The stratosphere of the blue planet did not just scream; it fractured. The vacuum, once a silent void, became a medium for the agonizing vibrations of two Tier 2 essences grinding against one another. King Borin lay amidst the pulverized remains of a mountain-sized glacier, his nervous system on fire. The black, soul-rotting venom of the Great Black Serpent was a sentient darkness, slithering through his veins like liquid glass.
Beside him, the Griffin Verlin—a creature of noble lineage and celestial bound—was a portrait of horror. Its golden plumage, usually radiant enough to guide ships through nebulae, was dissolving into a sickening, necrotic grey. The Serpent's toxin was systematic, unmaking the creature cell by cell, feather by feather.
Gronak stood over his son. The dark, void-edged blade of his greatsword, The Mountain Breaker, dripped with Borin's divine blood. Each drop hissed as it touched the frozen ground, eating through the ice like acid. His gaze was a harrowing cocktail: the ancestral hatred of a king whose legacy was "tainted," and the buried, agonizing ache of a father who remembered holding a child.
"You look pathetic, Borin," Gronak's voice rippled through the spiritual fabric of the world like a funeral bell. "I have never acknowledged you. You possess the 'Cunning of the Weak.' In our kingdom, we rule by brute force; we crush the mountain to show the mountain who is master. You? You think. You strategize. You are a scholar wearing the skin of a titan."
Gronak leaned in, his orange eyes flickering with the heat of a dying star. "I loved your mother. She was the only torch that could illuminate the frozen wasteland of my heart. But you... you were a curse. 70% human blood. Only 30% Dwarven iron. You are a 'Half-Step' in a universe that demands absolute purity. I wanted Zevan—he was a destroyer. But fate is a cruel mistress; I was slain by my 'Human' son, only to be pulled from the grave to finish the job."
A single, hot tear rolled down Gronak's scarred cheek. It did not evaporate; it froze into a diamond-hard crystal, a physical manifestation of his grief, before shattering on the ice. He wiped his face with a hand calloused by a thousand years of war. "I shall grant you a quick death before the void poison turns your soul into ash."
He raised the void-blade. The energy coiled like a hungry viper. But as the steel began its descent, the laws of physics stuttered.
The Solar Reversion
SCREECH!
The sound was a physical assault, a sonic boom that shattered the eardrums of any God-Seeker within a hundred miles. The Great Black Serpent, pinning Verlin to the ice, recoiled in a fit of primal terror.
The Griffin was no longer grey. It was becoming a sun. A Solar-Gold Radiance erupted from Verlin's pores, vaporizing the ice for five miles in every direction. The poison eating its heart wasn't just cured; it was used as fuel for a "Celestial Reversion."
"In the records of King DD's Epoch Walker, there is a mention of the 'Horus-Class' Sovereigns. These are the lords of the sky, descendants of the Emperor Dominatrix's personal summon: The Solar-Phoenix."
Verlin tripled in size, his wings spanning the width of a valley. He slammed his golden talons into the Serpent's skull. With a predatory snap of a beak harder than a Tier 1 artifact, Verlin ripped out the Serpent's left eye. Green, toxic gore sprayed across the steaming battlefield. The Serpent, a legend of the Aetheleon world, thrashed in its death throes, but Verlin was a god of the sky reborn. With one final, savage jerk, the Griffin tore the Serpent's head clean off, discarding the legendary beast like common carrion.
The Duel of the Two Suns was started.
Gronak roared, turning to strike the exhausted Griffin, but a hand—heavy and cold as a tombstone—clamped onto his shoulder.
CRUNCH.
The sound of Gronak's shoulder blade shattering echoed through the frost. Borin was standing. His face was a mask of gore, but his eyes were neon orange pyres. The venom was gone, purged by the proximity of Verlin's solar flares.
"Pick up your steel, Father," Borin growled. "Let us finish the lineage properly."
They engaged. The first clash of their blades sent a shockwave that flattened every jagged ice spire for ten miles. Borin's sword, a masterpiece of Light and Lightning, hissed as it met Gronak's Void-Blade.
For the first thirty minutes, it was a display of Tier 2 mastery. Borin utilized the Seven-Star Step, moving like a flicker of static. He thrust his blade toward Gronak's throat, the tip vibrating at a frequency that could cut through dimensional barriers. Gronak parried with a heavy, downward swing that carried the weight of a tectonic plate.
Clang! The sound was deafening. Borin spun, his cloak fluttering like the wings of a moth, and delivered a backhanded slash that opened a cauterized wound across Gronak's chest. Gronak didn't flinch. He leaned into the pain, using his momentum to deliver a shoulder-check that sent Borin flying through three frozen ridges.
Borin recovered mid-air, channeling lightning through his feet to stop his momentum. He lunged back, his sword becoming a blur of white light—the Thousand-Volt Thrust. Gronak countered with the Void-Eater's Maw, his sword creating a miniature vacuum that sucked the lightning into the dark metal, only to release it as a kinetic blast.
The ground beneath them began to liquefy. The heat of their friction was turning the "Blue Planet" into a "Water Planet."
As the swords grew red-hot and their hilts began to melt into their palms, both kings reached a silent agreement. They sheathed their blades at their waists, the metal clicking into the scabbards with the finality of a coffin lid closing.
"You think you are a warrior?" Gronak spat, throwing his helmet aside. "I will show you the strength of the Stone Head!"
They collided. No magic. No essence-projection. Just raw, Tier 2 physical power.
Gronak led with a massive, mountain-crushing hook. Borin ducked, but the wind pressure alone tore a gash in his cheek. Borin countered with a rising elbow that caught Gronak under the chin. The impact sent a shockwave through Gronak's skull, visible as a ripple in the air.
Gronak roared, grabbing Borin by the waist and lifting him over his head. With the strength of a titan, he performed a Sovereign Suplex, driving Borin's head and spine into the bedrock. The crust of the planet cracked. A fissure opened up, miles long, as the tectonic plate buckled under the force.
Borin, coughing up golden-red blood, didn't back down. He grabbed Gronak's beard, pulling the old king's head down and slamming his knee into Gronak's face once, twice, three times. Each strike sounded like a sledgehammer hitting a wet anvil.
They began to trade blows in a "Sovereign Stand-off"—neither dodging, only striking.
Gronak's Fist is landed on Borin's ribs. Three snapped, the jagged bone poking through the skin. Borin's Fist is landed on Gronak's temple. The old king's eye socket fractured, the orange eye filling with blood. Gronak's Headbutt smashed into Borin's nose, erasing the bridge of the bone and turning Borin's face into a mask of red.
They were no longer kings; they were two starving wolves fighting over the last scrap of meat in a dead universe. Borin grabbed Gronak's throat, his fingers digging into the thick, leathery muscle. Gronak responded by driving his thumbs into Borin's collarbone, the bone snapping with a sickening pop.
They tumbled through the slush, biting at each other's ears, gouging at eyes, and tearing chunks of flesh away with their bare hands. At this level of Tier 2 power, their bodies were harder than diamond, yet they were shredding each other like paper.
The fight transitioned back to the blades as they realized the fist-fight would take centuries to conclude.
At 60 minutes Borin's left ear was sheared off by a void-slash. He simply spat at Gronak and pressed the attack.
At 120 minutes Borin's lightning-edged blade sliced through Gronak's left shoulder, severing the brachial plexus. Gronak's left arm went limp.
At 150 minutes Gronak, finding his left arm a useless weight, reached over with his right hand, gripped his own bicep, and ripped the arm off his body with a guttural scream of defiance. He used the severed limb as a club to strike Borin before discarding it into the rising steam.
The Three-Hour Hellscape was gone when they were fighting.
The atmosphere was now gone. The planet had been stripped of its air by the sheer heat of their exchange. They fought in a vacuum, their grunts and screams carried only by the spiritual medium.
The damages were huge and the two kings lost many parts of their body and become so weak then they both understood their energy is draining.
"One more," Borin gasped, his Dantian cracked and leaking essence like a broken reactor. "One more," Gronak echoed, his skeletal frame barely holding together.
They channeled 100% of their remaining Tier 2 essence into their swords. Borin's sword became a pillar of white-hot lightning that pierced the clouds. Gronak's became a singularity—a black hole of compressed void.
They Lunged into each other.
When the tips of their blades met, the universe went silent. The sound was too loud for the human ear, so the brain translated it as a deep, vibrating hum in the soul.
The energy release hit the core of the blue planet. In a heartbeat, the crust shattered into a billion shards of glowing glass. The core, an icy heart of ancient magic, went supernova.
The Blue Planet: It didn't just break; it unraveled. The oceans turned to steam, then the steam turned to plasma, then the plasma was swallowed by the void-light. The planet became an expanding ring of fire.
The Chain Reaction: The shockwave, moving at a fraction of the speed of light, hit three neighboring uninhabited planets.
The first, a gas giant, ignited like a second sun before collapsing into a cloud of glowing dust.
The second and third, rocky worlds, were pulverized into a belt of scorched debris in seconds.
The Gravitational Shift: The sudden loss of mass from four destroyed planets caused the entire star system's center of gravity to shift. The sun of this system began to wobble, pulling in the fragments of the dead worlds.
There was nothing left. No dust. No ice. Only a screaming void where life once could have been.
The Aftermath in the Void
Borin drifted. His left hand was gone. Half of his face had been erased by the void-blast, leaving his skull visible—a literal death's head illuminated by the distant stars. He was a walking corpse held together by sheer, "Human" spite.
He used his last bit of magic to create a small oxygen bubble around himself. He kicked off a piece of floating rock—the last remnant of his mother's favorite mountain—and drifted toward a shape in the distance.
It was Gronak.
The old king was a skeleton in scorched skin. His chest was a hollow cavity, his eyes gone. He was no longer a God-Seeker; he was just a piece of drifting cosmic waste.
Borin reached out and took the sword that was floating near Gronak's remains—the symbol of the King of the Past. He looked at the remains of the man who had given him life and tried to take it away.
"I never loved you," Borin whispered into the silence of the bubble. "But I acknowledge you. You were a true King of the Dwarves. And you were... my father. This is the last time I am going to meet you. If we meet, it is going to be in only in the afterlife."
"Goodbye."
Then, a hand—so massive it blotted out the distant stars, the same hand that had pulled Thrain into the abyss—emerged from a rift in space. It was the Hand of the Underworld. It clamped around Gronak's body and soul, dragging the King of the Past into the eternal fire.
Borin turned away, his blood freezing in the vacuum as he began the long, slow journey back toward Aetheleon. The war of the two kings was over. The Stone Head Lineage had been pruned, and only the "Human" son remained to lead the ruins.