But what was causing Balisarda Sumernor’s palace to tremble? Was it the fight between Mephistopheles and Simba? No! Was it the fight taking place in the courtyard? No! Was it Jolvuthiz’s Pandora box? No! The cause was simple: it was the weight of a person who regretted his actions. It was the shudder of a man who had sacrificed himself and his men for another’s revenge. It was the resonant frequency of someone looking to scrape redemption from the bedrock of duty, to present the responsibility a leader must uphold. The cause was the sound of Jabari choosing his ground.

  INSIDE JOLVUTHIZ’S PANDORA BOX

  The crystalline hum within the structure gained a new, discordant note. The shuddering of the world outside. Jabari stood amidst the prismatic light, his impeccable navy jacket scarred from Kaelus’s fury, the brass buttons dulled by dust. His stone-carved face, framed by a short-cropped brown beard streaked with grey, tilted as if he listened to a distant strain of music.

  He looked down at Jolvuthiz, who was flexing his recently freed limbs, the dark, crackling energy on his right side eating away at the remnants of his charcoal vest. “There is a lot I wish I could tell you. And everyone else, Jolvuthiz,” Jabari said, his voice a low rumble. He closed his eyes for a moment, a fleeting surrender to a tide of unspoken burdens.

  Jolvuthiz met his gaze, vivid amethyst eyes sharp with understanding above an unnerving smirk. “Don’t worry about it, Jabari. We all have secrets we hide.”

  Jabari’s eyes opened. They moved from Jolvuthiz to the open top of the crystalline box, where a square of chaotic sky was visible. The sound was now a deep, tectonic groaning that pressed from all directions. But to Jabari’s ears, trained by a lifetime of command and one catastrophic failure, its source was agonizingly obvious. It came from above. His mind flashed back, not just to the cataclysm itself, but to the crucial hours before, to the reports he’d downplayed, the patterns he’d dismissed. He had not pieced together the fragments of the coming storm. That was the true failure: a lapse in a commander’s duty to project the enemy’s next move. This time, the groan was a textbook he would not misinterpret. He would not be blind twice.

  “Not again,” he thought, the words ironing in his mind. “We all might be sacrifices in this war. But that does not mean everyone has to die.”

  With a motive forged in regret, he bent his knees. The polished leather of his boots left the crystal floor. He ascended, a dark arrow shooting upward through the open top of Pandora’s Box.

  The atmosphere outside was a physical wall. The air itself was fleeing, rushing upward in a torrential wind that pulled at his tailored jacket and trousers. Then the sound reached its apex, a shattering, world-ending concussion that was less a noise and more the universe rebooting. It was the colossal bastard sword, fully announcing its presence to the earth, so close its textured, pitted iron filled the sky, a descending landscape that blotted out the sun and cast everything into a cold, metallic twilight.

  Jabari’s eyes, narrowed against the hurricane, found it. He soared, a speck of defiant will, until he was directly beneath its immense breadth, a mere sliver of screaming air between his back and the city-sized blade.

  Another deep, resonant vibration, a harmonic of its descent, shuddered through the colossal structure. The space between the blade and the churned earth below diminished by a fraction.

  Jabari twisted in the maelstrom, straightening his body with core-deep discipline. He hung there, suspended by will and the terrifying updraft, a man aligning himself with an avalanche.

  He waited, a statue of tailored wool and resolve. The sword’s descent was a slow, geological inevitability. He let its vast shadow completely envelop him, the world below vanishing into a premature night. The gap between the iron continent and the ground closed with a terrible, patient finality.

  Jabari’s chest expanded. He drew in a breath that tasted of ozone, crushed stone, and cold iron. When he spoke, his voice cut through the roaring womb of wind and pressure.

  “In the name of the Military Empire! That strives for peace! That fights against those who disrupt!” Each phrase was a hammer strike on the anvil of his will. “I call upon every function in my entire body! To unleash everything inside me!”

  He drew his right fist back, every muscle fibre coiling not like a spring, but like a galaxy condensing into a single point of inevitable violence.

  “GORY MASH!”

  The words were not a shout, but a key turned in the lock of his own limits.

  One.

  The first impact was a founding principle. A deep, singular report that did not echo, but embedded itself into the fabric of the moment. A perfect oculus of iron, large as a castle gate, ceased to matter and became memory, a blooming grey rose of dust against the monolith. The debris expanded with a solemn, almost ceremonial slowness.

  A silence followed, profound and personal. The wind, centuries old, whistled through the birthplace of the impossible.

  Two.

  The left fist was the confirmation. A second oculus, a twin eye, opened beside the first. Two voids. Two plumes of dust, born separately, began a slow dance in the torrent. The symmetry was sacred; right, then left. The foundation of a new reality.

  Three.

  The right returned. Its crater overlapped the edge of the first, a Venn diagram of annihilation. The first plume had not yet finished its birth when the third cloud shouldered into the world, a sibling in ruin.

  Four.

  Left. The symmetry became a rhythm. Right, left. A cadence was born, not of sound, but of consequence. Five. The craters kissed. Six. They merged. Seven. Eight. The individual plumes ceased to be. A continuous, pouring river of grey flowing from the wound in the sky. The thuds began overlapping, the sound of the sixth a dull echo behind the sharper crack of the eighth.

  He became a living engine. Nine. Ten. Eleven. Twelve. His shoulders were no longer joints but pivots in a perpetual-motion machine. Right side back, left side forward, a human metronome ticking against eternity. The space between each tick shrank. The thirteenth impact landed as the shockwave of the tenth was still a visible halo, a bubble of force catching up to its cause.

  Twenty. Twenty-one. Twenty-two.

  The sound shed its individuality. It became a grinding, monolithic roar, the voice of the iron itself being unmade. The damage was no longer discrete. A bowl-shaped depression, wide as a manor house and deep as its cellar, was being scooped from the continent of metal. His speed manifested in the air; itself the vacuum left by a retracting fist would suck tendrils of dust back into the void before the next strike could blast them into oblivion.

  Fifty. A hundred.

  The rhythm was now the world’s pulse. To those below, he was no longer a man but a shuddering abstraction, a charcoal smudge against the iron sky whose arms were twin blurs of relentless purpose. Damage was being measured in the spread of absence, a zone of non-being that ate outward. Chunks of metal the size of wagons did not fragment; they sublimated from solid to dust in the time it took a thought to form. The wind of his punches became a perpetual, shrieking cyclone, a self-sustaining storm.

  Five hundred.

  Time began bleeding. An observer would see the afterimage of Jabari’s right arm, fully extended, while the crater still bloomed. Superimposed over this, they would also see the phantom of his left arm already pulled back, elbow high, in the past-tense of a strike that had not yet occurred. Causality frayed. The sight of iron shattering would appear a hair’s breadth before the fist that caused it had even finished moving. The sound collapsed into a single, solid wall of pressure, a bass tone so profound that people felt it in the roots of their teeth and the cradle of their skulls.

  One thousand.

  He crossed the horizon of mere speed. It was no longer a punch, but the act of punching, a state of being as fundamental as breath. His deliberate torque of launch became a self-sustaining gyroscopic spin, a whirlwind generating its own inertia. Before him, the concave ruin deepened into a sheer-walled cavern in the iron sky. This volume of force, a constant volcanic eruption upward, now met the sword’s descent with tangible resistance. The unimaginable mass shuddered, resisted, and groaned to a quivering halt in the firmament held aloft not by magic, but by the unceasing barrage of fists.

  Five thousand.

  The world began to drag, burdened by Jabari's velocity. Light strained, lagging. The debris field around him, a complex galaxy of metallic dust, froze into intricate, suspended sculptures. A vortex of powder would hang, perfect despite that, for a measurable moment before the next shockwave erased it, that shockwave itself appearing as a frozen, crystalline ripple in the air. He was a dark, gravitational core, and around him, physics crystallised into slow, devastating art.

  Ten thousand.

  He was editing time itself. The castle walls, the pale faces in the courtyard, the very flight of arrows all existed in jagged, stuttering frames. Moments went missing, consumed by the intervals between his blows. The sword’s colossal face peeled away in great, curling slabs, like the skin of a celestial fruit, retreating with a dreamlike lethargy before dissolving into fine mist an aeon later. The alternating fists were now a single, humming oscillation, a diamond-tipped drill of pure will boring into the heart of divine judgement.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  Fourteen thousand.

  The blade’s tilt was a completed fact, a continental decision aimed with silent finality at the castle’s heart. A slower timeline had left behind sound. The evidence was purely visual: the relentless, silent sand-blasting of an iron mountain into nothing. His body was a constant smear of motion, the tatters of his uniform existing in multiple places at once, a permanent afterimage of a man who had moved beyond the limits of place.

  Fourteen thousand nine hundred ninety-eight. Fourteen thousand nine hundred ninety-nine.

  Two final, lucid points of focus resolved from the blur: a right fist, a left fist, distinct for the last time, the last twin beats of a heart before it becomes a single, sustained note of force.

  The sea of dark blue wool uniforms below froze in the courtyard, forming a tapestry of upturned faces. Soldiers stared, their disciplined postures broken by awe.

  “We… we might live,” a soldier whispered, his clean-shaven face pale as he watched the apocalyptic sculpture above him being methodically disassembled.

  “The leader…” another breathed, his hand slacking on his sword, the brass buttons on his chest catching a stray beam of fractured light. “The leader of the military is destroying it.”

  A third, his youthful face streaked with grime beneath his crisp cap, clenched a fist so tight the rough leather of his glove creaked. “Come on!”

  From the edge of the Pandora Box, Kaelus Gravemancer stared, his sharp, pale face and long silver-streaked hair whipped by the unnatural gale. His steel-grey eyes, usually so cold and calculating, were wide. “What the fuck,” he rasped, the spikes on his silver armour trembling. “That’s impossible.”

  A low, intrigued chuckle escaped Bismark. He adjusted one of the gleaming gold buttons on his dark navy coat, a sly smile touching his lips as he watched the defiance of physics.

  Chris pushed himself up, his caramel hair plastered with mud, his simple tunic filthy. A wild, desperate hope blazed in his blue eyes. “Yessss!!!” he hissed, his calloused hands digging into the earth.

  Inside his crystalline prison, Jolvuthiz watched, his head tilted. A wide, sharp-toothed grin spread across his pale face, his amethyst eyes alight. “This war,” he giggled, the dark energy on his right side snapping eagerly, “is fucking crazy.”

  As the rhythm of annihilation approached its crescendo. The fifteen-thousandth strike was not an end, but a focal point, a nexus where every preceding impact channeled its force. Jabari’s body, a conduit of impossible momentum, pivoted not just from the hip, but from the centre of the storm he had created. His right fist, leading the endless torrent, did not simply collide with the iron. It became the conclusive argument in a debate against mass, a concentrated truth that the stressed metal could no longer withstand.

  The force did not radiate out. It transferred through.

  The gargantuan sword, already tilted, groaned as the kinetic energy from that blow traveled up its ruined length like a lightning bolt through a rod. It was no longer a falling object, but a spear thrown by fifteen thousand prior punches. Its shattered tip, a jagged mountain range of iron, was driven forward with the last of its own catastrophic weight and all of Jabari’s gathered will.

  It kissed the castle.

  The contact was not a crash, but an insertion. The leading edge of the blade met the ornate, fortified front wall not with a blunt smash, but with the focused pressure of a tectonic plate shifting. For a hair’s breadth of a second, the stone held. Then it accepted the verdict.

  A crack nucleated at the defect and shot through the material in milliseconds. Not at the point of impact, but at the foundation, as if the entire castle flinched. Splitting the structure with a clean, ruthless line thinner than a thread, a white-hot steam of failure raced upward faster than any eye could follow. It did not zigzag or falter, but carved through marble facade, sculpted gargoyle, and fortified tower alike. Travelling a vast, three-hundred-and-fifteen-metre course from the subterranean darkness of the bedrock to the sky-piercing spire, it was a ruler’s line drawn by the sword’s edge. As it ascended, the castle seemed to unzip along a predetermined seam, each metre of height accompanied by a dry, splintering sigh as its heart was cloven clean through. A spray of powdered granite and mortar bloomed along its length, a ghostly echo of the strike.

  The sound was not one of collapse, but of profound, structural betrayal, a deep, groaning crack that was less a noise and more the castle’s spine breaking. The tremor that followed was deep and final, the shudder of a giant wounded.

  Jabari didn’t pause the cleavage. The sword, its purpose as a weapon spent in creating this monumental scar, was now just dead weight and fractured metal. His focus, absolute and unbroken, shifted instantly to disposal. The four hundred and thirty blows that followed were clinical, efficient, a mechanic disassembling a broken engine. Right, left, right, left. Each strike targeted a fracture, a connection, a supporting spar. Vast, crooked segments of the blade sheared away and tumbled down, not onto the courtyard, but harmlessly along the newly split castle face, avalanches of divine shrapnel crashing against the stone they had just sundered.

  The final fragment of the crossguard ceased to exist, not with a sound, but with a final, silent correction to reality.

  The silence that followed was not an absence, but an immense, pressing weight. It was the void left by the cessation of world-altering violence, and it fell over the courtyard with a force that made eardrums ache in protest. In that silence, the distant, forgotten sounds of the wider battle crept back in as pathetic whispers.

  With a complete total of fifteen thousand, four hundred and thirty punches, Balisarda Sumernor Divine Punishment was now destroyed by the fist of Master 1 Jabari.

  Jabari dropped.

  He did not fall; his will to remain aloft simply ended, and gravity reasserted itself. He landed in the churned mud of the courtyard, directly before the grand entrance. The doors were no longer doors, but a jagged, dark maw in the shadow of the colossal, perfectly straight crack that split the castle’s face from foundation to peak. His impact was solid, a deep thump that sent a splash of muck across the stone steps.

  He knelt. His head bowed, not in submission, but under the sheer gravitational pull of exhaustion. His powerful shoulders, which had held up the sky, now hunched forward with the weight of fifteen thousand four hundred and thirty counter-blows. A violent tremor ran through the thick cords of his forearms, pressed against his knees. Sweat and grey metallic grime coated the short, rough bristles of his beard and plastered the remnants of his white shirt to his skin. The tattered strips of his navy jacket hung from him like a defeated banner. Each ragged, heaving breath he drew was a monumental effort, sawing through the quiet. The air he pulled in was thick with the taste of iron, powdered stone, and his own spent effort.

  “Fucking hell…” The curse was a raw, scraped-out sound, more vibration than word. “Balisarda Sumernor…” He spat, the saliva dark with grit. “Shit…” His chest burned. “I need to… catch my breath.”

  For three long seconds, he was a sculpture of human limits, etched in mud and defiance. Then, the will re-ignited. It began as a tightening in his jaw, visible even beneath the grime. A deep, shuddering inhalation swelled his chest. With a staggering, monumental effort that seemed to strain the very air around him, he pushed. Muscles, pushed beyond endurance, screamed in protest as he forced himself upright. He stood, swaying for a moment, a tower on the verge of collapse.

  He took one deliberate step backward. Then another. His third step found firmer purchase. His stone-carved face, etched with deep lines of fatigue, hardened into its familiar, unyielding planes. Eyes, bloodshot and ringed with exhaustion, never wavered from the darkness of the shattered entrance.

  He dashed.

  It was not the blur of cosmic speed from moments before, but a violent, earth-tearing sprint that spoke of last reserves being spent without caution. He covered the short distance in a streak of tattered wool and fury, launched himself from the broken ground, and crossed the threshold.

  The world became a roar of wind and a blur of crumbling stone. The castle’s flank, a sheer face of seven hundred and forty meters, rushed past him. He was not flying but forcing his way upward, a projectile of pure will. He found cracks where there were none, snapped protruding stonework for leverage, and used the last of his momentum to reject the abyss below.

  That final, spent arc carried him over the ragged lip of the shattered wall at the castle’s utmost peak. He landed inside the throne room, not through the grand, gem-encrusted doors, but through the raw, shattered wound in the eastern wall. His boots struck not pristine marble, but a floor littered with powdered stone and glittering fragments of the colossal stained-glass window that was no more. The impact was a sharp, dry crack that echoed through the vast, hollow space, a sound of intrusion rather than entry.

  The aura of the room assaulted him.

  It was a physical presence, a lethal cold that seeped through his tattered clothes and bit at his skin. The air was thick, not with dust, but with a dense, viscous pressure that resisted every inhalation, threatening to drown him. It was laden with scent: the cloying sweetness of smoldering cedar incense from gilded braziers, the ancient, damp stone smell of the castle’s heart, and underpinning it all, the sharp, copper-rich tang of recently spilled blood, a dark, drying stain on the river of crimson carpet that flowed toward the dais. The taste on his tongue was dry, like old parchment and cold, hammered metal, the flavour of absolute, aged power.

  His senses, heightened by battle and exhaustion, mapped the opulent ruin. The room was a cavern sheathed in hammered gold, the walls alive with twisting, watchful veins of emerald and sapphire that glittered in the light from the broken wall. That light, now raw and directionless, poured through the jagged opening where the majestic window had been, scattering illumination across the golden snarling-wolf throne and the simple, unadorned box on a side table beside it.

  Two figures silhouetted against that chaotic light, facing the destruction he had just wrought.

  The taller one stood closest to the devastation, a motionless monolith outlined in bronze and dark fabric. He did not turn.

  Behind his right shoulder, a step back and utterly still, stood another man. His tailored charcoal suit and pale, precise hair were a stark monument of control amidst the chaos. His hands were clasped loosely behind his back, his sharp eyes fixed ahead.

  A soft, sighing rush of air accompanied the movement as the larger figure turned. It was not a quick motion, but a slow, inevitable reorientation. As he turned, the man in the suit inclined his head in a single, slow, acknowledging nod, his gaze shifting from the broken wall to the man who had broken it.

  Balisarda Sumernor completed his turn, his eyes finding Jabari. In them was neither surprise nor anger, but a profound, weary recognition, as if viewing a long-prophesied event finally coming to pass.

  “So,” came the voice. It was hushed, yet it filled the cavernous room effortlessly, vibrating in the glittering floor beneath Jabari’s feet. It was a voice that did not need to shout to be the only sound in the world. “You’ve finally arrived? Welcome to my throne room.”

  Jabari straightened. It was a deliberate act against the crushing pressure. He squared his shredded shoulders. His breathing, though still deep, steadied into a controlled, rhythmic pattern, a soldier’s discipline reasserting itself over the animal pant of exhaustion. He met the weary gaze with the sheer, unyielding mass of his own presence, a presence carved from regret, duty, and fifteen thousand four hundred and thirty punches against fate.

  “I have indeed arrived, Balisarda Sumernor.” Jabari’s voice was a low, gravelly roll, stripped bare.

  Balisarda’s head tilted a fraction. “Hel, this is where you will stand beside me,” he stated. The name was not a reminder, but a condemnation and a curiosity all at once. “Let’s put a stop to this.”

  At the mention of his name, Hel, from his position behind and to the side, gave another slight, deliberate nod, his sharp features impassive.

  Jabari’s resolve solidified, the last vestiges of fatigue burning away in the furnace of that direct, unwavering gaze. His stone-carved face, streaked with grime and sweat, set into its final, immovable lines. The time for breaths, for pauses, for regrets, was over. Only the end remained.

  “Indeed, Balisarda Sumernor.” Jabari said, the word final as a falling blade. “It’s about time someone put an end to this.”