon Lash!"
This was no ordinary spell. The Luminous flared with violent intensity, and Shiro felt a tearing sensation deep in his core that was fundamentally different from any physical wound. It was as if his very essence was being unraveled. He watched in horror as visible streams of crimson energy—the pure manifestation of his fire ability—began pouring from his chest into the crystal. The flames that usually obeyed his will now betrayed him, flowing against their nature into Anastasia's waiting vessel.
"No!" Shiro roared, trying to resist, but the pull was absolute. He could feel his connection to his power weakening, the familiar heat in his veins cooling to a dull ember. He collapsed to one knee, gasping as the last of the crimson streams vanished into the Luminous. The crystal now glowed with a violent red-purple light, pulsing with stolen power.
Anastasia threw his head back and laughed, a sound of pure triumph. "Yes! This is true power! Not mere imitation, but the real thing!" He crushed the crystal in his hand, and the absorbed energy surged into him. The transformation was immediate and terrifying. A hardened, obsidian-purple shell crawled across his skin like living armor, and when he opened his eyes, they blazed with the same crimson fire that had once been Shiro's. His aura intensified into a blinding violet corona shot through with streaks of red, making the air hum with oppressive energy. The very stones at his feet began to float, caught in the gravitational distortion of his amplified power.
Shiro stared in disbelief, feeling hollowed out. He could still summon flames, but they were weak, sputtering things—a pale shadow of what they'd been moments before. He was operating on half-power, while Anastasia now wielded his own stolen strength against him.
"Your pain makes you weak!" Anastasia taunted, his voice now layered with echoes of Shiro's own power. He raised his hands, and nine glowing rings of intricate magical script materialized around him, spinning like malevolent halos. "Rings of Divinity: Convergence!" The rings spun violently, converging their energy into a single, massive sphere of annihilating power that shot toward Shiro with the inevitability of fate itself.
Shiro crossed his arms, bracing as the sphere engulfed him. The force was immense, throwing him back dozens of feet where he skidded across the broken ground, his clothes smoldering. Before he could even regain his footing, Anastasia gestured again. "Serpent of Despair!" From the swirling purple energy around him, a colossal serpent formed of pure malice and captured screams materialized. It lunged, its maw wide enough to swallow him whole, and Shiro vanished into its metaphysical gullet.
For a moment, there was only the serpent's triumphant hiss. Then fire erupted from within its form. Shiro burst out of its back in an explosion of purifying flame, his speed creating a sonic boom that tore through the remaining stained glass windows. Anastasia merely smirked, utterly unfazed. "Gravity of Terror."
The world behind Shiro distorted into a nightmare landscape. He saw a vision of himself falling into an endless abyss, his own failures mocking him—the people he couldn't save, the battles he'd lost. Disoriented and psychologically battered, he unleashed a wild, desperate barrage of fire blasts in every direction, some nearly striking the still-immobile Queen and the straining Rael.
"Enough of this farce!" Anastasia bellowed, his voice now layered with the echoes of the power he'd stolen. He began to draw upon his full calamity power, the sky above the shattered palace darkening as a vortex of purple energy swirled into existence. Down in the city, the civilians of Serenar screamed in terror, their collective fear feeding his spell. "Lich of Annihilation!"
A wave of absolute nothingness expanded from him, a visible tide of un-making that disintegrated everything it touched—stone, light, even sound itself vanished into its advancing edge. It was the end of all things given form, the ultimate expression of his corrupted philosophy.
Shiro, seeing the wave of obliteration approaching, knew he couldn't defend against it. With a final, gut-wrenching roar, he pushed his remaining power to its absolute limit, his body glowing white-hot. Instead of retreating, he charged toward the wave, firing endless barrages of fire blasts in a desperate attempt to slow its advance. At the very last second, as the void-energy licked at his skin, he teleported in a flash of crimson light, appearing behind Anastasia with a spinning kick aimed at the mage's head.
But Anastasia was ready. He moved with impossible speed, his armored hand snapping up to catch Shiro's foot with an iron grip. "A predictable, desperate move. Farewell, brat." With a contemptuous flex of his enhanced strength, he hurled Shiro with impossible force directly into the path of his own decaying spell, then raised both hands to the darkened heavens. "Nature's Order: Raining Dispersal!"
The corrupted version of the Queen's sacred spell manifested as giant bolts of dark lightning, each one a spear of twisted natural law that rained down from the vortex. One struck the hurled Shiro directly, creating a colossal explosion that vaporized the surrounding forest in an instant. The magical conflagration set the entire western woods ablaze, creating an inferno of unprecedented scale.
Anastasia watched, panting slightly from the exertion, a triumphant smile spreading across his face. But then his eyes widened. The flames from the devastated forest—the ordinary, physical fire—began to swirl against the wind, drawn toward the crater where Shiro had fallen. They coalesced into a raging vortex, then were suddenly sucked into the figure rising from the ashes.
Shiro stood from the broken ground, his body glowing with the absorbed heat of the entire burning forest. His eyes opened, burning with pure, white-hot intensity. The ordinary flames he'd absorbed now danced around him, amplifying his remaining power to terrifying levels. He hadn't taken Anastasia's corrupt energy—he'd taken the very fire its destruction had created, turning the mage's victory into fuel for his own resurgence.