Story:Kings of Strife/Part 34

Part Thirty-Four
“You’ve changed,” said the woman who was once Maria Zorphan. She sat in a faded oaken throne, legs crossed and hands folded on her lap. Her throne was but one of many once-glorious furniture constructs in the old forest shack she was sitting in.

Silverius had been following her for days now. After chasing her through the city of Empiria, the two of them effortlessly cutting through any leftover ground resistance that sought to hinder them, Silverius followed her through the great forest west of Empiria and to this location, which appeared to be like an unobtrusive temple built right in between the grove of tall trees. They had been traveling nonstop, his footsteps never falling too far behind hers. The constant travel had been incredibly harsh on Silverius’ already tense body – he struggled to breathe while running, and had long ago lost all feeling of pain before the constant pangs of hunger – but he would not rest until his job was completed. Inside the temple, he had found the Chosen Knight, his enemy, sitting and watching him. The time had finally come.

“No,” replied Silverius as he removed his gunblade from his belt and raised it in a lackluster fighting stance in front of him. All thoughts of pain or exhaustion gave way to adrenaline and anger. Just as before, his eyes – reverted to their basic black color to preserve his energy - looked upon her with complete disdain. “It’s you who has changed. But that is meaningless now.”

“I have returned to my true self. My true abilities. My true power. Knowing this, and having seen it firsthand, you would still raise your blade against me?” The Chosen Knight, as she was now known, chuckled and batted her eyes at the warrior before her. As she did so, her large dark eyes seemed to flash before changing colors and glowing with a luminescent orange hue. “No human can stand before the Eyes of the Tyrant. I thought I taught you that back in Empiria, but it’s clear that I was much too lax on you. How persistent you first-cycles are!”

“If I remember correctly, you escaped after I turned the tables.” Silverius did not move, but kept his blade pointed straight to the Chosen Knight’s body. “Don’t underestimate what I can see. You won’t fool me again.”

“How do you expect me to take you seriously,” the Chosen Knight whispered, “when you’ve been blind to the real world all this time?” She had suddenly disappeared from her seat and reappeared next to Silverius with her back turned to the chair. She slyly turned her head to look upon Silverius’ face.

To her wonder, he was not looking at her with surprise or awe, nor did he react to the taunt and apparent teleportation besides an involuntary twitch at the sudden movement. She stood to the left of him, and as he turned to meet her gaze, the pupil of his left eye blinked into a bright orange shade, just as hers did. She recoiled in surprise.

“What I saw before,” Silverius started, “the world that I thought I was seeing, meant nothing. I was always blind, that much is true. But you were the one who forced me to open my eyes and see the world for what it really is – and that’s what awakened this power you see before you.” Silverius’ cheek throbbed as his eye boasted the same Eye of the Tyrant that the Chosen Knight did, and veins bulged slightly beneath his skin on the left side of his face. His demeanor did not flinch in the slightest. “Now, the things that I cannot see simply do not exist. I know that now.”

The Chosen Knight composed herself and chuckled before stepping backwards. “Tell me, then – what is it that you can see, now that you have that imitation of power under your grasp? That’s all it is, after all. An imitation.”

“I see the truth. My destiny… My hands. Stained with your blood, and the blood of every other living thing on this planet.”

“Is that so?” She giggled childishly before beginning to move her arms. Beneath the dark green cloak she still wore, a set of black armor pieces were visibly resting on her shoulders. As she moved her arms, the cloak parted and revealed that she was wearing a long-sleeve black shirt and short matching shorts, punctuated by dark violet highlights in both. She wore tall violet combat boots, and a golden crown atop her forehead that allowed her curly hair to be styled luxuriously as it ran down her back. She was beautiful and shapely built, grown into her thin body with much more confidence than Maria ever sported, but all Silverius could ever see in her was a painful reminder of his failures. “I apologize for the delay,” she cooed, “but I didn’t find you worth my time before. But now that you’ve come all this way to battle me again, I see I was mistaken. Come, boy, and make that dream of yours a reality.”

She was unarmed and had her arms raised, making her an easy target, but Silverius wasn’t taken aback in the slightest by this. He took the opportunity as one that wouldn’t arise itself again, and with an incredibly quick beastly pounce, he stabbed his blade forward, aimed at the Knight’s throat. Before he could make impact, a flash of light glinted from beneath the woman’s cape, and Silverius lowered his blade’s trajectory in an arc. The weapon met resistance, and the Chosen Knight chuckled again as her knife was held stationary by Silverius’ parry.

No other words were exchanged, for at this point both of them were completely focused on the battle. The Chosen Knight’s free left hand went behind her back and retrieved a long arrowhead, which she thrust at Silverius, but he backed away from the attack with the intent of letting her falter. He was mistaken, as she took the opportunity to shift her weight and threw the arrowhead right at his face.

His eye throbbed once again as its power activated themselves once again. Now that he had manually activated its powers, Silverius was able to consciously realize what the Tyrant’s Eye had gifted him and was able to comprehend it before acting accordingly. His brain processed the images that the Eye produced many times faster than those given by a normal eye’s vision, so much so that to his mind it felt as if time was slowing down, and he saw the arrow flying through the air towards him as a series of hyper-imposed images. The man ducked and weaved out of the way, successfully moving out of the trajectory of the arrow’s flight and backing away from the Knight. With the threat averted, the emphasis on his powerful left eye faded.

What had initially manifested as boosted reflexes, Silverius had noticed, was just the beginning of the Crystal’s gifts. Once he had become able to control the Eye of the Tyrant, as Vik and the Chosen Knight called it, and didn’t succumb to the berserker mode that it initially brought out of him, its powers were his to manipulate at will. That would be what would win the fight for him.

Silverius closed the distance between the two once again and jumped into the air with a kick towards the Chosen Knight. As he did so, he activated the Eye of the Tyrant once again, feeling the blood rush through his cheeks with a hint of pain, in preparation for the inevitable counterattack the Knight would launch.

However, the ability did not activate, and time continued to flow as normal for him.

Stunned by the surprise, Silverius did not anticipate the Knight’s counterattack and was unable to do anything against it. She misdirected his airborne momentum by hitting his foot with her forearm, successfully causing him to fly towards a nearby wall, where he crumpled to the ground for a second before standing with a pant.

“How… How could I…”

“How could you not see what I was doing, you ask?” The inquisition was another whispered statement from the raven-haired woman who had again appeared right next to Silverius’ person. This time he jumped – not from her sudden movements, but for the fact that he did not see it happen even with his Tyrant’s Eye activated.

The Chosen Knight chortled and did not move as Silverius stepped backwards and raised his blade at her again. “Is that all the strength you have acquired? And here I was beginning to believe you are a threat.” She looked at Silverius, right in his eyes, and for the first time he realized that, unlike him, both of her eyes were glowing with the Tyrant’s Eye. “I’ve told you already, First Cycle. Your imitation powers will never defeat me. Even a Tyrant can never subjugate his superior, which means your puny abilities cannot foresee what I will do, because my vision trumps yours. Two eyes are better than one. Understand?”

Silverius’ hand shook as his weapon faltered. He stepped back again, shaking his head roughly. “No… That’s impossible.”

“And what I can do doesn’t end there, human.” Her smile darkened, and the woman raised her hands to her sides once again as she looked up to the ceiling with a cunning smile. “With these eyes of mine, I can draw you into the dominion of imagination itself. Even your feeble mind must bow before me!”

Silverius blinked, and she disappeared. He was no longer standing near the wall with dirt and dust stained on his clothes. With a glance around him, he saw that he had returned to where he was when the Chosen Knight had started to speak. Indeed, she still sat on the wooden throne, her legs crossed and hands folded. Unlike before, where she simply looked down on him with disinterest, her eyes were still blazing with energy and her smile was the same as it was moments ago.

Their battle had never happened, Silverius realized. Suddenly her teleportation made sense; it must have been some side effect of whatever it was she did to him. His expression darkened as he activated his Tyrant’s Eye – for real this time.

“The ability to induce illusion and hallucination,” he muttered. “That’s what your Crystal has gifted you with.” And he hadn’t been able to see it because she had started it before he could activate his own artifact-gifted vision, he reasoned. It looked like he would have to keep it active just to stand a chance at beating her, even if it didn’t allow him to predict her movements.

“Yes, that’s correct,” she responded. The Chosen Knight stood with a flip of her dark hair and an equally black smirk. “An imaginary gallery that only I look upon with apatheticism – that is what I can subjugate those beneath me into. But, as I said, it looks like I won’t be able to end this that easily, will I?”

“Those visions won’t work on me again. I already told you,” Silverius growled, “that what I see with this eye is the truth. You have already brought me down to nothing, and now all I can see is my retaliation. Prepare yourself.” He raised his blade once again, this time with unshaking hands and a dark, determined expression. His cheek throbbed with energy.

“Let me ask you something before we start,” purred the Knight. She turned slightly, running her hands on the armrest of the seat she was previously residing in. “What is it that motivates you to fight us so strongly? L9 told me that you were a tenacious warrior, and that it was only luck that has kept you alive for so long. But even when your life has been spared, still you scurry back to our feet each and every time, only to be squashed once again. What drives you? What could you possibly have to fight about? Would defeating us and resisting the fate of humanity really make you that happy?”

“No. I already told you that I have nothing. You caused that to surface, but that void been within me my whole life. I was a fool, a blind fool, but now my eyes are open and I see the truth of my life and of the world. No, I am not happy… I cannot be happy, and I never will be. I have nothing. I have nothing to lose and nothing to gain. That emptiness is all that makes up my being… and I cannot truly live until I spread that emptiness to everything around me. Until there is nothing in you, or me, or anything… Life has no meaning for me.”

The Knight looked at him with curiosity for a second before her eyes narrowed and she crossed her arms. “What you’re saying makes no sense. If such a thing as nothingness truly existed in this world, it wouldn’t be something you bring about; it would be something that must be subjugated, and brought under the control of humanity, or it would swallow them up. Much like nature itself, and technology, or even magic… and much like we in Ouroboros will do to humanity itself. Your nonsense contradicts itself in its ignorance; for if you truly were made of nothingness, how would you have a goal at all? Why would you not terminate your own existence in a fit of despair the moment you came upon true self-awareness?”

A hint of a smile curled on Silverius’ lips, but his eyes still glistened with a dead light. “The truth is… I don’t deserve any other type of fulfillment. The man who gave me life died by my own hand. My would-be mentor and surrogate father, when he saw firsthand the type of person I am, tried to kill me – only to be killed by me. A certain person I once cared about told me to be happy, and to live a life that fulfills my goals. All she really wanted was for me to find my happiness; I know that now. But she died because of my actions as well, and in front of me stands an imposter of her memory who claims to know my fate. That’s why you’re wrong – you know nothing about my past, or my future.”

The Knight smiled. “You said your future is to retaliate for your sins and spread nothingness, but now you say that you live to pursue happiness. Is that right? You live for the memory of that vision, that shadow of a life?”

“Yes… She told me to be happy. That’s what I’ll do. I can’t achieve joy, or true contentment, but if being empty nothingness, the fate that is given to us in the universe and taken when we are born, isn’t true happiness… then what is?”

The Chosen Knight grimaced at his answer, but appeared satisfied with it when she did not press the issue further. Stepping down gracefully from the steps that lead up to her chair, she looked Silverius up and down before holding his eye contact. “Before we get started, you should know something about my abilities. The Reality of the Tyrant doesn’t just enable me to instill illusions to those weaker than I,” she revealed. Her sentence paused as she raised her arms into the air. The air around her hands began to shimmer as if waving with heat, and the atmosphere itself became colored with darkness. Before he knew it, Silverius realized that the air behind and above her was shimmering with the same spiraling dark circles that floated in front of her hands.

“You will never defeat me, warrior, because what your eyes allow you to see is the truth. That is all you can ever do – observe.” Silverius backed up as the twinkling air began to become more and more tangible. The Chosen Knight only smirked at his uncertainty. “But where you can only see, I can predict – create – and command. What I see is not the truth; I create the truth.”

Just then, like they were gates to an alternate reality, the dark circles in the air seemed to open, pulling the very atmosphere apart, and from these slim rifts slowly emerged pointed violet blades, made of the same ethereal glowing darkness as the gates themselves. These blades ranged from long to thin, short to long, but all of them looked exactly the same and moved at the same speeds out of whichever realm they came from. When every single weapon had entered reality, the final two unopened rifts above the Knight’s hands opened, spitting forth a long, wickedly curved ethereal blade and a hefty looking longbow, both of which she grabbed. As she did so and closed her hands, all the dark openings disappeared, but the weapons remained, and all of them pointed right towards Silverius.

“What you see before you is the sword of anguish and the arrow of subjugation. If you can truly see the real world with that eye of yours, then I imagine you’ll have a wonderful time watching as your existence fades away as slowly as I wish it.” The Knight smiled harshly, her eyes glistening with merciless disdain, and she pointed her blade at Silverius. At this command, the floating weapons cut through the air, all aiming to impale themselves in his body.

The mercenary couldn’t activate his Tyrant’s Eye ability fast enough. Before, when the Knight had thrown the arrowhead at him in her illusion world, he had been able to foresee where it would hit him and dodge accordingly; if that had worked, he figured, then this situation was simply a ramped up version of that moment, and he was correct. The ethereal blades, although created by the Chosen’s Tyrant powers, were individual objects that existed out of her hands, meaning that he could see them.

There was no way he would be able to dodge the hundreds of incoming weapons, even with his Eye showing him where exactly they would land, but he would be able to parry them. Moving as fast as he possibly could, the mercenary swiped and slashed away the knives and blades as they neared him, mostly hitting more than one in a single attack. Time slowed for his consciousness as his Eye worked its magic, but even with this buff in his favor, getting past every single weapon unharmed would be a herculean feat. He blocked and dodged with the best of his ability for all of a couple seconds as the weapons moved faster than the untrained eye could see.

Before he knew it, the weapons had all fallen, and he remained where he stood with a couple scratches and a small knife or two embedded in his arms. His foresight disappeared once the projectiles were all deflected, but not even an instant was given to him of rest before he sensed another threat to his life.

Looking up with a quick turn of the head, he saw the Chosen Knight airborne, mere meters away from his presence, with her bow held behind her and her sword raised in the air and rushing downward to cut him. Silverius’ muscles tightened into overdrive as he quickly swung his sword around in front of him in a crude attempt to block the attack. Sparks flew from his weapon at the power of the impact. The Chosen Knight, propelled from her jump into the air, managed to push him back a few steps but failed to overpower him at the moment. That much was clear to both of them, and once her initial strike was blocked, she stepped back before rushing in with another stab aimed at his chest.

Augmented with only his innate reflexes, Silverius held his own blocking the girl’s strikes, and the two were engaged in a vicious battle of ruthless sword strikes at one another for a solid amount of time before she stepped back and lithely danced away from the clash. The mercenary raised his blade and aimed it at her, his index finger immediately moving to the trigger on the sword with intentions to shoot. It was only then he remembered that what he held was just a normal longsword. His gunblade was long gone.

Taking advantage of his moment’s mistake, the Chosen Knight had raised her left hand and pointed her ethereal bow right back at Silverius. Dark circles flared up behind her again and they opened much quicker this time; from their depths flew out another weapon barrage, this time a horizontal rain of arrows as if her opaque bow had fired them all at the same time.

Silverius blocked the attacks as best he could with the same foresight he had exhibited earlier, but this time the Chosen Knight darted from the side and kicked him in the side right after the arrow shower had completed. He noticed her moving to his flank, and raised his free arm to block the attack, but was too slow and ended up receiving her kick right in his bicep muscle. The attack was extremely strong, and blasted Silverius right through the walls of the structurally weak building they were battling in.

Dust settled over the area as the duel paused for an instant, and the downed Silverius groaned as he slowly pushed himself off the ground. His back ached from the impact of bursting through the walls, even if they were constructed of an old and weak wood subsidiary, and his left arm was almost completely numb. He ignored the pain as he looked up at the building he had been ejected from, where the Chosen Knight’s silhouette was visible among the dust. She wasn’t attacking him for now, but he still had to keep his guard up.

Before he could plan his next move, a sudden throb of pain coursed through Silverius’ head and he yelped as he grasped his head. What felt like a sudden migraine pulsed in his brain, and his painful left eye began to involuntarily cry.

“I told you, didn’t I?” The Chosen Knight’s voice was much closer than he anticipated, but the throbbing was too strong in the mercenary’s body for him to even recoil in surprise. Still, his muscles tensed up as tightly as they could, especially as the woman walked ever closer to him. “Your handling of the power is admirable, but flawed. The human body has grown weak and unaccustomed to the benefits of magic; manipulating it is a surefire way to cause your body to cease functioning entirely.”

Silverius’ hands shook as he looked up at the woman who stood beside him. His vision began to blur and he could barely speak from the sudden migraine, and before he knew it, the Tyrant’s Eye faded. He squinted and saw double of the Chosen; the uneven degradation of his sight was jarring and made his head hurt more.

The Chosen Knight’s left hand opened, and the bow she was still holding onto disappeared into a dark mist. Her mouth tightened into a frown as her now free hand, slender and graceful, cupped the side of her enemy’s face. Her bright eyes, unstrained from the power she held, gazed deep into Silverius’ very soul.

“Tell me, child.” Silverius struggled to look away from her, to move and attack her with his weapon while she was too close to dodge, but with the disappearance of his ocular ability, all of his energy had been sapped from his body. She had him in her hands, literally, and he was hers to defeat as she saw fit. “Why do you claim to know anything about me or my organization? Are you not a simple criminal who has held onto the Crystal for far too long?”

Silverius’ jaw clenched tightly, as did his fists, but with effort he managed to open it and reply with gritted teeth. “What I remember… The girl that I loved… She’s dead now, if she ever lived. I’ve accepted that. I know I spent time with you, and I know that we grew to care about each other. That organization of yours erased those memories, and the fact that you don’t believe me proves that point.” The Chosen’s eyebrows furrowed, but she said nothing. Silverius continued. “I was a criminal… but I’ve gone beyond that now. The Crystal has given me the chance to right my wrongs. That’s what I will use with the power its given me.” His eyes had long since dried after his headache began to subside a bit, but now he began to silently weep as he remembered the brief time he had spent with Maria and the way she had made him feel. His lower lip quivered with emotion, but once more he endured this heartache and pushed them away in his defiant attitude.

“Your nonsense is consistent, if anything. But, answer me one more inquisition – what makes you think that these ambitions of yours are within reach, or even plausible, when I hold your very life in my hands, even as we speak?”

Now it was Silverius’ turn to chuckle. “I know you won’t kill me because I’ve seen it. It’s the truth. And besides… If you really wanted to kill me, you’d have done so already instead of asked my rationale for challenging you. The fact that I’m still breathing tells me more than anything that the Maria I knew – the peaceful, nature-loving girl who loathed to take a life – is still in there, deep within you, somewhere. And once I destroy everything… Once that damned Ouroboros is eradicated, and this world is wiped clean, by my blade… I’ll bring her back, even if it means killing you. Even if it means I have to die, as well. She deserves that… She deserves the world. That is also the truth.”

The Chosen Knight’s face, for the first time, devolved into an angry glare. Her grip on Silverius’ face tightened, smooshing his cheeks together slightly, but his smirk remained and her sword hand continued to hesitate. She looked him right in his eyes. “That’s all well and good,” she sputtered, “but can you really still see the truth with those eyes of yours?”

Silverius’ face fell and his eyes widened by a sudden stimulus. A second later, his body convulsed and his eyes rolled to the back of his head before he went limp and unconscious. She dropped him with distaste and his body fell unceremoniously to the ground. “Without your Eye of the Tyrant, you cannot resist an illusion I imbue in your consciousness, and there is no escaping my restraints.” Inducing unconsciousness from a particularly scarring illusion had been an easy feat for her.

But… why did she knock him unconscious instead of killing him? The Chosen Knight was unable to answer this for herself as she looked down at her hands. The dark ethereal sword was still gripped tightly in her right hand, but it was slightly shaking. She was hesitating. With a shake of her head and a frustrated groan, the blade disappeared and she held her hands to her head.

The headaches were starting to return, she noted with a hint of irritation. Ever since she had awoken again back in Shorekeep, during her and L9’s battle with Silverius and his friend, the headaches had been a regular occurrence that she had not been able to explain. They just didn’t make sense.

One of the benefits of being a Serpent Knight of Ouroboros was the fact that they simply did not get ill. This was a guarantee that the Leader had given to them all, and what he guaranteed was taken as an unshakable law of reality. His word was never wrong, they all knew, and what he said inevitably came to pass.

But that was beginning to happen less and less. The Leader had not predicted the Chosen Knight’s memories being lost, nor had he known why they had happened in the first place – either that, or he did not want her to know. None of the other Knights spoke to her about it, even when asked, and there were few who could resist her when she wanted answers. The Leader had told her that she would be confronted by Silverius, and that he would lose to her in battle even though the Crystal had been continually boosting his strength for the months he had held onto it, but she had been told that she killed him easily. The Crystal of Wind was supposed to return with her back to the Leader, where she would be rewarded and a road block removed.

So why hadn’t she been able to kill him? Why did she hesitate? Could the world be proceeding differently from what the Leader foretold?

That thought was not only impossible for her to imagine but also incredibly worrying. Despite all this, what was truly scary was that it was true. The whole damned thing was true – Silverius’ boasts and her hesitancy both. It angered her beyond belief that she not only didn’t want to kill the man, but couldn’t. Her body just didn’t respond when it came to dealing the final blow to the immobile enemy. Not only that, but she was unable to force herself to take his Crystal back, either.

There was only one explanation for this, and it troubled her to think about what it meant. Her memory loss and subsequent renewal had something to do with Silverius’ claims of knowing her despite his absence in her known memory. He must have gotten close to her, kidnapped her even, when she was in an amnesiac state, and now he was acting out of a flawed sort of reverse kidnapping infatuation. It made sense; he claimed to have been with “Maria” for two months at most, and according to the little amount of information on her condition that she had been able to pry from her fellow Knights, the memory loss and her disappearance had taken place through at least two months of time. But still, Silverius was a maniac, and slaying him would not only protect herself but directly benefit the Leader’s plans.

Even with this reasoning, she could not kill him.

She turned away from the man and started to walk away, her brow wrinkled in thought. The wind began to pick up around her, she realized, and a chill ran through her body; her skin tingled; the sky seemed to get darker. The Chosen Knight’s mind swam, her stomach fell, and she felt a presence. Slowly, she turned.

Silverius was standing where he was, eyes barely open as if he had just awoken from a deep sleep, and he was staring right at her with unrelenting fury. His entire body seemed to twitch and shake, as if he were tightly flexing every muscle. The wind noticeably began to pick up in the area, visibly shaking the trees in the forest they stood in. Unlike before, both of Silverius’ eyes shone with golden artificial light.

“But… That’s impossible,” muttered the Knight as she observed the man in front of her. She was frozen in her spot, unable to look away from Silverius’ eyes. They were just like hers, both glowing with the power of the Tyrant. “You’re just a first cycle… and to break out of my illusion…” She blinked over and over again, convinced that what was in front of her was a dream, a hallucination, something explainable, but what stood in front of her was completely real.

Silverius tightened his jaw, clenched his eyes shut before snapping them open again, and resolutely closed his hands into fists. “I told you,” he said through grit teeth, “that I saw my hands stained with your blood. That is the truth, and I will make it so.”

“To break out of my illusions… Even after falling unconscious… And to manifest both Eyes…!” As she spoke, the veins around Silverius’ eyes became more prominent and blood-stained tears discharged from his eyes. The Chosen Knight’s hands wrapped around herself involuntarily as the air chilled her. Dirt and debris from around the two began to be swept up in the spontaneous breeze, staining the wind with specks of darkness.

The Knight willed herself to move – to summon her weapons again and finish off the obviously drained enemy in front of her – but the synapses in her body stubbornly resisted. Fear had taken over, fear of the unknown and the irrational, and fear of being destroyed. The Knight had never known this fear – it was completely new to her – and she wanted only to crawl away from it. How, she kept asking herself, how could such a weak person be persistent enough to defy evolution, the weakness of the body, and biological limits themselves?!

“Because,” Silverius grunted – startling the Chosen, for she had not vocalized the question her mind grappled with – “I loved her.” He raised his right hand to the sky, his muscles visibly pulsing and flexing, and before Maria’s eyes, the wind began to blow around him. This was not a harmless breeze that she witnessed. The air darkened to a state in which it was evasively visible and wrapped around him in a wide circle, almost as if shielding him. As he raised his arm, the winds spiraled up his body and followed his arm’s direction to wind upwards. With the widest wind at his feet and the skinny spire at the tip of his fingers, what surrounded Silverius appeared to be an upside down tornado.

And then, so quickly that she hardly perceived it, the wind changed; shifted; hardened, even. It gained the same dark, ethereal qualities of her summoned weapons – became tangible and gained dimension. Around his arm the wind continued to spiral about turbulently, but it had a visible quality that likened it to a sword.

The Chosen Knight would have fallen to her knees if she was faint of heart when she began to comprehend that which was before her. Her mind raced as she remembered that Silverius had stolen the Crystal of Wind and still had possession of it. Not only did it give him the Eyes of the Tyrant, as all Crystals did, but it had gifted him command of even the tempests themselves – much like her own Crystal of Dreams had given her command over reality and illusions.

In other words, because this was a Crystal-gifted ability to one with both Eyes of the Tyrant, it would be impossible for the Chosen Knight to evade it with her foresight, and the long blade of wind did not look like something she wanted to be attacked with.

Her body seemed to immediately be filled with adrenaline. She jumped forward and to the side with the intent of getting too close to Silverius to be hurt with his cumbersome attack. As soon as she started to move, both of them still holding eye contact with each other and completely aware of the other’s movements, Silverius lowered his arm and with it, the tempest blade. The wind storm around the two had long began to fill the air with loud noises and rustling, and as he brought the natural weapon down, the atmosphere was torn apart and produced a sound similar to a clap of thunder.

The Chosen Knight made the right choice, for the dropping of the wind blade just managed to miss her darting body, and in her place it went right into the earth that she had just stepped away from. Seeing that Silverius was completely open and unarmed at this point, she darted from her landing point about two feet away and pounced towards him with her fist raised. Just as she was mere inches away from him, he looked right at her and startled the woman with the coldness of his eyes.

It was then that she remembered the wind that had been surrounding Silverius, and she was projected right into it as he started to stand up from his lunge. The atmospheric barrier, despite its elusive appearance, was hard enough to smack her in her face as she landed on it and the impact sent her crashing to the ground in front of him.

Not only was she hurt from the hard block, but she noticed within seconds that the impact points were cut as well as bruised. The wind had to have been moving so quickly that the instant she touched it, tiny cuts all along her arms and nose opened up. She had been pushed back to the ground behind her, and when she looked down quickly, she noted with horror that the tempest blade had ripped the earth apart and driven into it a ditch almost a foot in depth. If it had even grazed her body, she would have been bisected at best and disintegrated at worst.

She lay on the ground, paralyzed with fear and quickly rising pain, and looked up through squinted eyes. Silverius stood, looking down on her with the tempest swirling around him and his eyes full of cold, lifeless light. The tears falling down his face had begun to mix with blood, and thanks to the shadows encompassed on his face from his loose hair, he looked grisly and incredibly terrifying.

The Chosen Knight shook once again with fear as Silverius smiled and lifted his right hand again, this time limply pointing it straight to her heart. His intent was clear to both of them, as was the outcome; a sword of wind manifested in such a close range would pierce right through her body and rip it to shreds. The air shimmered; the wind howled; the Chosen Knight couldn’t close her eyes, was unable to look away, even as she watched death smile at its victory.

Silverius blinked, and his Tyrant’s Eyes disappeared. His arm dropped, limp, and the wind fell to a quiet hum instantly. The breeze ceased to exist and the man fell to the ground without any resistance whatsoever. Around them, small rocks, leaves, and dirt particles dropped to the ground, the force having given them force absconding within seconds.

What the Chosen Knight did next was completely out of her control. She did not understand why she did so, nor what possible purpose it served, but her body acted nonetheless. Rushing forward and turning Silverius on his back, she slapped his face and forced open his eye sockets, moving as fast as she could before she lost him to unconsciousness. The man’s pupils darted about slowly and sluggishly, clearly moving closer and closer to dazed absence, but she locked on them with her golden Eyes of the Tyrant and he squinted in her vision.

She instilled him with no illusions this time, but only flooded his senses with as explosive and clear a signal as she could. There was only a single word for her to communicate to him, but she overloaded his consciousness of it, so much so that it would be a wonder if he did not wake up and remember the word for the rest of his life.

She had only one word to tell him, one word for him to remember, and after she said it she left. Her body shook without reason; she had acted without reason; she was absconding without his head, still without reason. The Chosen Knight, the Serpent Knight of Ouroboros most known for her use of reason, cold calculations, and pure power in battle next to the Lance Knight, had been stricken with illogicality and had fled in the face of the enemy. She knew not whether this would be solved by the time she met Silverius again – had no way of knowing, in fact – but she had told him where to find her again, regardless.

“Icarun.”

...End of Part Thirty-Four.

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