The high dais beneath the Frozen Throne was a circle of black saronite ice, thirty yards across, suspended over an abyss of screaming wind.
At its center, the balance of the world was dying. Illidan Stormrage was a hurricane of green fire and jade steel. The Twin Blades of Azzinoth moved in continuous, overlapping arcs—less like swords and more like the interlocking rotors of an arcane engine.
He didn't just parry; he intercepted, his hooves leaving scorched tracks in the frost as he danced along the absolute edge of Arthas Menethil's reach.
Every strike from his warglaives carried the desperate, pressurized velocity of a demon who knew that a single frame of deceleration meant immediate execution.
Yet Arthas was no longer moving like a mortal man. The Death Knight stood at the center of the storm, his posture straight, his left hand guiding Frostmourne with a casual, terrifying economy of movement.
The runeblade did not roar through the air; it hissed. It was a cold, rhythmic sequence of minimal deflections. Every time the jade edge of a warglaive neared his throat, the sapphire-etched steel of Frostmourne was simply there, meeting the strike with a heavy, deadening resonance that sent vibrations through Illidan's muscular frame.
"You are slowing, demon," Arthas said. His voice was a dual-toned layer—the prince's human baritone overlaid by the resonant, metallic rasp of the Lich King. "The skull you devoured... its power is a shallow well. Mine is just like the ocean."
With a sudden, violent pivot, Arthas drove the pommel of Frostmourne forward. The blow caught Illidan directly in the center of his chest plate, the kinetic force cracking the hardened steel and throwing the Demon Hunter back ten yards across the slick saronite.
Before Arthas could advance to deliver the coup de grâce, the air behind him ignited. Leylin was forty paces back, his boots rooted into the frozen stone, his hands moving through a complex, hyper-accelerated sequence of somatic gestures.
He was not casting like a traditional mage of the Kirin Tor; he was not reciting formulas or drawing elegant geometric runes in the air. His movements were violent, rhythmic, and deeply physical—the stance of a martial artist forcing the elemental layers of the world to bend to his sheer physical will.
Thump. Leylin dropped his weight into a deep horse stance, his right heel slamming into the saronite ice. The permafrost beneath the dais didn't just crack—it roared.
A massive pillar of jagged, gray bedrock tore through the glacier floor, rising six feet out of the ice directly in Arthas's path.
Arthas didn't look back. He simply swung Frostmourne in a horizontal backhand arc, the runeblade's frost-aura shattering the solid stone into a spray of gravel.
But the rock was never intended to kill him. It was the catalyst. As the stone fragments filled the air, Leylin drew his hands back to his ribs, his palms cupping into a tight sphere.
The gravel didn't fall; it suspended itself in mid-air, spinning violently as a high-density thermal aura enveloped each individual stone.
With a sharp, dual-fisted punch forward, Leylin unleashed the cluster. The shattered bedrock didn't merely fly; it liquefied into a hyper-velocity spray of molten slag, white-hot and hissing with arcane compression as it tore through the blizzard toward Arthas's exposed back.
The Death Knight sensed the thermal spike in the millisecond of its creation. He spun on his heel, his tattered cloak snapping like a whip as he brought Frostmourne down in a vertical cleave.
[Anti-Magic Shell]! A translucent, dark-green dome of unholy energy erupted around Arthas's silhouette. The molten stone struck the barrier with the sound of rapid thunder, splashing harmlessly against the magical membrane in a shower of spitting red sparks and boiling mud.
"Clever," Arthas muttered, his sapphire eyes locking onto Leylin through the steam. "But static casters are simply monuments waiting to be broken."
Arthas pointed a gauntleted finger toward Leylin. [Death Coil]. A skull-shaped missive of pure, unholy shadow-energy tore from his fingertips, screaming as it flew across the dais, leaving a trail of dead, black frost in the air behind it.
Leylin didn't attempt to cast a counter-spell. He didn't have the time to construct a traditional mana shield. Instead, he relied on the raw, instantaneous physics of the earth beneath his boots.
He swept his right leg upward in a high, crescent kick, his shin catching the edge of a frozen rock formation. A slab of solid glacier ice, four inches thick and wide as a barn door, ripped upward from the floor like a vault door slamming shut.
The Death Coil struck the ice shield dead center. The shadow energy exploded, instantly rotting the structure into gray, crumbling slush, but the physical mass of the barrier had done its work.
The projectile was spent. Leylin rolled through the dissolving slush, his hands already gathering a massive, swirling vortex of red-orange plasma.
"Do not look away from me, Death Knight!" Illidan roared. The Demon Hunter had already recovered his footing. The great purple wings on his back snapped shut, launching him forward in a low-altitude sprint that blurred his outline into a streak of emerald fire.
[Fel Rush]. He hit Arthas before the Death Knight could reset his stance from the Death Coil. The warglaives came in from opposite directions, a twin decapitation strike that hissed with the green venom of a hundred corrupted worlds.
Arthas caught the left blade on the crossguard of Frostmourne, but the right blade tore across his shoulder plate, shearing through the thick saronite steel and leaving a glowing, green furrow that hissed as it bit into the dead flesh beneath.
Arthas didn't grimace. He didn't feel the pain; he felt only the reduction in his armor's integrity.
He stepped into the pocket of Illidan's swing, his elbow smashing into the side of the demon's skull with the force of a falling anvil.
Illidan stumbled, his blindfold stained with sudden, black blood, but his feral instincts kept his weapons moving. He turned the stumble into a low, sweeping spin, his hooves kicking out at Arthas's knees.
As Arthas leaped over the sweep, Leylin completed his sequence. He stood with both arms extended, his fingers curved like claws, his breath coming in a low, measured growl.
The air within twenty paces of his body had turned into a literal furnace. A sphere of condensed, white-hot fire the size of a carriage launched from his hands.
It didn't travel in a standard ballistic arc; Leylin was actively driving the projectile through continuous, punching motions of his fists, guiding the massive sun across the platform to ensure it didn't clip Illidan's retreating form.
The Pyroblast roared across the saronite, the intense heat instantly melting the top three inches of the ancient glacier into a rushing river of boiling water.
Arthas, still airborne from dodging Illidan's sweep, saw the miniature sun closing in. He could not dodge mid-air, and his Anti-Magic Shell was still recycling its energy cores.
He chose a different skill. [Icebound Fortitude]. The Death Knight's skin turned the color of deep-ocean ice. His very muscles became solid saronite, his density multiplying by ten fold in the space of a single heartbeat. He crossed his iron gauntlets over his chest as the white-hot sphere hit him.
The explosion shook the very roots of the mountain. A massive mushroom cloud of steam and black ash erupted over the dais, obscuring the sky, the throne, and the combatants in an absolute whiteout.
Through the thick shroud of steam, Leylin's vision was useless, but his connection to the ground was absolute. Every vibration, every heavy footfall of Arthas's iron boots on the melting stone, traveled up through the rock and into Leylin's nervous system like a telegraph wire.
He's moving right. His weight is heavily biased to the left knee. Leylin didn't waste a breath. He sank low, his hands skimming the boiling water on the floor, his palms pressing flat against the saronite bedrock below.
He ripped his hands apart in a violent, tearing motion. The saronite dais fractured along a perfectly straight fault line. A deep, jagged chasm, six feet wide, tore through the steam directly beneath Arthas's feet.
The Death Knight, his density still multiplied by his defensive spell, felt the ground give way. His right leg dropped into the sudden void, his massive momentum dragging his torso down as he wedged into the crack.
"Now, Stormrage!" Leylin shouted, his voice cracking with the strain of holding the earth apart against the Lich King's counter-pressure.
Illidan didn't need the instruction. He had already leaped into the air, his wings unfolding to their full, terrifying span as he hovered thirty feet above the trapped prince.
The green tattoos across his chest blazed with an intensity that turned the steam into a sickening emerald fog.
[Metamorphosis]. The demon hunter's form expanded. His skin turned into jagged, obsidian hide; his horns grew into great, sweeping curves of shadow-iron; his warglaives grew longer, their edges dripping with pure, unadulterated chaotic magic.
"For ten thousand years I have waited for a worthy foe!" Illidan's demonic voice shook the glacier. "You... are merely a puppet in a crown!"
He dropped from the sky like a falling star, his blades pointed straight down at the trapped king's neck.
Arthas looked up from the fissure, his face twisted into a snarl of pure, unholy rage. He could not pull his leg free in time; the saronite ice was locking around his thigh like a vice under Leylin's continued concentration.
He raised Frostmourne with both hands, bracing the flat of the blade against his shoulder to receive the sky-fall.
CRACK. The impact was a physical shockwave that blew the remaining steam off the dais in a three-hundred-degree circle. The force of Illidan's descent drove Arthas three feet deeper into the stone fissure, the saronite walls splintering into thousands of razor-sharp needles.
Frostmourne held, but the sheer kinetic violence of the strike forced the Death Knight to drop to one knee, his arms trembling under the massive, obsidian weight of the demon hunter's blades.
Leylin saw the lock. He knew this was the single, fleeting window where the Death Knight's mobility was zero.
He stepped forward, his movements transitioning into a fluid, circular dance—the graceful, deadly forms of a master firebender channeling the lightning within the soul. He separated his hands, his fingers pointing toward the black sky, drawing the ambient static of the magical blizzard into his own core.
The air around his fingertips began to crackle with blue-white arcs of high-voltage arcana. He did not cast it as a simple bolt. He focused the entire electrical charge into a narrow, drilling beam of energy, his fingers snapping forward like twin pistols as he released the stroke.
The lightning strike didn't hit Arthas directly—it hit the puddle of boiling water that filled the fissure around his legs. The effect was instantaneous and horrific.
The highly conductive, magic-infused water turned the fissure into a giant, industrial capacitor. Ten thousand volts of blue arcana shot through Arthas's lower limbs, bypassing his heavy plate armor through the wet seams and cooking the necromantic pathways within his legs.
The sapphire light in Arthas's eyes flickered. The unholy energy that sustained his dead muscles stuttered under the electrical overload, his arms buckling for a fraction of a second beneath Illidan's pressure.
Illidan seized the exploit. He twisted his right warglaive, the jagged emerald tip slipping past Frostmourne's guard and tearing through the side of Arthas's helm.
The iconic horn of the Lich King's plate armor flew into the air, accompanied by a spray of frozen black blood as the blade bit deep into the ear and jawline of the prince.
Arthas roared—a sound that was no longer human, nor king, but the raw, animalistic scream of the entity within the throne itself.
[Remorseless Winter]. A localized hurricane of absolute zero wind erupted from the prince's body. The air pressure dropped so violently that the moisture in Leylin's lungs froze instantly, forcing him to break his concentration on the fissure and stumble back as a wall of solid ice rushed toward him.
Illidan was thrown off by Arthas, his obsidian wings shredded by the high-velocity ice shards as he tumbled across the platform, his demonic form reverting to his standard, night-elf silhouette under the sheer weight of the absolute cold.
The three combatants separated, breathing heavily in the frozen dusk, the dais between them ruined, cracked, and stained with both green fire and black blood.
Leylin stood at the edge of the dais, his hands casually resting on his knees as he dragged freezing air into his burning chest. His mind remained as cold and clear as the glacier
He looked at Illidan. The demon hunter was already pushed back to his feet, using his warglaives as crutches, his blindfold soaked in fresh blood but his teeth bared in a relentless, feral grin.
Then Leylin looked at Arthas. The death knight had dragged himself out of the fissure. He stood with his left leg dragging slightly, his helm shattered on the left side, revealing the pale, vein-streaked face of the man he had been before he took up the sword.
The sapphire light in his eyes was no longer a steady flame; it was a churning, erratic storm that threatened to consume the very skull that housed it.
"You cannot win," Arthas whispered, his blade lowered but still humming with an insatiable, hungry frequency. "Every soul that dies on this mountain belongs to me. I am the end of all things."
Leylin didn't answer with words. He slowly brought his right foot forward, his toes digging into the saronite, his hands rising into the opening stance of the iron triad.
He looked at Illidan, a single, silent nod passing between the two frontliners. The wind howled through the ruined spires of the throne. They moved together.