The battle between the two elders and the wild beasts of Viscount rank continued to ravage the city, already reduced to ruins, blood, and corpses.
By a stroke of luck, the lightning boar had struck the silver wolf with one of its plasma balls, slowing its movents.
Taking advantage of this opening, Colson and Milson decided to focus entirely on the wolf wounded, ignoring the enormous boar. They knew that if they took down the alpha, the rest would lose cohesion.
Their movents were fast, precise, and almost choreographed. They didn’t need words. Despite having been rivals for years, they knew each other too well. They fought as if they were one.
Milson circled the wolf with agility, like a fish in calm waters, making clean cuts all over its body. His sword traced red lines with every step, while the constant pounding of the rain mixed with the growls and howls, forming a macabre lody.
Colson attacked the wolf’s joints with brutal force, seeking to break its mobility. At the sa ti, he effortlessly intercepted and killed the common wolves that tried to protect their leader.
From behind his wooden helt, blood continued to run down his face, a reminder of the impact that had thrown him against a ruined house minutes earlier. It didn’t matter. His eyes remained focused, his spear steady, his will unbroken.
The rain didn’t let up. The gray sky seed to cry along with the destroyed city. What had once been a place full of life, movent, and celebration for the spring tournant was now nothing more than a pile of rubble, corpses, and pools of blood.
Not long after the battle began, the silver wolf of Viscount rank collapsed with a loud thud onto the cobblestone ground, tearing up part of the ground as he fell. His thick blood mixed with that of the fallen, soaking the cracks in the field like black ink on a war book.
Colson and Milson could barely stand. Their breath ca in gasps, each inhalation a torture for their battered ribs. Defeating that beast had drained them of more energy than they had allowed themselves to expend in combat.
"Still... one more to go," Milson muttered, digging his water sword into the ground as if he needed an anchor to keep from collapsing.
"Let’s get this over with. I’m running out of strength," Colson growled, struggling to his feet. He took a step forward, dragging his leg as if he were carrying a mountain on his shoulders.
Milson followed close behind, cracking his bloody knuckles. Despite his exhaustion, a smile spread across his cracked lips. This was his last battle... and he couldn’t have asked for a more dignified end.
Because if they were going down, they would go down with their blood burning and their teeth bared. Not as martyrs. As warriors.
...
After a long and brutal fight, Lydia looked at the face of the woman with the scythe, now dying, lying in pools of blood. Her breathing was weak and ragged. There was no strength left in her body, just a shadow of what she once was.
Lydia said nothing at first. Her gaze, cold and sharp, descended like a knife on the murderer. She knew what she had seen. She knew what it ant.
The infiltrators had reached the heart of the domain.
Before moving on to the elders, she needed answers.
"How did you know about our movents?" Lydia asked, her voice controlled and firm, blood still trickling down her cheek. Her eyes showed no emotion, only determination.
The woman with the scythe coughed violently, spitting out a mouthful of dark blood. Her chest rose and fell with effort, and her gaze, increasingly clouded, tried to focus on her.
"It’s..."
She never finished the sentence.
Without warning, a golden fire erged from her eyes, her mouth, her ears... from every orifice of her body. It burned with sacred violence, like an irrevocable sentence. Her flesh evaporated in seconds, her soul was devoured by the fla, and all that remained was a mountain of ashes, silent, smoldering... and without any truth.
"So you were under a pact... in the na of the Old Sun God," Lydia murmured, without real surprise, just a hint of irony in her voice.
From the beginning, she had expected nothing from this woman. Her betrayal did not surprise her. But what did catch her attention was the activation of the pact: an oath to a god was not easily broken.
That could only an one thing. The woman with the scythe was going to talk. She was going to reveal that she was the mastermind behind the fall of the dici Clan.
Lydia frowned.
Poor deluded woman.
If only she knew that the real mastermind was not her... but the one she calls her young master.
How would you react if you knew that everything that had happened—the betrayal, the massacre, the downfall of one of the oldest families—was nothing more than Kael?
Tap. Tap. Tap.
The sound of footsteps made her spin around instantly, her trained body responding despite her extre exhaustion. She assud a combat stance, panting, her aura trembling around her. She was exhausted, yes. But she would fight to the end. Until her body stopped moving or her soul was torn from her.
But it wasn’t an enemy who appeared.
It was a young man.
He had brown hair, was thin, and covered in blood from head to toe. Pieces of human flesh hung from his clothes like sticky parasites, and his face... his face was empty. No anger, no emotion. Nothing.
Eren.
Lydia exhaled, relieved for a mont to see that it wasn’t an enemy. However, she didn’t make the mistake of letting her guard down completely. In tis like these, even a familiar face could hide treachery.
"Have you found any trace of the young master?" she asked in a firm voice, while in the distance the echoes of battle continued to roar like an endless storm. "Since everything broke out, I haven’t seen him."
Eren shook his head silently. Sweat and blood ran down his forehead as he wiped his face with the torn sleeve of his uniform.
"No," he said finally, his voice hollow. "I’ve crossed paths with several... but they all tried to kill on sight."
He didn’t explain further. He didn’t need to.
His clothes were torn, his right arm was bleeding, and his gaze, once inexperienced, now had a gleam in it. If it weren’t for the little training he had received... and the experience he had gained in the dungeon, his body would already be rotting in so forgotten corner.
He wasn’t a warrior. Not yet. But he had survived.
And that, amid chaos, was more than many could say.
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