Scorpio glanced back at the wreckage where he'd sent Kei flying. Some of the anger drained out of his face, replaced by a slow, satisfied grin. "That fool actually put up a fight." He rested his single-edged saber back across his bare shoulder, completely unbothered by the dust still drifting down around him.
Vincent had stopped screaming.
Yejin's head snapped toward the crackling sphere, panic slamming into her chest. "Vincent! Hey! Vincent! Wake up!"
She lunged forward, both hands reaching to tear the cage apart — but the static lashed out the instant her skin got close. Blinding arcs of electricity seared across her palms, blistering the skin and throwing her back with a sharp cry of pain. Inside the sphere, Vincent hung limp, suspended in a low, constant hum of raw current.
"You can't save him," Scorpio said. "And he's not going to be talking to anyone again. Can't you see that?"
Yejin's jaw clenched hard, fury burning past the pain in her hands. She did not waste time. Anima surged through her legs in one violent burst, and she blinked straight behind him. Her blade was already driving toward his exposed neck. "Get him out of that thing, you bastard!" she said.
But Scorpio caught it without even turning his head.
The saber across his shoulder shifted just an inch, deflecting her strike with a ringing clang that shuddered straight up through her wrists. A flick of his elbow threw her off balance, and the force sent her skidding hard across the sand.
"Protect the Princess!" an imperial officer bellowed.
"Shield wall — form up!" a Horris commander shouted back.
A dozen Horris soldiers in blue tabards slammed their heavy shields together into a locked barricade, imperial guards filling the gaps with spears leveled. Behind them, crossbowmen let loose a volley of heavy bolts, all aimed straight at Scorpio's chest and eyes, trying to buy Yejin enough time to find her feet again.
Scorpio did not even bother lifting a guard.
He simply swept one hand through the air, and a howling blast of wind tore loose from his palm. The force caught every bolt mid-flight, snapping them like twigs before slamming the whole gust straight into the shield wall. Shields buckled inward, spears splintered apart, and the entire front line was torn to pieces in an instant.
Men were thrown like ragdolls across the sand.
Of the eighteen who'd charged in, only a handful managed to drag themselves back up, gasping through the carnage.
"For the Empire!" one guard choked out, blood running down his chin as he raised what was left of his broken spear. "We'll bring the South down!"
Two Horris soldiers beside him drew their broadswords, shouting their own defiant cries into the wind.
"What are you insects even crying about?" Scorpio's face twisted with disgust. "You make me sick." He lowered the saber, and the air around the blade rippled with heat — crimson flame licking up along the steel.
The surviving guards froze in place, every instinct screaming that their lives were about to end right there on the battlefield.
"If you're going to die, then die quietly, will you? You insects!" Scorpio swung the saber in one massive horizontal arc.
A crescent of pressurized flame tore loose from the blade, expanding fast into a wall of fire that ripped across the ground, threatening to burn everyone left standing down to ash.
"Get down!" Yejin screamed.
She threw herself between the fire and the wounded men, pouring every scrap of mana she had left into her blade. The steel lit up white-hot as she drove it straight into the heart of the blast, splitting the wave down the middle. The heat alone was nearly unbearable — scorching her sleeves, blistering her arms, singeing the ends of her hair — but she held the line long enough to push the flames wide.
Even so, the effort was not enough to save everyone. The edges of the blast swallowed five imperial guards and one Horris swordsman whole, leaving only four survivors behind her, doubled over and coughing in the thick black smoke.
"You've actually got some real skill in you," Scorpio said.
He walked through the smoke toward her, and the real fight began.
His saber came at her with terrifying speed, strike after strike crashing down like a storm. Yejin's vision blurred as she fell into pure reflex — parrying by inches, pivoting on the balls of her feet, her Blood Rose footwork carrying her through angles that would have torn an ordinary fighter's tendons apart.
Clang! Clang-clang! Shhhk!
"Good footwork. Elegant, even," Scorpio remarked casually, parrying her fastest thrusts with one hand like it cost him nothing at all.
Yejin did not waste breath answering. Her lungs burned, every muscle screaming in protest, but she pushed harder anyway, forcing anima straight into her thighs and calves, driving her speed past anything natural, streaking around his blind spots like a red blur.
"Aren't you worried your legs will just snap, pushing that hard?" Scorpio asked, unbothered, spinning his saber to meet three of her strikes inside a single heartbeat.
Yejin gritted her teeth until blood welled at her lip. She had nothing left to spare on words — every last bit of focus was already poured into the fight, into her blade, even as her body edged closer to its breaking point.
Then Scorpio stopped holding back.
Dense, crushing mana flooded into his weapon, the blade humming low and dark. He brought it down in one massive two-handed diagonal cut.
Yejin threw her sword up in a cross-block, pouring everything she had left into the guard.
CRACK!
The sheer weight behind the strike shattered her blade into a dozen glinting shards, scattering across the sand.
Before the pieces had even finished falling, his bare hand shot out and closed around her throat, lifting her clean off her feet like she weighed nothing at all.
"I heard about you," he murmured, tightening his grip until her breath caught hard in her throat. "The War-Thorn Princess. That's the name, right?"
His eyes drifted over her face, an amused, mocking smile spreading slow. "I can see the princess part — you're every bit as pretty as they say. Not sure where the thorn comes in, though. Something prickly hiding under all that?"
Yejin clawed at his wrist with both hands, kicking uselessly against his hips, but his grip did not budge an inch. Her vision started going dark at the edges.
"You don't have to worry so much. You're gonna be meeting them all in Moknon soon, anyway." Scorpio said.
A few yards away, Vincent still had not moved, silent inside the crackling sphere.
And then the ground shook.
It started low, a deep rumble rolling under the shoreline, rattling loose stones — then a violent tremor that nearly knocked the last surviving guards off their feet. Dark, crackling arcs of energy split the sky in the distance, tearing straight through the clouds above the ruined district where Kei had been buried.
Scorpio's head snapped toward it, the mocking grin on his face gone in an instant.
Smoke and pulverized stone swirled inward, parting slowly around a massive shape rising up out of the rubble — tall, motionless, and radiating a cold that reached even this far.