Colt smashed against the wall, the impact rattling his bones and dislodging a cloud of dust and pebbles that fell upon his shoulders. For a moment, he struggled to breathe, but he shoved the resulting panic aside and threw himself into a roll that allowed him to narrowly avoid the descending blade. It hit the ground with furious momentum, cleaving almost a foot into the rock. That gave Colt a brief moment to bring his own blade to the battle.

Still under the effect of Wind of the Winged Serpent, he found his feet and danced away. As he did so, he lashed out, his blade biting into an enemy dark elf’s leg. She stumbled – only slightly – just enough to give Gwenivere an opening. Her axe came down, denting the creature’s helm and knocking the enemy senseless. A tight redirection of the blade, and the elf’s head tumbled free.

Colt only followed the battle via Blade Sense. His other, more mundane senses were entirely trained on the armored elf with the enormous sword. He watched as his opponent yanked that broad blade free of the stony ground. The elf glanced past Colt, and when he saw that his people had fallen, his eyes narrowed, his perfect features contorting in fury.

His silvery sword glowed with black power before he charged.

Colt had no intention of standing his ground and receiving that attack. Instead, he used Storm of the Sword Saint. An instant later, a cacophony of metal on metal rung through the tunnel as hundreds of ethereal blades slashed into the elf’s silver and red-trimmed armor.

But for the first time, the ability was stymied. When the effect faded – it only took half a second to play out – the elf’s armor was grossly dented and marred by deep grooves, but it had held.

Then, the elf was on top of him, swinging that ridiculously enormous sword. The blade was at least five inches across, and it extended more than four feet. However, despite its unwieldy size, the elf had no issues swinging it with ruthless speed and precision. Further complicating matters was that if Colt took the full weight of those attacks on his own blade, it would shatter his sword.

Thankfully, he’d trained for just such a situation, and instead of blocking the oncoming blow, he simply slapped it off course. Not a lot – just a few scant inches – but enough that Colt wasn’t cut in two.

However, this was not a simple battle between swordsmen – not with skills, spells, and ethera having been thrown into the mix.

After Colt parried the first attack, he felt weakness wash over him. He didn’t need to look at his status to know that his Strength had been decreased. More distressingly, the elf let out a roar and redirected his blade far more quickly than he should have been capable of. Colt had read about such spells, and he could recognize that the elf had drained some of his Strength, adding it to his own.

But Colt had never been wholly dependent on his Strength. Or his other attributes, if he was honest. His advantage lay in technique and experience. So, it scarcely mattered that he was a little weaker, while his opponent had grown slightly stronger.

His blade lashed out, finding the gap between the elf’s bracers and the armor covering his upper arms. It was just a nick, barely penetrating half an inch, but it was enough to slice into the elf’s elbow tendon. Not through, sadly, but that was more than okay.

The elf let out a grunt of pain as his arm went slightly limp. Colt didn’t press the matter, though. Instead, he slowly retreated, backhanding another elf whose attention was solely on Gwenivere. Like the experienced warrior she was, she took the provided opening, cutting through the enemy’s leg with a vicious hack. Her opponent fell, and though Colt’s eyes were locked on his own foe, he felt it when her blade descended. The elf tried to fend it off, but he had no leverage.

And Gwenivere was stronger.

Her blade bit into his chest, destroying his chain-link armor and obliterating the life-giving organs beneath.

By that point, Colt’s opponent had recovered enough to once again attack him. His blade came in much more slowly. Surely, the elf had plenty of Strength to wield the giant weapon with one hand, but due to its size, doing so was extremely awkward. So, with his arm weakened, he had difficulty controlling the blade.

Colt considered it a rookie mistake. There was a place for large blades, but they had significant weaknesses in one-on-one combat. The elf would have been better served by a much slimmer weapon.

Still, the blade’s length put Colt at a disadvantage when it came to reach. So, as the elf predictably shifted into a more defensive stance, the fight reached a stalemate. When Colt used Storm of the Sword Saint, his opponent countered by enacting some sort of defensive ability that blunted the effect.

As the pair slowly circled one another, the battle between Gwenivere and the remaining elves raged on. She took plenty of attacks, but her own armor was up to the task of protecting her. Still, she didn’t make it through unwounded, and before long, blood was dripping from a dozen cuts.

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Her will never wavered, though, and the sheer weight of her experience meant that the outcome was never in question. For the past five years, she had been fighting long odds for her very survival, and it became immediately clear that the elves had never been through such a crucible.

They fell before her axe, one by one, until there were only three combatants left. Colt, the armored elf, and Gwenivere.

She circled behind the enemy, an expression of grim determination on her pale face. Blood dripped from the blade of her axe, while her clothes and armor had been stained red. In that moment, she looked like a goddess of war, and not the sanitized sort one might see in popular media. No – she was a brutal combatant who would give her enemy no quarter. Nor did she expect to be given any in return.

She was a survivor.

And that was why Colt had recruited her in the first place.

One-on-one, the elf could fight Colt to a standstill – if only by remaining wholly on the defensive and using his reach to keep up with the Samurai – but now that there were two opponents, he clearly knew his days were numbered. So, he abandoned his defensive strategy and rushed forward, hoping to take Colt off-guard.

But Colt had expected the change in tactics, and he ducked under the horizontal slash, then darted forward to bury his blade in the dark elf’s neck. He wrenched it free, ripping out the elf’s throat, then danced away. It was a good thing, too, because a second later, the elf used another spell that made Colt stumble.

He fell to his knees, then tumbled onto the ground as his entire body was beset by weakness. It wasn’t a lack of Strength that afflicted him. Instead, it felt as if he was fighting the worst flu imaginable. His body shook, and his stomach roiled. And more importantly, when he realized that the elf hadn’t fallen and was aiming another attack at his back, he was too weak to respond in time.

Fortunately, Gwenivere was there.

She buried the blade of her axe in the dark elf’s back, cleaving through the armor like it was nothing. There was a skill at play there, though Colt was in no position to consider it. Instead, he pushed himself into a barrel roll that took him out of the elf’s path. The armored foe clattered to the ground, and though he wasn’t dead, he couldn’t defend against Gwenivere’s next attack.

Or the next after that.

It took five more swings of her axe to get through the armor and kill the elf, but in the end, she managed it. The moment the elf died, the affliction faded from Colt. And after letting out a deep breath, he turned over.

Gwenivere stood over him for a long second, her breath coming fast and hard, before finally, she extended a hand. He took it, and she helped him to his feet.

“Thanks,” he said. “That thing hit me some sort of draining ability.”

“His class was Dread Knight,” she said. “I’m not sure what that means in terms of his abilities, but it was different than all the rest. They were simple Guards.”

Colt nodded. Dread Knight sounded like a much rarer class, which would explain the leader’s increased power. Still, he didn’t like how easily it had bypassed his defenses. It was one thing to lose a sword fight, but something else altogether to have someone yank his attributes away via a spell. He vowed to look into ways of mitigating that sort of attack.

“Let’s gather anything of worth,” he said. “Starting with this armor. We’ll stash it somewhere close, then head to that gate to see what we can find. Maybe that’s where they took the miners.”

The first target was the armor worn by the dark elf, followed by the giant sword. It was huge and unwieldy, but it seemed to be high quality. Maybe Carmen could make use of it in some way. Otherwise, they found a few pouches full of copper and silver ethereum, but the other elves’ weapons and armor seemed mostly useless. Still, they stripped the bodies and deposited everything in a small and well-concealed alcove. The bodies were thrown into a pit they’d passed a mile or so back.

And just like that, other than a few bloodstains, the evidence of their battle had been concealed. With that done, Colt and Gwenivere marched toward the gate, and when they reached it, they found that it was predictably deserted.

Except for the bodies.

The miners, naked and bound, had clearly been tortured before someone had slit their throats. And it wasn’t difficult to figure out why the dark elves would do such a thing.

“We got us a really big problem here,” Colt muttered, untying the miners’ corpses.

“They wanted information on Ironshore. That’s the only reason to torture them,” Gwenivere reasoned. “Unless they’re just sadistic.”

“Maybe. Help me gather these bodies,” Colt said. “Some of these miners got families back in Ironshore. They deserve to be properly laid to rest.”

Gwenivere agreed, and after searching the guardhouse – which extended beneath the ground – they found a sizable cloth. Once they’d positioned the bodies atop it, they wrapped the bundle and put it aside for later retrieval.

After that, the pair continued down the tunnel, but it was only a few more miles before they found another gate. This one was guarded by an actual fort that had been carved into the stone walls. More importantly, it was populated by at least a hundred dark elves. They both knew they stood no chance of getting through that bulwark, so they retreated to the first gate, gathered the bodies, and returned to where they’d stashed the weapons and armor.

What followed was hours’ worth of travel, with each of them weighed down by their burdens. When they finally stopped to rest, Colt said, “I think war’s comin’. You saw it, right?”

“No civilians,” Gwenivere pointed out.

Indeed, there hadn’t been anything but armored soldiers at the fortress, which supported what they already knew from the map they’d found. There was a much larger settlement deeper underground, suggesting that what they’d seen in the fortress was a mere fraction off the dark elves’ martial capability.

“We’ve got to get back to town, tell the mayor what’s goin’ on down here, then figure out what we’re gonna do,” Colt said. “The city ain’t prepared for a fight like what’s comin’.”

Left unsaid was the fact that killing those guards could very well become an inciting incident for a brutal war. And unless people like Elijah came back soon, it was one Colt didn’t think Ironshore could win.