The Scarlet King barely raised his crimson-veined arm in time.
Rehan's fist met his forearm with a sound like two dying stars colliding—a concussive boom that flattened the forest for miles in every direction, uprooting ancient trees and turning volcanic rock to glass beneath the shockwave. The Scarlet King skidded backward across the shattered earth, twin furrows tearing themselves into the ground beneath his heels.
"Interesting," the King rasped, flexing his smoking arm. Hairline cracks glowed along the bone-obsidian plating where Rehan's knuckles had landed. "That actually hurt."
"Good," Rehan said.
He still held Ishita against his chest with one arm, gentle as a man carrying something made of glass, even as his other hand crackled with enough raw sovereign-aura to unmake continents.
The Scarlet King's crimson eyes narrowed at the sight. "You fight one-armed. Sentiment, even now? Even at one hundred percent, you cling to a corpse."
"She is not a corpse to me."
Rehan moved again—not fast so much as immediate, closing forty meters of scorched earth as if the distance had simply been deleted. The Scarlet King barely got his crimson war-glaive up to block the following knee strike, and even blocked, the force of it sent him crashing through three mountains stacked one behind the other, each one detonating into rubble and dust on impact.
Rehan landed at the base of the ruined mountain range, Ishita still cradled safely, his golden-emerald aura burning so bright it cast no shadows—only light.
The Scarlet King rose from the wreckage slowly, blood the color of dying sunsets leaking from a crack along his jaw. For the first time in ten millennia, something that might have been called fear flickered behind his crimson eyes.
"You're not fighting like the Sovereign I studied," the King said, low. "You're fighting like something that has already decided it doesn't need to survive this."
Rehan's golden eyes, twin dying suns, finally lifted to meet his.
"I don't," Rehan said quietly. "I only need you to stop existing before I do."
He set Ishita down at last—gently, reverently, upon a bed of untouched golden grass that his own aura had somehow spared from the destruction around them, as if the world itself refused to let her rest anywhere broken. He pressed one trembling kiss to her forehead.
"Wait for me," he whispered. "I'll be right there. Just... let me finish this first."
He stood. The golden-emerald flame around him roared higher, and cracks of white-hot light began splitting up through his own skin—the cost of holding 100% without her calm presence beside him to anchor it.
"Scarlet King," Rehan said, voice flat and final as a closing coffin lid. "Round two."
He vanished again—and this time, the resulting shockwave cracked the sky itself, a spiderweb of fractured void spreading outward from the point of impact, the very first tear in the dimensional wall that would, several chapters from now, hurl this entire war into the vacuum of space.