Wait

Duke let out a silent sigh of relief so profound it nearly deflated him. Antonidas, the Archmage himself, had agreed to step into the ring.

Gul'dan's sudden, unwelcome appearance had truly sent Duke's stress levels through the roof. It was like finding a venomous spider in your boot right before a dance-off.

Duke knew, with a chilling certainty, that Gul'dan, that sinister old snake, wouldn't lift a finger to truly help Orgrim Doomhammer unless it served his own twisted agenda. But here's the rub: there are some enemies in the world you have to deal with, full-throttle, even if you know they're just dabbling.

This wasn't just some run-of-the-mill warlock; this was the boss, the grand poobah of evil! This was raw, unadulterated power!

Duke looked at Gul'dan's arrogant, hunched figure, a silhouette of pure malice, and couldn't help but bite his lips fiercely. After this whole chaotic mess was over, he really had to buckle down and cultivate his own strength.

Personal power had to match the grand sweep of events. It was a cold, hard truth.

Duke knew very well that even if he were a full-blown Sunshine Mage, capable of conjuring rainbows and happy thoughts, he couldn't survive the siege of hundreds of thousands of bloodthirsty orcs. And he wasn't one yet, not by a long shot.

If you didn't have an Alliance to back you up, if you were outnumbered like a lone wolf in a kodo stampede, you'd likely be flattened, even if you had god-level strength. Strength in numbers, after all, was a thing.

In the "later ages," the ones Duke knew from history, Antonidas died here, and the Sun King Anasterian Sunstrider perished here too. A grim thought.

But today, fortunately, it wasn't Duke who had to go toe-to-toe with Gul'dan. He was off the hook, for now.

Antonidas, with a gentle, almost casual swipe of his staff in the air, began his magic. No one saw how the old Archmage chanted, no incantations, no dramatic gestures. Instead, mysterious runes simply formed a long, shimmering line in the air in front of everyone, like glowing calligraphy. Three seconds later, the line was stretched by some unseen, mysterious force and transformed into an elliptical aperture, a shimmering portal just large enough for one person to pass through.

On the other side of the aperture, the deserted Southshore gate was reflected, a ghostly image. That was the gate to the harbor and the town itself.

The orcs weren't fools; they knew that if they didn't kill the humans dug in on the two hills and rushed into the town rashly, they'd be signing their own death warrants. Under the furious scolding of the tribal commanders, all the orcs, like a green tide, rushed to the hills, their intended targets.

Conversely, in the midst of the fierce, chaotic battlefield, there was this strange, uninhabited open space, a calm eye in the storm.

The next moment, Antonidas appeared alone at the entrance of the town, stepping through the portal as if strolling into his own garden.

"Oh? I didn't expect that there would be a human mage who dared to accept the challenge?" Two hundred meters away on the churning sea, Gul'dan spoke in the common language of humans, his voice raspy, as if talking to himself. But he knew Antonidas would hear it. He always did.

"Haha, I also want to know what kind of strength the former demigod had," Antonidas retorted, his voice booming across the water, his tone dripping with a subtle, yet utterly devastating, insult. He was praising, yes, but with a knife hidden behind his back.

Gul'dan leaned on his staff, his knuckles white, and death waves made of dark power immediately spread downwards from the surface of the sea, rippling outwards. Under the seabed, countless murlocs, oblivious to the impending doom, a hundred meters away were immediately hit, their tiny lives snuffed out.

For a moment, the entire sea surface was surging, boiling, and a large amount of blood and body fragments were boiling and roaring like boiling water, a grotesque stew of murloc gore.

Gul'dan's face turned dark, a storm cloud of rage, and he replied coldly, his voice a venomous hiss: "I can kill you with half my strength, old man!"

"Come!" Antonidas waved, a dismissive flick of his wrist.

Without further ado, the two titans of magic unleashed their power. Their spells collided violently in mid-air, a cataclysmic clash of elemental and shadow energies.

At that moment, the entire Southshore, with the dock gate as its boundary, flashed with elemental glows of different colors, a dazzling, terrifying light show:

On this side close to the town, three-color elemental flame patterns of fire, frost, and arcane appeared densely, swirling and crackling.

With the pier as the boundary, the side close to the sea was flashing with layers of overlapping red flames and black shadow arrays, and it also carried a lot of mysterious and evil aura, a stench of corruption.

Two completely different scenes, two opposing forces, occupied the very center of the battlefield, completely enveloped the entire Southshore, and spread outwards in all directions, a magical maelstrom.

The next moment, the magic pouring out from the intricate magic circles around the two of them collided with each other, a deafening explosion of raw power.

The flames of destruction and the biting ice collided fiercely in mid-air. The raised ice chips and the aftermath of the flames formed terrible steam, a superheated shroud, roasting any creature that tried to approach.

The evil shadow arrows were blasted away by the fireballs, sizzling and dissipating, but not before dyeing the nearby grass black and instantly draining the life out of all the plants and animals they touched. The aftermath of the scattered flames was no less powerful, easily burning everything that could burn, turning the landscape into a charred wasteland.

The azure arcane light shone upon the cursed energies that were floating over mysteriously, shimmering like heat haze, rendering the warlock's most mysterious curse of pain utterly ineffective. It was like trying to punch a ghost.

The fight between these two men was more terrifying than the battle between ten mage regiments. It was a force multiplier beyond comprehension. The shock waves from the fierce battle easily swept across the entire town, rattling windows and shaking foundations.

Duke, who had identified Southshore as the main battlefield and wisely relocated the residents long ago, was still extremely shocked when he saw the fight between these two perverted strongmen, two titans of magic.

You know, this is not Gul'dan in his prime! Even now, Gul'dan still has to use more than half of his strength to maintain the operation of the Dark Portal, keeping that monstrous gateway open. In other words, Gul'dan only used less than a quarter of his power in his prime to fight Antonidas, one of the only two Sun Mages in the world of Azeroth. It was like a heavyweight boxer fighting with one arm tied behind his back.

At this moment, the entire Southshore, and even all the places between the two hills, seemed to have encountered a terrible natural disaster. It was a combination of a tornado and an earthquake, a localized apocalypse.

The brick and wood houses on both sides of the town's main road collapsed like dominoes, crumbling into dust. Huge trees were blown into the air by the powerful shock wave, ripped from the ground, but they were often bombarded by two or three magical forces before they even fell to the ground, reduced to splinters and ash.

Duke saw with his own eyes that the upper half of a tree was burned by fire, while the lower half was frozen solid, and finally it was shattered by the splash of shadow arrows. It was a magical trifecta of destruction.

Antonidas raised his staff, and the sea around Gul'dan suddenly intertwined with a blue magical glow. In less than half a second, nearly a hundred huge water elementals with inverted triangle-shaped upper bodies and two thick arms suddenly emerged from the sea, surging from the depths. Without saying a word, these water elementals fired more than a hundred icy arrows directly at Gul'dan in the center, a relentless barrage of frost.

Gul'dan also raised his hand, a sneer on his face, and dozens of equally huge dark blue inverted triangle-shaped "blue fat men" appeared beside him, shimmering into existence from the void. These strange demons from the void used their huge bodies as the best magic shields, absorbing the icy onslaught.

At the same time, near the town gate, a space channel connected to the void was opened, a swirling vortex of shadow, and a large number of demon hounds, slavering beasts targeting magic professions, rushed out from it and headed straight towards Antonidas, a pack of hungry wolves.

"Hmph!" Following a cold snort from the Speaker of Dalaran, a sound of pure disdain.

Countless ice cones appeared from the ground, erupting upwards, and pierced into the sky, a deadly forest of ice. The demon hounds, which should have been quite powerful against the mage, their natural predators, had no power to resist the physical damage caused by the elemental transformation. They were easily pierced from the bottom to the top of the abdomen like skewers, impaled on the icy spikes. Some of them had their heads chopped off by the ice and became corpses before they could even rise, dying mid-leap.

The magical energy erupting from them formed a terrifying pressure, a palpable force. This tangible pressure easily drew an invisible boundary on the battlefield, a line no mortal dared cross. Even if that place was not affected by magic, people with insufficient strength would not dare to cross the line, their courage failing them.

Seeing that Duke's arrangement had once again offset the Horde's offensive, balancing the scales, Lothar came over and said, "Duke, what are you waiting for? What's the holdup?"

"I am waiting for their trump card!" Duke replied, his eyes fixed on the magical maelstrom, a grim anticipation on his face. He knew there was more to come.