The cavern trembled, not from the Core's inherent rage, but from the clashing intentions of the two rituals. The air was a soup of conflicting energies: the cold, arrogant gold of Valerius's circle against the nascent, tripartite harmony of Haruto's group.
"Now!" Haruto yelled, his voice barely a whisper against the roar of the abyss. The plan was in motion.
Lyra didn't aim for Valerius or his mages—a futile effort against their combined shields. Instead, her anti-magic arrows, forged by Sun Elf enchanters, streaked towards the glowing conduits that channeled energy from the mages to Valerius.
One arrow struck true, and a section of the golden circle flickered violently. A mage screamed as feedback lashed through him. This was the distraction. In that moment of instability, Kaito and Haruto acted. Kaito's Sun-Blade blazed, but not as a weapon.
He drove it point-first into the ground before him, channeling all his power not into an attack, but into the first phase of their ritual. A lattice of pure, crystalline light erupted from the blade, not towards the Core, but weaving through the air around it, a beautiful and intricate scaffold seeking to stabilize the chaos.
Simultaneously, Haruto's shadows exploded outwards. They didn't attack the platform.
Instead, they flowed over the cavern floor, up the walls, and across the ceiling, forming a perfect, massive dome of utter blackness that encased the entire Core.
This was the Absorbing Barrier, a net of nothingness designed to swallow the coming explosion.
Valerius laughed, a sound of pure manic glee. "Perfect! You waste your energy on containment while you deliver the very power I need! The alignment peaks! Mages, now!" His mages chanted in unison, their voices a discordant counterpoint to the silent, focused will of the trinity.
The golden circle flared brighter than the sun, and lances of golden energy shot out, not at Haruto or Kaito, but at the lattice and the barrier. Valerius's hijacking ritual had begun.
He wasn't trying to break their work; he was trying to possess it. The golden energy began to crawl like parasitic vines up Kaito's lattice and over Haruto's barrier, siphoning their power, their very life force, into Valerius. Haruto grunted, feeling a terrifying drain, as if his soul was being pulled out through his pores.
Next to him, Kaito cried out, the brilliant light of his lattice dimming as it was forcibly tethered to the Regent. "It's not enough!" Vorlak roared, his claws digging into the stone as he fought to maintain his focus for the final phase.
"He is draining you faster than you can build! You must go deeper!" Haruto's eyes met Kaito's across the chaotic field.
A silent understanding passed between them. They had to risk everything. They had to push their powers beyond their limits, to pour so much energy into the lattice and barrier that Valerius's siphon would overload, if only for a moment. "Lyra! Cover us!" Haruto shouted.
With a final, determined nod to each other, Haruto and Kaito closed their eyes, turning their focus entirely inward.
They stopped defending, stopped holding back. They unleashed the full, raw potential of their otherworldly souls into the ritual. The result was cataclysmic.
Kaito's lattice flared with the intensity of a supernova, its patterns becoming impossibly complex and solid. Haruto's shadow barrier thickened from a dome of darkness into a sphere of pure, event-horizon blackness that seemed to suck the very sound from the cavern.
For a glorious, terrifying second, Valerius's golden vines shattered. The Regent staggered back, his eyes wide with shock and sudden fear. The backlash from the broken siphon threw several of his mages from the platform.
In that fleeting window of opportunity, as the Core, compressed and stabilized by the overwhelming force, reached its absolute peak of tension, Vorlak moved.
"It is time!" he bellowed, and plunged his own hands into the ground. "For the future of all worlds!" Violet demonic seals, ancient and profound, erupted from his body and shot towards the contained Core.
The final phase, the Binding, had begun.