The ’dots’ fell almost instantly.

Malik’s attack came and went in a near instant.

Those below barely registered it. They only saw a massive hole punch straight through the horde, allowing sunlight to pour in.

Malik raised the same hand again.

This time, instead of blasting away, he pulled.

The fire around his body roared and condensed, twisted towards his palm. The flames took shape.

A sword.

Fire given form.

The heat burned so hot that the air around the blade warped into a shimmering haze.

Slowly, its color shifted. Gold at first. The same blazing gold as his hair. Then blue, and finally, white. A most pure flame. The color of a star’s heart.

Malik held that white sword above his head.

For a single breath, everything went quiet.

Sure, the Fallen kept screaming, and the army below kept trembling. But in Malik’s ears, only the soft hum of absolute power remained, waiting to be unleashed.

It was a beautiful sight.

A white sun against the dark of Corruption.

He swung.

The white fire spread.

And then... well, for many of the Fallen, there was no ’then.’

Malik’s fire moved as fast as light. Instant and absolute. In every direction at once, the fire blasted through the air. Wherever it touched, the Fallen simply stopped existing.

They were devoured into less than ashes.

His attack was simply too strong.

Yet, somehow, the fire burned only the spawns of Corruption.

The sand didn’t turn into glass. The army stayed alive. Sinbad’s feathers stayed unsinged. The twisted ones, the Corrupted, the Demons that had Fallen too deep to ever come back—only they turned to empty air.

Moments ago, the sky had been black with them. Now gaps appeared in that wall of death. More holes where the two Suns peeked down.

Malik kept going.

He had no choice.

Every second, more of them poured in from the horizon. The Fallen had no formation or strategy. They just swarmed.

Truly, a locust plague made of nightmares.

For every hundred thousand he burned, another hundred thousand took their place.

The white sword swept left. A hundred thousand Fallen vanished. It swept right. Another hundred thousand disappeared. The swarm kept pushing forward, but every wave hit the wall of white fire and dissolved.

Though it didn’t seem like it to the stunned ones below, this was a battle of attrition.

Was Malik going to reach the time limit first, or was he going to kill the Fallen in time?

He didn’t show any nervousness, but his thoughts certainly were:

’Just how many of them are there?!’

Still, he kept going.

—

[Thirty seconds remaining!]

—

Even as the timer ticked down.

Malik’s arms began to feel the burn, yet he poured more into the sword.

He didn’t know if Soul Glyphs had a cooldown. He didn’t know if he could use another one right away.

All he knew was that if he didn’t end them before the timer ran out, there’d be a good chance that he, a mortal, would fall to his death beneath a sky full of claws.

He pushed harder.

—

[Twenty seconds remaining!]

—

Malik spun the white sword in a wide arc. The blade carved a circle of death around him. The Fallen at the edge of that circle tried to flee. The ones behind pushed them forward anyway.

A tide like this couldn’t stop.

But tides could certainly thin.

—

[Ten seconds remaining!]

—

Malik stopped swinging wildly. He needed to make these seconds count.

—

[Nine!]

—

He pulled the white sword close to his chest and then thrust it forward. A lance of white fire shot through the swarm, piercing clean through the horde. Even more sunlight poured in, seemingly healing the land below.

—

[Eight!]

—

Malik spun the sword in his grip, letting the blade trace a horizontal line across the sky. Every Fallen along that line vanished, crumbling the swarm’s entire front edge.

—

[Seven!]

—

’Faster.’

He swung again and again. The white sword became a blur. A wheel of fire spinning in the sky, too fast for the mortal eye to track.

—

[Six!]

—

At this point, the two Suns dominated the horizon, illuminating most of the region once more.

—

[Five!]

—

Malik’s jaw tightened, feeling the end of his power coming.

—

[Four!]

—

Finally, he stopped swinging and pulled the sword back.

The blade shrank slightly. And no, it didn’t get weaker.

Rather, it had gotten denser, brighter, and hotter.

The white light kept condensing until the sword became an... orb.

—

[Three!]

—

Sensing a power beyond imagining, the Fallen at the front tried to veer away.

Their jerky movements turned desperate, but of course, the ones behind kept pushing.

—

[Two!]

—

Malik crushed the orb and pulled his right arm back, dragging it against his left, mimicking an archer’s motion.

A blindingly white arrow had formed.

It weighed like a mountain and absolutely nothing at once.

He released it.

"Burn."

The white arrow... teleported.

Instantly, it was at the center of the horde, buried in the thickest part of the swarm.

In the same ’instant,’ it exploded. The biggest explosion since the beginning of the battle. Bigger than even the first blast.

A white sun bloomed in the sky.

It swallowed the last of the Fallen whole.

This one was too strong to be controlled, the shockwave hitting the ground an instant later.

A wall of gray sand rolled past the army, knocking soldiers off their feet before they could even realize what had happened. 𝙛𝒓𝒆𝙚𝒘𝒆𝓫𝙣𝓸𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝒄𝒐𝓶

It sent Aladdin stumbling backward and rattled Sinbad’s feathers.

The sky had turned clear.

No longer was it filled with black dots, just a beautiful blue and the two Suns.

—

[One!]

—

The fire around Malik’s body flickered.

He was only a second away from regressing into a normal man.

’I need to leave.’

In that last second, he looked down at the army, checking up on them for what he believed to be the last time.

To his surprise, even in their sorry states, the army still stared at him.

Thousands of faces tilted upward, their mouths hung open, their eyes wet with... tears.

Yes, many had tears rolling down their cheeks, cutting tracks through the dust.

Malik didn’t have time to stare any longer, immediately blasting himself away.

’Why? Did they think that I’d kill them? Are they fearful of—’

"Oh, Second Sun!"

The shout came from the front, cutting off his thoughts.

It was a shout so loud, it reached him even as he began to fly away.

Back on the field, Aladdin dropped to his knees in the sand, his staff falling beside him.

"Praise the Sultan."

"Long live!"

"Long live the Sultan!"

"Long live the Sultan!"

"Long live the Sultan!"

Much like the Fallen, the chant spread.

One voice became ten; ten became a hundred. A hundred became the whole army. They screamed it. They wept it. They threw their weapons down and raised their hands to the sky.

’Second Sun? Sultan? They aren’t afraid of me. They’re... cheering for me.’

In a way, that was worse.

Malik seemed to have transmigrated into a great figure amongst these people.

But of course, he didn’t stick around to find out why or how that was the case.

He kept flying until the army became a speck. Until the only sounds were the rush of air and the faint crackle of dying flames.

That was when his fire gave out.

’Crap.’

Malik was still moving fast. The ground was coming up quickly, and he had no way to slow down.

...or so he thought.

Just before the Soul Glyph fully vanished, he blasted downward one more time.

A single pulse of fire.

It was nothing close to what he had just displayed, but it was enough to pause his momentum.

Enough to turn a fatal crash into a hard fall that was survivable.

Tilting his body just before crashing, he hit the sand at an angle.

His shoulder took the first impact, and he tumbled, spraying sand everywhere.

Eventually, and thankfully, he rolled to a stop on his back.

Malik lay there for a moment, his chest heaving roughly.

His brain felt shaken in a jar. Since he’d half-returned to being a mortal midway through that flight, the G-forces from that flight scrambled everything.

His ears rang. His vision blurred at the edges, and the sky spun in slow circles.

He tried to sit up.

His body said no.

So he didn’t.

Malik simply lay there, breathing hard, trying and failing to stay awake.

Ding!

The last thing he saw was the result of his incredible might.

—

╔═══════╗

║FEARGAIN!║

╚═══════╝

[Fear Points: 5 → 6]

[You’ve felled a Demon x 7,482,915]

—

’...is that it?’

The screen didn’t answer.

Neither did the Suns.

Malik let his eyes close.

The darkness took him.