Chapter 1696: Wrath and Hunger
Aelindra timed a strike to a Ragnar exchange that demanded Kaelira’s full attention.
The blade dancer slipped past in a blur of dark-infused speed, and her blades came for Sera’s throat in a scissor cut that would have taken her head.
Quinlan broke spacing.
Ice erupted between Aelindra and Sera to buy a fraction of a second and wind hurled him across the gap to put [Soul Reaper] between the elf’s blades and Sera’s neck, and the parry sent Aelindra spinning clear, but the gap he’d left behind was what Ragnar had been waiting for.
The fist connected with Quinlan’s side and [Synchra] screamed as the reserve energies the anima-grade armor possessed surged into the plates along his ribs, the plating fracturing in a web that spread from the point of impact across half his torso.
Just as Nyxara had claimed, a single good punch could be deadly, despite the tankiness Quinlan now sported.
The blow drove him sideways and Sera’s hands were already moving, golden light flooding through her palms and into his body before he finished sliding, mending what it could while the fractures in [Synchra]’s plates stabilized but refused to close.
The armor’s reserves were burning down, and that was not something her heals could restore.
She’d been watching them for every second of the fight, Quinlan’s elements cycling with that dark intensity she’d never seen from him, Kaelira’s barriers arriving in his blind spots with a precision that had no right existing after only minutes of fighting together.
They moved in tandem and neither of them seemed to notice they were doing it, the shy smith and the furious Primordial locked into a rhythm that Sera couldn’t find the entrance to.
She stood in the backline with her bow drawn and the knowledge settling into her that she was the reason they were bleeding.
Fire was the only element missing from the family, and Sera had been certain it was hers since the moment she noticed the gap. She was a Dawnbringer. She carried divine light. Fire was in her nature.
She reached through the brand on her womb and called for it with all of herself. The Reservoir answered warm and open and willing, and fire did not come.
She pushed harder, watched Kaelira’s barriers crack for the twelfth time and [Synchra]’s fractures widen, and the silence was total.
’I’m not Ayame,’ she thought. ’I wasn’t born with a blade in my hand. I unlocked this class mere months ago and started fighting up close even more recently, and against opponents where a single mistake means dying and taking my friends down with me...’
She steeled her heart, tried to channel what fire meant, Quinlan’s pride, his refusal to bow to others, his absolute certainty, and reached one more time.
The bond stayed warm. Fire stayed absent. It had never been hers.
<You’ve been reaching for the wrong thing, girl.>
Nyxara’s presence settled against Sera’s mind, warm and unhurried, seeing her more clearly than she wanted to be seen.
<Those arrows you keep drawing from the backline? Those are apologies. And the thing you’re apologizing for is far more interesting than fire.>
Sera’s fingers tightened on the bowstring, and the denial that rose died before it reached her lips.
<Hunger.> The word carried something close to warmth. <And wrath. Those aren’t elements... And you, young lady, are full of both.>
Wrath. The word split something open inside her that she’d been keeping sealed since the moment she drew her bow.
The Elvardian Council had conscripted her into a war she wanted no part of.
Her regiment was used as bait to test human defenses, thrown at the front line like something disposable, and when the humans captured her they made her exactly that.
A sex slave. They stripped her rights, dressed her in sheer fabric cut to leave almost nothing to a buyer’s imagination, and put her up for sale, with the purchase right to own her body for as long as they wished.
Her buyer could do anything to her, and she was forbidden from refusing their touch or even choosing death over their bed.
If that buyer had not been Quinlan, Seraphiel would have spent thousands of years in the hands of someone who purchased her for exactly what those clothes promised.
Her mother would have shared that same fate, or worse.
And now the same people who threw her away were on this battlefield, fighting to take everything from her a second time, and Sera was standing in the backline with her hands trembling instead of tearing into them with everything she had.
Sera’s eyes found Kaelira, bleeding and grinning and rebuilding for the fifteenth time so that she could stand here safely and accomplish nothing.
She found Quinlan, weaving through strikes that would kill him if he slowed by a fraction, his armor running dry.
She didn’t want fire.
She had never wanted fire.
She wanted to be next to them with light in her fists and nothing held back, and the only thing keeping her here was the fear that she would fail them by trying.
’Trust Kaelira,’ she told herself, and the thought came quiet and clean and felt like the first honest thing she’d said since the fight began. ’Trust Quin. And do what I must.’
The brand on her womb ignited.
The light that bled through her clothes burned dark at its edges, celestial radiance folding inward until it became something denser, hungrier, wrong in a way that had no business coming from a Dawnbringer.
The brand seared through the fabric and blazed visible against her skin, and the golden glow of [Divine Arsenal] cracked along its surface as demonic force bled through the fractures.
The bow shattered in her hands and twin blades reformed from the wreckage, compressed dark-light screaming along their edges, divine and demonic tearing against each other in a shape that wasn’t built to hold both.
Dimensions away, Lilyanna watched purity she had personally blessed crack open and let something abyssal bleed through.
She remembered the girl. A teenager kneeling in a chapel with her hands clasped and her prayers so earnest and innocent they carried across planes, a soul so clean the Goddess had granted her the mark of her Purity without hesitation.
That girl was mixing her blessing with demonic force and using the result to charge at something that could kill her.
’You did it, Evil Boy...’ A breath escaped her delicate lips that was almost a laugh. ’You corrupted one more pure girl...’
Her fingers tightened on her skirt until the fabric creased. The laugh faded, and what settled in its place was quieter than the Goddess usually allowed herself to be.
’I’m sorry I couldn’t give you what you needed, Seraphiel.’
Deep inside Quinlan’s soul, the Primordial Demon of Lust watched the transformation settle into Sera’s body and felt satisfaction pool warm in her chest.
’That makes three.’
Vex had taken her curses and her obsession. Kitsara had taken her predatory cunning and her gift for warping perception. And now this pure, earnest, divinely blessed healer had taken her wrath and her hunger, the drive to destroy and the appetite that grew relentlessly.
Three facets of what made Nyxara herself, scattered across three of her Ruin’s women, and every single one of them was going to be flourishing using her blessing.
’He will surely have to stop being rude to me after this, and embrace me in his big, muscular arms like never before, after which he will...’ she mused, cheeks going red in excitement just as Sera launched off the backline at Aelindra with everything the transformation had given her, burning through mana at a rate she could feel draining her from the inside.
Thirty meters vanished so fast the air split behind her.
Aelindra pivoted with both curved blades raised, and the contempt in her expression lasted exactly as long as it took for the first strike to land.
Sera’s blade hit the guard with three times the force she had ever produced, dark-light detonating against infused steel in a burst that shattered Aelindra’s footing and drove her backward with both arms shaking from a single parry.
Sera pressed forward without restraint, dark-light hammering the corrupted elf’s guard in a barrage so violent her mana would be empty in minutes and she did not care.
Kaelira was already shifting to cover Sera’s unprotected back with both barriers raised and a grin wider than it had been all fight.
For a moment, Quinlan watched his Dawnbringer carve into the woman who’d betrayed her own blood for a crown.
Then he, too, tossed himself into the fray.
The continental showdown was entering its final stage!
