The western colosseum shook beneath the shifting bedrock. Ashley stood in the center of the sandstone arena, rings of blue lightning crackling around her wrists. Gulag emerged from the tunnel with her fifty Vanguard elites, fanning out to surround the perimeter.

​Before the troops could establish a formation, Ashley vanished. She transmuted her physical body into pure kinetic electricity.

A blinding streak of blue light ricocheted off the surrounding pillars. She tore through the Vanguard ranks, electrocuting a dozen mystics in a fraction of a second.

​Gulag could not track the movement with her eyes. She slammed both hands onto the ground and channeled the violet Ley-Crystal embedded in her core.

​While Ashley bounced off the far wall to initiate another strike, Gulag pulled millions of tons of material straight from the deep crust. Veins of pure conductive copper twisted together with black obsidian.

The ground erupted around the arena in a chaotic spray of dirt and stone.

​Suddenly, a colossal dome closed over the battlefield. The metal and glass fused into a perfect, seamless sphere, trapping Ashley entirely inside.

​Ashley reformed her physical body near the curved ceiling. She laughed and unleashed a torrent of lightning directly at Gulag.

​However, the strike never reached its target. The copper veins laced inside the obsidian instantly absorbed the voltage. The massive conductive shell routed the electrical current harmlessly down into the bedrock.

​Ashley scowled and tried to launch herself toward a higher vantage point to escape. But her boots found zero traction. Gulag had smoothed the interior of the glass sphere to a perfect polish.

Ashley slipped and tumbled downward. Her body instinctively converted back to kinetic electricity as she panicked, attempting to ricochet off the walls to regain control.

Fortunately for Gulag, the trap was designed for exactly that reaction. Ashley slammed into the curved surface and bounced wildly across the dome. The frictionless obsidian offered zero resistance to halt her momentum. She careened continuously against the conductive shell, unable to anchor herself to any surface.

Every single impact drained a massive portion of her magic directly into the earth. The brilliant blue streaks inside the sphere grew dimmer with each passing second.

Up in the sanctuary, Red watched the telemetry data on his console plummet.

’She is bleeding her core dry against a grounded circuit,’ Red analyzed, tapping his fingers against his armrest. ’Gulag effectively built a battery to drain a god.’

Down in the colosseum, the blue light finally sputtered out. Ashley materialized in mid-fall, completely exhausted. She crashed against the curved bottom of the sphere and slid into a tangled heap, entirely unconscious.

Gulag stood up and brushed the dust from her palms. She tapped her communication crystal, keeping her eyes on the sleeping girl.

"Target contained," Gulag reported. "Moving to the next objective."

"That’s two down," Red muttered. "I will send Glitch once all four are taken care of."

Syra stepped from the reflection of the quartz wall directly behind Jessica. She drove her condensed shadow dagger across Jessica’s throat in a clean arc. Crimson sprayed across the mirrored surfaces. Jessica stumbled forward, clutching her neck with both hands.

The bleeding stopped instantly. Flesh and muscle stitched together beneath Jessica’s fingertips to leave completely flawless skin behind. Jessica turned around and wiped the smeared blood from her chin. A bright pink aura flared around her armor to illuminate the entire hall.

"Did you really think a knife could kill me?" Jessica smiled, raising her hands toward the fifty Vanguard troops fanning out behind Syra. She unleashed a blinding wave of pink energy across the room. The light washed over the frontline fighters and bypassed their armor entirely.

The affected troops collapsed to the floor, violently clawing at their own breastplates. Their cells began to rapidly over-replicate, twisting their bodies into grotesque masses of uncontrolled bone and muscle. Jessica weaponized life itself to trap them inside their own biology.

Syra watched her elite squad mutate and realized a war of attrition was impossible against boundless regeneration.

Syra melted into the floor, becoming two-dimensional darkness just as another wave of pink light swept over her head. She darted across the polished quartz, moving flawlessly through the ambient reflections. She bypassed the destructive light and emerged directly from Jessica’s personal shadow.

Jessica spun around to face the threat, but Syra was already in position. Syra manifested a dozen microscopic needles of solid darkness and drove them directly into the base of Jessica’s spine.

The constructs severed the motor nerve pathways perfectly without breaking a single layer of physical tissue. Jessica’s eyes widened as her legs buckled beneath her.

She collapsed onto the quartz floor, completely conscious but entirely unable to move a single muscle.

’Regeneration requires physical damage to trigger,’ Red observed, resting his chin on his knuckles. ’Syra turned off the power switch without breaking the circuit.’

"Now, let’s move to Iron-Scale. And once he is done, I will have two more fragments of my soul."

"Chrip!" Glitch was eagerly waiting to go down and make Red happy.

Brandon slammed his gauntlets together. The sandstone courtyard liquefied instantly into a churning lake of white-hot magma. The intense heat warped the surrounding pillars and ignited the wooden bows of the Vanguard troops.

"You brought birds to a furnace!" Brandon roared from the center of the molten rock. A massive pillar of fire erupted from his shoulders to scorch the ceiling. The Harpies scrambled higher toward the enclosed dome to escape the rising inferno.

Iron-Scale hovered near the highest archway and sheathed his dagger. He watched the flames eagerly consume the ambient drafts. Fanning the fire with a windstorm would inevitably incinerate his own squad.

Iron-Scale channeled the violet Ley-Crystal embedded in his core to reverse the fundamental flow of his magic.

He violently ripped the entire atmosphere upward. Iron-Scale condensed the captured gases into a tiny sphere in his palm. A total void formed inside the courtyard below.

The roaring inferno died instantly. It was starved of the very element it needed to burn. The magma rapidly cooled into brittle black rock.

Brandon grasped his throat and dropped to his knees. He opened his mouth to draw a breath, finding nothing but empty space. His eyes rolled backward as asphyxiation claimed him. He collapsed face-first onto the hardened floor.

Iron-Scale descended from the ceiling and landed beside the unconscious body. He tapped his communication crystal to update the command network.

"Target secured," Iron-Scale reported.