The rings erupted.
White-hot light seared through bandages, throwing jagged shadows against the walls—not like fire, but like lightning frozen mid-strike. Elliot gasped, fingers clawing at his chest as the metal branded his skin with the scent of scorched linen and ozone.
Lytharos was already moving. His eyes locked onto the door—not with alarm, but with the grim focus of a soldier spotting familiar trenches.
"They’re not here to test you this time." His voice could’ve flayed stone. "These aren’t cult fanatics."
Sylra’s blade whispered free of its sheath. "Assassins?"
"Worse." Lytharos’ knuckles cracked as he clenched his fists. Essentia coiled around his forearms like serpents waking. "Professionals."
Outside—
—the wind died.
Not faded. Not stilled.
Strangled.
A presence pressed against the inn’s walls, dense as a landslide, silent as a knife between ribs. The fire snuffed out. The embers blackened.
Somewhere above them, the roof creaked under a weight that hadn’t been there a second ago.
Somewhere distant Leon’s body arched off the bed as if pulled by invisible wires.
His breath hissed through clenched teeth—a sound too sharp, too pained to be human. The Essentia in his veins detonated, flooding the room with jagged light that cracked the pottery on his nightstand.
The rings. Their rings. Screaming across miles of mountains and rivers, shaking him awake with the violence of a blade between ribs.
His eyes snapped open.
Blood ribboned from his nose, hot and thick, splattering the sheets.
"Not yet..." The words tore from his throat, raw as exposed muscle. "Not now—"
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He rose. Slow. Unsteady. Every joint protesting like rusted iron.
Then—
—vanished, leaving only the afterimage of Essentia scorched into the walls.
Lytharos stood alone, his cloak rippling in the unnatural stillness.
He’d felt it before he saw it—not a presence, but an absence. A hole in the world where sound and energy should have been. The void where a predator crouched before the pounce.
Then—
—there.
Askael.
The mask swallowed the moonlight. The blades drank the shadows.
No flare of Essentia. No battle cry. Just the quiet certainty of a knife already halfway to its target.
Lytharos’ fingers twitched.
The night held its breath.
Askael perched on the opposite eave like a carrion bird eyeing its meal. His twin blades hung still—long, slender, and wrong, their edges swallowing the moonlight rather than reflecting it. Weapons that severed light as easily as flesh.
The crisscrossing Nullsteel threads in his armor formed a lattice of anti-Essentia, turning his silhouette into a void against the night. No glow. No aura. Just the absolute negation of flow.
Death, dressed politely.
"Lytharos." His voice was soft, almost bored. "Elemental Vanguard. Thunderflow user. Close-range precision. High-response tempo." He stood slowly, leather whispering. "Your file was... extensive."
Lytharos didn't shift his stance. "You know a lot for someone about to lose."
Askael didn't laugh.
He vanished.
Lytharos moved.
Lytharos’ boots crackled with Essentia, lightning fracturing the roof tiles beneath him as he pivoted—
—just as Askael blinked into existence behind him, blade carving upward in a silent killstroke aimed for the floating rib.
The steel missed flesh.
But the Essentia surrounding Lytharos shattered, dissipating like fog under noon sun.
(He didn’t just cut at me—) Lytharos’ muscles tightened. (—he cut through my flow.)
Counterattack came instinctive. His palm thrust forward, Thunder Arc erupting in a concentrated beam—the same technique Elliot had studied with reverent frustration. It should’ve struck with the precision of a sniper’s shot, the sonic boom alone enough to rupture organs.
Askael’s foot twitched.
A rune flared crimson on his boot’s instep—just for a microsecond—and the lightning veered, scorching empty air.
Lytharos’ eyelids flickered—
—too slow.
The second cut came low, blade skating across his oblique. Not deep enough to cripple, but enough to warp his balance. He staggered, boots scraping shingles.
Askael held up his spotless blade between them. "I don’t kill your kind with brute force." The Nullsteel threads in his armor pulsed hungrily. "I kill you by killing what makes you dangerous."
A beat.
"Essentia."
Lytharos exhaled through his nose. The lightning around him reversed, collapsing inward until it sheathed his body in a skin-tight corona.
"So I’ll stop using it."
Lytharos surged forward—not with lightning, but with the raw, honed precision of a warrior who’d fought before Essentia ever answered his call.
Askael’s mask hid most of his face.
But not the smile.
A flicker. Brief. Genuine.
Then—
—the world blurred.
Two figures dissolved into the treeline, one wreathed in dying lightning, the other in swallowing silence.