Chris couldn't believe it, his twin stood between him and potential death. And most of all by Leza she looked borderline murderous with her face twisted into a mirthless predatory grin.
"Are you alright?" she turned her head to him and asked as he rose back up to his feet, and he hissed in pain whilst almost tumbled over from the pain that almost killed all the feeling in his injured leg. But alas he finally managed to achieve somewhat stable standing though his leg still stung horribly.
"Yes, she just roughed me up a bit." though he had been roughed up by a lot of people today.
"Who are you?" Joan demanded from the two Zodiacs.
"I am Leo, the Zodiac of Strength." the knight of Zodiac identified herself as she rested her hand upon her chest in a familiar military greeting.
" Fine, Leo of Zodiac." Joan kept her cruel smile. "I am Joan Ddraig, princess of Avalon and you just harmed my brother, but if you walk away, I will let you live."
" I wish that I could, princess." Leo swung her sword over her shoulder casually with all the calm in the world. " But you are the royalty of our enemy but most importantly, your brother nearly killed my sister over here. So I will have his head as recompense."
"Sister?, she is Juno's kin. It makes sense that she wants me dead." he thought.
Joan suddenly began laughing hysterically as as white flames began dancing across her shoulders before saying. "Oh, so death it is. Good to know."
With intent by all parties made clear Leo turned to Juno and called on to her. Juno jumped in surprise at Leo calling her like a cat that had just been sprayed with some water, and she meekly turned to Leo.
"Yes ma'am?" She asked almost trying to shrink herself from Leo's gaze. Even though the knights eye's weren't at all visible from the slits of her helmet.
"Go and aid Lady Nimue, she is in the great circle." Leo ordered her and Chris paused as he remembered that his mother had said something about the woman, but he could not remember what it was.
"Lady Nimue?"
"Yes, lady Nimue. Do you need me to really repeat that." Leo sounded annoyed as she spoke.
Juno looked almost heart broken with her downcast face and Chris felt a sting of sympathy for her.
" She just contacted me. It's time, so go and aid her in any way possible" Leo continued her order undaunted by Juno's sad face.
" Yes s...ma'am" Juno bowed and spearing one last look directly at Chris as she ran off to the other part's of the crumbling facility, vanishing from sight in a few minutes.
"Almost thought that she would go in for one last insult before she just ran off like that, but whatever." he thought.
" It's time for what ?" Joan demanded as she readied her flaming great sword.
"It's non of your d...".
" She's trying to became the Archtype-king" he answered Joan while cutting off Leo's rude retort.
"The what?"
" I don't know, but mother knows something about it and father too, I presume." he responded.
" Then you should go and stop her. I have this fool."
"Are you mad. Nimue is too powerful, I won't even be a speed bump in the way." he was optimistic but not an idiot.
" And if you do nothing we will lose."
"Don't put such unrealistic faith in me, Joan." Chris still focused on the immediate danger of Leo though he did cast a single glance in the direction that Juno had fled.
Joan opened her mouth to say something else, when a shockwave rippled through the air. The two turned just in time to see Leo rocketing towards them like a missile, with the very air around burning.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Chris went to his instincts to summon his mist wraiths in order to confuse her. But rather than a feeling of electricity tingling down his spine, he instead felt as if his internal organs were being pulled and outstretched.
"Damn it, I am lacking enough magical energy." he thought as he stopped himself from falling over in pain. " I am more likely to liquefy my organs if I try to push it."
Leo's sword came for him again, but even with his leg in excruciating pain, he managed to force himself to crouch out of the way as Joan's great sword came overhead and met Leo's blade.
The impact of both weapons let out a shockwave which not only tore apart the concert floor but also rendered earth to molten magma and they all stood in it.
Joan and Leo continued their battle with a nimbleness and skill which Chris had never expected in his sister. Leo on the other hand was a living war with heavy plodding power shots that almost knocked Joan over at every exchange.
Something dawned upon him as he watched Leo fight Pyrrha and he compared it to their earlier skirmish. "Every hit from her gets stronger."
He knew that it sounded a bit too much but it made sense as he remembered every parry from Leo had escalated from the feeling of being hit by a mountain Golem at first and then in a few seconds it was like a fire giant was wailing on him.
He turned to Joan inorder to warn her not to attempt to parry any more of Leo's blow if she could help it but his mouth once opened remained open in gaping astonishment. Joan was now halfway engulfed in her white holy flames and she laughed like a mad woman.
" Joan... " Chris whispered unsettled by the demon that had replaced his sister.
She turned to him, grinned and then vomited a stream of flames towards Leo who swung her sword hard enough to create a air pressure and blasted the flames away.
Chris didn't know what took him, but seeing Leo distracted, he planted his feet into the ground and leaped at her with Lucius-Aurora in swing. He could not keep the tears from streaming out of his eye's as the mangled flesh in his thigh that had been healing were once again damage as he took off.
He blitzed past Joan and intercepted Leo. The Zodiac of Strength easily parried the blow, forcing him down onto one knee but Joan also saw an opportunity and she also launched vicious sword swings.
Leo paired them and with superior skill was able to draw a shallow cut from Joan's thigh. Chris jumped in behind her and brought down his sword as hard as he could on the back of her helmet and sent her staggering.
She turned to attack and Joan doused her in a shower of flames and once again as she turned Chris smacked her hard enough that Lucius-Aurora cut through enough of her armour to draw blood.
Leo roared in frustration like the beast with which she shared iconography. As she did Joan took a big swing to her midsection and for the first time Leo was knocked onto her back. She tried to quickly get up but Chris rammed his shoulder into her gut and grabbed on to the both of her legs from behind, tackling her on back.
Joan then brought down her foot upon Leo's chest so hard that she cracked the floor upon which Leo rested and the breastplate worn by the lion of Zodiac had a boot dent that Chris hoped had struck something important to the target underneath it.
Joan then gripped ahold of Leo's helmets and the the two began to struggle as the princess aimed to rip it off and get a clean kill. Chris pinned Leo down from her legs, he felt like he was holding down a crocodile as Leo struggled to kick him off her, but he held on as best he could.
This struggle continued for two minutes and then by some unfortunate twist of fate, one of her many kicks managed to catch him in his open wound. It felt like having a hot furnace struck upon his open flesh from nowhere.
He gasped in pain letting go of her legs as his hands reached for his wound that was letting out a new flow of hot blood and buckling under his weight.
In this moment another one of Leo's kicks caught him under the jaw, this blow sent him stumbling away from Leo who remained to struggle with Joan. Chris tried and failed to return to his feet the pain in his leg had just become too much. But slowly and painfully he crawled up to his feet, focused entirely on the struggle between Joan and Leo.
The two continued this and he watched as Leo's left hand switched from Pyrrha's throat were it had been with her right hand trying to chock the the berserker princess to death but had failed to even get a good grasp. Chris watched as Leo's hand neared her fallen sword, she managed grasped a hold of her sword and raised it to the air.
It began to vibrate faster and faster as the roof above them became blacked like the night with glowing bright white dots start to materialise above them, it looked a lot like a constellation of some sort that glowed brighter and brighter with each passing second. Chris could see this potent Alpha-spell from a mile away.
He leaped forward even with the crippling pain that that made him want to cut off his own leg in the hopes that this action would take it away. He ran as fast as he could and with all of his force he flung his body into Joan pushing the two of them off Leo as the knight declared the name of her true power.
" Star of Bacchus!" this roar came with a shower of purple vines from the roof. Each one of the vines were as large as tree and they bore spikes both large and small. They swung aside left and right like a mad mans whips.
The floor underneath them was torn open by the man vines. This left a deep hole under which Leo fell and Chris would have fallen in as well had something not caught him.
He looked to survivor and surprisingly it was Pyrrha Ulster out of knowhere and she picked him up as if he was child and Chris could only fight with complaints. "You can't seriously be always there to save my life."
"Yes I can, now came on, you can barely stand." the elf retorted before turning to face an equally confused Joan. "Let's go, this floor will give way soon and I don't want to know what is down there."
She then took off as a part of the floor that they had been standing on began sinking and he held on tight to her as more and more vines swung in their direction but Pyrrha seemed to have retained her nimbleness and she gracefully weaved through them.
Joan was ahead of them and she used her fire sword to cut and burn any vine that stood in their way. Pyrrha managed to jump into the next room as the entire floor finally gave way and sunk into another part of this facility.
As she landed Chris felt his body rock the earth as Pyrrha tumbled over him and dropped him as she fell over as well.
"Hey, are you okay?" he asked crawling to her as she coughed violently unable to rise back up to her feet and answer his question "Pyrrha, what the hell is wrong?"
"She got tagged," Joan whispered in horror.
Chris then noticed as blood leaked from Pyrrha's sides with a spike the size of a knife sticking out, no doubt a final gift from Leo. He could see large amounts of blood leaking out of her body and he knew that unless he sealed the wound she would no doubt bleed out to death.
So he pushed himself forward to her and with a quick tug he pulled out the spike and grasped her side ready to seal the wound with ice. He grasped on trying to seal it shut and stop the blood gashing out but every time he tried to call upon the mana inside of his body to produce the ice he felt that feeling of his organs and blood vessels being stretched as if to squeeze the remaining amounts of mana left inside him.
He tried and he tried but all it produced was more torture upon his body. He looked at Pyrrha who gazed at him silent as she struggled to remain conscious.
"Leza damn you to the great charnel pits." he said without shame as he still kept pushing himself. " here I am, killing myself to save you... why does fate have to deal me this of all hands?"
At this point Chris had pushed his body so far that he felt like skin covering his finger's was being pealed off. "But I am going to save you, I AM GOING TO SAVE YOU DAMN IT!".l
As if this was what he needed his hands went cold as a thick coat of ice that rolled over Pyrrha's wound like a wave, covering it in ice and stopping the blood from leaking out.
He raised his hands into the air to celebrate his achievement but the strength to do this failed him as a light headedness slowly took his senses.
The world began to spin and blur as he crashed down upon his back unable to even support kneeling up. His vision began to blacken as he heard someone calling his name as a darkness fell to his eye's with the last thing he saw being a flash similar to that of lightning.