All his life, Arthur had been hailed as the strongest wherever he went.

He was the one who never backed down from a challenge, never refused to give everything he had when difficulty stood before him.

He had honed his skills across years of blood and discipline, each passing season sharpening him further, because he had always known what responsibilities awaited him at the end of that road.

Arthur had lived a life rich with victory. Defeat, true defeat, had visited him only once; the day he crossed paths with a general-ranked demon and was forced to retreat simply to survive.

But even that he had filed away not as failure, but as a lesson in preparation and inexperience. With the right support at his back, he would have broken that creature too.

That was not arrogance. That was record.

Time and again, his grit and raw strength had placed him a rank above everyone else in every room, every hall, every battlefield he had ever walked into.

Above everyone else.

He was Arthur.

The man who held the First Seat of the Great Hall.

He was Arthur.

And yet.

"Haah...haah..."

The sound that left him now was not the triumphant exhale of a man who had conquered something.

It was ragged and unsteady, torn from his lungs in short, broken pulls, the kind of breathing that belonged to a man who had stared into the full weight of his own limit.

He stood in the middle of the field, sword hanging loose in his grip as though his fingers had forgotten why they were holding it.

His eyes were fixed on the being before him, the one responsible for reducing the man who held the First Chair to this; breathless, trembling, and still standing only out of sheer refusal to fall.

The others had already fallen.

Their bodies lay scattered across the field, limbs slack, eyes closed, every one of them brought down before they could raise a hand in their own defense.

The mental assault had struck like a wave crashing through stone, and even Arthur and his two remaining comrades had only barely held themselves together against it, clinging to consciousness through will alone.

"Arthur." Merlin’s voice came quietly through the silence. "Can you hear my voice?"

Arthur turned his head slowly toward her and gave a single nod.

Then he looked to the other side. "Erik?"

The swordsman’s jaw was set, his eyes already back on their enemy. "Yeah," he said. "I’m good to go."

His gaze remained affixed on the levitating figure.

Something had shifted in the air around that being, a stillness that felt less like calm and more like the pause before a storm decides what it wants to destroy.

Erik studied it for a moment before he spoke, his voice low,

"You could have knocked them out sooner." It wasn’t quite a question. "So why let us attack first?"

William offered a casual shrug. "Felt like giving you all a chance to walk away clean. But I suppose the capital has done its work on you." His eyes swept over the fallen bodies around them, something flickering behind them that wasn’t quite pity. "Mindless. Every last one of you, just following orders without a thought of your own."

The words weren’t meant for them, not truly. The venom belonged to the capital. To those councillors, those particular breed of men who had made a quiet hell out of his father’s life and called it governance.

If not for Emma, if not for his father still siding them, William wasn’t entirely certain he wouldn’t have simply let go. Stopped holding back the part of himself the capital had spent so long fearing.

A demon. Just for a day. But long enough.

"My, my." Merlin’s voice came like silk drawn slowly over a blade. "Such a sharp tongue for someone so young."

She was smiling, but the warmth in it hadn’t reached her eyes. Her hands moved, and the air in front of her began to answer, folding inward as a hollow sphere took shape between her palms.

It pulsed with concentrated aether, dense and restless, and the space around it warped visibly, the atmosphere itself bending away from the weight of what she was building. Beside her, Lancelot took a quiet step back without being asked.

That spell could have leveled a small town.

And she was pointing it at one person.

Arthur didn’t flinch. Lancelot did.

His eyes cut briefly toward the treeline where the village sat just beyond the field’s edge, close enough that a spell of that size going even slightly off course would not leave much behind. He opened his mouth.

Merlin didn’t wait.

The sphere left her hands with a sound like the air being torn open, and it grew as it moved, swelling with every foot of distance it crossed, pulling the ground beneath it apart and warping the atmosphere around it into something unrecognizable.

Soil cracked. The air pressure dropped sharply enough to feel it in the chest. Whatever the spell touched on its way ceased to exist in any meaningful form.

It was one she rarely unleashed. She had kept it caged for years, reserved for moments that truly demanded it. But she had been watching this young man since the fight began, had been quietly recalibrating everything she thought she understood about what she was facing, and she had arrived at one conclusion.

She could not afford to hold anything back.

Arthur watched William’s face for a reaction. There was none. No shift in his stance, no flicker of alarm, not even the particular stillness of a man bracing himself.

He simply watched the spell come toward him with the quiet patience of someone waiting for a mildly interesting thing to finish happening.

That alone unsettled Arthur more than the spell had.

Then he understood why.

"What—" Merlin’s voice broke before the sentence could form.

She had prepared herself for retaliation. Had half-expected him to dodge, or to run, or to throw something back at her with equal force.

She had run through the possibilities in the fraction of a second before impact and had accounted for most of them.

She had not accounted for this.

The spell stopped. Not dissipated, or countered.

Stopped, as though it had simply forgotten what it was doing.

And then, with the same effortless calm he had shown since the moment they arrived, William reached out and took it from her.

The enormous churning mass of concentrated aether shrank steadily between his fingers until it sat coiled around one finger like a ring catching the light.

He tilted his head, studying it.

"What even is this?" His tone was less accusatory than genuinely curious, the way a person might examine something they had found left carelessly on a table. "You’re wielding something that would have torn through friend and foe alike without a second thought."

He looked up at her then, and for the first time something in his expression settled into disappointment. "A tool of pure destruction. Pointed at one person." A quiet sigh. "I had wondered what Emma saw in you. Now I think her respect might be less earned than she believes. You’re just a mage drunk on what you can do, aren’t you."

He pressed his thumb and forefinger together.

The spell ceased to exist.

Just like that.

William raised his hand.

Nyx began to gather at his palm before he added, "Now, catch this."