Gasping, Vin struggled to stay conscious as the world seemed to swim around him, and the cold sensation in his core seeped into his very bones. He was vaguely aware of Shia screaming something, but he couldn’t make out the words. Leaning on his incredibly high focus, Vin forced his spinning surroundings to stabilize as he pushed himself back to his feet and looked toward the lizardman.
The divine warrior was frowning, turning his glowing sword this way and that as if trying to tell if it had changed in any way. Based on how close he held it to his own face, it seemed as though he was immune to the brightness of his own sword.
Speaking of swords…
While Alka’s glowing green form was nowhere to be seen, Dancing Leaf, the enchanted blade she’d been gifted for becoming her world’s first common-born Slayer and the entire cause of her murder, now lay in two pieces, their soft green glows flickering as if struggling to stay alive.
“Vin! We have to go!” Shia cried, snapping him out of his stunned trance. Glancing at the elf, Vin saw tears streaming down her face as she sniffed, her hands shaking as they held her staff close to her chest. “We can’t beat him now, and we can’t let Alka die for nothing like this! We have to go!”
“But Alka…” Vin looked back at the lizardman blankly, half expecting to see Alka’s ethereal form fly out of her blade somehow before grabbing the pointed end and jamming it straight into the lizardman’s bulging eye while he was distracted inspecting his sword.
But of course, that didn’t happen.
Alka was gone.
Killed, for good this time.
Ignoring Shia’s cries, Vin realized he was stumbling forward, walking toward the divine warrior instead of running away from him. His body seemed to be moving on its own, as if Alka were puppeting him once again, and he had a brief flicker of hope that she’d simply taken over his body again rather than vanish before he realized he was still the one in control.
“Well damn, looks like I didn’t get any power from sacrificing her after all,” the lizardman gurgled, letting out a wet sigh. “Guess I shouldn’t be too surprised. I didn’t get any stronger from killing all those undead a few fragments back after all. Rotting Necromancers…”
“…Give her back.”
“Hm?” The lizardman finally raised his gaze, eyeing Vin like he was some random person on the street rather than someone that had been trying his damndest to kill him mere moments ago. “What was that?”
“Alka. Give her back!” Vin repeated, finally coming to a stop directly in front of the divine warrior. He felt his foot push against something, and his stomach blanched when he looked down to find himself kicking the top half of Alka’s sword.
“I know grief affects all of us in different ways,” the lizardman said, giving him a pitiful look. “…normally I would tell you she isn’t truly dead. That her purpose lives on within my sword, and that you’d soon be reunited. But in this case, she really is gone. She’s not coming back.”
Rather than answer, Vin silently wove the runic formation for Stone Wall within his core, casting the spell the moment it was ready without a single word. A small jut of stone erupted out of the tunnel floor by his foot, directly underneath the top half of Alka’s sword and sending it flying upwards. Snatching it out of the air, Vin slammed the pointed piece of petrified elder wood forward, aimed directly for the lizardman’s chest.
And hit nothing but air.
“She was never alive to begin with,” he heard from behind him, the lizardman somehow having not only dodged his attack, but done so without Vin even seeing him move. “She was a drifting soul, lost in the world of the living. I did her a favor.”
Vin spun around and stabbed the broken sword tip forward, and again, found himself facing nothing but empty tunnel.
“That wasn’t your choice to make!” He screamed, his rage only building as the helplessness finally set in. The divine warrior could somehow move fast enough that even with his impressive focus, Vin couldn’t even track him, let alone hit him. He’d killed Alka directly in front of them.
And Vin could do nothing about it.
“Sometimes our betters have to make the hard choices for us,” the lizardman said solemnly as Vin turned to stare daggers at him. The warrior’s glowing sword was finally raised above his head, prepared for the killing strike, but Vin couldn’t find it in himself to feel anything but rage. Despite knowing he was moments from death, that he didn’t even have his divine boon to protect him, Vin was desperate to do something, anything to smack that pitiful look off of the lizardman’s face. With the last moments of his life, before the divine warrior brought down his sword, Vin remembered his other recent battle against a superior foe, and more by reflex than anything threw together a desperate runic formation within his core, dumping every last bit of mana he had into the spell.
“Don’t worry,” the lizardman said, giving him a sad smile. “This will all be over-”
A literal nova of light blasted out of Vin as his modified Light spell was finished, and Vin grinned with his eyes scrunched shut as he heard the warrior’s voice cut off mid sentence.
To his surprise, rather than having his life snuffed out for his final act of defiance, Vin realized he was still alive.
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Stranger still, it felt like he was alone.
Cracking his eyes open, he did his best to rub the spots out of them and look around. His Light spell had been powerful enough that even with them tightly shut he still could barely see anything, which meant the divine warrior had to be practically blind right about now.
The lizardman was fast, but he wasn’t faster than light.
Knowing he might finally have his chance at landing a blow against Alka’s true killer, Vin rubbed the tears out of his eyes and frantically searched for the divine warrior. He could hear the sound of something dripping, and he looked down, blinking at the sight of his own blood practically pooling on the tunnel floor.
“Vin!” Shia’s voice finally registered once more as the elf ran over to him, and only then did he realize she’d been calling his name all this time.
“Where did he go?” Vin demanded, disregarding his bleeding fingers as he continued his search. “Why did he run? Even if I blinded him, he was still far stronger than we were!”
“Vin, you’ve nearly severed all five of your fingers!” Shia shouted, her hands wrapping around his own shaking one and ever so carefully prying the sword fragment loose. Tossing the bloody hunk of wood to the ground, she immediately began casting Renewal, the concentrated life magic seeping into his ruined fingers and slowly healing them. “If it weren’t for your ring of barkskin, you’d be down two hands at this point!”
“Shia!” Vin snapped, causing the elf to flinch and almost drop her spell. He’d never felt this much anger in his life, and his intended outlet for it was suddenly gone. “Where did he go?!”
“I don’t know!” Shia cried, her own eyes flicking back and forth between his damaged hand and the long, empty tunnel, as if she were terrified of the lizardman returning to finish the job. “I don’t know, but it doesn’t matter! We need to leave before he comes back!”
“He killed Alka!” Vin roared, holding his stump against his temple as the pounding mana headache finally set in. He’d dumped literally every ounce of mana he’d had into that final Light spell, and rather than be rewarded with a chance at finally killing that monster, all he got for his troubles was a horrible migraine.
“You think I don’t know that?!” Shia shouted, her own sudden rage snapping Vin out of his fury for a moment as the elf got right up in his face. “I was here, Vin! I watched her die, just like you did!”
“Then how can you say we need to go?” Vin demanded, realizing his entire body was shaking at this point as, with the target for his anger nowhere to be found, his burning rage flipped to sorrow in an instant. “He killed Alka, Shia… She’s… She’s gone…”
“I know,” the elf said, tears still streaming down her face as she finally finished healing his hand. “…but do you really think she’d want us to stand here and die trying to avenge her? He’s too strong Vin, we need to leave and regroup. Meet with Scule and Reginald and come up with some sort of plan.”
“Oh God, Scule…” Vin whispered, his legs nearly giving out as he realized they were going to have to break the news about what happened to Alka to the petian and his companion. “How...?”
“Worry about it later,” Shia said, giving his hand one last look. “It’ll need more healing once we’re out of here, but you’re not at risk of bleeding out anymore. We need to leave. Now.”
“Right…” Vin stood there, seemingly at a loss for what to do. Shia was right of course, Alka wouldn’t want them to give up their lives for nothing. Even so, he felt rooted to the spot, as though he couldn’t bring himself to leave the site of Alka’s true death.
They didn’t even have a body to bury.
Realizing they had the next best thing, Vin quickly snatched up the two halves of Dancing Leaf, careful not to cut himself on them this time. He hesitated for a moment, unsure how to transport them like this before Shia grabbed them from him.
“Here,” she said, placing the wooden fragments within the canopy of her staff. Vin watched as the tiny branches seemed to shift and move, growing around each of the pieces and holding them firmly in place amongst the tiny leaves.
That taken care of, the two of them took off down the tunnel, back toward the trogums and hopefully away from wherever the divine warrior had retreated to. As they ran, Vin realized something with a start.
“Shia, we can’t go back out the way we came,” he said, his blood chilling at the thought of being ambushed by a handful of trogum elites in their current state. “That elite abandoned us for some reason. I don’t know why, but the Rebel Queen clearly isn’t on our side anymore, if she ever was. If we try and backtrack, her elites might be waiting for us.”
“Broken bark,” Shia hissed, coming to the same realization. “Okay, do you have somewhere else we can exit? You mapped all these tunnels, right?”
“Yeah, hold on.” They ran for a few more seconds before Vin stopped them at a junction between tunnels. Closing his eyes, he ran through his updated mental map as quickly as he could, before pointing at one of the offshoot tunnels. “This one should take us to the surface!”
Not wasting any time, they adjusted course and kept running. Shia was forced to morph her staff into cat form, and Vin noted how the broken sword pieces seemed to shift to sit within the cat’s rib cage to ensure Shia didn’t end up stabbing herself as she rode upon the cat.
After a few minutes of running through empty tunnels that gradually sloped upwards, they suddenly found themselves out on the surface once more, gasping at the sudden blinding light from the sun.
A quick glance around showed that there wasn’t anything dangerous nearby, and Vin quickly angled them back toward the infernals’ fragment. If they could just make it back to the village, they should be safe. Vin doubted the divine warrior was willing to take on Madam Trebella again just yet, even if he could somehow best her obscuration ritual and find the village again.
The two of them didn’t share a word as they left the trogums’ fragment behind them, slipping into the insect infested woods and making a beeline directly for the powerful Witch.
Glancing over his shoulder one final time at the fragment that was now home to Alka’s final resting place, Vin made a promise to himself right then and there.
Somehow, someway, he’d get his revenge for Alka’s true death.
He was going to take that divine warrior down.
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