The fine dust from the shattered glass and the destroyed mahogany doors still danced in the gloom of the hall.
The invasion had already happened.
Now, only the consequences remained.
Laura stood in the exact center of the room.
Her posture was erect and unshakeable.
Her heavy boots crushed the shards of colored glass with a harsh sound at the slightest shift of weight.
She bled from a cut above her eyebrow, and her dark clothes showed the tears of battle, but her shoulders were perfectly relaxed.
The silver claws hung inert by her side.
She didn't growl, she didn't take the lead.
She merely raised her chin, her red eyes locked on the figure sitting on the dais, waiting in a predatory silence for her partner's action.
Beside her, Sillys held the elven spear firmly.
But as the seconds ticked by, the tempestuous wind the elf had brought with her began to die.
The atmospheric pressure plummeted.
The air in the hall became thick, heavy, plagued with the suffocating odor of damp earth and decaying flowers.
The alien atmosphere of the room choked Sillys's energy until it was reduced to a harmless breeze; the ecosystem there belonged entirely to the Queen.
At the top of the stairs, the solid gold throne was almost unrecognizable, devoured by thick, black roots that pulsed like the veins of an ancestral heart.
Elfhing did not stand.
Her aristocratic face showed no emotion at the desecration of her sanctuary.
Her eyes, whose irises resembled rings of petrified wood, fixed on her daughter with a frigid apathy.
The silence stretched.
The weight of countless years of abandonment finally taking its toll.
"Years of exile," Elfhing's voice echoed.
She didn't move her lips; the sound reverberated from the very beams and stones of the castle, whispering directly into the invaders' minds.
"And you return to the cradle only to break my windows and soil my sacred floor with this creature."
Sillys took a step forward.
The blue winds on her arms shone intensely, defying the oppressive gloom of the hall.
"The exile is over," Sillys replied. Her voice didn't tremble. It was cold, cutting, and laden with an authority she never possessed as a child.
"I didn't come to ask for forgiveness, Mother. I came to take what is mine. Stand up. Your reign ends today. I will take that throne."
Elfhing blinked slowly. The contempt in her gaze was palpable.
"The throne?" The Queen tilted her head.
Around her feet, lilies rotted and were reborn from the cracks in the gold in a matter of seconds.
"A crown demands the weight of responsibility. You were always too weak to even hold a spear; do you think a few gusts of wind make you a queen?"
Sillys spun the wind spear in her hands, the air compressing dangerously around the blade.
She glanced at Laura out of the corner of her eye and gave the command:
"Let's go."
The colored glass beneath Laura's boots exploded into a shimmering cloud, ground to dust the exact instant she sank her weight into her heels.
A supersonic crack whipped through the heavy air of the hall.
The sheer brute force of her thighs turned her body into a projectile; the space between the center of the rug and the golden dais simply vanished.
Suspended in the air, casting a lethal shadow over the throne, Laura bared her teeth.
The silver claws tore through the gloom in a perfect "X", whistling fiercely toward the goddess's pale jugular.
Elfhing didn't even blink.
There was no muscle twitch, no killing intent; the castle itself acted in defense of its primordial master.
The marble and gold at the foot of the throne simply disintegrated.
Two colossal black roots, sharp as siege lances, erupted from the underground at a speed that defied physics.
They braided together in the air a fraction of a second before the impact, raising a living, pulsating bulwark between Laura's fangs and the deity's lethargic face.
The clash was tectonic.
When Laura's silver met the black bark, the sound wasn't of yielding wood, but the deafening boom of heavy artillery detonating against a solid steel vault.
A storm of silver sparks hit the gloom, illuminating the Queen's expression of absolute boredom.
The girl's claws skidded off without leaving a single scratch.
That root wasn't a plant; it possessed the unflinching, crushing density of a fossilized mountain.
The kinetic energy of Laura's leap had nowhere to go but back into her own body.
A violent shockwave shot up her wrists, almost shattering her forearm bones and numbing both her arms all the way to the shoulder blades, locking the assassin mid-air.
Laura was still suspended in that split-second of paralysis, her arms numb and her guard completely shattered by the recoil.
She didn't have time to use her legs to defend herself.
The marble wall in her blind spot exploded.
The displacement of air was the only witness to the attack.
A third root, thick and hard as a warship's mast, swept through the gloom in a perfect horizontal whip-strike.
The lethal timber caught the side of Laura's body dead-on.
*CRACK-CRACK!*
The wet, sickening sound of multiple ribs caving in and snapping simultaneously tore through the tension of the hall.
The air was violently expelled from the girl's lungs in a thick mist of saliva and blood.
Her torso folded at a sickening angle around the point of impact, and she was launched sideways like a ragdoll tossed into the eye of a hurricane.
Laura spun wildly through the airspace of the room, smashing back-first into the relief of a massive support pillar.
The ancestral stone cracked under the kinetic transfer.
Sliding down the column, the girl left a thick, dark smear of blood on the white marble until she finally collapsed, broken, onto the pristine fluff of the Queen's rug.
"Laura!" Sillys's voice echoed, tearing through the noise of the impact, but the elf couldn't take a single step toward her fallen ally.
The marble beneath her own boots lost its solidity; the white stone rippled like boiling water, and the grout burst upward in jets of chalky dust.
Seated high on her corrupted throne, Elfhing opened the palms of her hands, and the sickening scent of raw sap and wet earth flooded Sillys's lungs, making the air heavy.
In a botanical nightmare, the floor of the central hall was obliterated.
Dozens of black roots, covered in dagger-sized thorns, erupted from the underground simultaneously.
They swallowed the little light left in the room, rising into a dome of wooden serpents that crashed down from all sides, aiming for the elf's body.
Sillys lowered her center of gravity and planted her heel on intact stone.
She spun her spear above her head, turning her own body into the eye of a static hurricane.
The hum of the metal escalated into a high-pitched howl.
When she unleashed her sweeping arcs, it wasn't the blade that met the wood.
The atmospheric pressure distorted reality around her, ejecting crescents of compressed wind at sonic speeds.
The air screamed.
The four colossal roots that were an inch from piercing Sillys's skull were shredded mid-air, exploding into a raining cloud of sawdust and dark sap.
But the entire castle breathed with the goddess's intent.
The massive masonry of the side columns cracked, spitting out gnarled branches that whipped through the airspace at irregular, lethal angles.
Sillys bent her knees and threw her torso back, letting her own wind push her body out of the massacre's trajectory for a split second.
The air hissed in her ears; even so, the sheer volume of the onslaught was oppressive.
One of the thorns shattered the wind, tore the silk of her tunic, and bit into the flesh of her left shoulder.
Her skin gave way, and a line of hot, red blood instantly trickled down her arm, staining her pale skin.
The pain brought no hesitation; it brought pure focus.
Ignoring the torn muscle, Sillys rotated her hips and tightened both hands on the weapon's shaft.
She aligned the tip of the spear directly with the dais.
In a single, brutal thrusting motion, all the energy stockpiled in her arms detonated.
A horizontal tornado, thick and formed by thousands of microscopic blades, fired from the tip of the weapon.
The vortex gouged a straight trench through the marble and collided violently against the shield of colossal roots protecting Elfhing.
It sounded like a buzzsaw chewing through mountains.
The impenetrable barrier couldn't withstand the continuous friction of the atmospheric pressure and was ground down into confetti of black bark, leaving the Queen and the golden throne completely exposed in the center of the destruction.
The black sawdust of the destroyed barrier was still raining through the air when Sillys gasped.
With the Queen's guard finally obliterated, the elf snapped her neck toward the bloodstained pillar, forcing the wind around her own hands to pull her ally's broken body from the rubble.
But the rug was empty.
The only thing Sillys caught was a violent displacement of air tearing past the side of her own face.
A steaming, crimson blur ripped right past the front line.
Laura didn't need rescuing.
Hot steam rose from the deep gashes on her arms, and the sickening melody of bones snapping and violently realigning beneath her skin echoed with every stride of her boots.
The girl wasn't stepping on the marble.
Without slowing down, Laura stepped onto the wall of the hall and kept running across it.
Her silver claws dug into the ancient stone to support the brutal momentum of her body, scattering fragments of masonry through the air.
Killer vines whipped through space trying to crush her ankles, but found only the vacuum left by Laura milliseconds prior.
The smile on her face was an abyss of pure carnage.
"Look at me, Your Majesty!" Laura's guttural roar made the chandeliers overhead tremble.
She used the relief of a column on the wall as a springboard and ejected her own body toward the center of the hall.
Laura dropped from the ceiling like a blood-soaked meteor, casting a lethal shadow over the back of the golden throne.
She tucked her knees against her chest, prepping a double dropkick with her steel soles aimed exactly at the base of the goddess's spine.
The air whistled under the crushing weight of the drop.
The Queen didn't even look over her shoulder.
With a terrifying fluidity impossible for any natural anatomy, Elfhing simply tilted her neck and torso millimeters forward.
Laura's strike swept through empty air.
*CRAASH!*
Laura's heavy boots collided dead-on with the massive backrest of the throne.
The thick gold yielded, crumpled, and shattered under the kinetic force, tearing the precious metal apart as if it were tin foil.
But the girl didn't have a single second to recover from her own impact.
Without even rising from the deformed golden structure, the Queen twisted her torso; the movement was contained, lazy, bordering on absolute boredom.
She raised her arm and, using only the bare back of her hand, swatted Laura's chest in mid-air.
The impact sounded like the detonation of a siege cannon exploding against the girl's chest.
Through pure divine force alone, the impact ejected Laura upward, causing her to violently smash against the hall's ceiling before plummeting to the marble floor with a dull thud.
Sillys charged down the center, hurling her own body into a lethal thrust aimed at her mother's heart.
The tip of the spear pierced the Queen's vine dress, but stopped abruptly a meter from her pale skin, blocked by a dense atmospheric pressure that Elfhing manipulated effortlessly.
"Your hatred is noisy," Elfhing whispered, looking directly into her daughter's tempestuous eyes.
"And useless."
The Queen stamped the sole of her foot on the dais.
A dark-green shockwave swept across the floor; Sillys was thrown backward, skidding and stumbling across the marble.
The entire castle groaned.
The masonry of the ceiling groaned as colossal trunks pierced the stone, sniffing out the movements of the two invaders like blind, homing predators.
The entire hall had become a living meat grinder, and Sillys and Laura were forced to dodge the trunks.
Laura slid on her knees beneath a collapsing beam, her silver claws slicing through three thorny vines that whipped straight for Sillys's jugular.
Blood dripped down the girl's face, but she flashed a manic grin as she launched her body sideways, escaping a crushing root by mere millimeters.
"We're doing pretty damn well for getting into a brawl with your mom, don't you think?!" Laura shouted, her voice almost swallowed by the deafening roar of shattering stones.
Sillys didn't smile.
The elf spun her spear above her head, weaving curved shields of compressed wind that deflected and pulverized a ton of massive debris raining down upon them.
Her tempestuous eyes were locked on the top of the hall.
"We aren't winning, we're just delaying the execution!" Sillys shot back, her arms trembling as she forced more mana to keep the hurricane active.
"This isn't about us! Suki needs this bell, or we die for nothing!"
The continuous impact of those structural vibrations and unbridled violence finally reached its zenith at the foundation of the roof.
High above the chaos, chained to the ancestral beams that threatened to snap, the colossal Sacred Bell swung abruptly on its axis.
*Dong.*
The sound wasn't just noise; it was a gravitational wave.
Deep, profound, and absolute, it reverberated through the fractured columns of the hall, pierced the stone walls, and traveled like an invisible lighthouse beacon through the entire forest outside.
The immutable face of Elfhing froze.
Elfhing's eyes narrowed, and the lethargic apathy finally cracked.
Until that exact second, the attack made no sense.
*Why would Lavinsk send only three warriors directly into the heart of my absolute domain?*
*A frontal clash against me is the same as trying to stab the ocean.*
*And why were Laura and my own daughter bleeding, breaking their own bones, just to run in circles around the hall?*
*They were fighting... but clearly not on my level. They were deflecting the debris away from the ceiling.*
*That last meeting in Lavinsk...* the thought echoed in the goddess's frigid mind, sharp and dangerous.
Elfhing shifted her gaze from the shattered roots to Sillys's wind shields.
They weren't positioned to protect the elf's own life, but rather to armor the support columns of the ancestral beams.
The final puzzle piece snapped into place.
*The target was never my head.*
"I cannot believe you did this to me, Queen of the Gods," Elfhing whispered.
Her lethal voice sliced through the chaos of the hall like an obsidian blade, hushing the roar of falling stone.
*"I will kill those you sent... and then I will set out to completely destroy that shitty kingdom of yours."*
The boredom vanished, replaced by a killing intent so heavy it made the air in the room freeze.
The roots around her thickened grotesquely, snapping and churning with absolute fury.
"You came to speak to the world," the Queen concluded, locking her cold eyes on the top of the tower.
"As long as that bell exists, your ridiculous truth can survive."
The goddess extended her bare hand toward the ceiling.
"Then I will rip it from the heavens with my own hands."
The Queen took the first step to descend the golden stairs of the throne.
But the tip of her toe never touched the marble.
**BOOOOOOOOM!**
The massive masonry of the eastern wall didn't just collapse; it was atomized.
The supersonic shockwave preceded the deafening roar, sweeping the hall like an invisible wall and hurling tons of splintered stone, lead, and fire straight into the sanctuary.
Sillys crossed her arms over her face on pure instinct, a thick gust of air anchoring her boots to the floor.
Laura dug all ten silver claws into the floor, the muscles in her back straining to their absolute limits to keep from being blown away by the gale.
In the exact center of the suffocating cloud of chalky dust and smoke, the destruction vomited two anomalies into the room.
Suki tore through the sacred marble.
The soles of his boots melted the stone through continuous friction, carving two glowing trenches until he finally braked, coming to a halt on his knees.
The boy's body was a single open wound.
A dense, thick, crimson cyclone orbited frantically around his figure, vaporizing his own blood before it could even hit the floor.
When he raised his head, his irises were gone; the absolute, translucent white glow in his eyes harbored no despair, no pain, no fury.
Exactly twelve meters away, the thick gray smoke was parted by the dragging sound of metal grinding against stone.
Lucas emerged from the haze.
Sillys's breath hitched.
The elf's hands trembled around the shaft of her spear, her wide eyes capturing the figure before her.
*Was that Lucas?* she thought.
Her former master, the unshakeable monolith, the captain who never bled, the most feared and disciplined force in the entire elven army.
But the warrior lord no longer existed.
The black armor had been shattered and broken, fused to his dark skin in a nightmare of flesh and blood.
Lucas's left arm hung useless and inverted, the exposed bones jutting at nauseating angles with every limping step he took.
His chest was a torn trench, gushing dark blood onto the white stones.
And the worst part wasn't the crumbling body; it was his face.
Lucas no longer exuded a frigid aura of command.
His face stretched into the wide, lethal, and irrational smile of a rabid hound that had finally snapped its own chains.
The wind spun violently.
The scent of damp earth and ancient divinity from the throne was obliterated, gutted in a single second by the oppressive stench of ozone, rust, and pure barbarism.
Sillys looked at the smiling carcass of her former master.
Then, she lowered her eyes to Suki's back, bathed in blood, burning away his very life force just to stay standing in front of that monster.
*He's doing it,* the realization struck the elf's mind with the force of a thunderbolt.
*The boy is actually doing it!*
The disbelief and terror evaporated from Sillys's eyes, replaced by an incandescent fury.
The elf's heart raced, pumping adrenaline into every numb muscle in her body.
She spun the wind spear, channeling twice as much energy straight into the blade.
The frigid, blue winds on her arms flared with such intensity they blinded the gloom of the hall.
If Suki was paying with his own blood to tear down a legend... she wouldn't step back a single millimeter.
Lucas didn't give Suki a single fraction of a second to breathe.
With a bubbling snarl drowned in blood, the elf charged; Suki crossed his arms in front of his face, condensing the crimson cyclone into a dense barrier, but there was only the collision of an irrational force.
Lucas's bare, mangled hand ripped right through the cutting storm and grabbed Suki directly by the face.
The muscles in the elf's back popped under their own tension.
Lucas threw the monumental weight of his entire body forward, lifting the boy off the ground for a split second before slamming the back of Suki's skull straight into the sacred marble with meteoric violence.
**KRAKOOOM!**
The floor of the hall cracked and was disintegrated.
The center of the room caved in like a sheet of thin glass crushed beneath an anvil.
Suki and Lucas were instantly swallowed by the massive crater that opened beneath their bodies, plummeting through the destroyed floor into the darkness of the lower level.
Two seconds later, an overwhelming impact made the walls shudder: the booming crash of tons of masonry, armor, and flesh violently colliding against a pool of water echoed from the depths.
Immediately, thick columns of scalding steam and chalky dust billowed up through the giant hole, hissing into the cold air.
The two warriors had just crashed straight into the ruins of the lavish royal baths hidden beneath the hall.
The dust rose, but the tension in the throne room didn't drop.
On the contrary.
It snapped.
The scent of damp earth instantly turned acidic, toxic, and suffocating.
The thick roots around the dais cracked in unison.
They stopped their lethargic crawling and began to whip through the air, swelling with a chaotic and irrational aggression.
At the top of the stairs, Elfhing's irises no longer harbored emptiness.
The apathy evaporated.
The goddess swept her eyes over the destroyed walls, the shattered stained glass, and finally, the steaming crater that had swallowed the center of her millennial sanctuary.
Her perfect ecosystem.
Her untouchable floor.
Profaned, dirtied, and torn apart by pests.
The Queen's pale fingers curled into fists; the solid gold armrests of the throne buckled and were completely crushed under the gravitational pressure of her rage.
The deity overflowed with a silent, lethal fury.
Slowly, with the entire castle trembling in response to her absolute irritation, Elfhing finally took the first step and descended the golden stairs.