"Your quenching can suppress my flames."
Zhurong spoke with a strained calm in his voice.
"But you can hold them down for a while, not forever."
"Every time you shatter my fire, it gathers again. And each time it returns, it burns fiercer than before."
Iron Hammer grinned, showing a mouthful of white teeth. It was the pure excitement a blacksmith felt when he saw a fine piece of iron on his anvil.
"Then I'll hit it a few more times."
"I've hammered iron all my life. If there's one thing I don't fear, it's forging the same piece again and again."
Zhurong looked at Iron Hammer in the distance and said nothing more.
The fiery red patterns on his skin suddenly began flowing toward the center of his body.
Like a hundred rivers pouring into the sea, they converged at the center of his chest and formed a complete flame sigil.
The sigil took the shape of a Phoenix with its wings spread wide, its long tail feathers streaming like fire. Scorching fragments of law curled along the edges of its wings.
The instant the sigil formed, the lingering heat of every flame across the Arena flowed back toward him.
The scattered remnants of the fire dragons, the remains of the flaming dome, the ripples of heat suspended in the air.
Every ember of fire law poured into the Phoenix sigil on his chest like iron filings drawn to a magnet.
His power surged.
Once the Phoenix sigil had devoured every ember, it began releasing ring after ring of fire. With each wave of heat it sent out,
the fire law beneath his skin grew denser.
Blue-white fire flickered in his eyes.
"Fire God: Possession."
Zhurong became a streak of blue-white flame.
He vanished from where he stood, leaving