ShadowBound: The Need For Power
Chapter 388: Fall Of The Green Calamity (6)

Chapter 388: Fall Of The Green Calamity (6)

The air shuddered.

Eliv’s aura surged, the realm convulsing with elemental rage. The very myst of the world warped around him, howling in protest or submission—it was hard to tell. Water spiraled from the boiling streams nearby, condensing into blades and spears. Lightning cracked across the sky, not summoned, but commanded. Stone rose in jagged pillars beneath his feet, forming a small fortress of defense, and wind coiled around his form like a divine cloak—ready to lash out at the slightest command.

A Grand Primordial in full fury.

Galen simply blinked, his face unreadable. Then he yawned.

That single act made Eliv snap again. He roared, slamming his palms together. "Elemental Dominion: Worldbreaker Wrath!"

The ground beneath Galen imploded, crushed inward as a tornado of elemental fury was unleashed. Dozens of jagged stone pillars, sheathed in electricity, launched upward from a ruptured circle beneath him. Water shaped like serpents coiled around them midair, superheated by plasma and fused with molten cores. Above, a spear of concentrated myst—a condensed lance of pure weather—fell from the sky like divine judgment.

Galen didn’t move until the last second.

Just as the attacks collapsed on him all at once, he muttered under his breath.

"How many times must you use the same attack pattern? How pathetic." He said disappointedly then vanished in a blink of red.

Then the attacks collided

The entire arena detonated, stone erupting outward, trees splintering from the raw pressure and the lake trembled violently for the first time. Fire, water, lightning, and earth became a storm of screaming chaos in the air.

Eliv hovered above the crater, panting but resolute. "There. You arrogant son of a—"

He felt a whisper of movement behind him.

Eliv’s instincts flared—he twisted midair, just in time to raise a barrier—

But it wasn’t enough.

A fist broke the sound barrier and slammed into his stomach.

There was no myst infused with the fist.

Just pure, concentrated force.

It didn’t matter that Eliv had armor reinforced with myst. It didn’t matter that he was in mid-flight. The impact folded him in half, compressing his lungs and spine in a single, deafening second. He could hear his own ribs shatter.

Blood erupted from his mouth in thick globs as his body bent unnaturally, then rocketed down like a meteor, smashing into the scorched earth below with a shattering impact.

A crater exploded beneath him. A ring of pressure cracked the terrain in a thirty-foot radius. The sound of bones creaking and veins bursting could be heard. Eliv twitched at the bottom of the pit, gasping for air like a fish on land. He coughed once—then vomited blood and bits of his own teeth.

Standing at the edge of the crater, Galen adjusted his coat sleeves.

"That’s one," he said flatly.

Eliv forced himself up, hands trembling, bones mending with painful groans. Already his myst surged, working overtime to repair the fractured mess of his chest and organs. Steam hissed from his body as he healed—but the ache of humiliation lingered worse than the pain.

"You—" he croaked, voice shredded.

"Seems like you still have enough air to speak," Galen muttered. "Let’s fix that."

The moment Eliv blinked, Galen vanished again—but this time, heat warped the air around where he’d been. A second later, a blinding orange flash appeared directly to Eliv’s left.

Galen was there, one hand raised.

In his palm swirled a miniature inferno—a focused orb no larger than an apple, but its glow rivaled the sun. Symbols of ancient myst, etched in burning sigils, rotated slowly across its surface.

"Let’s see how much fire it takes to melt a ’Grand Primordial.’" His hand pulsed.

Then in a blink of an eye a blast of concentrated infernal energy fired point-blank. The stream wasn’t just fire—it was heat stripped of morality. A lance of raw solar breath, shrieking as it tore through space. It struck Eliv mid-regeneration—

And detonated with a loud, cataclysmic boom!

A column of hellfire erupted into the sky, turning everything above them orange-red. The heat alone turned the ground into slag, warping trees and stone like melted wax. The wind itself was annihilated. The lake steamed violently, a third of its surface evaporating in an instant.

Eliv’s barrier shattered before the fire even touched him.

Then the flames hit.

His skin instantly liquefied and the bones in his right arm vaporized. His robes disintegrated, leaving blackened muscle and glowing white bone beneath. The right side of his face turned to charcoal as his screams were swallowed by the roar of the inferno.

He was thrown through several meters back, crashing into the remaining trees like a ragdoll made of burning trash, landing face-first in the molten dirt. Smoke rose from his back, chunks of myst trying to regenerate the damage—but it was slow. It was so slow. Even the magic struggled to recover something that had been so thoroughly annihilated.

Eliv writhed in agony, gasping, half his vision gone.

And Galen... Galen still hadn’t moved. He stood exactly where he fired, smoke rolling from his arm, watching like a hunter observing a twitching deer.

"That’s two."

Eliv screamed—not in pain, but in rage. His good hand slammed into the earth.

"WORLD’S CORE—REVERSE VORTEX!!"

The entire realm shook. Below them, tectonic lines of myst ripped open. A spiraling fissure of raw elemental essence surged upward, trying to invert the very myst flow of the area. Galen’s coat flared, his boots skidding a few inches from the spatial distortion, but he didn’t move from his spot.

The sky screamed.

Eliv’s body surged with raw myst, the earth fracturing beneath his feet as he gathered the full might of his elemental arsenal. The inverted vortex spiraled upward, twisting the realm’s leylines, feeding the center of his forming spell with reality-bending force. It was no longer just a technique—it was a full-scale elemental catastrophe.

His fingers spread wide, every atom around him resonating with destructive purpose. "WORLD’S CORE—REVERSE VORTEX DESCENT!!" he roared, his voice tearing the very clouds apart.

The heavens responded.

From above, the sky ruptured.

A chasm of pure elemental force opened like a divine mouth, swallowing the sun and darkening the world. Blades of wind howled from the rift. Rivers of molten stone, electrified rain, and crushing gravitational waves spun down in a cyclone of obliteration. Even the very laws of nature twisted in recoil.

The lake—silent and still for so long—finally bent to the will of chaos. Its serene surface was shredded apart, spirals of water twisting up like sacrificial serpents, joining Eliv’s attack in a spiraling doom that rained down upon the world.

The land trembled as the cataclysm began its descent—aimed squarely at Galen.

Eliv’s eyes burned with the certainty of triumph. "Burn in the hell you thought you owned!" he bellowed.

But then—

He blinked.

Something was wrong.

The spot where Galen had stood was... empty.

And in a flash of flickering embers, Eliv felt the ground shift beneath him.

The weight of the myst changed and the angle of gravity skewed.

Suddenly—he was the one standing where Galen had been.

And when he whipped his head around, heart pounding, he saw him—Galen—standing across the torn battlefield, hands buried in his coat pockets, fire gently trailing off his body like steam rising off lava.

Eliv’s mouth fell open.

’No—no, no—how?!’

Galen tilted his head. "Didn’t I tell you?" he muttered. "You people always use the same damn formula."

Then the spell dropped.

Eliv didn’t even have time to raise a defense.

The full force of the Reverse Vortex Descent slammed into him like the judgment of gods.

The sky collapsed into the earth.

The lake vanished in an instant, vaporized before its water could even scream. A beam of annihilation struck from the heavens and punched through the landscape like a war god’s spear. Mountains shattered, rivers boiled to nothing, the trees that had once danced in the sacred ring were reduced to smoldering embers.

The earth cratered—no, it caved in. Like the continent itself had lost the will to hold form. The impact left a gaping wound in the land, wide enough to swallow cities. Pillars of flame, molten rock, and myst erupted into the air, tearing the horizon apart.

When the light faded along with Eliv’s shrieking scream—what remained was silence.

The world had gone totally quiet.

Ash fell like gray snow, swirling over the lip of the crater, revealing a pit that looked bottomless.

And there—at its center—lay a body.

Or what could barely be called one.

A blackened, unmoving husk.

The skin was gone, muscles were charred beyond recognition. Bone gleamed white beneath exposed strips of seared flesh. Eliv’s body twitched—barely. He was still alive. But his myst couldn’t regenerate fast enough or at all. His soul clung to life through sheer will, but his physical form had been devoured.

He couldn’t scream. He couldn’t speak. Every breath was agony and his eyes were crusted, half-melted, with only one still working—barely.

Then in the silence, footsteps echoed in the distance heading towards him.

They were soft and deliberate.

And then, a shadow fell upon Eliv’s ruined body like a death sentence. It was Galen—standing just a few paces away, looking down at the barely-living corpse of the Grand Primordial.

"Damn," Galen said, voice low, amused. "That was one hell of an attack."

He slowly clapped.

Mocking, ironic, and cruel.

"You know... if I actually let that hit me, I wouldn’t be looking much better than you," Galen said thoughtfully, his voice drifting lazily through the smoke. "Nah—I wouldn’t be dead, but I’d have to fire off a full myst counter. One of those annoying, flashy moves that burns through fuel and takes actual effort."

He shrugged. "And honestly, I didn’t feel like putting in the work. So I just... made you hit yourself. Easier that way."

Eliv twitched, wanting to ask a question.

Galen crouched, staring down at him like a disappointed teacher observing a failed student.

"Don’t worry. You’re not the first big-shot mage to think they had a chance, only to get wrecked by me... and their own spell," he said with a smirk. "But you were by far the dumbest."