The Extra's Rise

Of course, the sky didn't literally rip apart. That would have required more paperwork. But anyone looking up at that moment would have been forgiven for thinking someone had taken a celestial can opener to the heavens and pried them open just a crack, just enough to let something truly unpleasant through.

That something was Vorgath Ironmaw.

Pope of the Savage Communion, Warlord of the Ten Thousand Dismembered, and general enthusiast of mayhem, bloodshed, and axes roughly the size of mid-sized vehicles. The moment his weapon came down, it didn't feel like an attack so much as a statement—namely, this planet is in my way.

And yet, Grand Marshall Meilyn Potan—stoic, practical, terrifyingly composed Meilyn—met it. One swing. One block. And for a breathless heartbeat, the world didn't end.

Around her, the air rippled with summoned power.

A Dullahan shimmered into being beside her, head held beneath one arm and eyes glowing with cold detachment. An Arch Lich rose on the other side, tall and ancient and slightly offended to be summoned at this hour. And anchoring them all was the most impressive of the lot—Meilyn herself, clad in an armour of interlocking deep blue bone, swirling with energy so dense it made Erebus look like a first-year illusion spell.

'Kraken's skeleton,' Luna whispered in my head, voice unusually subdued.

Right. A Kraken. A nine-star beast. One of those creatures people tell horror stories about at military academies, usually right before sending students into a forest with a butter knife and a prayer. And Meilyn had worn it. Like a jacket.

Her scythe crackled with enough power to power a small city—or at least wipe one off the map—and her face was as impassive as always, like she was scolding a particularly unruly vending machine.

Vorgath, of course, looked delighted.

The Pope of the Savage Communion—one of the Five, a butcher in the body of a mountain with miasma seething from every pore—stood with his axe humming with both miasma and mana, as if it couldn't decide which apocalypse it preferred and had settled for both.

Why was he here?

That was the question.

Because this wasn't supposed to happen. Not now. Not yet. This wasn't in the novel.

So why here? Why now?

The vehicle was going further away, but what was the point?

I knew.

Meilyn was monstrously strong but she wasn't a Radiant-ranker.

She hadn't taken that step.

She was weaker than Vorgath.

She would die in this fight.

The truth of this realization hit me like a physical blow even as the hovertruck continued to retreat. Rachel's fingers dug into my arm, her eyes wide with horror as she watched what was unfolding. Rose's face had gone pale, her usual composure cracking. Even Clana was fully awake, her expression grim.

"We have to go back," I said, the words torn from me before I could think better of it.

"You heard the Marshal's orders," the driver replied, not taking his eyes off the path ahead. "We're to return to the outpost and report."

Behind us, the battle began in earnest.

Meilyn moved first, her scythe carving a perfect arc through the air as she activated her Scythe Domain. The space around her warped, reality bending to accommodate her mastery of the weapon. Each swing didn't just travel through space but seemed to define it, creating zones where her control was absolute. It wasn't the highest level of martial ability—that would be Unity, the perfect melding of self and weapon—but it was close.

Vorgath parried with contemptuous ease, his Axe Unity allowing him to counter as if the weapon were a natural extension of himself. Where Meilyn's Scythe Domain created zones of control, his Axe Unity simply ignored them, cutting through the fabric of her technique with the casual disregard of someone swatting a fly.

"Is this all the Western Continent can offer?" he taunted, his voice like gravel being crushed. "Their second strongest?"

Meilyn didn't bother responding with words. Instead, darkness gathered around her—not the purple-black of conventional dark mana, but the absolute void of Deepdark. It pooled around her like liquid night, then surged forward in jagged spears aimed at Vorgath's heart.

The Axe King laughed, a sound like mountains collapsing. Fire erupted from his body—not natural flame but miasma-infused inferno, sick green and sunset orange intertwined in a blasphemous dance. The Deepdark spears met his fire miasma in a catastrophic collision, the resulting shockwave flattening the terrain for half a kilometer in all directions.

The Dullahan and Arch Lich moved in perfect synchronization with Meilyn, as if the three shared a single mind. The Lich hurled spells of such complexity they resembled mathematical equations made lethal, while the Dullahan's sword left trails of absolute cold in its wake. Together with Meilyn's scythe, they created a three-pronged attack that would have annihilated most opponents.

Vorgath was not most opponents.

His axe blurred, becoming less a weapon and more a concept—the idea of severance made manifest. Where it passed, connections broke. The Lich's spells unraveled mid-flight. The Dullahan's sword strikes hit nothing but air. And Meilyn's scythe, meeting the axe directly, shuddered under the impact.

For a moment, they were locked together, power against power. Meilyn's face remained impassive, but sweat beaded on her forehead, the first sign of strain I'd ever seen from her. Vorgath's expression was one of fierce joy, like a connoisseur sampling a particularly fine vintage.

"You fight well, human," he acknowledged, pushing forward. "Few can stand against me for even this long."

Meilyn disengaged, leaping backward as her summons regrouped. The Kraken armor around her flickered, parts of it crumbling under the strain of channeling so much power. She raised her hand, and the Deepdark responded again, this time forming complex geometric patterns that rotated around her like the world's most lethal mathematical model.

"Vorgath Ironmaw," she finally spoke, her voice steady despite everything. "You're a long way from your temples."

"The world is my temple," he replied, rolling his massive shoulders. "And all battlefields my altar."

He raised his axe high, and the sky itself seemed to darken in response. Fire miasma spiraled around the weapon, condensing until the blade glowed white-hot. At the same time, he channeled pure mana through it—not the refined, controlled mana of human mages, but raw, primal power that made the air itself groan in protest.

"But enough talk," he said, his voice dropping to a rumble. "Show me what the Grand Marshal of the Western Continent can really do."

The attack that followed defied description. It wasn't just an axe strike; it was annihilation given form, a concept rather than a physical action. The air split, the ground beneath it sublimated, and reality itself seemed to protest.

Meilyn met it with everything she had.

Deepdark erupted from her in a catastrophic wave, her summons dissolving into it, lending their power to hers. The Kraken armor fully activated, ancient runes blazing across its surface as it channeled power that no human frame should have been able to contain. Her scythe, wreathed in both Deepdark and death energy from her Gift, swept up to meet Vorgath's descending axe.

The collision was beyond spectacular—it was nearly biblical. Light and darkness, fire and void, miasma and mana, all crashing together in a single point of cosmic absurdity. For one impossible moment, the two forces balanced, neither yielding.

Then, slowly, inexorably, Vorgath's axe began to push through.

Meilyn's defense cracked. The Deepdark wavered. The Kraken armor fractured along ancient fault lines. And still, her expression remained composed, accepting, as if she'd always known this would be the outcome.

With a sound like the world ending, her defense shattered completely.

The backlash hurled her backward, her body carving a trench through the earth before coming to rest nearly fifty meters away. Her scythe lay broken beside her, its blade cracked clean through. The Kraken armor hung in tatters, more suggestion than substance now.

Vorgath lowered his axe, looking almost disappointed that it was over. He approached slowly, savoring the moment, his massive form casting a long shadow over Meilyn's fallen figure.

"You fought well," he repeated, and there was genuine respect in his voice. "Few humans have ever forced me to exert myself to this degree. Had you taken that final step—had you reached Radiant-rank—perhaps this would have ended differently."

Meilyn struggled to her knees, blood trickling from the corner of her mouth. Her golden eyes remained defiant despite everything.

"It's not over," she said quietly.

"No?" Vorgath raised his axe once more. "Then show me."

She gathered what little strength remained, Deepdark flickering weakly around her hands. But it was clear to everyone watching that it was over. The gap between peak Immortal and low Radiant might seem small on paper, but in reality, it was an unbridgeable chasm.

"Why?" she asked, staring up at him. "Why come yourself? Why now?"

Vorgath's massive head tilted slightly. "Because change is coming. The balance shifts. And I wished to see for myself what the Western Continent could offer against that tide."

The axe began its descent, a perfect execution stroke that would separate Meilyn's head from her shoulders with surgical precision.

I don't remember making the decision to move. One moment I was in the hovertruck, watching in horror; the next, I was standing between Meilyn and Vorgath, Erebus drawn and raised to meet his axe.

The impact when our weapons met should have shattered every bone in my body. Should have. But it didn't.

Erebus blazed with a light I'd never seen before, absorbing and redirecting the catastrophic force of Vorgath's strike. My arms trembled, my legs threatened to buckle, but somehow, impossibly, I held.

"Well," he said, his voice somewhere between amused and intrigued. "What do we have here?"