Chapter 344: The Fire Elemental Lord

Let us turn back time slightly and return to the elemental plane of fire, to when the members of the Council of the Arcane, who had come to gather materials and data, fled in desperation through a collapsing mountain range…

A magician summoned a howling tempest, wrapping the entire party within its furious winds. The storm lent speed to their retreat and deflected the molten shards that erupted from the scorched ground.

“How could that slumbering Fire Elemental Lord awaken so suddenly? It was supposed to remain dormant for at least another decade! The damage we inflicted by gathering samples was basically nothing. It should have felt like little more than a scratch, especially in a region already so unstable with fire essence.”

One scholar, carried on a knight’s back, was frantically flipping through a conjured grimoire and scanning the recorded data with trembling fingers, his voice ragged with disbelief.

“That’s not something we can afford to worry about right now,” roared the magician steering the gale, his voice straining against the mounting roar of the flames. “The density of fire mana here is absurd. Other spells will be at half their usual power, if that. At this rate, we’ll never outrun the Fire Lord’s pursuit!”

Indeed, the storm he had conjured was faltering. Sparks bled into its currents, and the winds themselves began to take on heat. The flames inexorably corrupted the air.

For one, there was simply too much fire mana around. For another, the Fire Elemental Lord was closing in on them.

Then the earth broke. A colossal arm of searing flame and blackened stone burst forth from beneath the lava, striking the land with ruinous weight.

Molten energy coursed down into the fissures, guided by the will of the one who commanded it: the Fire Elemental Lord.

The Lord itself began to rise. Its gargantuan form emerged from a lake of magma, the heat radiating from its body so intense it could melt mountains and boil seas.

Around it spread an aura of burning dominion. Within it, all forms of life and matter would wither into ash unless they possessed the strength to endure the growing heat.

The titan stood fifty meters tall. Its mere gestures could devastate mountains. Its awakening alone had shattered the peak of the mountain range, collapsing the entire mass in one fearsome convulsion.

Now, as its aura enveloped the fleeing magicians, their spells began to falter and unravel.

“How can we not question it?” the scholar shouted hoarsely. “This isn’t mere chance! When we observed the molten wyverns before, they too were abnormally hostile. They were mad with violence!

“And before that, the fire-bats at the volcano acted the same way! Once or twice might be a coincidence, but again and again? No! Someone must be working against us, or we must’ve been tainted by—”

His cry was drowned out as a fissure split the ground. Fire belched up as another magician hastily conjured a towering wall of basalt. The fissure struck it and detonated, causing the shockwave to tear across the land. Magma was hurled skyward and rained down as glowing hail.

The basalt wall, two meters thick, crumbled in an instant. What had taken long preparation from an earth magician was undone with one casual strike from the Fire Lord. The rocks tumbled alongside the scrambling mortals like gravel loosed from a cliff.

Knights seized faltering magicians, dragging or carrying them bodily onward. Without their intervention, half the company would already have perished.

“Forget your pet theories!” the wind magician barked grimly. “If we don’t get out alive, none of this matters. We’re not without hope. The reinforcements left just before the Fire Lord awoke. They should still be nearby.”

“And how about the wizardry?” he snapped at the wizards in their midst. “If you’re not ready, the moment that thing hurls its next spell, we’ll all be nothing more than cinders!”

In the distance, the Fire Lord raised its molten hands. A vast sphere of lava coalesced, a burning orb as large as a fortress, roiling with heat. Ribbons of fire spiraled around it as it swelled to a quarter of the titan’s bulk. With a bellowing surge, the giant hurled it toward the gathered party like a bomb.

Its aim was crude, but precision was hardly necessary. Even a near-miss would scour the earth with an inferno fierce enough to annihilate everything, wards and all.

“Our reinforcements had better be Icarus himself,” muttered a wizard as he lofted a runestone toward the descending inferno. “No one else could possibly stand against a Fire Lord.”

“Not Icarus,” the mage admitted, “but strong enough to get us out alive. At least, I hope so…”

Would their reinforcements really be able to take down this Fire Lord?

It looked to have the strength of a proficient mage, but given its size and battlefield advantage, it was at least a legendary threat.

The only silver lining was that the Fire Lord seemed to have no mind for strategy. All they had to do was escape; they didn’t have to defeat their opponent.

Enchanted stones streaked upward and formed a circle of void energy. A black mire oozed across its surface, a glistening, viscous swamp of nothingness.

The blazing meteor fell into it, swallowed not with explosion but with suffocating silence. The void devoured the fire, feeding upon its ruinous essence.

The void, at least, was not weakened by the concentration of fire mana in the vicinity. Though magicians could not make full use of their spells, wizards, at the very least, could.

“This Fire Lord is ridiculously strong. Even with all our wizards working together, we couldn’t nullify the attack completely…”

The wizards shook their heads with faint murmurs.

As the mire dispersed, the meteor remained, diminished but still lethal. The meteor had been devoured to a mere eighth of its size, while the void itself had faded into nothingness.

Even so, the diminished meteor plunged into the ground with thunderous force and shattered the formation of the fleeing party once more.

Buried deep within the soil, the meteor burst apart. From its fragments emerged a host of blazing lives—small fire elementals, birthed from the Lord’s essence infused into the stone.

Even before they struck the earth, they loosed fireballs in obedience to their creator’s will. As they crashed down, their bodies burst into a rain of molten shards that hissed across the ground.

“Damn it, that Fire Lord’s been enraged!”

A magician turned and cast a horrified glance at the distant titan, his blood running cold at what he beheld.

The giant had driven its arms into its own chest. Beneath the molten shell of its body pulsed its source of power, its elemental core.

That gesture could mean only one thing. The Lord was about to draw upon that wellspring of power, unleashing a single strike of such devastation as to erase the Council of the Arcane like insects trampled beneath its wrath.

Infernal flames surged into its hands. The Fire Elemental Lord gathered the entire essence of its Core into its palms, then slammed its palms down into the mountains below.

A tide of searing crimson fire surged outward like a flood, rolling across the ridges with impossible speed. As it spread, it drew more flame from the air itself, from every vein of molten stone in the land, swelling higher, hotter, a wall of annihilation.

“We’re finished…”

Despair welled up in the magician’s heart. Here, in the Fire Lord’s dominion, its strength was absolute. All they could do was throw up every defense they possessed, hoping for even the smallest chance of survival.

Magicians poured power into spells. Wizards channeled what void they could muster. Knights clenched their fists, filling their bodies with fighting spirit, raising shields against the oncoming inferno—though in truth, before such a tide, they were but ants.

And then, just as they braced themselves for imminent death, a rift split the sky above them. A colossal shadow burst out from within.

In the minds of the magicians came a piercing resonance—not of sound, but a violent tremor of magic itself.

They looked upward, shocked, as a message reached them. Their reinforcements had arrived. Was this… their salvation?

It was a dragon, yet unlike any dragon recorded in their tomes. Its wings were not made of flesh and membrane, but wrought entirely of metal, venting gouts of fire like burning feathers from steel vents.

Its body dwarfed that of ordinary dragons. Its hide was not armored with scales, but rather covered in a dark, matte plating etched with intricate sigils.

As the magical resonance thundered in their minds, glowing runic circuits flared to life across the dragon’s body. From the jagged horns of its head to the tip of its tail blazed radiant conduits of power, filling its colossal frame with incandescent light.

Magic surged into the dragon in torrents. As a red dragon, Sieg was attuned to fire. In this elemental plane, he was far less suppressed than in the undead plane.

And clad in the Living Dragon Armor wrought from Behemoth’s remnant flesh, a hidden strength that even he was unaware of reduced the planar suppression to nearly nothing.

Sieg wove the countless runes inscribed upon his armor together, linking them one by one. With the boundless fire mana of this plane pouring into him, he could shape nearly any spell he desired.

To counter the surging tide of flame with ice would have been folly, both wasteful and doomed to failure. What he needed to do wasn’t to dispel the fire, but rather to block it.

The earth quaked. Before the stunned eyes of the magicians, Sieg tore a mountain free from the ground with raw earth mana, then heaved it into the path of the approaching tide.

The inferno struck the mountain like a wave against a cliff. The wall of fire, ten meters high, rose ever higher until it seemed to set the very sky aflame.

But though it melted vast portions of the stone, carving rivers of lava that streamed down its sides, the mountain endured. And with it, the tide of destruction broke.

The Fire Lord’s aura flared in fury, its will spreading outward to summon every elemental life within reach, commanding them to converge upon the Council of the Arcane.

The roar of engines shook the sky. Steel wings thundered from Sieg’s back, their vents blazing brighter as he pushed the gravity spells to their limit.

Purple arcs of power crackled as the segmented exhausts fused into two colossal thrusters at the span of his wings. Then came ignition.

Claws ripped trenches into the earth as Sieg kicked off, the force launching his vast frame skyward. Steel wings thundered, driving his colossal body faster, higher. A blazing tail of fire streamed behind him as he ascended. And with every last ounce of momentum, he hurled himself straight at the Fire Elemental Lord.

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