The queen came at him quickly enough that he didn’t have enough time to summon his weapon. He dived out of the way as her sword came down.
He just barely managed to summon his sword in time to take multiple relentless strikes.
There was practically no opening for him to take. All he could do was block every strike she carried out. He enhanced his sword with his mana still struggling against the might of her large sword. If he didn’t enhance it perpetually, she would’ve easily broken it apart in two halves allowing it to plunge straight into his body.
While he fought off her majesty, Silvy had her own fight as she fought Lewis. If Silvy went down, he doubted the prospects that he would succeed as the other knight could assist the queen in her efforts to eliminate him.
With one foot back and a foot ahead of himself, he anticipated one of her downward arcing strikes. He motioned just a few inches out of the way and thrust his sword up against her breastplate. He infused the tip of it with some of his mana allowing it to have better penetrating power.
As it hit her breastplate, it caused the armor to form a crater towards the left side. Luckily her armor wasn’t strong enough to avoid taking damage. Unfortunately, the armor was strong enough to quickly return to its previous state somehow as if he hadn’t just landed a good blow.
“That’s a nice trick you have there,” he said as he deflected another one of her attacks.
The queen was abnormally strong. She had lived for over a century so she had plenty of experience and ability to show for it, but the longer he fought her, the more he found himself being capable of reading and predicting her moves.
She kept a relentless pattern that tried its hardest to prevent the opposition from having a moment to go for an offensive strike. It forced him into a defensive dance that left him battered and beaten down.
But her movements weren’t all that impressive. Simple, harsh, and effective against most targets assuredly. For one such as he however, he began to see more and more opportunities to counterattack during those brief periods when an opening showed itself.
He hit her armor twice more only for the dents to disappear. She let out a yell as she sent her sword slamming down towards him. Their swords slammed up against each other with neither pulling back.
In a quick sudden maneuver, he unsummoned his sword which blocked hers allowing for all her energy to force her sword into the marbled floor. As he stepped to his left to avoid the strike slamming down where he once stood, her sword pierced straight into the ground. He grabbed a newly summoned sword in his left hand that he had been preparing a moment prior as well. It always felt awkward whenever he wielded a weapon in his non-dominant hand but he had to be willing to change things up a little to keep her from predicting his attacks.
He sent the sword towards her wrist as hard as he could. He focused the mana on the side of the blade that would strike at her armored hand. If he could leave a dent in her armor, then he thought it might just make sense that if he struck a part of the armor that wasn’t as fully protected or strong, it might just be capable of slicing through.
Thankfully it was as he suspected. Kiran’s blade went through the less strong part and blood began to flow. Her hand once wielding onto the giant sword fell to the ground and she pulled her hand away towards her face. She backed away screaming.
He wasn’t just about to let her have time to herself. He charged forward and leaped into the air and sent his sword directly to her unprotected face.
It surprised him when the sword went straight through. It split apart her skull by passing through her left eye going past her brain and all the way out of the back of her head. The queen fell backwards as he yanked the sword free.
“My queen…” Lewis muttered aloud from some distance behind. He began to yell as he fought Silvy even harder.
Is that it? Was that all it took for me to finish her?
While he found himself a bit surprised and observed a little of the fight between Silvy and Lewis, a terrifying chill ran down his spine.
Two heavy thuds hit the ground and the one whose face had a sword forced through it began to heal itself. “We are both bearers of miracles,” the queen began to say. Her eye that had been nothing more than a bloody mess reformed and the hand he had severed prior. She gripped her two-handed sword once more and stood up straight.
He had managed to cause severe damage to her and despite that, her body much like her armor returned to an undamaged state.
Kiran had survived a fatal wound before due to his familiar sacrificing a lot of their own power for him. He wondered how she had managed to heal such a traumatic injury considering she—as far as he was aware—did not have a familiar to heal her. Something else had to be giving her this power and providing her with an incredible burst of regeneration.
Guess I should’ve not gotten my hopes up so quickly eh? It figures this wouldn’t be over already.
It didn’t matter if he penetrated her skull multiple times so long as she could keep regenerating from any damage done to it. Eventually, it would be an inevitability that he would lose all of his energy and be forced to submit to her and be granted an audience with death. Or worse yet, end up tortured to death.
“Why would you think to ever willingly fight me? Can you not see the futility of such a decision?”For whatever reason, she chose to speak to him rather than continue their fight.
“Are you really asking me that question? You can’t imagine why I might want to kill you, especially after what you’ve done to me and many others?”
The fighting between the two knights stopped. He briefly looked over his shoulder spotting the flame-bearing knight with her aflame sword pointed at Lewis who currently knelt before her as it appeared their own personal duel left Lewis unable to continue lest his head be taken off his body.
The queen gave him a sideways glance. “You cannot begin to understand things from perspective,” she began to say. “Why would I, protector of Liall and humanity willingly choose evil and commit evil? Ask yourself why I, and I alone am willing to bear these grave sins so that all of my people shall continue to live and flourish. I think if either you or anyone else thought about it honestly, you would come to realize that sometimes evil must be utilized so that a greater evil does not take hold. I have chosen to bear these sins for myself so others are spared of it. I have willingly chosen to accept evil so others need not.”
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“So, commit evil yourself so others don’t have to? What a load of nonsense.”
“Like I said,” she said, “you cannot understand the perspective of one such as I nor do I expect you to. I have done all I possibly can to secure a place on this fractured planet that is still safe for humanity to flourish. I have sacrificed my every being to accomplish this feat and yes, I have committed evil to accomplish it and I do not regret any one bit of it.” She was unflinching in her belief. She did in fact believe to be in the right without a doubt in the world. She gazed into his eyes unflinchingly. “Look at what Liall is. There is no other place like it. Outside of this protected land I have cultivated, there is nothing more than a rotten and deprecated wasteland. And outside of this domain, there is nothing worth cultivating there either. Liall is all that is truly viable for humanity.”
“And how exactly would you know that?”
“Because I have seen with my own eyes of what the rest of this fractured planet is like. There is nothing but depravity out there. That is why a century ago, I decided to come here and create what you see now by establishing order and relative peace. While humanity does and can exist elsewhere in the other domains, the truth is that nowhere but here is suitable for anything long-term or for cultivating a growing population. And if you believe that to be false, then hope you never have to find out how things are outside of this domain.” She gazed through his eyes causing more chills to course through his body. “You cannot even begin to understand the things I have seen Kiran. If you think I am evil, then you know nothing. There is nothing but nightmares without end out there. Such conditions are not suitable for humanity to exist or flourish. Liall is truly the last remaining sanctuary for humanity so long as I live. You would take that from everyone here and condemn everyone to a pointless end. Killing me will only lead them to their deaths.”
Whatever her reasons were, she could excuse away her actions as being justified for one reason or another, but it didn’t change a thing. She had to be stopped and now that the coalition had their own way of powering the pillars, the queen was no longer needed to sustain Liall. They could sustain it themselves.
She clearly thought otherwise, however. “Did you never once think that if you hadn’t become murderous, that you would not face such opposition from people like us?
She began to laugh and gaze down at him seriously. She was quite a bit taller than him and immensely confident in herself. “I have tried peace before. There was peace for many decades in fact during the early days of this city’s creation and expansion. But I was taken advantage of and my kindness soon wavered as I came to experience the repeated nature that humanity is cursed to inflict upon itself. The reality that I have come to accept over time, is that our kind requires someone willing to do things we may not like. And no matter how cruel I must be, I will bear that sin and gladly stand against those who would stop me for I know, that I am righteous.”
“I don’t care,” he simply stated before her. “You kill innocent people like their lives don’t matter. You are uncaring, unjust, and cruel as you yourself admit. You are not fit to serve humanity any longer. The only thing you are fit for anymore, is to simply die.”
“And you, stranger who came from the wasteland, will be the one to do what? Kill me? Who are you to make that decision for humanity? Have you ever stopped to think about what everyone else might want besides what it is that you want?” She furrowed her brows towards him. “I have wondered since you first came here to my city, of what purpose you serve, but clearly you serve no purpose except to be a wandering soul unaware of the way the world works. You consort with familiars—the bane of absolute evil. You consort with those who would tear Liall apart. And you remain ignorant and worse, complicit in taking particular actions when you yourself do not know what may come of it. It is my duty as queen, to protect my people against people like you. My only regret is that I did not kill you the moment I realized an outsider walked through my city’s front gates.”
Queen Luvia Aenveld was one for defending her own perspective. He had had enough of it however. Her words were hollow to him due to her murderous actions. She was a tyrant and deserved to be done away with.
She especially deserved to meet her end for murdering Della.
“Answer me this though. Who or what are you exactly? When I gaze at your soul, it is unlike any human or familiar soul that I have ever seen.”
“I am nothing more than a man.”
“Nothing more than a man? How…how amusing Kiran.”
Rather than allowing her to take the initiative again, he charged forward being the first to attack. She was noticeably weaker than before as they fought. That didn’t mean she wasn’t without her own surprises however.
A bright white aura sprang from her blade appearing like flames rippling off its metal surface. Beads of sweat trickled along his brow as the aura gave off tremendous heat whenever their blades met.
The queen was becoming desperate. She exerted more power into her attacks, but her maneuvering became sloppy. Those intense eyes of hers also came to harbor fear as she herself realized that since her return from those egregious injuries he unleashed upon her earlier, she was not back to her former strength even if it looked like it on the surface.
He had managed to strike at her armor at varying places such as towards one of her pauldrons, plate legs, and breastplate. And unlike before, the damage stayed rather than immediately recover.
Whatever had given her such tremendous regenerative power before had gone away. Perhaps it was because he had delivered such a devastating blow to her earlier that it drained whatever reserves she had. He couldn’t say for sure but he had his suspicions on that being the case.
“Enough!” she screamed aloud.
He managed to hit her armor with his blade strengthened again with mana. It struck it and caused her to back away as she appeared completely worn down by his attacks. With her distanced a little from him, she kept him from approaching as a ton of steam rose off her armor stinging his face if he got too close to it.
However, the armor that she wore began to fade away. More cracks formed along its surfaces with a bluish-white light spilling out from them. As more and more cracks ran through her armor parts of it broke off and turned into a vacuous aura that quickly dissipated into the air.
The queen’s protective armor by all accounts was not a physically based one but instead, an arcane one in the same kind of way his sword was summoned into existence. She struggled to maintain her stature as her naked form appeared before him. She grasped onto the two-handed blade that was far too large for her to wield now. She was also quite a bit shorter than him with her armor gone and the skin around her naked arms and legs appearing blackened with some kind of rot.
At the center left of her naked chest where her heart was supposed to be was instead a protruding glowing rock beating rapidly with a bluish-white glowing light.
“Why…” she pathetically muttered. “Why am I so weak? Were my efforts for all this time all for naught? This shouldn’t be happening. Why then…”
The two-handed sword fell over onto the ground and disappeared much like her armor. He also began to get a real sense of how hopeless the queen was as she stood there unarmed and without any protection. She was completely defenseless before him and yet, he hesitated to strike her down.
Once before she appeared as a tall and formidable foe. Now she was just a broken and weak figure that couldn’t even wield their own weapon of choice.
She pressed her palms to the object that was in the place of her heart. She looked up to him with tears forming in her eyes and the light that remained in them, went dark.
The queen who had ruled over Liall collapsed to the ground. The parts of her body that had not turned black did so slowly. Eventually, the obsidian-shaded rot that covered her arms and legs covered the entirety of her body with further cracks forming rapidly. Within a few seconds, she began to turn to dust, and a pile of obsidian-colored dust settled on the bloodied white marble floors. Atop this pile of what remained of the queen, a still-beating object sat there. He crouched and observed the object realizing what this thing truly was in place of her heart.
An arcane root? What in the world? It glowed, and glowed, and glowed with a rhythm like a beating heart, until the light within it too, went completely dark.