“You are equally brave and foolish to have come out here alone.”

Icy said, sitting casually atop a throne of white ice as Lily with her glowing red body dared step foot into her domain. Worse yet, Lily tried pushing outward with her own influence on the Wave, hoping to press back against her ice with her flames.

What futile efforts. Icy watched with amusement as the lower ranked Boarded member expanded the Wave outwards as the mark over her right eye started to glow white, indicating the activation of her Perfect Synchrony.

“Fire Mecha!” Lily shouted, landing squarely in the middle of the realm of ice as the rebellious fire element Manifester looked up at the throne and its slopes in all of its glory. Underneath its feet, the interface between ice and fire steamed up, creating trails of smoke that followed her every step.

“Oh~” Icy slightly raised her eyebrows as Lily propelled her gigantic flaming body upward towards her. Then, she casually dragged her finger through the air, conjuring massive ice spikes that grew from the base of her throne as it clashed into Lily’s Fire Mecha.

The columns bounced off its body, the ice melting and turning instantly to sizzling steam as Lily stayed her course, getting close enough before suddenly detonating a ball of flames right in front of Icy.

“When you come for the queen…” Icy said, leaning forward as walls of ice formed in all four directions aounrd Lily, trapping her inside, “You best come prepared to die. Nilfelheim Devastation!”

Locked within the cube of ice, Lily tried breaking through the thick walls initially, but the stubborn ice repelled the attacks of the Fire Mecha with utter ease. Trying to get out over the top of it, Icy then slammed a massive iceberg from the top down, nearly chipping off Lily’s head in the process.

Then, a whirlwind started forming in the middle of the ice prison, the harsh rapids of air ripping away strands of flames from the Fire Mecha’s body one piece at a time as she felt the weakening of the flames all around her.

“No! I must…hold on for longer! Buy…buy her more time!” Lily growled, instead rapidly pulling in the flames of her Fire Mecha, concentrating all of that power around her body until her head felt like it was about to explode. She looked down at the turnado of ice and hale that’s surging towards her from all around, and she focused forward, concentrating all of her energy into a single beam.

Just like how Wu concentrated his Void Domain into a laser…that’s what Lily will do. No…that’s what she must do.

Manifesters pride themselves in the sheer amount of Wave that they are able to access, and that coincidentally placed a huge load on their ability to control their power output during battle. That was particularly true for someone with powerful Manifestations like the elements of fire or ice, or something like the Kraken.

For Lily, she was able to achieve her perfect synchrony by simply letting go of all of her restrictions and allowing her powers to flow out freely. That completely removed the requirement to suppress, control, and focus her power, leading to the Fire Mecha as a natural extension of her power as she viewed it.

However, against someone who had not only access to Perfect Synchrony itself and knew her Manifest like the back of her hand, that was not enough. Icy had finetuned her Ice Manifest to such an extend where she would be able to use the full extend of her Wave abilities AND direct it in such precise manners to create something like…like a throne to sit on.

Lily have to be honest. For a time, she was complacent. Even within the same Infinite Academy, those at the top and those at the ground level live vastly different lifestyles, and she enjoyed being the big fish in the small pond.

Then, the cursed Wu, and his wack squad of weirdos showed up, and everything in her life changed.

Fatera offered her defeat at the second most important tournament in the Infinite Academy, and then, on the island, Wu managed to scrambled his squad together and defeat her own squad on the last day of training. Seeing the drives of Wu, Lera, Augen, Fatera, and Ver to get stronger also sparked something within her.

A fire that had been extenguished for a little while, now burning more furiously than ever.

True strength is not about how flashy you can look, but about how you can utilize every single ounce of strength you have in the effective manner. For too long, she had simply let her power gone wild, treating it as if reaching the state of Perfect Synchrony meant the end of her journey when, in fact, that was only the beginning.

“Here goes nothing.” Lily murmured, enduring the physical from the pain that reminded her of the first days of manifesting her fire. Concentrating everything together, then compressing it further and further like an oven. She held on until she could no longer, then, unleashed it all forward.

A massive glowing blue beam tore through the ice walls created by Icy and chipped off a corner of her throne as she stood up with shock. Then, through the hole melted, Lily surged forward, her body now a figure of pure blue flames with her mark of manifestation glowing white within.

“So you weren’t as weak as I thought you are.” Icy floated forward, her hands by the side as flakes of snow whirled around her hand, “Perhaps I should end you before you become more troublesome.”

“You can try, but you will never put out this fire.” Lily said, her lungs burning with every word. Then, she clapped her hands together, shooting forward her red concentrated beam of fire as it ripped through the foundations of the throne and sliced up towards Icy’s body, “Perfect Synchrony: Volcanic Eruption!”

“Perfect Synchrony: Absolute Zero.” Icy responded, her own Mark of Manifestation pulsating with white as the mark that looked like a branching snowflake created its own concentrated beam of ice that shot out from her eye, clashing onto the blue beams of flames created by Lily.

“Tsk!” Lily growled, pressuring her interiors as everything in her body started to strain, “You will not win! I am the leader of my squad, and I will make sure of it!”

“At the end of time…” Icy continued pressing forward, her literal cold gaze looking down at Lily as she continued, “The fires within the suns will have been burnt out, and all that remained in this universe would be an endless cold.”

An explosion rocked the forest and blew back Principal Khan’s yellow haze before Icy’s beam penetrated further into Lily’s own attack, deflecting her flames to the side with every inch of her advance.

“My victory was written in the fate of the universe itself, and your defeat was evident from the very first moment.” Icy said, pushing more and more of her power into her right eye until it started to go blind. Through the flashes of white, she saw the ghostly outlines of those that she promised will save, and those that she promised will change the world for.

She cannot afford to lose here. Not like this, not right now. She cannot afford to look weak, when her goals of dismantling the Valkyrie system of her home kingdom and reforming its culture were still so far away.

“I will not lose! For all of them!” Icy growled, her pupils now burning with an obnoxious sting, but she pressed straight through as Lily’s body was thrown into the ground by the impact of her attack. This pain was nothing compared to what the girls had gone through in their processes to become Valkyries.

This pain was nothing compared to what her little sister went through.

“I am sorry, but you are not the only one fighting for someone else.” Ver’s voice suddenly came from behind Icy, and she rapidly turned around as Ver, her body now coated in the thickened oil and shell of the Kraken which replaced her skin charged forward at Icy with the Sky Splitting Sword in her claws.

“You!” Icy smiled even as the figures of Ver became blurry to her, “You…coward hiding while your comrades fought in your place.”

“No.” Ver shook her head, reaching her hands out before pulling out Lily’s body from a whirlpool that formed directly from an extension over her finger, “She bought time for me, because she trusted that I will push past my limits here, just like she did.”

“Yeah? And what makes you think you have a chance against me?” Icy turned, reconcentrating her power before firing again, “Perfect Synchrony: Absolute Zero!”

The blast shot straight through Ver’s chest, and her expressions became frozen before her body splattered in a splash of ink.

“Wha-” Icy blinked as Ver’s body completely disintegrated in front of her very eyes. Then, a cold hard metallic tip pierced from her back, sliding in between her vitals as her entire body tensed up in an instant.

“Perfect Synchrony: Kraken’s Cowardice.” Ver’s voice came from behind Icy’s body, then the image of the forests in the background started shifting like fluids before the outlines of Ver’s body appeared, “For too long, this move was used to run away, but that will no longer be the case, for we, have a our dreams to fight for too.”

“You…you…” Icy winced in pain as Ver slowly removed the blade from her body. The domain of ice rapidly melting away now that she had concentrated her powers inward to start the healing. Ver watched her seal up the wound before wacking Icy in the jaw with the flat side of the blade, knocking her out.

With the ice elemental Manifester out of commission, the effects of her previous attacks on Lily also started to gradually fade away, but from the looks of it, she would be sleeping for quite a bit longer.

Sitting back down with grave difficulty, Ver exited herself from the perfect synchrony as the scales all over her body started retreating back into her squidly Mark of Manifestation over her right eye, though the thick fluids remained over her arms and legs.

“Hey, are you going to clean that up or what?” Ver asked, but the Kraken chose to ignore her, knowing full well that he was obviously the one guilty for his own secretions.

“Ver! Ver!” Wu and Lera’s voice came from the side as they flew through the vast barren lands with Fatera alongside them, “Are you okay?”

“Yeah…” Ver nodded, shaking her fingers free of the fluids before recalling all ten of Lily’s squads, “It’s...over.”

After dividing the strongest squad, Wu and Lily’s squad also conquered them. Matty, Braka, and Yuna defeated Bez Aro, the demon manifester from the Voidlands. Shin and Augen defeated Ilia Fals, the faux Dominance of the Dragon user from Necrovia. Wu and Lera defeated Dolly Hawk, the glass cannon Caster from Yarka Kingdom. Fatera defeated Ajax Hawk, the Dominance of the Eagle User from Yarka Kingdom, and Ver and Lily defeated the Ice elemental Manifester, Icy Hale.

To those squads remaining in the strongholds, all they would have known were that the strongest squad were taken away, but as the dark veil dropped down from the exterior of their strongholds, they now faced a world when all five of the strongest squad were taken out of commission. However, they played their roles of buying time perfectly, just like the strongest squad unknowingly did too.

Now with the preparation ready, John King, the leader of the Union and number one on the Boarded, and Mus Ongaku, the Grand Commander of PORA, are ready to move.