Stormblade [Skill Merge Portal Break] (B1 Complete)

It was impossible.

She was Queen Mother Yalerox. Mother of millions, Paragon of the Hurricane. Her forces had breached the fortress's walls, killed all they could find, and sated the voice in her head—for now. The fortress would help form her stronghold in this world. Once she tore its walls down and lined her portal's borders with its metal and stone, she could focus on fighting the wars ahead of her. On eradicating the S-Rank portal to her west. On starting to rule the desert.

Queen Mother Yalerox had plans. Designs. Aspirations. And after her first encounters with the powerful aura in the distance and the mass death it had caused north of the fortress, she'd budgeted her children accordingly. Thousands could die. Even tens of thousands. If that's what it took to end that aura, then so be it. She'd been prepared for that sacrifice.

When the world darkened, she thought it was her storm strengthening. Instead of reacting, she simply watched the clouds. Even the rippling tang on her taste buds meant nothing; her Health repaired wave after wave of flesh-melting damage almost instantly.

She'd budgeted for that.

She hadn't budgeted for the flash, or the firestorm traveling across the desert. For the sheer force slamming into her beautiful hurricane and destabilizing it. For her children's deaths. So many. So quickly.

Thousands of her children disappeared in the first blinding bursts of light. Their shadows smeared across the glassed sand where they'd been standing.

As even more of her army screamed in agony, Yalerox realized they'd been the lucky ones. It wasn't just the wood and plant matter, or the animals, that were on fire. It wasn't even her children. They were, of course. But so was the sand. The river a mile to her east. The air. Everything that could burn, did. Everything that couldn't burn found a way.

Yalerox hardly cared. Her children were replaceable. Those few who weren't—the lower-powered Paragons she'd raised up as representatives of the Hurricane, in defiance of the God of Thunder, the Lady of Cyclones, and the other Paragons who claimed to rule over her—were the only ones that mattered—them, and Tathrix.

She was more concerned with herself. With her own survival. Yalerox reached out and made contact with the Eye of the Storm back in her portal world. She hadn't wanted to tap into its power. It would be weaker across the border between her world and this one. But she had no choice. Not if she wanted to win.

Not if she wanted to sate the voice screaming in her head.

The tang on her taste buds redoubled, and the hurricane overhead slowed. The eye walls disintegrated. A cascade of rain poured down for almost a minute as Queen Mother Yalerox broke her own storm into pieces in a bid to put out the fire that, even now, was ripping across her army of misbegotten, twisted children.

It was night. It had just been day, and now it was night. Nothing made sense. Yalerox blinked. Health poured into her eyes, and color and brightness slowly reasserted themselves. The flash. It had all but blinded her.

She tried to grasp the reins of her storm and bring it back around her. To shield herself and her bodyguards.

Then another flash rippled out, larger than anything she'd ever felt.

And another.

And another.

Angelo hadn't expected so much resistance.

Going all-out, he had the raw power to overwhelm most A-Rank bosses—even if he was lacking the survivability to weather their attacks. That was the trouble with his S-Rank build. He needed all five skill merges to power his combo. That left him with limited mobility and defenses beyond what an S-Ranker had.

Typically, that didn't matter. He was either well-protected by a front line like Deborah and Terrel, or the enemy was so far away they couldn't strike back—and not many enemies could handle the Light of Dawn in full Fusion.

But to the east, something was doing just that.

Angelo smiled. That implied exactly what he'd hoped for. The portal world's boss was on the battlefield, and whatever it was, it was a Paragon.

His entire strategy changed.

The Light of Dawn no longer cared about the portal or the convoy. He switched his entire focus to finding the strongest auras he could. All Angelo cared about was searching and destroying. His weapons were uniquely unsuited to a precision mission, to eliminating the opposition's leadership in a controlled manner.

But they were uniquely suited to eliminating everything, so that's what he did.

Fission. Demon Core. Power Plant. Supercritical.

Fusion.

Repeat.

Repeat.

Repeat.

One hundred percent of Angelo's power went into his assault on the aura to the east. One hundred percent of the strongest mage in Phoenix, and one of the strongest delvers on Earth.

He wasn't a typical mage. Most mages mixed skills and spells into an offensive combo, just like he was. But unlike them, his combination was truly an engine, with all his skills contributing to fuel it, Fusion providing all the damage, and his spells helping in other ways.

Yes, he was casting spells; as Power Plant and the Demon Core vomited Mana at him, he had to or he'd overload. But his spell selection was geared toward stabilizing and shielding himself from his skills, not toward adding more damage. Radiation protection. Shockwave stabilization. The more power he poured into his magic, the more power his skills grew. Supercritical. Angelo's body heated up. Sweat poured from every pore as his skin prickled.

Fusion.

Repeat.

Repeat.

Repeat.

His combination of skills was unique among mages. No one else had the Unique skill—Demon Core—to sustain a Mana-producing reaction. No one else had built entirely around that reaction. Every spell, every skill, had been about either starting the reaction or keeping it running, or about not shredding himself with the sheer power he possessed. Not about precision, or powerful spells, or any concerns of a lesser mage.

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Angelo didn't target individuals. He couldn't. Not even the Paragon at the source of the aura.

But no one was as good at wiping out monsters by the hundred or thousand as the Light of Dawn.

And wipe them out he would.

Queen Mother Yalerox felt something new.

Fear.

And uncertainty.

The aura was too strong. She couldn't resist it. The sand below her feet crackled as it melted and resolidified as a sheet of glass. Her children were dying. The ones in the fortress were safe, but any outside…any outside was burning, dying, or disintegrating against the sheer force arrayed against her.

Only the handful of Paragons more powerful than her had the power to obliterate her aura with theirs. Only they could push her around like this. Nothing else could. And the S-Ranked aura attacking her was no Paragon.

And yet, she was losing.

The hurricane she'd assembled over the fortress was in chaos. Its orderly walls and coordinated winds had fallen into chaos, and every time Yalerox tried to grasp the reins, another rippling explosion and surging wave of aura smashed into her. It was overwhelming. How could this world have such a powerful defender? And how could that defender care so little about the world that he'd destroy it in an attempt to kill her?

A single, smaller aura raced across the desert from the north. A familiar one. Yalerox gritted her teeth against the tang of ozone and metal and tried to rally the remnants of her storm around it. It obeyed, but it obeyed sluggishly. Painfully. It took every ounce of Queen Mother Yalerox's might to force the clouds and rains around Tathrix.

It blurred across the desert. Fifteen seconds. But in that time, one of its arms sloughed off. The skeletal frame and chitinous exoskeleton both gave out even through its healing. Its skin had blistered, and it skidded to a stop at Yalerox's feet.

"Queen Mother, inside, quickly," Tathrix said. "I will hold them off."

"No."

Queen Mother Yalerox faced the oncoming, rippling flashes of light and gray-white-orange clouds. She grappled with her own hurricane. Struggled even as her own chitin blistered and bubbled. She would resist. This was her world, not this…this monster's. She fought. She struggled with her flickering, weakening aura against the titanic, ever-growing energy source in the distance. Only once before had Yalerox ever seen anything like it.

Something lifted her from the ground, and a moment later, her vision flashed purple.

Her connection with the magical hurricane severed. The aura—and the burning, tickling sensation across her body—both cut off. She squeezed an eye open as Tathrix knelt before her. An arm grew from nothing, bone and chitin and muscle forming in a matter of seconds.

It wouldn't meet Yalerox's eye. It couldn't. Even as an A-Rank, its aura had no chance of matching hers.

It wasn't even a Paragon.

Her bodyguards—and the Paragons she'd raised up to serve her—were gone. Cut off and scattered.

Her forces outside of the portal were gone. Dead.

But Yalerox had won. She'd survived everything her rival could throw at her, and she'd done it on his turf. Even as she breathed painfully through char-broiled organs, her Mana reserves rocketed back to full.

Decades of work were paying off.

Queen Mother Yalerox, the Paragon of the Hurricane, hadn't simply rotted in her birthing pit as she waited for the portal to open. She'd worked magic. Great, powerful magic.

Outside of the sandstone spires of her fortress, a storm raged. The one she'd thrown together outside her portal, in the world that should have been hers, was a pale imitation of its glory. In all her years as a Paragon, she'd only seen a similar force once. And that had been a bare handful of minutes ago.

"Tathrix, bring me to my workchamber," she said.

She didn't need to say more. The armies within her portal world would be enough to buy her time. And time was all she'd need—time to bring the Eye of the Storm to bear.

The Eye of the Storm would allow her to stand against the aura she'd felt. Its strength would match the uncontrolled, terrifying power she'd felt. And when it did, her children and her storms would make short work of even the 'all-powerful' figure before her.

After all, even a dynamo like that couldn't stand up to the raw fury of the Path of the Hurricane.

The Light of Dawn ripped all pretense away from Deborah Callahan.

She hated him. Hated his quiet arrogance. His smug self-assurance that the Trial of Responsibility was still ahead of her—and the hypocrisy of what he'd asked her to do. He was such an ass. An ass that didn't deserve his rank.

Not his Rank. The power before her was well beyond her ability to combat. If he chose to direct it toward her, Deborah knew that she'd fold in minutes—and that even those minutes would be an achievement. But his rank. Angelo Lawrence shouldn't be in charge of a guild. It was moments like this that proved it to her.

She took another step forward. Toward the purple glow in the distance and the nuclear hellstorm between her and it.

Angelo was less than a quarter mile ahead of her. The explosions rippling off from him should have cooked the strike team alive. But Deborah had been building to fill this role for a long time. To survive on the periphery of the Light of Dawn.

It wasn't just hatred. It was also fear. Deep inside, Deborah Callahan feared the day that the Light of Dawn decided he was done playing with her. She knew. Deep down inside, she knew that he knew everything. The extent of her attempt to betray and overthrow him. The depths of her hatred for him. Everything.

Under the Light of Dawn's nuclear gaze, Deborah felt like little more than a scared little girl.

Like she had when he'd pulled her out of the rubble outside of Wickenberg and carried her blistered, wailing body to the healers. She'd been terrified of him ever since then, and he hadn't even recognized her when she'd joined the Roadrunners years later. He'd told her no when she'd asked to be his bodyguard, or his apprentice, or anything else but just another pawn in the Roadrunners. That was enough to prove his unfitness to lead, in Deborah's mind.

She'd wanted to kill him ever since. It was why she'd worked her way up to the strike team. Why she'd done everything she could to gain power. Why she'd run her little off-the-records training program. Everything had been for that one mission, damn the fucking consequences.

But she was too scared.

A tear worked its way down her cheek. Then, the nuclear storm she was striding into vaporized it. She didn't even have to brush away the salt; it burned, too.

Deborah hated the man in front of her. And she feared him.

And that was why—

The purple glow vanished. The hurricane overhead disintegrated almost instantly.

"What the hell?" the Portal Tyrant asked behind her. "Did he kill the boss?"

Deborah didn't say anything. She just took another step toward the nuclear firestorm. Then another. Then another. She had a job to do. And she had a mission to complete.

She'd complete them both. Even though she was scared.

Her hate was too strong for her to do anything else.

The heat rippled and crackled across my cloak.

My brain was full of fuzz. I could hardly think.

Jeff's Split-Second Shield rippled and flickered to the west, where the worst of Hell poured across the desert. I dragged Yasmin behind me with one hand and Sophia with the other. Ellen crouched behind all of us.

"Carrol, we can't make it back!" I shouted. The radiation rippling across the desert stole half of my breath. It felt like breathing battery acid with every gasp. "We need shelter!"

"There's no shelter here!" he yelled back.

The A-Rank fighter was holding up better than the rest of us. His skin was only burned, and he still stood upright instead of staggering along. But even he couldn't survive out here. Not for long. He wasn't built for this.

None of us were.

We couldn't go back. And we couldn't move toward the convoy; the Light of Dawn stood between us and them, and if this wasn't all of his power, it was close enough to make no difference. My mind looked for solutions. For moves on the chessboard that might help turn the tide.

But there was only one. A gambit. A high-risk play. A sacrifice.

"We need to keep moving into Loving!" I yelled.

"What?" Jeff shouted back.

"There's only one safe place! We have to go into the portal!"

He looked at me like I was insane. So did Carrol. Then the A-Rank fighter nodded. "We can wait it out in there, by the entrance. The strike team will bail us out. It's…it's a bad idea, but it's the best one we've got."

I broke into a stumbling run. My joints screamed in pain even through the Stamina. The wreckage of Loving flickered by. A broken gas station. A shattered appliance store. A purple glow.

A purple glow.

"There!" I said.

We didn't wait. I dragged Yasmin and Sophia across the burning, steaming asphalt and into the abandoned, once-white church's doors. And there it was. A portal, fifteen feet tall and wide. Lined in purple, with a hint of metal to it. A Paragon portal. A-Rank.

A death sentence. But so was staying here.

We didn't wait. An explosion rippled close enough to throw my vision into black and white static, and I lunged through the portal.

Air.

Fresh, clean air. Almost damp with humidity. The howl of a hurricane—building, but distant. I breathed. Stamina poured into every cell in my body. Behind me, Sophia and Yasmin's burned, bruised bodies did the same thing, and they recovered slowly. But they recovered.

We were safe. I looked around for the portal.

But it was gone. A trap. An impossible, trapped Paragon portal.