Sadrianna cut through the threads binding my left side in one swipe with her Razor-Beak skill, and I gasped as one half of my body could move once more. Before I could process things, her next strike freed me entirely, and I coughed as I fell forward, Sadrianna streaking away as I did so.

  I looked up, watching the mage track the barbarian with her head and I hit her with Axis-Shift even as I knew it would not be enough. But there was an explosion in front of the woman’s head as Sadrianna flashed past, blinding her and allowing the barbarian to reach Jacyntha without being ensnared.

  Jacyntha was freed a moment later, and then I watched with glee as another arrow exploded in dark grey mist before the mage. Three more followed in quick succession, and I stumbled to one side, calling Resolution to my hand even as I directed my fang-dagger from its sheath and towards the mage’s still form with the aid of A Frozen Pyrre.

  I hadn’t seen Fandar since I had hit the lines of the white-armoured company surrounding Vera and the mage’s fight, but his arrows were coming from angles such that he must have been circling the battle at great speed. His barrage was unlikely to do much to hurt the mysterious cowled woman, but they were excellent distractions and allowed us to fan out at different angles.

  I was sure that the woman had some sort of mana-sense with which she could track us, but her hands could not point in every direction at once, and anytime they were not plucking the loom around Vera, my dauntless companion was making steady progress forwards.

  It became a game of cat and mouse, where Jacyntha and I would attack the mage whenever we could, and Sadrianna would cut us free whenever the mage managed to snare us. Fandar’s ranged attacks kept some of the heat off Sadrianna, and her quick and unusual movement was enough to keep her unbound for the moment.

  The goal was not to cause real damage – none of us were strong enough for that, besides perhaps Jacyntha with the element of surprise – but more to distract and annoy the woman. To give time for Vera to complete her inevitable march towards the white-robed mage that had so locked down the battlefield before our arrival.

  She had incredible power, but her narrow specialisation clearly hurt her here. She could kill many weak individuals with ease, or entirely disable a strong one, but multiple enemies that would take a moment’s concentration to kill were a pain when engaged on multiple fronts. We turned the battlefield into chaos, striking from multiple angles concurrently, and wreaking havoc on her senses.

  I managed to score a gash with my hatchet after pushing it slowly along the ground over the course of several attacks, before using A Frozen Pyrre to telekinetically project it towards her from beneath her notice. It was a shallow wound, but the mage had no time to reverse it as she had done with previous ones, and I began to see a way through this battle.

  I was caught again, and in the several moments it took Sadrianna to streak across the battlefield to free me, I caught a glimpse of Nathlan drawing strange patterns in the air from where he stood just beyond the ring of soldiers. I wasn’t sure what he was doing exactly, but he was moving around the ring of soldiers, marking the ground with his blade with one hand while painting the air the other. Something began to shimmer in the air, like a translucent barrier separating us from the army behind.

  He had made solid progress, but there was a gap still open through which soldiers could pour perhaps two or three abreast. Luckily, the rebels were keeping them occupied for now, the company no longer pushing back towards us and instead fully focused on defending the onslaught from their front.

  I smiled as I was freed, the teamwork and coordination displayed by the four of us – five with the aid of Fandar – as we zipped around the mage in a symphony of distracting violence filling me with a fierce pride.

  Vera was only meters away from the mage now, her face set in a mask of outrage. She had witnessed our near deaths, after all, and I doubted she was a woman used to feeling powerless on the battlefield. Behind her, the semi-circle of soldiers had completely disintegrated, the white-clad company melting away into a confused brawl as black-armoured rebels harassed and fought them on equal footing.

  The mage must have noticed this all too, for she let loose a scream of rage, and then whipped her arms out to either side. I felt myself enveloped within bands of steel once more, my heart stopping inside my chest as the strange time-altering powers she had woven into her skill took effect. The chaos nearby stopped as Jacyntha, myself, and most importantly Sadrianna, found ourselves trapped. Vera grunted and took two more steps forward, and I saw the white-robed woman flinch as the heat that roiled off Vera singed her, her fluttering robes crisping to black at their edges.

  She then did something unexpected, and leapt into the air. Arms splayed to either side like a victim of crucifixion, she hovered a few meters off the ground before rising further into the air under the power of some sort of flight. It was eery, seeing her pristine white robes, blackened at their tips, fluttering in the breeze beneath a sky of burnished gold.

  She looked like a swan hovering beneath a meteor storm, and I was yanked into the air alongside her after a moment, left to dangle in absolute stillness a dozen meters off the ground opposite Jacyntha and Sadrianna. It was hard not to appreciate the beauty of it, trapped as I was within a timeless prison of invisible threads, watching the world as we knew it end above us.

  Vera was still grounded below, and I realised just how brilliant a strategy this was from the mage. Vera normally would find a way to hurt the woman, no matter how high she fled, but given the ongoing restraints I doubted she could do much to reach the floating mage.

  That didn’t bode well for me, and I felt despair trying to rear its ugly head, End Of The Hunt putting it swiftly in its place.

  I should never have doubted Vera though. The Butcher of Sternsbridge exploded with fire, her hair erupting like a bonfire atop her head and casting her face into deep shadows. She hunched down, and then reached out with deliberate slowness, windmilling her arms in front of herself. Then she inverted her wrists and gripped something.

  It was then that I realised she had been gathering the threads that restrained her, and now she pulled with all her might. Considering this was Vera, that might was impressive to behold indeed. The ground beneath her feet cratered as she pulled, and slowly I watched the mage in her wind-whipped robes being dragged back to the earth.

  I waited with bated breath – not by choice – as the titanic struggle between a mage of unmistakable magical power battled for supremacy against a woman of uncompromising physical might, and I rejoiced as Vera won. The mage was nearly grounded, and Vera began to reel her in like a fish.

  The battle raged on between both the rebels and the mage’s company, but I was facing away from them and so unable to see the result. I could only put my trust in Fandar and his people, as well as Nathlan’s wards, and place my faith in the righteousness of their cause to triumph over this mage’s strange desire to stay on and end the battle.

  Slowly, methodically, Vera pulled the mage towards her, and I knew the end was approaching. The moment my companion got her hands on her, the battle would be over. I felt pride bloom in my chest to witness the ferocity and implacability of my friend, especially knowing what she had gone through to reach this moment. The duke’s death might have been anti-climactic, but as I watched Vera strain with every muscle to pull the mage to her, I thought that perhaps this moment was more emblematic of her journey.

  Vera’s goal had not been the duke’s death. She had ignored revenge for so long, after all, only returning when the stakes were heightened by the Ashkanian Vault. She had been fighting all this time, not for herself but for her people. The Marchlands and the men and women that lived within needed help, and she had taken it upon herself to give it.

  Each inch that she drew the mage closer seemed to come with greater difficulty, but Vera persisted in spite of it. She snarled in defiance of the constriction, broke through whatever chronomancy the white-robed mage commanded, and fought with everything she had. Not to kill the woman, but to protect her people.

  That iron-hard purpose was perhaps what allowed her to push so hard, as I saw red marks creeping across her skin as blood vessels feeding her arms and shoulders burst beneath. She was pulling herself apart to win this fight, but she was winning.

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  Until she wasn’t. The mage stopped, Vera straining but unable to pull the woman further down. They hovered there for an eternity, locked in place, and we hovered with them. Jacyntha, Sadrianna and I were still stuck some dozen meters in the air, the mage still had her arms splayed to either side, cowl drawn low over her head to hide her face, and Vera still stood on the earth, straining with invisible cables wrapped around her arms.

  I felt those same threads wrapped around my own limbs, only far less of them, and yet the pressure and pain were palpable. Not like before where they were pulling me apart, but the constant pressure was still agonising, and I imagined it must be a thousand times worse for Vera given how many she had wrapped around her arms, and the force with which she was pulling.

  “Give this up, Butcher,” the mage said, words dripping from beneath the cowl like stones into a pond. They were not loud, but all nearby still felt their ripples, despite the cacophony of blood and death beyond our small battle. “You can’t win this.”

  Vera bared her teeth. “Neither can you. I can hold you here till your magic fades,” she spat, voice gravelly and dangerous, reminding me of a leopard in the night.

  “I’m sure you can, but your companions can’t breathe. Their hearts can’t even beat in their chests. How long can they afford to wait in my grasp, I wonder?” she asked casually, but we could all hear the malice underneath it, the vicious glee at our predicament.

  “I’d say you have to make a choice,” she continued, dripping her poison from beneath a white hood, “but you don’t have any options here, Butcher. Or would you bet your little group of rebels against Aerlyn’s finest?”

  The question was clearly rhetorical, but I couldn’t see the battle taking place behind me between black and white, soldier and rebel. Vera’s face darkened though, and I winced internally at what that likely meant. No arrows had come for the mage in a while, which meant Fandar was either dead or too busy supporting his rebels to fight. Considering he rode the whole way out here just to support Vera, that seemed like a sign that the battle wasn’t turning in our favour.

  I watched Vera’s face, wanting to shout out to her but unable to move so much as my tongue. I wasn’t out of breath, able to go without for a substantial time what with my endurance as high as it was. The lack of a heartbeat would kill me far quicker though, I knew. My enhanced body meant it would not be the handful of moments that it was for a regular classless human, but it would not be measured in bells either, by any means.

  The mage was right – even were the rebels to defeat her soldiers, by the time they appeared to support Vera, we would already be dead. Sadrianna was feeding power to her spear, the head glowing ever brighter with that strange heat-haze shimmer to it, but it was held out to one side, too far to cut through the threads of mana binding her currently. Jacyntha was likewise flaring brighter with each moment, the arms exploding once more from her back to rip and tear at the magical restraints binding her but making little visible progress.

  Vera’s face began to change though. The noises of battle weren’t changing behind me. No cheers or cries of victory, just the same screaming, cursing, yelling mess of men and women stubbornly doing what they had drilled a hundred times prior and unable to accept the consequences as they occurred. But Vera now grinned.

  It was a ghastly expression on her face, covered in blood and grime as it was, but I recognised a look of grim satisfaction when I saw one. Something had changed.

  I couldn’t see what for long moments. It felt like an eternity passed as Vera just stared at the soldiers behind me, watching something neither I nor the mage could see, until the mage clearly decided she needed to see what was happening. She tensed her shoulders, and then heaved, spinning around in a circle to turn towards her soldiers, Vera now standing behind and below her, rather than in front.

  Nothing else about our positions changed, but I had hoped that perhaps the movement would give Vera a chance to strike. It didn’t though, and the mage hovered a meter or two off the ground with us held fast within her magical grip.

  Now facing the battle, I could finally see what Vera had noticed. The rebels fought a losing battle against a numerically superior foe, one better armed and armoured, and seemingly more experienced and disciplined. However, they fought with a startling courage, launching themselves against solid lines and clambering over shields to slash and stab into the ranks below, taking damage themselves – sometimes lethal – but always harrying the lines and giving them no chance to breathe.

  Fandar rode up and down the line, his bow a constant source of danger for the defending soldiers, and likely the main reason that rebel casualties had been relatively low. Whenever a rebel seemed to over-extend, at risk of being pulled over the first line and away from their fellows, a rain of arrows, magical explosions and general chaos would soon find its way there, and it seemed the soldiers had settled into a slow defensive pace, waiting for their leader to defeat us and return to them to finish the battle.

  There was a single person that stood out among the white and black armoured fighters, one that wore the garb of neither and carried themselves unlike either side. I heard him before I saw him, a hacking, unnatural sound that was more akin to the death throes of a drunkard than a man that had spent decades in physical training at the least. Nevertheless, I recognised the voice and felt my hope return. Then I saw him, and that hope withered slightly.

  Jorge stumbled drunkenly through the line of soldiers, barely able to stand. He leaned on a staff of some kind, wheezing every few steps before continuing on. He looked…old. His single long braid now completely grey, verging on white, his bushy eyebrows frosted at their tips and the crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes now colonising the whole of his face.

  He had somehow forced himself into the ranks of white-armoured soldiers, and I saw the bodies of two dead rebels behind him, giving me a hint as to how he’d broken through. How they had died and he had survived I had no idea, as he looked more like a corpse than the two dead bodies behind him. Even as I watched, a soldier in front of him – their back to me – raised a sword and charged him. He lurched to one side, the motion awkward, but he did manage to avoid the strike, the soldier tripping over his back leg from where Jorge had moved.

  It was startlingly lucky, though the impact on his leg almost knocked Jorge over. He managed to turn to fall into a spin, and avoided a spear tip speeding his way by mere inches. He steadied himself on the staff before kicking the bottom of it outwards. I realised it was the broken haft of a spear he must have recovered from the battlefield as the jagged edge flicked out and opened the throat of the spearman as Jorge wobbled his way forwards.

  He proceeded in this manner for many breaths, barely avoiding death a dozen times by a hair’s breadth, seemingly by pure luck. As he made it through the ranks of soldiers though, moving slower than all of them but somehow avoiding any significant damage and dealing a fair amount of death and carnage himself with a broken weapon, I realised that there must be more to it.

  He seemed to see everything, reacting even as circumstances appeared, and while his body was slower and weaker than everyone he faced, he seemed to have a preternatural sense as to where his weapon needed to be to end a life as quickly and cleanly as possible. No attacks glanced off armour, no parries pushed him back. In fact, he seemed to glide through the company, weaving and stumbling his way around, beneath, and through the disciplined soldiers and turning them into drunken half-wits, even while looking like one himself.

  As my head began to pound and vision darken at the edges from a lack of air, he stepped onto the empty field between the back of the company and the battle between Vera and the mage that we had found ourselves caught up in.

  He moved slowly; step, squelch, step, squelch, as his impromptu walking stick poked through the sucking mud below. The mage screamed in irritation, but Vera held tight, preventing her from moving, and still Jorge came forwards.

  Each step was laboured, and his breathing was audible from here, but moment by moment he crossed the open ground to stand before the woman in white robes, arms splayed to either side as she hovered in the air before him. I expected him to say something, to give some witticism in his thick accent, to smirk and offer a laugh before the end.

  But Jorge just looked up into the mage’s deep cowl. Whatever he saw, it made him sigh wearily.

  “I’m sorry, lass,” he said to Vera, holding her gaze for a moment even as he lifted the spear from the floor. “Glad I got to witness it before the end though. Grieve for me, aye?”

  Then he lifted the broken spear in one hand and extended it towards the mage. He held her gaze, watching her face as he hefted the jagged wooden weapon, painted with the blood of her own soldiers. He took a deep breath, and then threw.

  I’d like to say it was a perfect cast, technically flawless and something I could study in my mind’s eye with hope of one day replicating , but in reality, it was a shitty throw. He lacked the strength and grace for anything beautiful, and in truth it looked more like one of the many casts with a spear I had done when first learning to wield the weapon. Nevertheless, the weapon flew true.

  The mage screamed and dropped her arms, threads vanishing as she fell through the air, and I watched the spear sail over her head. She had given up her control to save her own life, but she must have known she could not escape.

  Her arms dropped, but not without purpose – instead, they now pointed at the weakened form of Jorge standing before her. The air above him shattered, some insubstantial barrier breaking apart with a tinkling of glass, and then he fell to the ground limply even as she fell through the air.

  When the mage reached the ground, Vera was there to catch her, and in the next moment she was wrapped in a bear-hug by the physically strongest woman I’d ever seen. Vera wrapped arms stronger than the mage’s magic around her and hoisted her into the air.

  The mage’s scream turned into a choked gurgle as ribs were crushed and lungs pierced by shards of bone. Vera bunched her great legs, and then, no longer encumbered by magical restraints, she exploded into the air. She must have leapt a hundred feet directly up….and then she immolated.

  A blinding flash as bright as a hundred suns lit up the sky above, overwhelming the golden dawn and replacing it with spotty after images of a white corona that I blinked away. The boom was loud enough to rattle teeth in my skull, and there was not a single soul on the battlefield around us that hadn’t stopped to stare at the conflagration.

  Vera fell from the sky like a comet amidst a cloud of ash, thudding into the earth with hands to the floor and one knee raised. She stood to her impressive height afterwards, and turned a stern glare to the white-armoured soldiers that had just watched her kill their leader.

  Suffice it to say, the battle for Castle Ryonic, and the entirety of the Western Marchlands, was over.