The air vibrated with a deafening tearing sound; where I had just been, there was now only an empty crater.
Lucas tried to react. His eyes swept the crater on high alert, his combat experience dictating he look for the basics: the vibration of footsteps on the ground, the sudden displacement of oxygen, the muscle tension that telegraphs a strike.
But there was none of that.
The first impact was a hollow, muffled thud, sounding almost as if it came from inside his own body.
My fist struck the center of his abdomen before Lucas's mind could even register that the ten meters between us had vanished. The steel breastplate gave way with a dry crunch, crumpling directly against his stomach.
The warrior's body was launched into the air, ripped from the ground without a shred of dignity, cut and pushed by invisible gusts of wind that followed my every move.
Every step I took on the shattered marble produced no sound of footsteps, but rather a subtle explosion of compressed air.
Lucas's body dragged across the marble, carving a shallow trench in the floor until he slammed violently against the base of a pillar. The impact caused the stone structure to crack from bottom to top.
He pressed his gauntlet against the floor and forced his body up. Dark blood trickled from the corner of his mouth. His eyes, always so cold and apathetic, were now wide in pure shock. He looked down at his own crumpled steel breastplate, then raised his face to me. His fingers trembled slightly as he tried to process how I had crossed the hall in a fraction of a second.
I took a step forward.
My boot never even touched the marble. The air compressed beneath my sole and burst outward in a dry shockwave. The atmospheric pressure in the hall plummeted. The ground beneath Lucas's feet shook violently. The gigantic stones that had fallen from the destroyed wall began to shudder and slowly levitate, pulled by the vacuum of the air currents now spiraling around me.
Lucas gritted his teeth. He extended his left hand toward the crater outside, the muscles in his arm locking tight.
The sound of metal scraping against stone echoed from outside. His massive spear, which had been lodged in the rock, vibrated intensely and was ripped from the earth.
The weapon tore through the air like a black missile, flying in a straight line right for my back.
I didn't turn around.
The wind blowing through every crack of that castle warned me of the mass displacement before the weapon even crossed the courtyard doors. When the dark steel tip was millimeters away from piercing the back of my neck, I simply tilted my head and rotated my left shoulder.
The spear whizzed by a hair's breadth from my face, tearing only the wind, and landed perfectly in Lucas's outstretched hand.
As soon as his fingers closed around the shaft, the warrior used the incoming momentum of the flying weapon to spin his body and bring down a devastating vertical strike upon me.
I stepped into his range.
I used the shaft of my black wooden spear to strike the flat of Lucas's blade mid-swing, parrying his attack. The tip sank into the floor, exploding the marble beside us in a shower of splinters.
Taking advantage of his open guard, I let go of my weapon. I let the wind push me downward, sliding underneath his raised arm. I planted both hands on the stone floor, bent my knees, and fired both boots straight into Lucas's jaw.
*CRACK!*
The impact snapped his head back with a sickening crunch. The compressed air in my legs detonated upon contact, ejecting the warrior's body high into the air.
Before he could begin to fall, I used the air beneath my palms to launch myself off the floor. I stopped mid-air, at the exact same height as him.
I twisted my hips and delivered a cyclone-wreathed side kick straight into the center of his armored spine.
Lucas was fired across the hall, smashing through one of the pillars with his own body and collapsing into the rubble amidst a dense cloud of white dust.
The silence lasted for only a single heartbeat.
The mountain of white debris exploded from the inside out.
Lucas stood up. He advanced like a calamity; with his free hand, he dug his fingers into a chunk of the destroyed column, tearing the rock from the ground and hurling it at me as if it were a mere river stone.
The boulder tore through space. I raised my hand, and a spiraling blade of wind hissed from my fingers, slicing the block perfectly in half. The two halves flew past me, crushing the floor far behind with a booming crash.
But the boulder was only a distraction.
Seizing the split-second of my slash, Lucas burst through the curtain of dust. He gripped his massive spear with both hands, the muscles in his neck and arms stretched to their absolute limits as he brought the weapon down in a brutal horizontal arc, intent on cleaving me in two.
The physical force of the motion was so absurd, so dense, that the mere pressure of the weapon breaking through space repelled and shredded the currents of wind orbiting my body.
Aerodynamics yielded to brute strength.
There was no time to counter or dodge. I spun my black wooden spear, gripping the shaft with both hands and channeling a wall of compressed air around the wood to try and weather the impact.
Lucas's blade collided against the center of my weapon.
The impact sounded like steel breaking the spine of a mountain; a shockwave swept through the hall. For a split second, the wind and the ancestral wood held the pressure, but the monster's kinetic transfer was simply overwhelming.
*CRACK!*
The wooden spear shattered in my hands, violently snapping in half.
Without losing a single ounce of speed or weight, Lucas's heavy blade broke through my shattered guard. The matte steel sank into the flesh of my shoulder and tore downward in a diagonal gash, slicing through my skin and breastplate down to the center of my chest.
The pain was a blinding white flash. Blood sprayed, instantly vaporizing in the wind currents trying to protect me. The force of the blow launched me off the ground, and I was violently thrown backward.
The air beneath my boots burst, and I was forced to skid through space for nearly ten meters, digging my heels in to brake against the monster's overwhelming momentum.
Pain tore through my torso with every heartbeat. I looked down. Hot blood flowed from the deep, ugly gash across my skin and armor.
My numb fingers opened. I dropped the two splintered halves of the wooden spear, and they hit the ruined marble with a dull, irrelevant thud.
Ten meters away, the floor beneath Lucas's boots had sunken into a new crater, still glistening with a few drops of my blood. He should be unconscious, at the very least; my first few strikes would have ground any elven captain's bones to dust.
But Lucas didn't fall. He took a step forward, my blood dripping from his blade, ready to finish the hunt.
And then... he froze.
The momentum of his stride simply died. The elf violently snapped his neck backward, his wide eyes searching for something only he could see.
I heard nothing but the high-pitched howl of my own energy and the sound of the castle crumbling around us from the battle raging outside. But to him, something there felt more real than the battlefield itself.
He stared intensely at the crater from which he had just ejected me. There was absolutely nothing there. Only suspended dust swirling in the breeze and the dark drops of my blood drying on the shattered stones.
His matte steel gauntlet trembled visibly.
"Yasmin...?" Lucas whispered to the void. That baritone voice, which had once exuded a divine, untouchable apathy, now sounded hollow, fragile, and pathetic.
I clutched my wound, straightening my posture in sheer agony, and frowned. The name made no sense in the middle of this hell. *Yasmin?*
The elf's breathing grew entirely erratic. He loosened his grip on his weapon, letting its tip drag against the marble, and clawed his left hand against his own head, his armored fingers squeezing his skull as if trying to keep his mind from spilling out.
"No... no, no, no, no..." he began to mutter.
He started walking back toward me. He wasn't marching anymore. His steps were erratic, heavy, almost tripping over his own legs as he walked briskly, fighting ghosts I couldn't see.
To Lucas, the castle's white marble walls no longer existed. His reality was shattering.
Violent flashes tore through his vision. In his fragmented mind, he saw Yasmin's face, stained with soot and bathed in blood, staring at him with eyes full of disappointment. A voice only he could hear pierced through the defenses that centuries of solitude had built:
*Weak. You were weak.*
My floating silhouette ceased to be an opponent. To the delirious elf, I had become the epicenter of a hellish memory. The glowing white marks pulsating on my body and the wind currents twisted before his eyes, transforming into the roaring red flames of a colossal inferno.
The ancestral forest burned, the screams echoed in his head, and the illusory smoke suffocated his lungs. And from amidst the flames of his own madness, the hallucination delivered the killing blow.
"You didn't save me."
Lucas froze in place. A guttural rumble began to rise from his chest, tearing up his throat until it exploded into a deafening scream. It was a roar of pure agony, a sound so broken and bestial that it made the very stones of the ruined hall tremble.
When he lowered his hand from his head and looked back at me, the lethargic gaze, the impenetrable defenses, and any remaining shred of sanity were gone. He was boiling with a raw, irrational, bestial hatred. The pain of my strike to his ribs didn't matter. The exhaustion didn't matter. The iceman had melted away; all that remained was a wounded animal in lethal desperation, ready to tear apart reality itself just to kill the fire in front of him.
In Lucas's fragmented mind, only a single feminine phrase echoed: *Be the strongest.*
I raised my face to the monster.
The wind began to swirl furiously and out of control, forming dense spirals of compressed air around my bare arms and fists, tinting itself with the crimson mist of my own blood. I clenched my hands into fists. I no longer needed a spear for this dance.
Lucas's bestial scream was still tearing through the hall when he charged at me.
There was no more footwork. The half-blood's posture and swordsmanship had been reduced to pure, unadulterated strength. He lunged like an avalanche of flesh and steel; the hot blood spraying from his fractured ribs evaporated instantly in the oppressive heat of his fury.
He threw a straight punch that tore through the distance between us. The wind responded to my instinct on a primal level; I leaned my torso back by mere millimeters. The gauntlet whizzed by just a hair from my face, but the shockwave generated by the sheer brute force of the movement cracked the floor beneath my boots and shattered the remaining windows of the hall.
The half-blood's left arm came down in a lethal arc, aiming to crush my collarbone.
I slipped beneath his open guard. I shifted into the close-quarters combat stance that Sillys had forged into my muscles during the blizzards. The air swirled in vibrant, hissing bands around my bare forearms, dyed red by the drops of blood escaping the gash on my chest.
Lucas spun on his axis and lunged again. And we collided.
He threw a right cross. I blocked with my left forearm wreathed in air; the clash between wind and steel sounded like a striking anvil. Riding the kinetic energy of his recoil, I twisted my hips and drove the palm of my right hand squarely into the center of his ruined breastplate.
*BOOM!*
The atmospheric pressure wave swept through the warrior's innards, passed straight through his body, and exploded out his back, obliterating a tapestry and a stone wall fifteen meters behind him.
But Lucas didn't even blink.
He swallowed the impact that should have crushed his lungs, spread both his arms, and simply threw himself at me. The elf's monumental weight struck me like a battering ram. We were launched backward, crashing onto the floor and rolling through the rubble of the hall in a brutal tangle of violence. The wind exploded and gouged the floor with every chaotic spin.
With his arms pinned in the fall and his mind reduced to ashes, Lucas craned his neck, unhinged his jaw, and sank his teeth like a rabid wolf directly into the open wound on my shoulder and chest.
The pain was agonizing and sharp; I felt the hardened leather and my own flesh tear.
I sucked in as much oxygen as I could, channeled it straight to my heels, planted my boots against his stomach, and unleashed a double detonation from the inside out.
The explosion disintegrated the marble beneath us. Lucas was ejected vertically, smashed against the twisted wrought-iron mount of a ceiling chandelier, and crashed down on the far side of the hall, gouging a trench into the stone with his sheer weight. He stopped on his knees, spat a bloody chunk of my armor onto the floor... and flashed a grotesque smile, his teeth stained bright red.
On my end, I tried to stand up, but my knees gave out. I collapsed, slamming a flat palm onto the ground to keep from falling over entirely.
With every gasp of air, it felt like I was swallowing ground glass. My entire body trembled in uncontrollable spasms of agony. The glowing white marks on my skin no longer shone with absolute firmness; they flickered and faltered erratically, as if the energy was cannibalizing my very own life force.
The wind orbiting my body was now a thick, crimson mist, saturated with my vaporized blood.
*This body isn't going to hold out much longer.* The thought crossed my mind, cold and lucid amid the chaos.
I closed my eyes.
I clenched my fists until my knuckles popped. I forced my mind to compartmentalize the excruciating pain of my sliced chest. The sound of the castle collapsing outside faded away entirely.
When I opened my eyes, the chaotic storm in my irises had stabilized into a translucent, absolute blue.
I let the air itself pull me. My boots didn't scrape against the stone, nor did I hear the booming sound of a push-off. The white dust simply swirled in the vacuum where I had stood a fraction of a second before. The entire space between us wasn't traversed; it was folded and swallowed by the storm.
Lucas widened his manic eyes and brutally twisted his torso, swinging his gauntlet blindly, but met nothing but empty air.
I was already inside his intimate guard. With an open palm, concentrated with my cutting winds, I spun and slashed a small section of his neck.
*THWACK!*
Lucas's cartilage popped, and a dark spray of blood stained the air, but it wasn't a fatal blow.
*CRACK!*
I slid like a ghost into his blind spot and delivered a short kick, shrouded in wind, driving my heel with full force into the back of his left knee. The armored leg buckled with the wet sound of snapping tendons.
*BOOM!*
The exact instant his body began to fall, I rotated my torso and sank the base of my palm up right beneath the warrior's jaw.
The surgical force of the air ejected the elf off the ground and hurled him backward like a ballista bolt. Lucas crossed the airspace of the hall, blasting through the three remaining pillars. His body shattered the solid rock before finally collapsing and vanishing beneath an avalanche of heavy rubble on the far end of the ruins.
I stopped in the center of the destruction. My arms fell limp at my sides. My breath caught in my throat, and the world around me began to darken dangerously at the edges of my vision.
The chalky dust took a long time to settle. Silence hung heavy over the crater.
And then, from the middle of the mountain of boulders and shattered beams, the sound of shifting rocks scratched at my ears.
A crushed steel boot stepped onto the cracked marble.
Lucas emerged. The black armor no longer existed, reduced to mere splinters of iron embedded in his flesh. His left arm hung useless and inverted, broken in multiple places. His dark skin was split open and bathed in the very blood pouring from his neck.
His eyes no longer held any trace of focus or humanity; they were opaque, primitive abysses.
He was a dead man who outright refused to meet the ground.
Slowly, dragging his mangled leg through the dust, the dark elf marched in my direction once more.