Seeming to have a sudden epiphany, Halation stopped his assault. "Right! I have other attacks! Of course!" He held his moon-blade aloft, the blade glowing with a new, intense light. He swung it in a wide, horizontal arc towards Eryndra. A shockwave of pure energy erupted from the blade, screaming across the room. She was knocked off her feet, sent crashing through the far wall and nearly off the side of the ship. Just before she fell off the ship, she managed to grab onto the splintered edge of the deck, pulling herself up, debris and dust clinging to her armor.
She charged back into the room, a low growl in her throat, and drove her fist deep into his gut. He grunted, the sound a mixture of pain and surprise, but he didn't double over.
"How are you so tough?" she demanded, her knuckles aching from the impact.
"I am not," he replied, his voice a pained but even tone. "You have broken many of my cage-bones. It is, in fact, the most pain I have ever experienced in my long life."
Eryndra blinked. "Cage-bones?"
Roy's voice crackled in her ear. "He means his rib cage, Eryndra."
"Oh. Gotcha." She engaged again, her movements now smoother, her speed overwhelming his defenses. He launched a volley of conjured wooden spears in a desperate attempt to create some distance. She narrowly avoided being skewered, but as she was distracted, he slipped behind her, his moon-blade raised for a final, desperate overhead strike.
Eryndra, her patience finally exhausted, dipped into her Apparition Mode faster than she thought she could, just for a fraction of a second. The jets on her armor vents flared with a silent burst of power, propelling her just out of the blade's path. She spun so rapidly the air started vibrating around her before she threw a powerful side-kick that landed squarely on his arm. A sickening, audible pop echoed through the room as his shoulder was wrenched from its socket. He was launched sideways, a silent scream on his face, and tumbled off the side of the ship.
Eryndra, not finished, followed him down.
His body now in freefall, Halation used a burst of magic to cover his feet in a torrent of swirling wind. He landed, with a surprising grace, on the surface of the dark, churning water below.
Eryndra plunged into the water a few feet away, her own impact sending a massive splash into the air. She stared at him, a look of profound confusion on her face. "Wow. You can walk on water. So… you don't even need to know how to swim, do you?"
Halation, his good arm cradling his dislocated one, blinked. "Oh. Yes. I forgot I could do that."
Eryndra laughed, a genuine, delighted sound. "So you really could have run away this whole time, you sneaky bastard."
Halation's face went blank. He sheathed his moon-blade, calmly turned, and began to walk away across the water. "Oh, that's right. You are correct. I apologize. See you." He then broke into a run, speeding off across the waves, a trail of displaced water in his wake.
Eryndra waded there in the middle of the ocean, utterly, completely baffled for the first time in this fight.
Roy's voice, a sigh of pure, unfiltered exhaustion, came over her comm. "Eryndra. Please get back on the ship."
With a final, incredulous shake of her head, she kicked off the water, a powerful surge of energy launching her back up towards the hole she had made in the ship's hull.
Warrex, watching from above, let out a slow, appreciative breath. He dropped from the rafters and continued his silent infiltration.
His path now led him to the ship's opulent officer quarters. Most were empty, their occupants either dead or fighting for their lives. But from one chamber, he heard the low, rhythmic scrape of a whetstone on steel. He pressed himself flat against the bulkhead, peering through a small crack in the wooden door. Inside, a dark-skinned elf with the same unsettling, pupilless white eyes as Halation lounged on a divan, idly sharpening a set of wicked-looking daggers. A discarded uniform lay crumpled on the floor. An elf rushed past Warrex who was expertly hidden behind a large plant in the corridor, muttering under his breath, "Damned lazy Commander Cicatrix, shirking her duties while the rest of us die. A waste of pure blood. Those experiments were a failure."
Warrex's eyes narrowed. Her. The pressure from this one was far less than Halation's. Still a coiled danger, but not the same raw, terrifying power. Manageable. An opportunity. A silent kill to clear the path.
He slipped past the door, his movements still utterly soundless, his axe raised for the swift, decisive blow that would end it before it began.
As his axe descended, aimed for the base of her skull, Cicatrix moved. It wasn't a panicked dodge; it was a fluid, almost lazy uncoiling from the divan. She didn't even look at him. Her dagger simply came up and parried his heavy axe with an almost disdainful tink of metal on metal. The force of the block, so effortless yet so absolute, sent a jarring shockwave up Warrex's arm.
Before he could recover, she was on him. She flowed from the divan, a burst of flashing blades and precise, debilitating strikes. Warrex, caught completely off guard, was forced onto the defensive. He grunted as one of her daggers left a deep, searing cut across his chest. This was no lazy brooder; this was a predator playing possum. He was outmatched.
He was slammed back against a wall, Cicatrix's cold, pupilless eyes staring into his, a cruel, bored smile on her face, her dagger inches from his throat. "Zehrina, Eryndra," he growled into his comm, a note of genuine, desperate urgency in his voice. "I need backup. Now."
The ceiling above Warrex disintegrated, not in an explosion, but as if it were simply unwritten from existence. Zehrina descended on a swirling column of her black dust, her expression a mask of cold fury and condescension. She landed lightly, her feet barely touching the floorboards. Her sleeves were gone, having already dispersed into the swarm of dust around her. She remained almost perfectly still, a calm eye in the coming storm.
"Another one," Cicatrix sighed, her voice dripping with a bored, immature contempt. "This is getting terribly repetitive."
With rapid angle changes, Cicatrix flowed across the room, a whirlwind of flashing blades and precise, debilitating strikes. Zehrina didn't move to meet her. Instead, the dust that had formed her sleeves swirled and coalesced, forming a dozen sharp, obsidian blades that met Cicatrix's assault in a chaotic symphony of violence. Sparks flew as her daggers were parried again and again. Cicatrix's speed was clearly beyond Zehrina's own, yet Zehrina held her position, her storm of dust blades effortlessly blocking the relentless attack.
Seeing a momentary opening, Zehrina gestured with one hand. Two walls of hardened black dust slammed together from either side, trapping Cicatrix between them. With her other hand, Zehrina conjured a crackling bolt of frosted lightning and fired it point-blank into the trapped Child of Purity. The spell struck her dead on, erupting in a blinding flash of ice and electricity.
The dust walls dissipated. Cicatrix stood there, completely unfazed, a thin layer of frost clinging to her form which she contemptuously brushed off. She looked almost bored.
"That tickled," Cicatrix drawled, and then she moved. With a speed that defied the eye, she closed the distance, her twin daggers pointed forward. She plunged one blade deep into Zehrina's stomach, then the other, twisting them with a cruel satisfaction before Zehrina could react.
Zehrina gasped, a flicker of genuine shock on her face, before a powerful wave of black dust erupted from her back, blasting Cicatrix away. The Child of Purity landed gracefully on the other side of the room, a predatory smile on her face.
"Impressive," Zehrina said, her voice tight with pain but her gaze unwavering as the wounds on her abdomen slowly began to seal over. "Not many can withstand my frosted or iced lightning."
Cicatrix shrugged, cleaning a speck of dust from her dagger. "I'm immune to most forms of direct magic. It's one of the perks of being... me."
Back on the Nightshatter's bridge, Roy surged to his feet, his heart hammering against his ribs as he watched Zehrina get stabbed on the monitor. "Tr—"
Zehrina's calm, steady voice cut through his comm before he could finish. "I'm fine, Roy. No need to worry. And no need for backup. Eryndra is much faster than her so I should be just fine. I am the strongest member of your crew after all."
"Excuse me!?" Eryndra protested over the comm.
Roy slumped back into his chair, a mixture of relief and exasperation washing over him. He let out a short, shaky laugh. "You think you're sooo smart, huh, Zehrina?"
Back on the elven ship, the entirety of the dust that made up Zehrina's robe now swirled around her, a massive, pulsating cloud of pure, weaponized dark. "No more treating you with kindness, then," she said, her voice now a cold, flat monotone.
Cicatrix's speed increased dramatically. She was a phantom, a whisper of motion, darting and weaving, her blades seeking any opening. But Zehrina kept her at bay, a defensive perimeter of dozens of whirling dust blades making it impossible for her to get close. From the living wood of the floor beneath Zehrina, a spire of twisted, thorned wood erupted, another of Cicatrix's tricks. But the black dust simply swarmed it, grinding it into fine, harmless sawdust in an instant. Frustration began to creep into Cicatrix's expression as she found every avenue of attack blocked.
It was during a brief lull in their clash that a lesser elven officer burst into the room, his face contorted in a supremacist snarl. "Die, you filthy half-breed traitor!" he shrieked, priming and pointing a magic arrow made of fire at Zehrina.
Zehrina just chuckled, a low, dangerous sound. But before she could respond, Cicatrix, jolted towards the elf, spun and drove her dagger through the officer's throat.
"Silence," Cicatrix said, her voice still dripping with that same bored, immature contempt. "Your incessant, shrill bigotry is giving me a headache. And you're interrupting my fight."
Zehrina paused, her brow furrowed in genuine confusion. "You… you defend me? I thought you supremacist types were all about racial purity."
Cicatrix scoffed, wiping the officer's blood from her blade. "Honestly? I'm not really about all that stuff. It's terribly dull. But her Ladyship insisted I join the cause. I was kind of… dragged along for the ride."
Zehrina's eyes widened in surprise, a flicker of something that might have been pity crossing her features. But then, her expression hardened. Roy felt a sharp tug at his mana. She rapidly threw her arm in a wide arc, her dusts projected shadow expanded, and the blades moved far faster than before. Before Cicatrix could even blink, a blade cut from her collarbone down to her hip, nearly cleaving her in half.
Cicatrix collapsed, a look of profound, almost childlike confusion on her face. "What… what the hell? I thought… I thought we were having a rather fun, fair fight…"
Zehrina stood over her, coalescing her swirling dust into a long, sharp spear, its point hovering inches from Cicatrix's chest. "So you're not a believer," she stated, her voice cold, devoid of all its earlier warmth. "Just a puppet. Standing beneath a flag you're too cowardly to defy."
"If you knew her... you'd be just as cowardly," Cicatrix responded quietly, her gaze distant.
Zehrina's voice dropped to a low, chilling whisper. "The only thing I despise more than supremacy… is complacency."
She raised the spear.
Warrex, his own injuries tended to, continued his grim work. He located the ship's gold storage and relayed its coordinates to Roy. On his way to the upper decks, he passed a corridor where the aftermath of a recent, intense battle was evident. As he passed silently, Truman, who was standing amidst the carnage, turned his head directly toward Warrex's hidden position and gave a small, knowing wave. Warrex just grunted, a flicker of grudging respect in his eyes.
He finally reached the heavily decorated, heavy double doors of Lady Brinevein's chambers. Takara was already there, her face pale but her stance resolute. Warrex dropped his spell and emerged from the shadows, his sudden appearance causing her to yelp and spin around, her runic gauntlets flaring to life.
"It's just me," he rumbled, a faint smile touching his lips.
Takara let out a shaky breath. "You took your sweet time."
"I was being thorough," he replied. He reached for the heavy handle of the door.
"Wait," Takara said, her voice a hushed whisper. "She could be incredibly strong."
Warrex's grin widened, a flash of predatory teeth in the dim light. "Yeah. She probably is judging by the ass whooping I just got from one of her commanders. And that's exactly why we shouldn't wait. The sisters will just hog all the fun for themselves." He gave her a reassuring look. "They are seconds behind us, between you, me and the Presidroid we can last a few seconds. And don't worry. I'll protect you."
"Quote from man killed by an insane elven racist, but okay" Takara mocked, ending with a sigh.
He pushed the heavy doors open.
The room beyond was a grotesque, horrifying masterpiece. It was enormous, lavish, its walls covered in rich, velvet tapestries and golden filigree. But lining those walls were hundreds of small, magically sealed containers, each one holding the perfectly preserved, frozen body of a slave from every "pure" species imaginable, their faces twisted in silent, eternal screams.
She was laying on a massive, ornate bed in the center of the room, surrounded by several impossibly handsome and muscular male elves, each clad in nothing but a tight-fitting pair of silken underwear. Lady Brinevein herself was only partially visible, her legs draped elegantly over the side of the bed. As they watched, her legs parted, revealing her upper body. She was holding the severed, but perfectly preserved, head of a dark-skinned elf, his eyes wide and unseeing in a rictus of final, abject terror.
"Takara," Warrex murmured, his voice a low, grim rumble. "The eyes. On the head she's holding."
Takara tore her gaze away from the wall of preserved bodies and looked. "What about them?"
"They're the same," Warrex said, a note of dawning, horrified realization in his voice. "Just like the other two. The pale one and the dark-skinned one. No pupils. That… that must be the third Child of Purity."
Lady Brinevein ignored them, her attention focused solely on the head. Her voice, when she spoke, was a strange, unsettlingly beautiful sound, as if it were harmonizing with itself.
"Commander Choler… How often you spoke of your strength, your vigor after your accelerated training. That you could… make it through the night. You thought yourself holy enough to weather my lust. But no mortal bears the weight of divinity unscathed."
She gently caressed the dead elf's cheek, slowly rocking side to side.
"But purity, true purity, is poison to the impure. Didn't I warn you? Every man breaks beneath my touch. Every man fails to satisfy what cannot be satisfied by anything less than a god."
Her voice then took a sudden, chilling turn, becoming cold, flat, sociopathic.
"I shall keep your face just as it is… a lesson in ambition… embalmed in failure."