The elf was still there, on his knees in the bloodied water of the hot springs.
Suki's trembling hand rested on his bare shoulder, stained with soot and sweat.
The silence in the destroyed room was absolute, broken only by the continuous dripping of hot water and the muffled rumbles that made dust fall from the cracked marble ceiling.
Lucas looked at his own hands.
They were dense, calloused hands, with scars overlapping one another.
Hands that had crushed skulls, burned forests, and served as weapons for the goddess who abused his pain.
He had become the strongest, exactly as Yasmin had asked so many centuries ago in the dark of that slave ship.
But he didn't get her out of there. He only forged the chains of other innocents.
His voice no longer carried the metallic growl of a beast, but the harsh, broken lament of a boy who had been running for too long.
"I didn't save her."
"But now you can save others, Lucas." Suki said, his soft voice contrasting with the chaos outside.
Lucas raised his disfigured face.
His dark eyes, once opaque and dead, now burned with a painful lucidity.
The blind fury that drove him had evaporated like the mist of the hot springs, leaving behind only the crushing weight of reality.
"Go, kid," Lucas ordered, lightly pushing Suki's hand away from his shoulder.
"Don't waste time with me. Sillys is up there... Elfhing is going to kill her. Go and ring that bell. Make the whole world wake up from this nightmare."
Suki nodded firmly.
He took a step back, clenched his jaw, and pulled the air around him to activate the Wind Transformation.
But what came wasn't the swirling white energy.
Suki let out a strangled scream, falling to his knees in the water.
A searing burn tore through the fibers of his legs and arms.
The white lines of his aura flickered beneath his skin, failed with an electrical hiss that smelled of burnt ozone, and faded completely.
His lungs burned with every breath, as if he were inhaling glass dust.
The boy's body had pushed past its biological limit during the fight against Lucas; there were no more reserves.
The wind didn't respond, and he couldn't fly.
High above, a monstrous crash made the columns of the hot springs crack.
Entire blocks of marble collapsed, and the ceiling partially caved in, revealing the gray sky saturated with corrupted energy and freezing winds.
At the top of the castle, the air was thin, freezing, and smelled of blood.
Sillys was fighting alone.
Laura was no longer there; the warrior lay unconscious beneath the rubble, having sacrificed her own body minutes earlier, taking a lethal beam of energy to the chest just to stop the Sacred Bell's tower from being obliterated.
Elfhing hovered in the air.
With a divine and arrogant laziness, she raised her arm. The space around her elegant fingers distorted, condensing a mass of black energy that crackled like a swarm of wasps.
With a snap that swallowed the sound of the wind, a colossal dart of pure corruption shot toward the bell's supporting pillars.
Sillys didn't blink.
Her muscles screamed from exhaustion as she ejected her own wounded body directly into the trajectory of death.
The impact was a deafening roar.
Sillys spun the elven spear horizontally, locking the shaft against the black beam.
The collision detonated a shockwave that shattered the remaining stained-glass windows of the tower into a rain of sharp glass.
The blue aura surrounding the girl exploded into sparks, furiously hissing like water thrown onto boiling metal as it tried to neutralize the goddess's power.
The kinetic force of the strike dragged Sillys backward.
Her boots tore through the roof's floor, kicking up stone splinters and carving two shallow trenches in the marble.
The spear's shaft trembled with such violence that the friction began to burn the skin on the palms of her hands, leaving raw flesh exposed.
She locked her jaw hard enough to nearly break her own teeth, while the taste of copper and hot blood flooded her mouth.
Just a second later, Elfhing smiled and fired again.
And then again.
A merciless rain of darkness spears cut through the air.
For each one of them, Sillys threw her own body as a shield. With every brutal clash, her blue aura grew thinner, flickering weakly like a dying candle.
The girl's breathing turned into an agonizing wheeze, streams of dark blood ran from her ears due to the absurd pressure, and the bones in her forearms threatened to snap in half.
Her legs finally gave out, buckling under the crushing weight of the penultimate attack.
She fell, digging one of her knees into the cracked floor. The pain was a furnace consuming her body from the inside out, but Sillys's shadow, projected violently against the bronze bell with every lethal flash, didn't budge a single millimeter from its post.
The goddess hovered in the air, untouchable, without a drop of sweat, watching her daughter bleed with a smile of pure superiority.
She was loving playing with her daughter, watching her slowly die for a cause she considered pathetic.
"Such useless insistence, child," Elfhing mocked, her voice echoing over the ruins like multiple thunderclaps.
"Do you think this pathetic effort means anything to me?"
To prove her point, to crush Sillys's last, stubborn drop of hope, the goddess decided to show her what true divinity was.
Elfhing opened her arms.
With a shrill sound reminiscent of steel swords being sharpened, the space on the Queen's back tore open.
Two titanic wings exploded outward.
They weren't made of soft feathers, but of crystallized white energy, sharp as diamonds and shining with a cold, cruel light.
That was the absolute peak, the ultimate and unattainable form an elf could achieve in their entire existence.
The simple flap of those wings generated a hurricane of invisible blades that cut through the clouds.
Sillys widened her eyes.
She raised her spear in a desperate block, but it was useless.
Elfhing advanced in the blink of an eye, materializing right in front of her daughter.
With a dismissive flick of the back of her hand, the goddess delivered a strike concentrating all the brute force of her corruption.
The impact shattered Sillys's defense as if it were glass, disintegrating the spear in her hands.
The girl vomited blood in the air and was hurled downward with the speed of a meteor.
Her body tore through the thick clouds, plummeting uncontrollably toward the castle ruins.
Elfhing laughed, turning toward the top of the marble tower.
With a single quick gesture of her fingers, the ancient structure gave way, the stones exploded, and the supporting pillars instantly turned to dust.
And the gigantic Sacred Bell, freed from its secular chains, began to plummet, descending on the exact same lethal trajectory as Sillys.
In the hot springs, Suki heard the deafening sound of breaking stones high above.
He clenched his fists and tried to force the Transformation again, but only coughed up blood, his body collapsing from exhaustion against the marble floor.
"Focus, kid!"
Lucas's voice cut through his despair.
It was firm and authoritative, the harsh tone of a war general. The elf, even without the strength to stand, stared intently at Suki.
"The wind doesn't respond to panic, it flees from chaos! Focus, kid!" Lucas instructed, his dark eyes locked on the boy's agony.
"Sillys is falling, that bell is falling, everything that exists depends on you now. Take a breath!"
Suki closed his eyes.
The burn in his muscles was still there, tearing at his flesh, but he forced his own mind to quiet down.
In the darkness behind his eyelids, he didn't see the crumbling castle, nor the armies fighting down below.
He saw Sillys's face. He remembered the months of torturous training in the woods, her smiles, and the unshakable trust his master had placed in him.
He was no longer the weak, scared boy who arrived in that world.
He had been forged by the best.
Suki's heart beat once. Slow and Strong.
The air in the hot springs began to spin, forming invisible spirals.
The red water from the puddles levitated, defying gravity.
Suki opened his eyes.
The white stripes didn't just flicker; they tore through his skin with a blinding glow, dancing violently across his arms, neck, and cheeks.
The power erupted from the inside out, completely ignoring muscle fatigue, driven purely by the indomitable will to protect her.
With a sonic boom that shattered every intact glass and mirror in the hot springs, Suki bent his knees and launched himself.
He burst through the destroyed skylight of the hall, surging toward the stormy sky like a white light missile at maximum power.
His goal was only one: ring the bell.
The freezing wind howled mercilessly in Sillys's ears.
She was in freefall.
Her vision, blurred by her own blood and tears forced out by the wind, showed the forest below approaching at a terrifying speed.
She couldn't feel her arms, she couldn't feel her legs; gravity and pain were pulling her hard into the darkness.
*It's over...* she thought, her lethargic mind giving up the fight.
It was then that a white flash cut through the gray sky.
Suki was ascending, tearing through the air on the exact reverse route.
When the two crossed paths in the middle of the celestial abyss, thousands of meters in the air, Sillys's perception of time shattered.
Everything around them entered an absolute slow motion.
She looked to the side.
Suki's face was mere centimeters from hers. He was destroyed—there were deep cuts on his neck, purple bruises closing one of his eyes, and dark blood drying on his forehead.
But his gaze...
Suki's eyes didn't hold a single trace of hesitation.
They were locked in the sky, focused on the bell falling above them. He was using every torn fiber of his being, every drop of blood, to keep climbing.
He wasn't going to give up on her.
He wasn't going to give up on the bell and the future they had built together.
That look of pure determination struck Sillys's heart like a lightning bolt.
A volcanic explosion of feelings—pride, love, anger, and an indomitable will to live—overflowed from her fractured soul.
Sillys's blood boiled in her veins, dissipating the chill of the fall.
The ancestral heritage, dormant in her genetic code, reacted to that emotional storm.
A blinding golden flash consumed the space around the girl, swallowing the clouds and the grime.
From her back, tearing through the cold air with a welcoming, vibrant heat, Elven Wings were born.
But they weren't cold, white, and sharp like her creator's.
They were made of a warm, golden, living light, pulsing with the primordial energy of the forest itself.
They were majestic and absolute.
Sillys halted her fall mid-air with a single flap of her new wings. The brute force of the movement generated a shockwave that pushed the surrounding clouds miles away.
Meanwhile, higher up, Suki danced in the chaos.
He dodged plummeting pieces of towers, using gigantic marble blocks as trampolines in the middle of nowhere, gaining even more speed with every jump.
In his right hand, enveloped by a compact tornado, the message of the Queen of the Gods glowed in an intense emerald green.
He raised his head.
There was the bronze bell, falling inexorably in his direction, colossal and heavy.
But right behind it, diving like an angel of death with diamond wings spread wide, came Elfhing.
The goddess's hands were charged with a black, crackling electricity, ready to annihilate the boy before his fingers even grazed the metal.
"DIE, MALIGNANT INSECT!!!" Elfhing roared, diving in for the kill.
Suki didn't back down a millimeter.
He gritted his teeth and cocked his punch, channeling all the remaining wind into his fist.
Before the goddess could reach him, a golden blur streaked past Suki's side, ascending at twice his speed.
It was Sillys.
Suki's eyes widened in admiration as he saw the colossal wings on his friend's back.
Sillys didn't swerve.
Like a furious golden comet, she collided head-on with Elfhing mid-air.
The impact cracked the sound barrier.
She grabbed the goddess by the neck and dragged her away from the bell in a chaotic spiral of cosmic clash, white lightning, and golden energy.
Before vanishing into the cloudy sky locked with her mother, Sillys turned her face downward.
With a voice that echoed over the armies, over the forest, and over the entire world, she screamed at the top of her lungs:
"SUUUUUUUUUUUUKI NOOOOOOW!!!!"
The boy roared.
He stomped brutally on a final fragment of pillar suspended in the air, concentrating all the wind, all of Lucas's century-old pain, all of Laura's blind sacrifice, and all of Sillys's living hope into his right arm.
Suki punched the side of the bell in freefall.
The emerald message fused with the ancient bronze the exact moment of impact.
B O O M.
It wasn't a simple metallic toll.
It was a physical detonation of light and deep sound.
A translucent shockwave, thick and visible to the naked eye, expanded outward from the Sacred Bell.
The deep ring echoed across the blood-stained plains, pierced the celestial vault, and penetrated deeply into the chest, bone, and heart of every living being in the forest.
The black storm clouds of energy cracked, splitting down the middle and letting the clean sunlight flood the earth.
The dense, corrupted air that suffocated the kingdom was purified by fresh winds.
Down below, the fighting stopped instantly.
Swords fell to the ground; elven warriors from both sides dropped to their knees, letting go of their weapons and feeling the divine vibration resonate within their own souls.
The exact moment the bell reached its peak resonance, the hidden truth about the false divinity didn't need to be heard by ears.
It echoed silently in the minds of all elves across the continent, an undeniable feeling of clarity and legitimacy.
The forest, and the wind recognized their true heir.
Sillys now becomes the new elven queen.
The bell stopped vibrating in the air, plunging the world into sudden peace.
And in the skies illuminated by the glow of the golden wings, Elfhing felt her invincibility, her empire, and her divinity finally crumble.