Mystic Calling：Stone of Glory

After Feylora’s life energy poured into him, the first thing Ethan noticed was his breathing.

The heaviness clinging to his chest drained away fast. The wound across his back—torn open by Maelor’s sword pressure—stopped worsening. Pale green light seeped into his flesh, merging with the power already flowing inside him. The emptiness from nonstop fighting was filled bit by bit, until even his fingertips steadied again.

Ethan raised his hand.

White lightning leapt from his palm—no longer pure. Tiny blue and green sparks were mixed into it now. The three forces didn’t fully fuse, but they flowed along the same track. Under his control, they tightened into a sphere.

He didn’t waste the recovery.

Ethan sent the energy sphere into the space between himself and Feylora. The moment it left his hand, it unfolded. White electricity stretched outward, weaving into a curved barrier that covered both of them—and Ataneya nearby—inside the arc.

The pale blue and green specks scattered across the shield, filling the gaps between lightning threads.

When the barrier fully sealed, the howling wind outside was blocked. Loose stones smashed into the white screen and only produced rings of ripples that spread and vanished.

Ataneya lifted her head, looking toward the angel silhouette hanging in the sky.

The golden spear was still in its hands, pressing down on Maelor’s position. Light and wind continued colliding midair. That zone had been split into gold and teal so sharply that even the platforms’ shadows were pulled in two different directions.

Ataneya lowered her gaze.

The power of the Shadow Vixen Deity burst open from inside her.

All twenty-four tails spread at once, their tips slicing through the air and dragging up deep, heavy energy. That power didn’t disperse. It ran along the tails and poured into her chest, making the pale-blue core she’d been compressing shudder with a low, ominous vibration.

Ataneya stopped chasing perfect stability.

She reached out, grabbed the energy mass in front of her chest, and flung it casually outward.

The pale-blue orb left her body, spinning half a circle around her wrist. Then infernal energy surged from her palm and spread fast across the orb’s surface.

The flames didn’t burn from the outside.

The first spark ignited inside the orb—then punched through the pale-blue shell and leapt several yards into the air. Infernal heat didn’t destroy the sphere. It squeezed the blue-white power inside even tighter.

The temperature around it spiked.

Air warped. Firelight danced across the shield. The stone surface of the platform blackened in patches, and thin heat haze hissed out of the cracks.

Before the orb even flew, it was already a death notice.

Ataneya snapped her arm and sent it to Ethan.

Ethan jumped and caught it midair. Infernal flame licked up his forearm, but the white lightning in his hand split it away, keeping it off his skin.

He looked up.

Seraphine and Maelor’s attacks were about to collide head-on. The golden spear crushed the wind layer above. Maelor’s rising sword pressure climbed toward it from below, pushing back in the opposite direction.

Wind energy gathered beneath Ethan’s feet.

The airflow detonated downward, boosting him higher. Holding Ataneya’s infernal orb, he cleared the jagged edges of broken platforms and reached Seraphine’s side.

Ethan stopped holding back his lightning.

Electric light burst from his arms, shoulders, and back in continuous strikes, splitting outward. The sky that the angel silhouette had lit turned into a storm of dense thunderbolts.

The light didn’t vanish—

—but it was chopped into countless bright-and-dark slices.

A white bolt slammed into a distant platform, blowing the stone open from the center. Another climbed the wind currents and left wild, snapping arcs crawling across the domain’s ceiling. Thunder rolled in a chain, crushing Maelor’s laughter and even the wind’s howl under it.

Ethan steadied both hands.

His left supported Ataneya’s infernal orb.

His right gathered every thread of white lightning he could command right now.

The closer the two forces got, the more violent the reaction. The orb’s blue-white core pulled at the lightning. But when the arcs truly neared, the flames on the orb’s surface pushed them away.

Attraction.

Repulsion.

The tug-of-war numbed Ethan’s arm to the bone. The air between them screamed under the pressure, and hairline cracks flickered into existence in the surrounding space—then vanished.

If he forced them to collide directly, they’d detonate early.

Ethan stared at the shifting gap between the two, and the solution clicked into place.

A wind sphere formed in front of him.

Wind power compressed into a ball, then Ethan slid it into the space between the two forces. It didn’t touch the infernal orb. It didn’t touch the lightning. It hovered between them, keeping them separated with a constantly rotating current.

Infernal flame hit the wind sphere and was carried outward.

White arcs reached forward and were redirected by the spinning airflow.

The wind sphere became both medium and barrier.

Two dangerously unstable powers stopped slamming into each other and settled into a brief, controlled balance.

Maelor’s sword pressure was already closing in.

The dragon-horn sword cut forward, and teal wind blades spread sideways across the entire domain. Wherever that sword pressure passed, floating stones were sliced neatly in half, the cut surfaces so clean there wasn’t even a hint of crumbling.

At the same time, a denser teal glow rose behind Maelor.

Wind gathered at his back, first shaping a massive torso, then extending outward. Eight wings unfolded one after another, each one outlined by tightly spinning airflow.

When the glow stabilized, a huge dragon silhouette appeared behind Maelor.

Eight-winged.

Layered teal scales covered its body, clear under the lightning’s glare. The dragon lifted its head, eyes burning red, spread its wings, and charged the angel silhouette in the sky.

Seeing it, Ethan couldn’t help letting out a breath of awe.

If Seraphina were here right now, this would feel a lot less hopeless.

But there was no time to wait for reinforcements.

"Seraphine. Let’s go."

Queen Seraphine turned her face slightly and met his eyes.

Neither hesitated. They advanced on Maelor together.

Ethan moved first, shoving both hands forward.

The infernal orb in his left and the condensed white lightning in his right shot from his palms along two adjacent lines. The wind sphere between them followed as well.

Ethan closed his fingers.

The wind sphere expanded instantly. Spinning airflow stretched outward, wrapping both the infernal orb and the white lightning at once. Wind pressure squeezed them inward. In flight, the two forces were driven together—

—merging into a larger, heavier energy sphere.

Flame coated the outer layer.

White lightning braided inside without stopping.

Pale blue became the stabilizing core.

Green sparks scattered through the structure, and every time they flashed, the sphere’s internal pattern tightened and "clicked" more complete.

The energy sphere flew at Maelor.

It didn’t cross the space quietly.

Power inside it kept venting outward—infernal flame burned through the wind along its path, while white arcs lashed down toward nearby platforms. More unsettling than that...

As it advanced, it was absorbing power from the domain itself.

Broken wind streams were dragged into it.

Loose energy scattered in the distance was pulled closer.

With every stretch of distance it traveled, the sphere swelled a little larger, and the pressure rolling off its surface grew heavier.

Seraphine glanced at Ethan, then at the sphere as it fed on the battlefield.

She understood immediately.

Seraphine lifted her twin blades, and the angel silhouette behind her mirrored the motion. The golden spear that had been locked on Maelor rotated in midair. Its tip left the teal dragon silhouette and realigned with the flying energy sphere instead.

The angel silhouette gripped the spear with both hands.

Gold light streamed along the shaft toward the spearhead.

Then it brought the spear down in a straight, decisive slash—cutting toward the energy sphere.

Ethan gave a small nod.

His body began breaking apart from his feet upward, dissolving into fine black particles. The grains didn’t rush Maelor. They drifted along the wind currents near the energy sphere, keeping a subtle, hard-to-notice distance—waiting.