Chapter 200 - Behind the Locked Door IV

There was a brief pause as the two parties stared each other down. Taken aback by the hulking beast’s sudden appearance, the warriors immediately drew their weapons and prepared for a confrontation. After a moment of consideration, Claire decided to lean into the misunderstanding. She stood tall, obscured the encampment with her tail and warned them with a snarl—all actions that could easily be justified as necessary precautions. She left it to the Cadrian warriors to follow through on their training, to prioritise their safety by striking without first voicing their questions. And disappoint the ascended lyrkress the pair did not.

Their demeanor changed as they realised that the portal had closed behind them. One of the two scouts readied his spear, loosed a battlecry, and charged in a straight line, while the other took the opportunity to step back and blend into the background. It was a well-practiced tactic employed by two-man cells of all experience levels. One would distract her and stall for time, while the other would flee the battlefield and report their discoveries to their superior.

Claire did not fall for the trick so easily. Her eyes glowed in the darkness as she looked away from the distraction. Magic coursed through her circuits, flooding them with just enough power to paralyze the escapee and freeze his eyes. In just a split second, he went from a potential loose end to an easy target, a guaranteed casualty of the icy beam she fired from her jaw.

It was no breath attack, just a basic spell cast in Headhydra’s image. But backed by a five digit wisdom stat, its raw power was immediately apparent. The cave fell a full five degrees as soon as she opened her mouth, with its temperature only plummeting further when the spell emerged from within it. Natalya and Sylvia both shivered, even though one was hidden beneath a heavy blanket, and the other nested in the lyrkress’ mane.

The aggressors were undeterred. To cover for his frozen ally, the fully functional warrior stepped in the way of the magical blast. He dug his feet into the ground with a guttural grunt and neutralised it with his shield. A familiar skill was used to bolster his defenses. He created from the buckler on his arm a much larger echo, a magical phantom to deflect her attack. It was an ability that came alongside many a knight class, a defensive reinforcement specialised in deflection of the magical variety. But his spirit, the ability score representing his resistance to magic, was not high enough to overcome her raw power. The magical barrier shattered after a brief moment of impact and left his body exposed.

When subjected to the beam, his shield arm froze, its blood vessels violently rupturing as the cold liquid expanded. And yet, he stood firm. Breaking off his own frozen limb with his spear, he grew another, retrieved his buckler, and dusted the frost off of his unshaven beard. Unlike his faulty barrier and his brittle body, the enchanted shield was unbroken. It had suffered only a few splinters upon its seams. The runes engraved into its steel boss reinforced its wooden frame and rendered it many times tougher than it had any right to be.

While the shielder took a moment to recover, Claire lifted Boris with her tail and took aim at his unmoving ally. Though given no explicit instructions, the lizard knew exactly what to do. He closed his eyes and transformed from an iguana to a serrated dart in less than a tenth of a second. Like an arrow, he flew when she released him. His blade tore straight through the plate armour in his path and mutilated the warrior’s gut. With a twist of the frame, he carved the centaur’s lower body apart, emerging out the other end with all the man’s horsey entrails in tow. He transformed again when he hit the wall, dislodging his nose and scurrying back towards his master, his metallic scales still covered in a glistening sheet of red.

Against anything but a trained Cadrian knight, it would have been a fatal blow. The warrior, however, did not allow his life to end. He didn’t even grit his teeth as he ordered his body to regenerate and bore with the intense, accompanying pain. He even made an attempt to strike at the sentient projectile, but Boris faded before the horse’s greatsword made contact. He phased out of the centaur’s view and into Claire’s grasp, ready and willing to be thrown again.

For a moment, the lyrkress was stuck pondering what she was meant to do. She was more accustomed to the other side of the tiny person versus giant monster equation, and sparring with Lia had taught her that size was not as much of an advantage as it so often seemed. Though wounds inflicted by the tiny and insignificant were not nearly as painful or damning, the shape of her body made it difficult for her to claw at a less sizable foe. Her arms were too short and stubby, and her neck too long; she was unable to use her forelimbs without exposing her throat lest she made like an eagle and snatched her prey from above. She likely would have committed to the strategy had they been outside, but the cave’s ceiling was too low for the necessary acrobatics.

That was why she suddenly tucked in her limbs and dropped to the ground instead. Slithering like the massive wyrm she was, she sped through the cavern and met the closer centaur head-on. She beat the air with her wings as she lunged, tripling her speed at the exact moment of impact. He tried to intercept her with his spear, but she twisted her head out of the way and delivered a slash with the lizard that had appeared in her mouth. Boris had repositioned himself again, his shape shifted to that of a massive, dragon-sized dagger.

Claire’s first strike was off center. The soldier parried it with his buckler and drove his spear towards her side. He managed to bring its point down on her scales, but the swing lacked the force to pierce them. The only impression he left was a haphazard scratch that ran from her neck to her arm.

When she spun her head around, to slash at him again, he was ready. He raised his shield just quickly enough to deflect the attack whilst lifting his spear overhead. He shifted his grip towards the weapon’s tip to increase his leverage before driving it towards the side of her neck. It was on course to strike her, but a jagged claw beat him to the punch. Massive talons pierced through his chest and destroyed his lungs. Knowing that a flesh wound was not enough to finish the man, she closed her fist around his body and squished it in a brutal demonstration of raw power. His bones crumpled like paper. The blood was wrung from his pores like water from a rag, draining all over her hand and coating it with a slick but sticky paste.

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His ally did not allow his death to be in vain. Finally freed from his paralysis, the second knight seized the opening that followed and leapt at her with his greatsword raised overhead. A grin appeared on his face when she swiped her tail towards him. Turning on a dime, he darted out of the way and cleaved at the fluffy appendage with his heavy blade. The weight of the blow provided the steel with all the force it needed to cut through her scales. But that was as far as it got. His cocky smirk twisted into a look of horror when he realised that his weapon was stuck in her flesh. Ice ran up its length, trapping it where it was.

He tried to let go, to flee from his encroaching death, but he could not outrun the whisper of the winter winds. It seized him by the hands and locked him in place for the finishing blow. Claire wrapped around to his side and paralyzed him again just to rub salt into his wounds before driving Boris into the weakest part of his body.

The sharpened lizard tore through the centaur’s waist, cleanly separating his upper and lower halves. Ever resilient, he tried to crawl away and regrow his equine parts, but a hoof crashed into his face and crushed his skull, finally ending him for good.

Only a few seconds had elapsed, but the battle was over, completely and unilaterally decided by the superior party.

Kicking the corpses into one of the room’s far corners, Claire took a deep breath and returned to her previous position. The commotion had woken some of the camp’s members. The mantis smirked at her from the cot that he had on the wall, while Lia had scrambled to her feet, only to fall asleep again as she realised that her aid was unneeded. Arciel and Sylvia had outright refused to rise, one because she had failed to notice the circumstances, and the other because she simply did not care for the horses’ lives.

Her companions remained as silent as they had been in their sleep, leaving Claire to reflect on the level that she had gleaned from the horse people’s deaths.

She had known going in that she would emerge the victor, and easily at that. The Llystletein experience and her nonsensical second ascension had provided her with more power than most in her level range. Still, she was disappointed, not only in herself, but her countrymen as well. Cadrian knights were supposed to be the best of the best. That was what she had always been told, as well as what she understood from the results of their battles.

The pair she had fought were certainly not in any way reputable or outstanding. Neither bore any particular insignias or badges, and neither had been recruited to Augustus Manor for further training. They were run of the mill, ordinary soldiers. But even so, she found them almost too pathetic. She had applied none of her more powerful abilities. Her force magic remained untapped, and the only rogue skills she had leveraged were passive. Her racial traits were the only ones she had exploited to achieve the landslide victory, and not even all of them had been required. A breath attack from afar would have guaranteed a pair of instant kills.

They were almost weak enough for her to suspect that they were not truly Cadrian soldiers, but their race’s names and styles of combat served as evidence to the contrary. It was impossible to ascend and become a Tornaturn wingrunner without joining Tornatus’ town guard and surviving its grueling training regimen. They simply had to be up to standard, at the very least. But even though they roughly were the same level, neither could hold a candle to the catgirl curled up next to the fire. Claire was confident that Lia could have dispatched them with her eyes closed and her berserker abilities sealed away.

Claire was so annoyed that she blew a breath in the soldiers’ direction and disintegrated their corpses. The pony was already starting to get ideas, and consuming them was the last thing she wanted to do. Such funeral rights were reserved only for those that deserved her respect.

She was finally beginning to understand why war was on the horizon. If the quality of the Marquis’ troops was reflective of the country as a whole, then Cadria could only have been on a steep decline. Pollux was meant to be a warlord, responsible for guarding the nation’s southern border from its many hostile neighbours, but with his troops so weak, he could mount no such defense. It was no wonder Kryddar was rallying its troops. If they could not be stalled till dusk by warriors of a superior quality, then the armies of first light were nigh unstoppable; reclaiming their taken territories was no longer a pipe dream.

“I wonder if this is how Father felt.” A tired, wry smile crossed her lips. She felt as if she had suddenly come to understand the duke’s disappointment, the frustration that was her inability to live up to expectations. “Perhaps he would change his mind if he saw me now.” She reacted with a twitch as she heard the words that had unwittingly emerged from her mouth, but calmed soon after. Taking a deep breath, she dismissed it as just another ordinary thought—a rational hypothetical that anyone in her circumstances would have been sure to consider—and allowed the train to follow its tracks.

Though she had proven herself far better than an unskilled soldier, there was no doubt that her father would still consider her inferior. She had suffered a hit during the exchange, and while it was insignificant, it rendered her performance worse than that of a squire’s. Valencia’s town guard was better than most, and trainees as fresh as Nymphetel were able to breeze through their ranks and strike down their commanders without breaking a sweat.

She needed to grow, to continue bettering herself, if she wanted to stand up to the royal guard, whose deliberate class combinations and carefully allocated ability scores propped them far above the rank and file.

With another tired sigh, she closed her eyes and allowed the mantis to take over the next shift. She would need to sit down and have a long think about the path forward. And though unlikely, it was possible that the phantom and his bizarre training regimen could offer a glimmer of insight, a spark of inspiration that would set her on the path of becoming a true natural disaster. As dragons and their ilk had always been meant to be.