Firestar

Firestar is the second round of The Battle Majestic.

Description
The contestants are deposited on the beach of an island dominated by a large volcano. They are told that there are natives present on the island, and that their shamans were told that seven devils would come to the island to end the world. They were also told of a temple that the natives' current level of technology would be incapable of producing, and informed that the volcano is due to erupt within six months.

Events
The contestants scatter in different directions after Vexmagog gets upset on the beach about the untimeliness of the end of the previous round. Blitz and Sen stay nearby, while Wolf and Jacob both retreat to different locations at a safe distance where they can still watch the proceedings. John leaves and begins to climb the volcano, while Steven flees into the jungle and is quickly captured by native women and taken to the temple for interrogation. Each pursues their own objectives which mostly converge at the end of the round.

Magog's influence leads Vexmagog to decide that killing Sen early to end the round and prompt an arena change is the best course of action. They engage in a brief skirmish while Blitz, conflicted over the loss of his father's voice in his head, urges Vexmagog to stop fighting. He is largely unsuccessful, but the fighting soon stops regardless thanks to the arrival of a party of female natives wielding spears.

Sen flees the fight and the group of natives splits in two, one group pursuing Sen and the other approaching Vex and Blitz on the beach. Sen coincidentally runs towards Jacob, who attempts to ride the beast away from the pursuing women. They manage to lose the women temporarily, and, after a minute's contemplation, Jacob decides to try and kill Sen himself.

They begin a long battle throughout the jungle, Jacob exploiting his abilities while Sen uses the environment as a weapon. Jacob manages to cut off several of Sen's toes, who then retreats into a root cavern and forges new ones out of wood.

John encounters them both, as do another party of natives. Sen adapts to Jacob's sword by developing a thicker bark-like armor and re-emerges, and all present parties become engaged in a skirmish. Jacob and John retreat up the mountainside while Sen battles the natives and plants another world tree seed. They discover an unnatural cavern in the side of the mountain and enter to investigate, at which point John manipulates some sort of magma idol, angering the local volcano goddess. She appears and berates them, then seals them inside the cavern to deal with another issue.

Sen, meanwhile, attempts to draw attention away from the growing world tree by befriending the locals. She finds an injured girl in the jungle and carries her back to the temple.

The other half of the native group approached Vexmagog and Blitz on the beach. Vexmagog used illusions and pre-existing knowledge to fabricate a tale concerning himself as one of the gods of the island and the other contestants as innocent victims of body-stealing shadow devils. The women mostly accept this story, except for one woman named Nalu, and led he and Blitz back to their temple. Wolf, having heard the exchange and disagreeing with Vexmagog's decision to lie to the natives, followed stealthily to keep an ear on the situation.

There, they find that Steven has already been captured. Vex digs himself a little deeper by putting on a big illusory show for the shaman, but does not realize that Nalu was watching while hidden. Since he wasn't aware of her, she didn't see the illusions, and knew that he was tricking the whole village. However, she was slated as a virgin sacrifice, and waited for an opportunity to use this knowledge in a way she hoped would bring down the whole religious institution and save her life.

The shaman decided to throw a feast in celebration of the return of the "god", while Vexmagog looked for an opportunity for privacy with one of the native women he had been seducing. He finally got an opportunity after filling Steven in on the web of lies and dealing with some accidental destruction caused by Steven's gloves. Meanwhile, Nalu convinced the shaman to allow her to take some of the hallucinogenic fungus in order to test Vexmagog.

Meanwhile, Wolf was given a dose of another drug by one of the women at the feast, which leads him to communicate with a being called Iris. She tells Wolf that the ritual he underwent before being stolen for the battle was intended to return her to life, as she was a sage of considerable power who was worshiped as a deity. She told Wolf that he holds her heart in his chest, and he must physically die for her to complete her rebirth.

Nalu succeeded in slipping the drug to Vex in a private bedchamber with the other woman. He quickly began to have vivid hallucinations, where he was discovered by the god of dreams from his world. His dream self was escorted back to his homeworld.

There, the dream god separated Magog's consciousness from Vex's, stating that he could not separate them permanently, but would not guide the two back together. Vex visited a few of the other gods of his world and caught up on recent events, most importantly that his son (who none of them like) found a method to take the unclaimed station of god of Chaos, using a method that Vex could employ if he were to return in the flesh. They agreed to try and assist him in escaping in the future, but urged him to try to win the contest in case they were unable to aid him.

Vex returned to the dream god, who took him through the local goddess's realm, causing the distraction that made her lock Jacob and John in the lava cavern earlier. Vex managed to trick her and return to his body, waking up with Magog absent from his arm.

The goddess, angry at being tricked and now armed with the knowledge that the death of a single contestant means they all get off the island, causes the volcano to erupt. Jacob and John are still locked inside the chamber inside the volcano, and John's ice splints from the previous round melt enough to cause them to break. Jacob uses his powers to tunnel out of the room and attempts to help John escape as well, but John succumbs to the heat, fails to escape in a timely enough manner, and remains in the cavern as the intense heat causes the rock under him to explode. A stone breaks his back and he dies.