Grey
The world narrowed to the arc of my sword and the symphony of chaos. Dawn's Ballad was a living extension of my will, its teal edge humming with contained lightning, a cold, familiar weight in my grip that was both comfort and condemnation.
With Realmheart active, the battlefield dissolved into a terrifying, beautiful tapestry of flowing energy. Spells weren't bolts of fire or shards of ice; they were intricate, volatile weaves of mana, each with a structure, a frequency, a flaw.
My perception, honed by a lifetime of combat and elevated by this power, saw patterns of force to be unraveled.
A volley of Alacryan fireballs, sickly orange and laced with corrosive intent, rained down on a phalanx of Dicathen shields. I unmade them before they could even form. With a flick of my wrist and a surge of will, Dawn's Ballad traced a precise, dismissive pattern in the air.
The complex mana matrices of the fireballs shuddered, their internal harmonies disrupted, and they dissolved into harmless motes of fading light and a smell of spent ozone before they could ever strike. It was like plucking the vital thread from a tapestry and watching the whole image unravel.
"Vanesy!" My voice cut through the din, sharp and commanding. Professor Glory—no, Captain Glory now—her face streaked with soot and determination, turned from directing a counter-barrage. There was no hesitation in her eyes, only a hardened trust forged in the fires of Xyrus and tempered on these bloody fields. "Lead the push! Now!"
She didn't question. She simply nodded, a soldier's acknowledgment, and turned, her voice rising above the clash of steel and the screams of the dying.
"Vanguard, on me! Forward!"
How long has it been since I was leading a war? The thought was a ghost at the edge of my focus. A lifetime ago. A different world. King Grey led from a throne of cold ruthlessness, moving pieces on a board.
This… this was visceral. The coppery tang of blood, the acrid stench of burnt mana and charred flesh, the gut-wrenching thud of spell against shield, the wet, final sound of a blade finding its mark. This was leading from the front, a dance on the razor's edge between strategy and survival.
My body moved with lethal economy. An Alacryan Striker, his body augmented to grotesque proportions, lunged for a young elven mage. Dawn's Ballad slid along the haft of the Striker's axe, its edge severing the mana channels reinforcing his grip.
As he recoiled in shock and pain, my free hand was already moving, weaving threads of fire and lightning into a lance of pure, incandescent destruction. It pierced his hastily conjured shield like paper and took him in the chest.
Sylvie! The mental call was instantaneous, a thread of thought amidst the storm.
Her presence blossomed in my mind, calm and vast, a draconic awareness superimposed over my own.
'The vanguard follows Captain Glory. The non-mages are holding the defensive line, fueling the barrier runes. They are… brave.'
After the initial disorientation of her new form, Corvis's insightful training had taken root. She manipulated the very atmosphere to create subtle downdrafts that hampered enemy arrows, to disperse concentrations of toxic spells, to whisper warnings of flanking maneuvers on the wind itself.
'The Alacryans are retreating in disarray. Still no sign of Scythes or Retainers. Their command structure appears… absent.'
I clicked my tongue, the sound lost in the battle's roar. That was the problem. The nagging, tactical dread. We could win a thousand battles like this, grind their armies to dust, but without decapitating the leadership, without eliminating Agrona's elite, it was just… mowing grass.
It would grow back. A single Scythe, left unchecked, could undo a week's victories in an afternoon of slaughter. This was the curse of a world where individual power could eclipse armies. It made war a game of assassins, not soldiers.
My gaze swept the field, a commander's assessment running parallel to the warrior's instincts. Vanesy's push was a spearpoint, driving deep into the faltering Alacryan lines. Good.
The plan, a desperate amalgamation of Seris's intelligence, my own Earth-born knowledge of Napoleonic warfare—swift, decisive annihilation of the enemy's force—and Corvis's cryptic, invaluable insights, was working.
We were leveraging our few advantages: the unsealed Lances, Chul's raw might, and my own… peculiar set of skills. We couldn't win a war of attrition; we had to break them, fast.
My focus snapped to the right flank. A wave of pure dread rolled from that sector. A mutant mana beast, a nightmare sculpted from a distorted elephantine form, stomped through our ranks. Its skin was a patchwork of weeping sores and chitinous plates, and its face was a horrifying, screaming humanoid mask frozen in agony.
On its back, four Alacryan Casters rode like grotesque royalty, their hands weaving spells that rained acidic death and shrapnel on my soldiers. Swords bounced off its hide. Spells splashed against a personal barrier generated by the riders. Men and women were being trampled, dissolved, torn apart.
Since when did I start to care about foot soldiers? The question was a cold splash of water. King Grey viewed soldiers as statistics, assets to be spent for victory—for revenge.
Their deaths were columns in a ledger. But now… now I saw the young human boy whose shield shattered, his face a mask of terror before he was crushed. I saw the elven woman trying to drag her wounded comrade back, only to be engulfed in green acid. A cold fury, entirely separate from Grey's calculated rage, ignited in my chest.
Did it mean I finally left my past behind?
Action bypassed thought. I became a bolt of lightning. Mana surged through my limbs, augmenting my speed to an impossible degree. I shot into the air, Dawn's Ballad raised high.
The world slowed. I saw the trajectories of the spells, the arrogant postures of the Casters, the beast's lumbering gait. Electricity crackled around the teal blade, a miniature storm contained in silver. I dove.
Time seemed to fracture. I landed amidst the riders in a cataclysm of sound and light. Ice magic erupted from my left hand, flash-freezing two of the Casters to the saddle, their spells dying on their lips. A pivot, a circular slash too fast for the eye to follow.
Dawn's Ballad sang its deadly song, and the heads of the other two riders tumbled from their shoulders, expressions frozen in surprise. The beast roared, its trunk swinging. I didn't retreat.
I channeled pure fire through the sword, and with a final, two-handed swing, I sheared through the monstrous neck. The head, still screaming its silent scream, flew clear. The body took two more steps before collapsing, its death throes electrocuting the frozen riders into shards.
No. The answer came as I landed amidst the gore, chest heaving. King Grey is still here. The efficiency, the cold precision, the utter lack of hesitation—that was him.
I couldn't escape that core of ice. It was my weapon and my curse. And now, with Cecilia here, reincarnated by my own hand and Nico… the ghost of my past was no longer just internal. She was a living, breathing reminder of every failure, every compromise. I understood the necessity. Letting the Legacy fall into Agrona's hands was unthinkable.
But the cost… the potential cost was my best friend. The thought of Agrona's wrath falling upon Corvis was a constant, gnawing terror in my gut. And yet, Virion had agreed. He had let me and Nico perform the ritual. We had gambled his life for our continent's survival. The guilt was a lead weight.
Another one of the elephantine abominations was wreaking havoc further down the line. The calculation was instantaneous. I moved. An earth mage tried to entrap its legs, but the beast shattered the stone. A soldier was about to be crushed.
I slammed my hands to the ground, pulling a shell of rock and soil around myself and launching it like a living projectile. The earthen armor took the full force of the stomp, exploding into fragments, but it shielded the soldier. I stood then, unarmed for a fleeting second, directly under the beast's colossal foot as it descended again.
"Run!" I roared at the stunned soldier, who scrambled back. Then, I braced. Mana flared through every muscle, every fiber of my being. I met the descending foot not with evasion, but with raw, augmented strength. The impact drove me inches into the mud, a seismic shockwave radiating outwards.
The strain was immense, bones groaning, muscles screaming in protest. For a heartbeat, I held the impossible weight of the monstrosity. Then, with a guttural shout, I shoved upwards with every ounce of power I possessed. The beast, unbalanced, stumbled back.
Dawn's Ballad was back in my hand, summoned from its dimensional storage in a flash of light. I leapt. A single, perfect teal arc. The blade, superheated with focused fire, met the beast's black, coarse fur.
A wave of blue-white flame erupted along the gash, racing across its body, consuming the Alacryans on its back in a silent, voracious inferno. The smell of roasting meat and burnt hair filled the air.
Virion. The old elf's face surfaced in my mind. Tessia's and Corvis's grandfather. My commander. In another life, he might have been a rival, a political obstacle.
Here, he was the grandfather I never had. In the aching void left by Corvis's disappearance, we had clung to each other, a family forged in shared guilt and desperate resolve. He carried the infinite grief for his grandson, yet it never clouded his judgment, never poisoned his compassion. He was the leader I should have been. Wise. Collected. Caring. A good man.
We were partners in this sin. While we had let Corvis be taken by Agrona that wasn't even what pained us the most. The deeper, more private heartbreak was Tessia. She believed her twin was ill, confined to the castle, a necessary lie to keep her focused on the defense of Elenoir, to prevent her from doing something catastrophically reckless.
It was the lie told to all of Dicathen. It was unthinkable to declare that Vice Commander Corvis Eralith, the Prince loved by the people and made their lives better was captured by the enemy.
We—Virion, her parents, me—were treating her like a child. A child I knew she wasn't. The fierce, resilient woman I loved was being shielded from a truth that would shatter her. The thought of being the one to tell her, to see the light in her teal eyes extinguish… it was a pain I couldn't bear.
It was unfair. It was a betrayal. And a part of me, a selfish, desperate part, clung to the insane hope that if I could just win this war fast enough, I could pull Corvis back from the abyss myself. I could make it right.
'Grey.' Sylvie's voice was firm, pulling me back. 'The perimeter is clear. No high-value targets incoming. I am certain. Do you need help in mopping up the remnants?'
Yes. The reply was grim. End it. Fast. The treaty between Asuras was ash now. Sylvie no longer held back, no longer concerned herself with the technicalities that had once constrained her.
As if summoned by my thought, the sky above the shattered Alacryan rear guard… tore. A vortex of purple and white mana erupted, and from it descended Sylvie in her full draconic glory.
Her scales shimmered,, her wings blotted out the sun. A beam of pure, violet annihilation lanced down erasing everything in its path. It was a spell that Corvis taught her somehow, an elf teaching a dragon how to use her own mana arts—ironic yet just something my best friend would do.
Where it struck, Alacryan soldiers and mana beasts simply ceased to be, vaporized without a sound, without ash, leaving only scorched, glassy earth in their wake.
A grim, hard smile touched my lips. This was it. This was the price of crossing us. This was the power we would wield without restraint.
The battle was over. The cleanup began. We had won and the city of Slore was safe. But as I looked at the devastation, at the cost, and felt the phantom weight of the secrets I carried, the victory felt hollow.
It was just one battle.
The war, and the far more terrible personal reckoning waiting at its end, stretched before me, longer and darker than ever. We needed to return to the Castle, to report to Virion, to plan the next move.
But all I could think of was a twin's worried face, and a brother lost in the enemy's heartland, and the devastating truth that laid between them.