The world blurred into streaks of wind and color.
Kael blitzed forward, vanishing from Elandor before even the dust could rise from where he stood. The sound of his departure came after he'd already disappeared—an air-rending thunderclap that rattled windows for miles.
He wasn't flying.
He wasn't teleporting.
He was simply moving—on foot.
He circled Valeria once.
Then again.
Then again.
Ten times.
And it took him exactly 0.10 seconds.
Continents blurred. Oceans folded. The Hollow Skies became a flicker in his peripheral vision. Villages, cities, frozen peaks, Essence storms—he passed them all in less than a heartbeat.
Then, as suddenly as it began, he stopped.
The world didn't catch up. It shattered around him.
Kael stood in the heart of a nameless forest near the edge of the Veyloren Wilds. Birds fled in panicked flocks, animals dropped into silence, and the air around him trembled from the residual velocity still bleeding off his body.
He let out a breath. Even that stirred the trees.
"Too fast…" he muttered, slowly raising his right fist.
He aimed at nothing in particular—just the treeline ahead. A test. A light test.
Kael exhaled again and thrust his fist outward with surgical control. He didn't coat it in Lightning. He didn't activate Flame Essence. He didn't even channel Kinetic energy.
It was just a normal punch.
Or at least, it was supposed to be.
BOOOOOOOOOOM.
The shockwave didn't ripple—it devoured.
The forest in front of him vanished. Not fell. Not caught fire. VANISHED. Trees were ripped out of the ground like twigs and hurled miles away. Earth peeled back like shredded fabric. Dust and debris spun into a rising vortex that swallowed the sky.
Far beyond the forest, a mountain ridge caught the residual blast.
The mountain cracked, split—
—and a perfect circular hole was bored through it.
Not from direct impact. But from air pressure alone.
The atmosphere screamed. A jetstream curled into chaos above, and the clouds bent in submission to the ripple of energy expanding from that single punch.
Kael stood still, arm extended, eyes unblinking.
"…I was right," he whispered. "If I even moved wrong earlier…"
His gaze slowly lifted to the heavens above.
"…I wouldn't have just split the earth. I would've destroyed it."
He flexed his fingers, then clenched his fist. His body thrummed with so much compressed Essence that the earth beneath him cratered from tension alone.
This wasn't just power.
This was potential annihilation.
Kael turned, focused, and vanished again—this time more gently. No sonic booms. No warping trails. Just stillness where he'd once stood.
—
He returned to the secluded training ground he'd crafted for himself during his time in isolation—a pocket-space deep within a collapsed Essence fissure, untouched by the rest of Valeria.
The air here was still. Thick. Primordial.
A single breath pulled in more Essence than most mages could in a full incantation cycle. Here, Kael could test without risk.
He stood at the center of the obsidian floor and raised both hands, closing his eyes.
"Multiplicity," he said, voice quiet, firm.
Essence gathered. His soul shimmered with weightless radiance.
Then it tore.
Not in pain—but in division.
God Essence: Multiplicity.
Twenty pillars of elemental energy erupted around him—Storm, Flame, Lightning, and Kinetic—coalescing into twenty humanoid forms. Each one bore his face, his form… but with glowing threads of their core affinity swirling through their limbs.
Each one moved independently. With intelligence. With aggression.
And each one pulsed with 80% of his current raw strength, speed, and reflexes.
Kael opened his eyes.
"All of you," he said calmly, "try to kill me."
The training ground exploded into chaos.
Twenty Kaels launched at him, each with a different angle, tactic, and elemental approach. Some rained lightning lances from above. Others blurred forward with storm-wrapped fists. One surged the ground with kinetic gravity bursts while two others detonated flame strikes meant to box him in.
Kael smiled. Just slightly.
And moved.
He weaved between them—not teleporting, but predicting them. Knowing them. Every strike, every combo, every angle—they were him. But he was more.
He dodged four attacks in less than a tenth of a second, backflipped through a flame wall, countered a kinetic pincer with a twin elbow strike, and used one clone's body as a platform to leap higher and redirect an overhead lightning finisher.
His battle IQ had soared to such impossible heights that it no longer mattered how many clones he summoned.
He was their origin.
He was their end.
Five minutes in, he'd eliminated fifteen. Ten minutes in, all twenty had been dropped.
And then he summoned twenty more.
Not to defeat them—this time, to train with them.
Because Kael knew this power wasn't going away.
And if he didn't learn to master it—perfectly—there wouldn't be a world left to save.
He stood still in the center, surrounded by versions of himself, as they bowed slightly in respect.
"Again," Kael said, sweatless, eyes focused.
"Until I'm perfect."