Alea Triscan
"For all Dicathians!"
The cheer echoed across the field of blood-soaked rose petals that was once Mana Square, grounding me as I took heavy, laboured breaths to regain my strength.
With the immediate vanguard utterly destroyed, the terrified civilians were finally being guided toward the massive, pristine gateway in the centre of the plaza so they could escape this nightmare.
Olfred moved through the wreckage, his sturdy dwarven frame aiding exhausted soldiers back onto their feet and helping them organise with their surviving squad leaders.
The heavy rhythm of a hundred approaching footsteps then caught my attention. Turning my head—my senses still sluggish from the sheer volume of mana I had just expended—I saw Elder Virion himself.
The King Emeritus was leading a heterogeneous group of mages, Adventurers, and armed non-combatants into Mana Square, exactly as His Highness had planned.
"What in the world happened here?" the ancient elf asked, his eyes scanning the impossible sea of fuchsia flowers. But before anyone could answer, he waved a dismissive hand, tossing the topic aside as he turned back to his battered reinforcements. "Join the evacuation efforts! With the Alacryans cleared from Mana Square, we can finally organise a proper counterattack."
Observing the King Emeritus in his true element—the bloodied battlefield—was something genuinely awe-inspiring.
The legendary hero of Elenoir moved from group to group, naturally adopting the mantle of leadership over our desperate, fractured army. He barked a few rapid orders, then snapped his fingers, catching Olfred's attention and gesturing for both of us to approach.
"This is Virion Eralith," the King Emeritus announced into his nautilus-shaped Shell-Radio, though only after tinkering with the small dials for a few seconds too long. "I am alongside Lance Alea Triscan and Lance Olfred Warend. Mana Square is fully secured for the time being."
A few tense moments of static hissed before a reply broke through.
"The Earth Ward is in desperate need of reinforcements, ehm... Lord Eralith," Gideon Bastius reported over the channel. "There are still far too many of those bastards, their mages, and those damned pachyderms roaming the city."
"Be much more precise, Bastius," Elder Virion sighed heavily, the seasoned commander taking over. "I need exact positions of our weakest flanks and a headcount of who is nearby so I can allocate the correct amount of troops."
"You really like correcting people, huh?" the prideful Sapinese artificer retorted through the static. "Reminds me of a certain someone..."
"I have no time for your antics, Bastius!" Elder Virion roared into the shell. "Patch me through to the other commanders!"
"Sur—"
We didn't hear whatever Gideon Bastius was about to say next. A deafening, horrific tearing sound—like the very fabric of reality being violently ripped in two—echoed across the skies above the floating island.
Everywhere, in a massive, suffocating circle around us, dozens upon dozens of new, shimmering Tempus Warps lit up the smoke-filled sky. It was as if the Alacryans hadn't already poured enough of their monstrous manpower onto Xyrus City.
I saw even the hardened Virion Eralith visibly pale at the sight. The soldiers rallying in Mana Square, whose morale had just miraculously soared from our hard-fought victory and the arrival of reinforcements, instantly sank back into the darkest depths of despair.
Everyone's wide, terrified eyes stared upward, waiting with utter dread for whatever new wave of horrors was about to descend upon us.
But nothing came.
The oval-shaped invasion portals shimmered aggressively, their spatial magic violently churning, but no Lavatic Pachyderms emerged. No Alacryan soldiers stepped through.
And then, it happened.
An inexplicable, comforting vision suddenly flashed across my mind: the warm memory of my mother carefully patching back the torn fabrics of my childhood clothes.
High above us, the glowing spatial tears in reality were suddenly being aggressively embroidered shut by unseen hands. They were being forcefully denied access to Xyrus City.
The portals violently collapsed inward, sparking out of existence in a cascade of harmless blue light.
His Highness had actually done it. He had managed to execute whatever miracle he had been planning.
"Let us not waste this opportunity!" Elder Virion shouted, his booming voice instantly breaking the stunned silence. He drew his weapon, his fierce eyes burning with renewed, lethal determination. "Push them back! Reinforce the rest of the city!"
A tainted darkness surged into the distance, its ominous presence unmistakable even from afar. A new battle was unfolding at the edges of Xyrus City, the clashes of combatants' magic so immense that they dwarfed anything Dicathen had ever witnessed.
I immediately recognized one of the mana signatures:
"Cylrit..."
Cylrit Vritra
The Adaptarmour's cloak billowed behind me, its dark, tattered lengths fanning out like hundreds of overlapping scales as I stepped before her.
At my command, Fatima's Lifework shifted into a full suit of hard-plated armour, each individual plate gleaming like a tile of polished obsidian.
The mantle remained draped over my shoulders, its ragged edges fluttering in the wind like the torn banners of a continent I had forsaken, of a god I never considered mine.
"Seris," for her part, looked at me emotionless, something that didn't surprise me as my master had always been the kind of person to hide her every feelings way too well, but this person was different.
Same pearl-coloured, long hair falling like curtains, reflecting the sun like quartz and reaching to her lower back; same onyx eyes, same spiraling horns and even the same style of dressing as my master.
She wore her signature turtleneck battledress, an elegant fusion of tightly fitted scale armour and flowing silks that hugged her figure before cascading into regal folds. Every inch of it seemed crafted for war, lending her the imposing splendour of a goddess descending upon the battlefield.
And yet she felt so horribly wrong, a sensation I didn't know how to name.
Dozens of bodies of slain mages belonging to Highblood Frost and the Farrago of Fiachra lay behind me, and the grip on my sword tightened.
"Cylrit," the thing wearing Seris's face greeted me, her voice chillingly familiar yet entirely devoid of its old warmth. "It is about time you showed yourself. Good. Return to Alacrya with me. The High Sovereign is magnanimous, and since you have survived years in the Relictombs, in his infinite wisdom he shall find a reason to forgive you. Eventually, your former position could even be restored."
Her words left me momentarily speechless, and for a fraction of a second, I dared to hope. I dared to hope that a fractured piece of the true Seris still lived deep within her; a part that genuinely recognised me as the Retainer she had personally chosen decades ago.
But looking into her cold eyes, I saw only empty, calculated scheming.
She merely desired to see what would happen (and how greatly she would be rewarded) if she dragged her former, renegade Retainer back to her High Sovereign alive and well. Disgusting.
I focused my will upon Pitchaverrer, one of my two Regalias, and the air itself began to rot and wither around my outstretched hand.
Decay mana surged at my command, boiling into existence in a thick torrent of tar-black magic. Its viscous mass violently twisted and hardened, quickly taking the lethal shape of a broad longsword. The weapon coalesced with a terrible, unnatural weight.
Its jet-black edge actively swallowed the ambient light around it, the very photons withering in its corrupting presence.
"Your words betray the true corruption that has overcome the woman I once proudly called my master," I declared, feeling the oppressive tension of the mana between us rising a hundredfold. "I will kill you here, and finally put the memory of my master to the respected rest she deserves."
The husk formed a cruel, twisted smirk.
"How unfortunate, Cylrit," she purred. "This city is where I will finally wash away the lingering taint of my past betrayal. I will cleanse it in front of the eyes of the High Sovereign with the spilled blood of these Dicathians. You could have been a part of this glorious purge, and yet you still foolishly cling to ideals contrary to Lord Agrona's absolute will."
"The ideals you now call foolish were once yours, Seris," I said, my stance dropping low, ready for the brutal fight to commence at any second. "But even then, you are not Seris anymore. She died long ago, and now only a brainwashed husk remains. By putting an end to you, I will serve my master one last time."
The false Seris didn't say another word. With the door to pleasing her Sovereigns by returning a live traitor now firmly shut, only the bloody execution of said traitor would satisfy her maddening desire to serve the Vritra.
From beneath her right sleeve, inky black tendrils of decay magic violently slithered into existence.
They coiled tightly around one another to form a serpentine, sickening fusion of sword and whip: a rigid hilt from which lashed a nest of writhing, blood-hungry tendrils.
I mirrored her aggressive stance with my own conjured longsword, and I aggressively imbued Rotbolt (the decay equivalent of lightning magic) into my blade through my Nullbash authority.
Arcs of jagged black electricity danced across the edge like dark corollas of destructive energy.
In the exact same instant, both of us attacked. Even with my combat reflexes honed to razor sharpness by years of fighting for my life in the Relictombs, I was barely able to register the corrupted Scythe's movements.
Like the cruel hand of an even crueller master, her spiked leashes lashed out at my throat. But I was there to meet them, my crackling blade cleanly slashing through each incoming tendril before it could taste my flesh.
The serpentine leashes of the false Seris's whip retreated back to the rigid hilt in her hand as the Scythe prepared her next strike.
I leaned down, lowering my centre of gravity, and sprinted forward to close the distance before she could unleash them again.
This husk fought exactly like my true master had, that was something I could use against her. At a distance, her whip would completely overwhelm me. Not that I was guaranteed to fare much better up close.
I slashed my conjured longsword in a brutal arc aimed at her throat, but the fake evaded the strike with preternatural speed, fluidly dancing around my heavy blade as if it were entirely weightless.
My eyes darted right, and I struck out viciously with my elbow, Nullbash making jagged black arcs of Rotbolt flare violently from my joint.
The form of my master materialised at my right side, her previous position nothing more than a supersonic afterimage left behind to mask a lethal flank.
My electrified elbow connected dead-on with the hilt of her weapon.
Our opposing magics violently clashed in a devastating explosion of rival decay mana: a shrieking, pitch-black storm that instantly erased the cobblestone road beneath our feet and fractured the stone faces of the surrounding buildings.
The sheer force of our clash sent me flying backward, a dark silhouette streaking through the sky as the false Seris's mana still blazed across the Adaptarmour covering my body.
Dark tongues of vile Soulfire tried to devour my flesh, clinging to my body like the jaws of some ancient beast, but the cold, black flames found no sustenance on the plates of Fatima's Lifework.
Even her Soulfire feels exactly the same, I grimly realised, time seeming to freeze as I locked onto the cold, empty eyes of the imposter from my airborne position.
"You are a prime product of Sovereign Kiros himself, Cylrit," the husk of Seris said, her voice carrying a sickening hint of admiration. "And yet you struggle against the grand design of Almighty Vritra, futilely swinging your sword and heretically using your magic for the sake of this land of lessers."
The tattered mantle of my Adaptarmour flapped violently as the shockwave of a distant explosion sent a powerful gust of wind tearing through the street.
"I am a product of my true master's vision," I spat back. "Gone is the Cylrit who was just yet another experiment of Kiros Vritra; I am a product of her teachings and of my own dream."
The next time I blinked, the Scythe's whip was already soaring through the sky, its two serpentine leashes violently slicing through the air to close in on my flanks.
I rapidly shifted the flat of my broadsword to block both incoming strikes, violently twisting my body mid-air as fast as physics permitted.
With Nullbash flaring across my lower back, I ruthlessly punched one of the leashes—which looked increasingly like a gigantic serpent of pure decay.
Rotbolt instantly exploded in a devastating shockwave of black sparks around my gauntleted fist, repelling the strike.
Using the momentum, I dove hard toward the imposter's position, strictly focused on never letting her gain distance over me again. I cratered the street as I landed, the sheer force of my impact fracturing the brick facades of the surrounding buildings.
Absolute destruction surrounded me as the false Seris seamlessly reappeared from the thick smoke kicked up by my landing. Her expression remained completely unaltered. The lethal leashes of her whip slithered across the ground like living things, actively corroding the exposed soil beneath the pulverised cobblestones.
"No matter how much you refuse it, Cylrit," she said flatly. "You remain a child of Vritra. Ultimately, you will always belong to him, just as all Vritra Bloods and Alacryans belong to the Father of Mankind."
I clenched my teeth until I felt the enamel crack at the sheer blasphemy this puppet was forcing my master's mouth to pronounce. Seris's greatest ambition had always been to give the Vritra Bloods a second chance; a path other than becoming mindless thralls of Agrona and his tyrannical clan.
Throughout the decades, she had constantly reached out to them, trying to save them before—or even after—they fully awakened the cursed Asuran blood coursing through their veins.
This husk was openly mocking every single year of my master's life's work.
"Vritra, Vritra, Vritra," I repeated coldly, tilting my head to the side in an open, lethal challenge. "You truly have absolutely nothing left of Seris inside you if he is the only thing you can talk about."
I launched myself at her throat once more.
My conjured longsword fractured before I could even reach her neck, my decay magic pulverised by the sheer, crushing density of "Seris's" own. But I did not relent.
Between the fingers of my left hand, I immediately conjured another longsword with Pitchaverrer, the weapon withering into reality directly from my mana reserves.
I struck at the imposter again, following up my slash with a brutal punch wreathed in crackling arcs of Rotbolt. The air trembled.
"Seris" raised her arms to defend herself, momentarily pushed onto the defensive by my relentless onslaught.
My master's imposter raised her whip. The two leashes violently coiled together, snapping into a rigid, corkscrew-like blade forged from intertwined twin serpents.
Our weapons violently collided, launching black chips of decay mana into the air like hardened tar. "Seris" slashed with all the terrifying elegance and rapidity of my true master, while I answered with the raw power and technique that had been drilled into my skull since I first formed memories.
But Seris had not been considered the strongest
Scythe—second only to Cadell Vritra, the High Sovereign's personally designed living weapon—for nothing.
The Scythe of Sehz-Clar was fundamentally different from all the other personal enforcers of Agrona Vritra.
I attempted a rapid, low strike with my longsword, directing the blade at the imposter's lower abdomen.
The Scythe twisted her arm in an anatomically impossible way, bringing the twin serpents of her blade down to perfectly block my attack.
The resulting shockwave unleashed devastating ripples of decay mana into the surrounding atmosphere.
Much like Melzri Vritra, Seris had always known how to employ every single inch of her body as a lethal weapon, pushing her own anatomy to the absolute extreme.
"Seris" immediately launched her counterattack.
I barely managed to raise my armoured arm in time to block one of the serpents from biting at my neck—the rigid sword transforming fluidly back into a whip in a fraction of an instant.
The plates of the Adaptarmour groaned, but held firm against the crushing pressure of my former master's magic.
Hundreds of motes of purple-black Soulfire—the result of fusing the decay deviant of fire magic with pure fire mana itself—ignited around the husk. It was the full, terrifying power of one of the mysterious Regalias she had kept secret even from me for decades.
I have to match her mana output! I screamed in my head, instantly realising the imposter's plan.
I abandoned my conjured longsword and went fully on the defensive with Nullbash. It was a Regalia that hadn't been born as a Shield rune, but Retainers and Scythes possessed the distinct advantage of having been granted access to the Obsidian Vault, effectively eliminating the rigid limits of the Alacryan magic system.
A static, crackling field of black lightning surrounded my body. A myriad of Rotbolt arcs violently lashed out, perfectly matching the blistering motes of Soulfire summoned by the imposter.
But much like Scythe Cadell, my master had always been an unstoppable, overwhelming force; an opponent where, once met in open battle, the only thing you could genuinely hope for was a swift end.
"Seris" wrapped her whip around her waist, the serpentine leashes coiling tightly around her battledress to act as a secondary set of armour.
She then passed an elegant, pale hand across the floating motes of purple-black Soulfire, her sharp nails lightly grazing the deadly specks of Vritra magic.
A simple yet devastating bastard sword materialised in her right hand, radiating pure, concentrated purple energy. And exactly as the brute Scythe Dragoth would have done, the imposter went completely on the offensive.
I swung my conjured blade left and right in a desperate attempt to parry the incoming flurry of attacks: left, right, up, and down. I was continuously, violently forced backward until I found my spine slammed against one of the few surviving brick walls in this sector of Xyrus City.
And the very second my back hit the wall—"Seris" drove a Soulfire-wreathed punch straight into my stomach.
The sheer kinetic force sent me plummeting backward through dozens of ruined walls and half-standing homes.
I finally crashed down onto the scattered, dead bodies of the Alacryan soldiers I had killed earlier, lying breathless and broken, metres away from the unfeeling monster wearing my master's face.
"Cylrit."
I snapped my head rapidly to the right, where a large porcupine with spikes like jagged stalagmites crouched in the rubble.
"Take this," the porcupine said, dropping a Dicathian storage ring onto the cracked stones before immediately speeding away.
It took me a fraction of a second to realise it was Lord Evascir in an animal disguise.
My eyes darted back to "Seris." A dense, suffocating point of darkness was already coalescing at her fingertips as she readied her next strike.
I rolled hard to the side just before the attack was unleashed, scooping the storage ring into my palm. I instantly fed my mana into the band to retrieve whatever the Titan had left inside.
The sphere of pure darkness, however, curved mid-air to track my roll. But this time, I was ready.
I channelled Pitchaverrer directly into the weapon Evascir had given me: an elegant, rectangular hilt without a crossguard, possessing a single, dark gem set deep into its core.
The gem—a flawless cube of onyx—shimmered violently as it absorbed my decay magic. A brilliant, terrifying blade made of the absolute purest decay I had ever manifested through Pitchaverrer erupted from the hilt.
I swung. The blade clashed directly with "Seris's" tracking sphere, and this time, it was my decay magic that ruthlessly overwhelmed and shattered hers.
"Don't you see the irony of it all?" the imposter asked, her voice mocking. "You defy the absolute will of the Sovereigns, and yet it is their magic you rely upon. The purer it is, the closer to them you become, and the stronger you are."
"Power is power," I stated coldly, repeating the exact words my true master had once taught me. "It does not matter where it originates from, only how it is wielded. To refuse it simply because of its source—no matter how vile, no matter how much we hate it—is either supreme stupidity or fatal naivety."
The black blade in my hand hummed with a terrifying resonance of destruction and total collapse, the Pitchaverrer Regalia flaring across my spine brighter than it ever had in my entire life.
Titan's craftsmanship, I murmured in my head with grim reverence, tightening my grip on the onyx hilt as I rushed at "Seris" for the umpteenth time in this brutal duel.
—
The brutal fight dragged on for what felt like hours.
Amidst the chaos, I noticed that the reinforcements "Seris" relied upon, the Farrago of Fiachra and whatever other Sehz-Clar troops she and Highblood Frost had recruited, had completely stopped coming through the Tempus Warps.
The spatial portals had vanished just as suddenly as they had first appeared.
I stood panting heavily in the middle of the battlefield. What had once been a merry, vibrant section of this Dicathian city was now little more than a district-wide mass grave.
My mantle (already tattered like a many swallow-tailed coat) was now burnt to a few charred strips of cloth. Even the Djinnic plates of the Adaptarmour itself were cracking under the continuous, punishing strain of the duel.
The false "Seris," however, did not fare much better.
Lord Evascir's weapon gave me just enough raw strength to match her, but I was still agonizingly far from actually defeating the second-strongest Scythe.
But I was far from done.
Despite my aching body, my fractured bones, and my freely bleeding wounds, I could not stop until my true master was avenged and her puppeteered husk was finally put to rest.
Our fight escalated into the sky. We both took flight, our magics colliding violently in the heavens above.
Rotbolt against Soulfire: jagged black-red lightning meeting blistering purple-black flames in a devastating contest of supremacy.
The whip versus the sabre: "Seris's" leashes exploded through the air, wildly aiming for whatever inch of flesh or armour they could sheer from my body, while I precisely cut wherever necessary to defend myself and counterattack in the exact same breath.
The Scythe versus the former Retainer: the onyx sabre in my hand cleanly severed one of the two leashes of "Seris's" whip, but the other violently bit into my arm. The Soulfire failed to melt through the Adaptarmour plates, but the staggering kinetic force snapped the bone beneath, tearing a raw scream from my throat.
I... I am going to lose... I cursed in my head. After all, I am still just that wretched kid who was unable to rise through the Court of Basilisks.
I threw a Rotbolt-infused punch directly at "Seris," but she met it with her last remaining serpentine leash, which instantly hardened back into a straight longsword to block my fist.
Rotbolt arced wildly as the impact sent us soaring even higher above the floating island of Xyrus. I punched and slashed desperately with Lord Evascir's sabre; "Seris" parried and lashed out with her whip.
Soulfire sizzled and Rotbolt roared, the thermals of our clashing magic pushing us ever higher into the freezing clouds.
I need to end this... I told myself, looking at the imposter through heavy, bloodshot eyes. Master... I... I will avenge you, even if it costs me my life.
I needed to land an attack so overwhelmingly powerful that not even Seris at her strongest could block it.
But how? Deep down, I had always known the answer—the most desperate, sacrificial attack a Basilisk could ever land. It was a taboo something no Vritra Blood would ever dare consider out of sheer disgust and terror of the consequences: using their own horns as weapons.
And so I did. With a gut-wrenching scream, I grabbed the left obsidian horn protruding from my skull and violently tore it free, snapping it at its thick base to form a jagged, makeshift dagger.
"Seris's" dead eyes widened as the husk finally realised what I was about to do. My severed horn began to emanate a terrifyingly dense dark mana. I ruthlessly ripped half of my entire remaining mana reserves directly from my core and forced it into the piece of charred bone.
With a feral scream that made my throat bleed, I lunged forward and plunged the horn directly into "Seris's" heart.
I wrenched it free and brutally repeated the motion, stabbing her again, and again, and again.
"I am sorry, Seris..." I moaned in blinding pain, blood pouring from my scalp. "I am sorry neither of us will live to see the Vritra Clan finally defeated."
My Regalias and the secondary runes supporting them flared blindingly across my back. In an apocalyptic tempest of unleashed Vritra magic, I drove the horn deep into my master's chest one last time.
Entangled in each other's grip and completely spent, we both plummeted from the sky toward the ruined earth below.