Thunderous explosions rocked the mountain so violently that cracks ripped through the stone beneath their feet. The moment the black wave swallowed the Thunder Dragon warriors, a terrifying force slammed into them and stopped their charge dead.

The first few to collide with it felt as though they had rammed straight into an invisible wall. Their bodies froze for a single instant, wings snapping wide, spears trembling in their hands, and then the wave blasted them backward. Blood burst from mouths, armor bent inward, and chunks of mana were torn from them as if the black force was devouring pieces of their very existence.

Some warriors were hurled through others like broken dolls. Some smashed into the mountain and slid down in trails of blood. Others hit the ground so hard that stone burst beneath them.

Thor watched thousands of his men get flung backward by a single attack, his mouth left hanging open in disbelief. Blood covered their bodies, especially the first ranks that had taken the impact head-on.

He knew exactly how powerful his warriors were. They were proud dragons, their bloodlines close to pure, men who could crush armies and burn kingdoms to ash.

But this... this was no longer a human standing before them. It felt like a god had stepped onto the battlefield.

Max, however, was already breathing heavily. That single strike had burned through an enormous amount of mana. His arms felt heavy. His chest tightened with each breath. The only reason he was still standing was because the stolen mana from the warriors was pouring back into him in violent streams, rough and unstable, barely keeping him upright.

It did not even feel fully his. It felt wild inside his body, crashing through him like stolen thunder forced into a vessel that could barely hold it.

But he knew better than to waste more attacks like that.

If Thor stayed standing, then the lesser warriors would keep rising no matter how many times he smashed them down. He needed to cut off the head before the wave swallowed him whole.

His eyes locked onto Thor in the center of the chaos.

"I must move fast..." Max muttered.

The next second, he shot forward into the broken wave of warriors.

Two vortices spun wildly in his palms. One devoured mana from every warrior close enough to be caught by its pull, dragging the blue-gold streams into his hands. The other exploded with crushing pressure, smashing into those still standing. Their bodies twisted violently as their bones cracked. Several warriors were ripped off their feet and hurled aside before they could even scream.

Ten warriors stood before Thor, and not a single one of them feared Max.

Several stepped forward without hesitation, their spears sweeping aside the warriors still being thrown back in their direction as if clearing the field with practiced precision.

"He’s strong. We should crush him together." Sigurd drove his spear into the ground, and sparks burst outward in every direction. "Follow me into battle."

His command rang out sharply, and the other nine moved with him at once.

Their spears crackled with lightning, but not the same lightning as the rest. This one was deeper. Sky-blue light spilled from their golden weapons and wrapped around their bodies like living snakes. Their formation was tight. Not one of them moved too early or too late.

Max felt it instantly.

Something was wrong.

He trusted that warning and barely managed to shroud himself in black mist-like void energy before the crackling force of their combined power smashed into him.

Boom.

The impact drove into his guard and sent him sliding backward across the broken mountain. His boots carved trenches through stone before he forced himself to stop.

"Blue lightning?" Max’s expression sank.

He had run into a serious problem.

The warriors coming at him were nothing like the others. They were not weak, not even close. Their strength was likely on his level, or perhaps equal to it. Worse, they moved like one mind split into ten bodies.

For the first time since the battle began, he did not know how he was supposed to fight what was in front of him.

Their bodies crackled with lightning, then vanished from his vision.

CRACKLE

The hairs on the back of Max’s neck rose so sharply it felt as if needles were pressing into his skin. He twisted to the side on instinct.

A streak of sky-blue light tore past his face. A heartbeat later, a sharp pain followed. His left cheek split open, and a thin crimson line of blood ran down his skin before he had even fully registered that he had been cut.

Max’s eyes widened.

He had dodged it, and he had still been hit. That was when he truly understood that these ten were not just strong. They were fast enough to kill him.

Another crackle tore past him and ripped pain from his thigh. Then another came. Then another. The attacks were far too fast for his eyes to follow. Max could do nothing but force himself to defend, yet even through that panic, he understood something that made his heart sink.

These ten were strong enough to cut through his natural defenses.

If he failed to blast them all away at once, they would wear him down slowly until his body gave in, and that was exactly the plan they had chosen. They were not rushing him together like fools. Their attacks were carefully controlled, perfectly timed, each strike meant to draw a little more blood than the last.

But even the ten commanders were wary of Max. They knew they had landed hits, yet all they had managed to leave behind were small wounds, nothing close to the killing blows they had intended.

The first strike had been aimed for his neck, but instead it had only pulled some strange energy from his skin and barely left a scratch along his cheek. That mysterious defense was infuriating. It was something they had to grind down slowly, piece by piece, yet breaking through it was exhausting them too.

"Piss off!" Max roared, wrenching his body into a violent spin as both hands unleashed void energy from within him. He spun fast enough for a tornado of black mist to burst into existence around him.

The moment one of the unlucky commanders struck it, terror seized him as if he had stared straight into death itself. His golden spear twisted and shattered in an instant, and his body, far too late to stop, was dragged directly into that devouring force.

The battlefield was thrown into chaos. One of the ten commanders was shredded into a spray of blood by the expanding vortex, its black force rushing outward in every direction. It was an all-out attack Max had chosen to bet everything on, even if it forced blood from the corner of his lips.