Chapter 1697: Pitiful Woman
Sera’s eyes found Aelindra, and the focus that settled over the Dawnbringer left no room for anything else.
Until this moment, she had fought from behind shields, loosing arrows from the backline into targets her frontliners softened for her.
The elf crossed the ridge toward Aelindra with [Divine Arsenal] blades burning dark-light in both hands.
Her opening strike hit Aelindra’s guard with force beyond anything her class should have produced, divine and demonic fused into an edge that cratered the stone beneath the blade dancer’s boots. Sera pressed into the opening and the dark-light detonated against infused steel, shattering the lock and sending Aelindra skidding.
Aelindra recovered with a spinning kick that bled momentum into a counter-slash aimed at Sera’s ribs, and Sera met it head-on.
The collision created a loud hissing sound, and the four exchanges that followed shook the air, neither elf yielding a step.
Aelindra’s expression shifted from contempt through surprise into cold calculation as she read the patterns in Sera’s aggression and started turning them sideways, her footwork finding redirecting arcs that bled millennia of experience into every pivot as statistical superiority reasserted itself.
But her eyes were ugly, her teeth bared, and her mind harbored thoughts she never thought she would.
How couldn’t she, when the elf pressing her was barely a hundred years old?
A century, the threshold where elven childhood ended and womanhood began, and this girl was matching her blow for blow.
Rough around the edges, sure, and clearly burning a lot more mana than Aelindra was, yes.
But she was still matching an age-old warrior.
The mark blazing through Sera’s clothes was proof that a man had looked at this girl and decided she was worth bleeding for.
Aelindra had never had that.
Male elves lived brief lives and could not level, a cruelty so old that most women stopped expecting companionship from their own kind entirely. Aelindra had taken lovers across the millennia, all of them women, none of them serious enough to remember.
She had spent those millennia building power because there was nothing else worth building toward, and had clawed within reach of a throne by stabbing the only family she had left.
And here was a gorgeous young elf, barely having begun womanhood, who had been sold as a sex slave, trusted a random man in hostile lands, and built a family from nothing with her own hands.
She had a mother who loved her, friends across multiple races, and a man whose adoration bled through every element he cast to keep her alive.
She was at the center of something vast, essential to its existence.
In thousands of years, no one had ever looked at Aelindra the way that man looked at the girl fighting beside him.
Sera was everything Aelindra could have been if she was luckier, she reasoned. But instead, the blade dancer was here, fighting alongside a dwarf she despised.
The rage that followed had nothing to do with tactics.
"You sleep in the arms of an outsider, and now you’re trying to kill your ruler," she seethed. "How do you live with yourself?"
Her weapons ignited with dark infusion and she threw herself at Sera with every ounce of speed her level afforded, strikes coming faster and more vicious than anything she had shown on this ridge.
"You? My ruler?" Sera could barely believe what she was hearing. "You’re not even the queen of Elvardia, let alone mine."
Then her expression turned sly, and she met Aelindra’s next strike without losing it. "As for how I can sleep in my lover’s arms... it’s the easiest thing in the world, really. You feel those big, strong arms wrap around you and everything else stops mattering. The muscles, the warmth, the way he holds you like you’re the most precious thing he’s ever touched..."
"And the possessiveness..." A dreamy sigh left her between clashes. "That grip that tightens when he’s half-asleep, like he can’t stand the thought of you slipping even an inch away. I’ve honestly never slept better in my life than in his arms." Her grin sharpened. "You wouldn’t understand that, though. Pitiful woman."
"You dare!" Aelindra screamed, and every strike that followed was raw fury.
Sera met the assault without guarding, and the hunger Nyxara had named inside her found its spell.
[Daybreak’s Wrath] made the Dawnbringer’s light burn harder the longer she fought, a gift designed to plateau at the limits of her class.
The wrath bleeding through the brand had torn that ceiling off. A divine spell fueled by demonic hunger, just like the rest of what Sera had become: a contradiction.
An elf loving a human.
An elf with big womanly curves in a race of lithe bodies.
An elf who didn’t believe in the Eternal Forest and Luminara.
An elf who went from noble privilege to humiliating slavery.
An elf, who despite all she went through, could smile brightly, joke cheekily, befriend people of other races, and find true happiness.
And now...
An elf who was endorsed by both the Goddess of Purity and the Primordial Demon of Lust.
Each strike landed heavier than the last.
Dark infusion collided with compressed dark-light in shockwaves that split the stone beneath their feet.
Sera had no guard, no defense, nothing between her and death except the output she poured into every swing and the smith standing at her back.
"Fall already, traitor to your race!"
Aelindra’s right blade found the gap and drove toward Sera’s throat.
"Traitor number two is here to help!" Kaelira shouted as her shield arrived from the left with a crack that split the air, primordial earth slamming the infused steel wide, and the Runeweaver planted herself between the two elves with both barriers raised and blood still drying on her chin from the exchanges before.
Sera took the opening. Dark-light erupted from her left blade in a rising cut aimed at Aelindra’s collarbone, and the blade dancer twisted clear with reaction speed that turned a killing blow into a graze across her shoulder before her roll carried her out of reach.
"Damned arrogant-"
Lightning hit her before she finished recovering.
Quinlan’s bolt arced from thirty meters away, threaded between Ragnar’s latest swing and the ridge’s broken terrain, and caught Aelindra mid-pivot with enough force to lock her muscles for a fraction of a second. She snapped a barrier spell that ate the current and hurled her backward, boots scoring furrows in the rock.
Ragnar’s fist hit the spot Quinlan had cast from and the stone beneath it disintegrated, a shockwave of compressed force scattering debris across the ridge.
A second strike missed by a margin thin enough to feel against Quinlan’s cheek, and a third caught [Synchra]’s shoulder plate and drove him sideways with enough force to send a lesser fighter off the edge entirely.
Wind caught him before the momentum could carry him off the ridge, and ice erupted behind him to buy the half-second he needed to cycle back, [Soul Reaper] already moving before his boots found stone.
"Keep him occupied, you incompetent midget!" Aelindra’s voice cut across the ridge as she straightened from the lightning’s aftermath, smoke still curling from her barrier arm. "He can’t cast freely if you’re on top of him!"
Ragnar’s eye found her across the distance, and the look he returned carried about as much deference as a wolf gave a leash.
But he charged, because killing Quinlan was the one thing they agreed on.
"Let’s finish this deranged kin killer before she spouts even more nonsense about Quin. I don’t even wanna hear his name coming out of those hideous lips," Sera said, and Kaelira responded with a loud slam of her shields.
The duo turned on Aelindra together, and the coordination between blade and shield was immediate enough to look rehearsed.
...
With the girls pressing Aelindra south across the ridge, the fight collapsed back to two.
[Soul Reaper] carved a magma-edged arc across Ragnar’s chest with three elements behind the edge, and the saber skated across the fused armor-flesh and left a score one fingernail deep that sealed before the sparks hit the ground.
"Still thinking about the snake cunt, Villain?"
The words came through foam and dark residue, Ragnar’s voice rougher than it had been a few minutes ago. But the feral intelligence behind his eye was sharp.
"She fought hard. I’ll give the wench that much." His fist came through and Quinlan twisted clear on wind. "But everyone breaks. Even the strong ones. Especially women."
’She’s fine.’
