The axe-wielder didn't give his remaining men another command because he didn't need to. The moment he raised his left hand, the hesitation in the clearing disappeared, and the ground beneath Eren's boots suddenly erupted upward. A jagged column of earth burst from the dirt where she had been standing a moment earlier, forcing her to throw herself backward. The edge of the stone caught her shoulder as she moved, and she rolled across the tall grass before managing to recover her footing.
At the same time, the man moved toward Shion. He did not charge recklessly or try to overpower her through speed alone. The earth beneath his boots shifted in small, controlled movements that carried him across the uneven terrain without losing momentum, and for a brief moment, the runes engraved into the leather became visible as they reacted to his magic.
Shion noticed them.
Not because she had time to study them, but because a fighter who had survived this long learned to observe even when a blade was already coming toward her.
His axe came from the side with enough force to break her stance if she met it carelessly. She raised her greatsword and caught the strike on the flat of the blade, but the combination of his strength and the movement granted by his magic forced her backward, her boots digging two long marks into the soil.
He immediately followed with another strike, using the momentum of the first attack to bring his second axe down toward her. Eren saw it happening as she pushed herself up, ignoring the pain in her leg and rushing forward to interfere, but Shion didn't try to resist the force coming toward her. She lowered herself to one knee and changed the angle of her sword, allowing the axe to slide along the metal and carry the man slightly past where he intended to be.
That was enough.
Eren arrived from his side and thrust her sword toward his exposed ribs, but the man didn't even look at her. His left hand moved again, releasing a concentrated burst of wind that pushed her blade just far enough away for the strike to scrape against his armor instead of piercing through it.
The same movement gave Shion the opening she had been waiting for. She pushed herself upward and drove the pommel of her greatsword directly toward his face. He managed to catch it with the shaft of his axe, but the impact finally forced him to take a step backward without the assistance of his magic.
It was a small thing, but Shion noticed it immediately.
"You're relying too much on your left hand," she said between breaths. The smoke was still sitting heavily in her lungs, and every word made the cuts across her body remind her they were there, but her voice remained steady. "Every time you use your magic, your weight changes. You're predictable."
For the first time, the expression on his face changed. It wasn't anger, and it wasn't panic, but the irritation that had been hidden behind his calm attitude was becoming more obvious.
The remaining bandits noticed it too.
Until now, they had been fighting under the certainty that their leader controlled the situation. They had seen him manipulate the smoke inside the house, create openings with his magic, and turn every mistake Shion and Eren made into another wound. But the two mercenaries were still standing, and worse, they were adapting.
One of the bandits took a step backward.
The axe-wielder noticed immediately.
"Hold your ground," he said.
His voice was calm, almost the same tone he had used when he invited them into his house and offered them a meal.
The man hesitated. His eyes moved from his dead companions near the doorway, to Shion's blood-covered sword, and finally to the forest behind him.
"Boss," he said quietly. "This isn't worth—"
The axe left his hand before the sentence was finished and crossed the short distance between them in a blur, burying itself into the man's skull. He collapsed face-first into the dirt, his own words dying with him before he had the chance to finish them.
Nobody moved.
The remaining bandits stared at the body of the man who had fought beside them only moments earlier. The axe-wielder walked over without urgency, pulled his weapon free, and cleaned the blood against the dead man's clothes before turning back toward the rest of them.
"If you're no longer useful, don't become another problem."
He didn't raise his voice or make a threat. He simply stated a fact the same way someone might comment on the weather, and somehow that made it clear that the man who had offered them shelter had never been a kind host pretending to be a bandit. He had always been exactly this person.
Shion adjusted her stance and noticed the change in the clearing.
The remaining bandits were no longer looking at her as the greatest threat.
They were looking at him.
That was the first moment the axe-wielder truly lost control of the fight. He still had his magic, he still had his weapons, and he was still dangerous, but the thing that had made him so difficult to fight from the beginning was gone.
His own men no longer trusted him.