The impact of the punch blew out the entire floor Drahn and Igwanda had been within, along with the thirty floors above them, and sent every other building within a five-block radius toppling outward in a circle. It was an extinction-level event that nothing the raid party had could stop. Nothing they could survive.

  At least, not most of them.

  “I think you forgot who your opponent is,” Yanily said, Tempest Roar extended in one hand to where the tip of the spear stopped the house-sized fist cold. Behind him, thick ropes of lightning arced back from his shoulders like wings stretching the length of the floor he stood on, shielding a cone of safety and untouched stone.

  Along with two archers, one of them barely holding on.

  “Get him to Laseen,” Yanily said, the lightning wings crackling, stretching, and spreading as Yanily lifted slowly into the air. Like the huge fist couldn’t pull away from his spear—probably because of more lightning arcing along the knuckles—the Raze’s arm followed Yanily’s slow and steady rise.

  “Thank you,” Igwanda said, scooping what was left of Drahn up in her arms, then leaping away.

  “Don’t thank me,” Yanily whispered to nobody in particular. It was his fault Drahn had gotten hurt in the first place, because he hadn’t been able to stop the Raze sooner. Losing Yully and Dole was bad enough. He’d promised himself he wouldn’t watch any more of his friends die. That he’d take the risks, so they didn’t have to.

  That he’d stop the threats before they reached the others. He’d been so sure he could do it. He was S-Rank now. Strong. Powerful.

  Naive. Arrogant. Stupid.

  His fingers tightened around the haft of Tempest Roar, something within the spear pulsing in time with his self-recrimination. Thunder rumbled in the distance, matching his dour mood. Remnants of the clouds Left had pulled to the city swirled above him in a whirlpool, churning with the winds of his emotions. Crystal, stone, and other debris rattled on the ground before getting picked up to join the pressure mounting in his chest and the air around him.

  With Igwanda carrying Drahn away, it left Yanily alone with the Raze, no other Endless, Blightfire Spites, or party members anywhere within more than a dozen city blocks. That was good. He didn’t want the others to see him like this. To see his shame.

  Or to see the one side of him his father had taught him.

  How to be angry.

  Oh, he preferred the easy-going-idiot routine, because it kept his blood at bay. Kept him from lashing out like his father had his entire life. Kept him from admitting he was this close to being just like that man. He kept it on a tight leash, buried deep beneath a fa?ade of ridiculousness, because that was as far from his father as he could get. That didn’t mean it wasn’t there, though. That it wasn’t constantly clawing at the inside of his skull, demanding he react with violence at every provocation. That it wasn’t a beast he kept on a thin leash.

  But, now, seeing Drahn cut-in-bloody-half, right after losing Yully, he was having a really hard time caring about keeping that side of him bottled up. Especially with such a deserving target right in front of him.

  Floating a hundred feet above the rubble of the building where the two archers had nearly died, his speartip pressed to the Raze’s horizontal arm like they were connected by a magnet, and hurricane-force winds churning in a wide circle around them, Yanily met the Raze’s eyes.

  You know what? Fuck it.

  Yanily let the beast out.

  An advanced class notification window flashed in front of him as solar energy exploded out of him like a bomb.

  Nah, he told it. That wasn’t right. He wasn’t Heaven’s Spear. Not now. Lightning flashed and paused mid-strike, while the window warped. Flickered. Yanily focused his gaze on the words, and he forced them to change.

  Another flicker, like the window was trying to resist him. Like Heaven’s Punishment was trying to resist him.

  Good luck.

  Yanily’s will pressed into the window, into the way it connected him to his distant sponsor through the Black Gates, and he made it very clear what was about to happen.

  The window flickered again, the letters making up the name of the advanced class blurring and shifting. Breaking down and changing.

  One more push from Yanily, and two words became three, then five. This new class didn’t replace the first, but instead joined it. Matching the duality he felt threatening the inside of his chest, his S-Rank advanced class could be swapped depending on the task at hand. And, his eyes moving again to the Raze, it was obvious which of the two classes he would be using right now.

  Heaven’s Spear / Spear of Punishment.

  After that, he didn’t even bother reading the class abilities, simply hitting Yes in the window before time snapped back into place. The exploding wave of Yanily’s solar energy lifted the Raze from its feet and hurled it away to crash onto its back. Thunder boomed with such a bellowing release, it shook the earth more than the falling Raze did, while streams of lightning arced from the wall of powerful wind.

  There, as Yanily stood in the eye of the storm, he became the storm.

  Power surged through him, transforming his body more inline with his Aspect, even though he didn’t activate it. His face elongated, scales grew along his flesh, while true wings spread from his shoulders. Muscles bulged along his arms and legs, dramatically bolstering his physical stats, and he felt his mind partially retreat from the violence he was about to administer. Instinct sent electric shocks through the veins of his body, now doubled in size, and he threw his head back and ROARED.

  Dwarfing the sounds of battle across the city—though nobody outside the hurricane-wall could see inside—even the Raze paused in the process of getting up. Like it froze in the presence of an apex predator, the crystal eyes weighed the creature held aloft by ropes of lightning arcing from its body to the surrounding storm.

  And, like that predator, Yanily launched himself in that moment of inaction. Retributive Skyfall threw off the protections it gave the spearman at the point of impact, in exchange for ramping up the damage.

  The horizontal, building-thick lightning bolt slammed into the center of the Raze’s chest in its frozen, half-sat-up pose. Crystal buckled and broke like a fist hitting a mirror, before the attack bulldozed the Raze back—tearing crystal up from the ground—then smashing it back down a second time.

  Ignoring how the impact had bashed Yanily into the powerful body of the Raze, the spearman ripped his spear free, throwing a shower of broken crystal shards in a wide arc. With his weapon arm twisted out behind him, he reached out with his free claw, like he was reaching for the distant, oversized face of the Raze. Except, it wasn’t with his physical hand.

  Condensed lightning exploded from the ground, then split into five clawed digits that grabbed hold of the back of the Raze’s head. More electricity spread and arced, while two of the Raze’s hands went to try and free itself. The other two, it pressed into the ground, trying to haul itself upright in some instinctual response to escape.

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  Instead, it should’ve kept its attention on the real threat.

  Swirling winds, dense storm clouds, and torn debris from the ground spun together in twenty distinct locations. At each of them, within a second, a draconic face formed. Eyes of balled lightning, faces of pressurized clouds, and teeth of crystal, the maws opened, one by one.

  Then all of them made the world go monochrome.

  Lightning fell in flashes of black across a world painted white. Dark windows in the few remaining buildings stood like ominous portals to the underworld. The white, final sun, visible through the eye of the hurricane became an orb of infinite void, with only a single crack of pure white sitting in its heart.

  Like an eye watching the proceedings below, the final sun witnessed the apocalyptic Dragonflight Breath unleash. Unfocused, the twenty death beams of wanton destruction strafed across the space within the hurricane, leaving walls of rampant, rising energy in their wake.

  Blasts that crossed the Raze’s body left crackling scars in the crystal. Testament to the Raze’s god-like—and growing—power, none of the attacks resulted in serious wounds.

  Of course, they were all only the pre-show—the warmup—with Yanily standing above the shattered chest, his own ball of swirling black-and-white growing between his spread mouth. With another roar that shook the city, he released his personal Dragon Breath directly into the chest of the Raze.

  The force of the blast hit like Nivian’s Aspected warhammer, the ground beneath the Raze caving at the crushing power of it. Columns of reflected energy tore into the sky with a lightshow of black and white as the pair fell into the bowels of the city. A cavern, like the one where Hiral found the Avatar of Time was finally enough to stop their crashing descent, though rocks and wreckage continued to fall behind them like rain.

  Beneath Yanily’s clawed feet, shredded crystal in a hole twenty-feet wide and a six-feet deep had been carved out of the Raze’s chest. As powerful as the attack had been—modified by Shock and Awe—it hadn’t been enough to completely punch through.

  Not that Yanily was even thinking about that, Tempest Roar sweeping across like he was wielding an axe more than a spear. Blades forged of pure lightning tore at the already-broken crystal as he swung, reached the apex of the motion, then brought it back around for another attack. One after another, he ripped his way deeper into the monster’s chest, closer with every swing to the curled form of the true Raze within the crystal body.

  If he got to it…

  WHAM, a swatting hand crashed into him from the side, compressing his body on the palm, before hurling him from his perch to smash into the cavern wall. The chamber shook with the impact, then shook again as one of the Raze’s shoulder-cannons absolutely unloaded on the spot Yanily had crashed into. S-Rank—no, stronger—blasts slammed into the wall like they were trying to hammer down a particularly stubborn nail, before they began trailing across the wall.

  Or, more accurately, chasing.

  With raw power, speed, and instincts guiding him, Yanily sped along the wall of the cavern, basically running across the vertical surface, his wings beating occasionally to shoot him ahead. From Tempest Roar, thick bolts of lightning flew in the opposite direction, sparking off and across the Raze pushing itself to its feet. Around them, more chunks of stone from the wall and ceiling came crashing down from the continued conflict.

  Darting behind one particularly thick chunk of rock, Yanily skidded to a stop—clawed toes digging into stone—while the continued blasts from the Raze chased where it predicted he would go. Before it even had a chance to realize it’d lost sight of him, Yanily shot off the wall, through the stone—spear first—streaking straight at the Raze’s knee.

  Sparking as he tore through the air, his path turned him into a spear himself… until a backhand from the crystal giant caught him mid-flight to send him crashing into the wall again. All around his impact-point, the stone wall cratered, fissures spreading in every direction, before it all began to collapse.

  Right on top of Yanily.

  Tons of boulders fell on him like an avalanche, entombing him in…

  “RAAAAAAAAAH!” Yanily roared and flexed his solar energy, blasting the rubble off him before it even settled, bands of lightning flashing between the hundreds of rocks soaring into the air. Just the thought of being entombed reminded him of Yully and Dole. Reminded him of how he’d let everybody down.

  Reminded him he would not be lacking again.

  Powerful muscles in his legs flexed, his wings braced, and then he pushed. Becoming lightning himself, Yanily joined the thousand other bolts bouncing around the room between the stones that fell like they were in slow motion. Twisting and landing on one stone, his knees bent, before they uncoiled like a spring. So fast, even lightning had trouble keeping up with him, he flashed past the Raze, Tempest Roar dragging a scar across its chest.

  As soon as he landed, he was gone again, bolting off at a slightly different angle to score a gash across a knee. Land, spring, stab, he took a chunk off a shoulder. Land, spring, slash, the inside of an elbow fractured. Land, spring, cut, the hip lost a chunk of crystal as big as Yanily was. Land, spring, pierce…

  “AAAAAAARG” the Raze bellowed as Yanily’s spear drove deep into the crystal formation it called an eye. Stumbling back in pain and outrage, it brought two of its hands to its face, though Yanily was long gone. Another step took it crashing into the wall, its shoulder cannons firing wildly, while two of its hands thrashed blindly in case Yanily came raging back in at it again.

  If it had been looking—been able to see—it would’ve spotted the spearman standing on a large rock back in the center of the room. Through the fight, the storm had made its way down into the cavern with them, hurricane-force winds circling against the walls, rain and lightning falling in thick sheets, and thunder booming in time with the swinging fists.

  Despite the scene, Yanily stood atop the stone practically floating there, held up by tethers of lightning. Gone was the nearly uncontrollable, berserker-like form of the Spear of Punishment.

  Instead, the man stood almost peacefully, back in his normal form, his feet spread shoulder-width apart, and Tempest Roar held above his head.

  He’d let the beast off its leash, and it had done what he needed it to. Not the part where it beat the hell out of the Raze, but where he had let his body act while his mind reset. It was power without control. Instinct without thought. It was what his father represented, in his mind.

  And, as much as he hated to admit it, it would have a place as part of him. It always had, and always would. But, unlike that man, he wouldn’t let it control him long. He also wouldn’t let it be a crutch. An excuse. He would face the loss of Yully and Dole himself. They deserved that.

  Bringing Tempest Roar down, he began to spin the weapon casually in his hands. Round and round, over and over, the weapon twisted, lightning crackling behind as low thunder rumbled. Wings of lightning spread across the entire width of the cavern, lifting him from the stone. Then, almost like dozens of giant spider’s legs, they walked in the direction of the Raze, carrying Yanily at the center of them.

  As if sensing what was coming for him, the Raze stopped its mad swinging, and instead thrust two of its hands down to the stone wall to push itself off. Using the speed of the motion, it came around with a punch that dwarfed what it had tried to smite Drahn and Igwanda with. The air tore at the motion, rips leaking through where purple-and-red flashed from a battle on the other side, and there was no way Yanily could stop the attack like he’d done to the other.

  He didn’t even try to stop it, Tempest Roar twisting into the perfect position to guide the punch past him. Bolts of electricity sparked off the limb where his spear dragged across it, but the other fist was already coming for him.

  Yanily barely leaned to the side, calmly guiding this blow up and above him. A third punch, a fourth, a fifth. No matter how the Raze thought he had the Grower lined up, Yanily’s spear steered the devasting blows around him as he continued his steady pace in the giant’s direction.

  Panicked blasts from the shoulder cannons came next, though they didn’t slow Yanily either. If anything, they were like a gift, with Tempest Roar hungrily devouring the blasts as fast as they came. Finally, the Raze took another step… though this one was backward.

  Yanily was… inevitable.

  His eyes glowed with power and restrained fury. His spear spun a blur of perfect defense. To the Raze, he grew larger and larger with every inch he floated forward. From a man six feet tall, to half the size of the Raze, to looking it eye to eye, to twice its height, to towering so large, his body extended far, far above the roof of the cavern.

  By the time Yanily reached the Raze, the spearman stood as tall as the sky itself, and it was the crystal construct cowering against the cavern wall.

  In Yanily’s hand, Tempest Roar thrummed with power as he lifted it above his head, speartip pointed down. He had let go of his Spear of Punishment class to embrace his Heaven’s Spear, and as he brought his weapon down in the namesake attack, the entire sky came with it.

  A beam of pure fury, like an entire storm compressed into a spear half-a-mile-wide, struck Visionary. Struck the cavern Yanily had carved out. Struck the Raze.

  And, as it landed, Yanily screamed.

  Screamed his anger. Screamed his grief. Screamed for the friends he would miss.

  And he screamed his promise.

  He would not let it happen again.

  Everything vanished in a dome of expanding energy that consumed all it touched.

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