Cainan zipped forward first, his chains grinding around his fists as Shackleheart Descent surged through his frame, each stomp of his feet sending pulsing magic circles thudding into the earth like a death knell.
He spiraled through the falling ash and glowing mist, punching through a curtain of withering dark magic, only for Elsha's fingers to twitch—thumb to ring, index to pinky—and a chain of inverted healing slithered across the air, not slicing but unraveling the tissue of his shoulder as if his body regretted healing in the first place.
"Tch!"
He collapsed to one knee, his momentum rupturing inward.
'Get up!'
Before he could even rise, Lynzelle blitzed past him, scythe dragging behind her like a streak of moonlit vengeance.
Her body twisted unnaturally mid-sprint as she rotated the scythe into a full-body vault, slicing upward in a flourish of Flesh Ripper, but Elsha only raised two fingers—and the air recoiled in rot. Lynzelle's scythe was caught mid-motion, stuck in a veil of reversed restoration that stitched her muscles in the wrong direction, nearly dislocating her arm as the glyph rejected her physical motion.
'Shit….! THIS is reverse healing?! What more can she do?!'
Qorrak surged forward, all four arms twisting the wind into violent jets. He vaulted off Lynzelle's shoulder with his stuff, turning mid-air as one hand wrapped the wind around Cainan's chains, sending them spinning back into Elsha's direction like razors. His other three hands constructed a fast cyclone of compressed gusts, each laced with the scent of steel and blood. Elsha's fingers twitched into a hand seal—a spiraling interlace—and from her grimoire burst a dome of black-threaded wind that spun against Qorrak's own magic.
His own cyclone imploded, dragging him downward. He tried to roll through the landing but was caught mid-fall by a flick of Elsha's pinky, which formed a horizontal ring of reverse life-magic that touched his wind-wrapped ankle and burst the blood vessels up to his thigh.
Qorrak screamed, the blood siphoning out in red mist, his foot limp as he landed and flipped away, bouncing twice before he caught himself with his staff and limped into a retreating crouch. "Yeah. This isn't gonna be easy, lads."
Astrid flew into position, hands glowing, her lips curled in frustration.
She didn't dare copy Elsha yet—she knew doing so without understanding the intricacies would kill her outright. She looked up, seeing Lynzelle's falling body with a controlled gravitational pull, only for the ground beneath her to shift—black flowers erupted from the ground, recreating the funeral field Elsha once mourned in, the scent of lilies and decayed wood seeping through the mist.
'Can I really not do anything right now…?' Astrid thought. 'I wanna join, but it's risky. That's why I told Cainan I'm somewhat of a fighter, no matter how much I love violence…'
Cainan surged up again, breath ragged, invoking Dirge of the Severed Coil. His chains locked to his thighs, wrapping around his hips and calves as his entire lower body snapped into destructive harmony. He sprinted low, each step fracturing the ground with silent, violent rupture.
His legs no longer moved—they devoured space, and when he reached Elsha, he pivoted into a slide-kick aimed at her midsection. The move was clean—perfect. But, he didn't hit her. He hit a barrier covering her, the barrier clanged line glass and had gold streams spreading from it. But as soon as Cainan hit it, he felt an agonizing amount of pain in his leg, and he roared in anger, flipping back away from her.
'A barrier…?!'
Qorrak screamed in defiance, wind swirling around his staff like a living hurricane, dragging Lynzelle and Cainan with it.
"Got you two kids!" He exclaimed.
'My wind magic is not as destructive as Lynzelle and Cainan's power, but what I can do best is support. But Elsha..her reverse healing is on another level. No doubt the Witch Queen is involved with her.'
The three fighters formed a temporary cyclone, Qorrak at the center, whirling them around Elsha like a celestial ballet of violence. Lynzelle raised her scythe and summoned Wail of the Abyss, the screaming glyph expanding over her head as she twisted through the cyclone, carving upward.
"Something's protecting her, she's encased in something." Cainan twisted with her, one arm lashing out a chain enhanced with Maw of the Bound Flame, the glyph burning at his throat. Qorrak amplified their speed, the wind vaulting them like arrows toward Elsha's platform.
Lynzelle replied, "Ummm she wants to fight and die and stuff but she's hiding behind some barrier?! Should we just leave?"
"It's weird. Why would she be in there?"
Qorrak yelled from below, "Just keep hitting the shit! It's gotta be connected to that harp!"
Cainan looked at the harp, and the music coming from it seemed to resonate around Elsha.
'Could the harp be repairing the barrier every note? Or is it a conduit for the magic she's using right now? Does it connect to get grimoire…? The hand around her throat?'
The battlefield shifted again. Now they stood upon a rooftop under pale rain—Elsha's wedding day. Her figure danced with her husband in golden light above the harp as the memories of joy and love played out around them in haunting contrast. That memory of love now guarded her like a cathedral of agony.
As the group staggered upright, Astrid called out, "We need a new approach!"
But even her voice sounded muted here, as though kindness had been banned.
Qorrak barely managed to catch Cainan before he fell. Lynzelle's scythe hand shook. Her nose bled freely. Cainan's body was a lattice of bruises and burns, and the glyph on his chest was cracked.
Elsha had not moved. Not one step. She floated just above the harp, the grimoire still open. Her flower crown glowed with sorrowful white radiance, her dress fluttering like silk soaked in death. Black veins pulsed under her golden eyes, tears bleeding from them freely. "This is an honor," she whispered, and the harp resonated with her words. The music was cruel, heavenly. Beneath her, the petals from her past wedding scattered across the air like snow, blasting Cainan, Lynzelle, and Qorrak back down to the ground, leaving a large crater of dirt and wind.
The group now slowly stood in a broken triangle—each of them wounded, breathless, blood pooling beneath them. Cainan clenched his fists as the chains flickered weakly around his arms, his eyes locked on the woman above. Elsha was untouched. And she smiled, sadly.
Cainan said, "That harp…it's connected to her magic. It has to be. Every piece of magic has a conduit to draw power from. Like our Soulbrand, how our souls are conduits. Like my chains..and Lynzelle's scythe. And that cursed hand around her throat, twisting her healing magic she had before and reversed it completely. A soul doesn't have to be the only one to fuel a magic skill. Like amulets and artifacts work…it's the same concept. The power of runes on weapons..it's the same thing." He looked at the wind runes on Qorrak's staff.
Lynzelle, breathing heavily, said, "The harp..fuels her barrier. The hand from the grimoire fuels her reverse healing. It's warping her own magic.."
Qorrak asked, "How…how can you two be so sure..?"
Lynzele slightly pointed at Cainan, saying, "He's seen a bunch of witches and fought and killed a lot of them. I'd go with what he says."
Elsha hovered above them in silent stillness, the dark veins of her hovering grimoire pulsing in rhythm with each subtle twitch of her fingers. Her eyes—serene, ancient, unreadable—never blinked, never moved. Just watching.
Studying. Her calm was maddening. Below her, Cainan's boots scraped against broken stone as blood dripped down his arms, breaths ragged, chains slack around his shoulders. Qorrak's chest heaved, hands clutching his staff tight enough to splinter it. Lynzelle wiped a crimson smear across her lips, grinning wild through the pain, while Astrid hovered nearby with blood pooling down one leg.
Qorrak said,. "She doesn't need to move. She resonates everything through that damn harp and her hands. Reverse healing… it's not just magic—it's a command. A rewrite."
"Then we corrupt it," Lynzelle growled. "All at once. We rush her so hard she can't use it fast enough—"
"Or…," Cainan snapped. "Astrid."
Cainan looked at Astrid.
"Your mimicry. You take someone's power and form for fifteen seconds, right? Like you did Thurna…"
Astrid nodded slowly. "Yeah, but I can't stack them. Two times max or my body tears apart. You remember what I told you back at the arena?"
"Then we rotate you," he said, brain clicking into motion. "I'll count down from fifteen during the fight. When it hits one and you're about to change, someone else hits you. That's thirty seconds total of mimicry—enough time to break through her barrier. That barrier isn't invincible. If she wants to honor her husband by dying here, hiding behind a barrier is not her specialty." Cainan said that loud enough for Elsha to hear, and Elsha was looking at him with a sad face, but then grinned.
Cainan added, "She's testing us, or she's feeding off of the attacks we're throwing at her barrier. I felt nothing but pain once I hit that fucking magic shield of hers. We survive the attacks she throws, and then all at once we hit the barrier. No need to keep hitting it over and over and weaken ourselves."
Qorrak said, "Astrid should take Cainan and Lynzelle's forms," he said instantly. "You two are our sharpest blades."
"Then we go now!" Lynzelle declared, and without hesitation, and with a smile, she twisted and punched Astrid in the gut, sending her spiraling through the air.
Her flesh warped mid-flight, eyes snapping wide as her limbs stretched and buckled grotesquely—and then her figure reformed, scythe trailing sparks, blood-red glyphs blooming along her arms as she landed with the same twisted grin as Lynzelle. The battlefield shifted. They moved. She looked just like her now, long black hair, black horns, and red eyes and thin pupils.
Lynzelle quickly admired herself as she looked at Astrid, saying, "Mhm mhm. I'm some kind of gorgeous aren't I?" Then she yelled to Astrid, "Don't get fucked up too much in my form, ya hear me, fly?!"
"Yeah yeah whatever!
The stone beneath their feet melted away into wind-scattered field ruins, tall golden grass flowing with memories of Elsha's past—the scene awash in pale, haunting beauty as ruined homes and scattered bones painted an aching story of her life before war.
"She's changing the scene again! Watch your backs!" Cainan yelled.
They had no time to admire it. Elsha raised her hands, and with a sharp flex of her index and middle fingers, massive glowing white hands burst from the soil—towering things, split-veined with rotting black and covered in reversed glyphs that screamed with the word "CREATE" etched across their palms.
They didn't strike—they crushed, reformed, and struck again, with every missed slam splattering the field in inverted glyph-burns. Cainan twisted low as one hand clapped down from above, the air thunderous with its descent. He braced and vaulted upward, slamming both feet into the hand's side and carving downward as his chain-fused fists exploded into the joints.
'She's baiting us to attack the barrier. She's gonna try and weaken us before she pulls out the big shit. Why do all of this when she wants to be killed? Or is it because she's heard of me..testing my limits..finalizing my worth to see if I'm capable of killing her and honoring her dream…'
The impact didn't throw the hand—it imploded it, fingers writhing in agony before vanishing into cursed smoke. Qorrak hurled a gust to catch Astrid -formed—as she danced between the fingers of another hand, her scythe twisting with grotesque elegance as she hooked the blade into the palm's glyph and ripped downward, forcing it to twitch violently, severing a chunk of glowing flesh.
But it wasn't enough. The sky cracked open behind Elsha. Giant sheep, black-veined and twitching with contorted forms, descended in an unholy stampede. Their wool peeled and reformed mid-charge, dragging the smell of death with every step. Each one gushed reverse healing magic from their mouths and nostrils like twisted hymns, warping the very field with healing so brutal it unraveled muscle.
One struck Astrid mid-swing—its haws biting down, not with teeth, but with reconstitution. Her form reknit itself wrong in real-time, causing her ribs to twist and bones to pop free from sockets. Screaming, she backflipped into the air and somersaulted off Qorrak's wind, straightening her body with sheer force of will. Cainan dashed low, spinning into a slide that sent red glyphs surging from his ankles. With a shout, he triggered Dirge of the Severed Coil, and his legs shattered the terrain with every step, each kick cleaving the sheep's form apart as reality frayed at every strike. One sheep tried to retreat—it collapsed into pieces mid-air as his glyphs detonated along its spine.
"Thirteen…" Cainan thought, watching Astrid out of the corner of his eye. He had to time it perfect. She was burning through the first fifteen seconds and barely holding.
Qorrak leapt above a surging hand, spinning his staff mid-air, twisting the currents into spears that shattered against Elsha's defensive veil. Still, she never moved. Her hands continued dancing—twitching with godlike rhythm. Another series of hands erupted from the earth, seizing Lynzelle's leg. She didn't hesitate—her scythe swung behind her backward, slicing through her own foot and the hand at once, flipping her headlong into a hurling sheep.
She plunged her weapon into its chest and ripped upward with a roar, glyphs screaming across the blade as she exited through its skull. Qorrak grabbed her midair with his wind, redirecting her launch with a cyclone beneath her feet. Cainan dashed alongside her, his torso wrapped in chains, destruction crest flaring at his sternum. Every punching strike now collapsed space in short bursts—bones folding, bodies imploding. Still, Elsha hadn't moved.
"Seven," Cainan growled, a hand gripping the edge of one sheep's throat, the crest in his palm flashing as Maw of the Bound Flame triggered.
The creature's face caved inward, imploding in a hiss of bone ash. He kicked its falling carcass upward and springboarded off it, spinning midair to deliver a double-fisted strike into another glowing palm descending toward Qorrak. It shattered on impact, raining down in melted glass.
Behind him, Astrid crashed through another hand, carving glyphs into its knuckles and ripping a strip of glowing flesh away. Elsha's fingers began shifting again. New forms. A reverse chorus rose from the harp, and a wave of magic swelled like a heartbeat. Hands reshaped into bladed stumps. Cainan narrowed his eyes. "Three…"
The field trembled—memory shifting again. The battlefield melted into a ruined cathedral drowned in moonlight, broken pews and stained glass scattered around them. Elsha remained the center—hovering, divine, untouchable.
'The excitement she's getting from this fight…she's merging it with the excitement from her past before her husband was killed…she's trying to feel every ounce of joy and happiness before she dies…! Even with the disturbing memories she's displaying at times, she's using that as fuel.'
The harp sang another note, and a column of reversed healing burst toward them. Lynzelle yelled, "Now!" and threw Astrid with all her strength.
Astrid twisted, spinning through the cathedral air like a cursed meteor, and just before she reached Cainan, he smashed a fist into her gut. Her body snapped inward then outward, reshaping—bones cracking and stretching—as chains exploded across her arms, the halo forming over her head. Destruction pulsed inside her veins as her form matched his. Both of them locked feet in mid-air, using the momentum to pivot sideways, dodging a crashing hand, then kicking off one another in opposite directions, converging again in a whip of blood and chains.
The trio—Cainan, Lynzelle, Astrid—converged. They vaulted, spiraled, and ripped through the remnants of Elsha's cathedral guardians, battering their way forward. Astrid detonated a palm with a spinning kick,, the chain inside rupturing the air with unnatural force. Lynzelle flanked left, scythe dancing with magic of anguish, slicing the thigh of a summoned sheep and causing it to fold into itself.
Cainan struck center, every movement a precision implosion, fists crushing into Elsha's summoned constructs like celestial anvils. The three came together, rising in tandem, chains spiraling, blood trailing from their wounds. At the apex, they struck—an explosive trinity of scythe, chain, and mimicry. The force slammed into Elsha's barrier. Her harp let out a jarring note. Her body reeled backward—and for the first time—her nose bled.
And still, she hovered. Silent. Calm. Eyes locked on them as though nothing had changed.
"Did we get her….?" Lynzelle asked, almost falling over.
Elsha staggered, just barely. Her posture dipped as her toes grazed the soil for the first time since the fight began, a rare shiver pulsing down her spine. The blow hadn't crippled her—but it had touched her. A slow, breathless moment stretched between them, blood dripping from blades and hands, armor cracked and scorched. Then, her voice rose—soft, almost tender beneath the crackle of burning debris and bleeding glyphs.
"Do you know why I fight back?" she asked.
None of them answered. The silence was deafening—only the sounds of their own rasping breath, of sheep beasts dissolving in the distance, and of blood dripping to soil filled the air.
Cainan looked up, chains slack around his forearms. Lynzelle panted, her hand hovering above a wound too deep to ignore. Qorrak knelt beside Astrid, now small and glowing faintly, her fairy form flickering with instability. The group was cracked open—raw, strained, and trembling from exhaustion.
Elsha's eyes, wet with pain, glowed dimly as she continued.
"I fight… because it would shame him if I don't." Her voice was louder now. "My husband. When the people of Thalgrimir dragged him from our home and burned him alive… he died helpless. Powerless. They stripped away everything. Dignity. Voice. Even prayer." She blinked through the tears beginning to fall freely. "If I allowed myself to die the same way—cornered, weak, without honor—then his death would have meant nothing. And there is no disrespect to him…it's just reality."
Astrid clutched her side, her wings twitching as she tried to stand, to protest, but Qorrak held her with a single hand and shook his head.
"There's nothing else you can do, little one," he whispered.
"But—" she started.
"No," Qorrak said gently. "You gave us the key. That's enough. You don't need to break again."
Elsha's gaze turned to the harp, still pulsing with its corrupted brilliance. "Your strength," she said to them, "managed to crack my veil. The protection that the harp sustained… It faltered. For a moment. And that moment is all I needed." She began to descend, the wind wrapping around her like a mourning veil. She stopped in front of the harp, one pale hand lifted. "So now… I can have a death worthy of him. Now I know you will be my harbinger or warfare. I had to make sure. And I wanted to weaken you. To see you fight harder and push yourself to defeat me, so this fight could have more meaning. The way I fought hard to stay strong from him, I wanted to see how I looked through you."
With a whisper-light motion, she played a single note from the harp.
The sound was haunting—gentle, bright, heartbreakingly beautiful. And then the harp shattered in an explosion of luminous fragments, each string dissolving like strands of moonlight breaking across shattered glass. The sound echoed like a farewell hymn, and the battlefield seemed to hold its breath.
The grimoire in front of Elsha began to hum violently, pages flipping of their own accord until it slowed… and stopped. A grey, female, rotten hand emerged from between the pages, pressing against Elsha's throat. Another was already coiled around her neck. More followed—dozens of them—grabbing her shoulders, her ribs, her jawline with slow, reverent pressure. And from her collarbone, a sheep's head surged outward with brutal finality, its eye sockets glowing with reverse glyphs, its maw stretching as it fused with her flesh. Elsha didn't scream. She didn't flinch.
Above her, a radiant white halo ignited—pierced by black veins, corrupted yet divine. And within it, small glowing figures—her and her husband, dancing, twirling beautifully in slow, eternal embrace. The moment was sickening and transcendent, a perfect echo of a love burned too soon.
From her back erupted twisting vines, glowing white but threaded with thin black veins. They pierced the air with soundless grace, large and sinewy, twitching with unnatural hunger.
And she cried openly.
"This is for you," she sobbed, staring upward. "I will die an honorable death… for you."
Behind Cainan and the others, the ground split open—not with force, but grief. A 70-foot-tall effigy rose from beneath them: her husband, also the same size as the effigy, burned beyond recognition, pinned in a posture of crucifixion, fused to the ruins of a forgotten statue. His flesh was charred, ruined. His eye sockets wept rivers of blood, long dried, now reborn. The group turned. No words could be said. Not even Lynzelle spoke. Even she—half-drenched in madness, was silent in the presence of that monument of loss.
Elsha sobbed harder, trembling as she looked at the towering form. "This death is for him. But I'm so scared…I wanted to live…"
Seeing her like this, reminded Cainan of how battered and helpless he looked after losing to Nezreth. And he gritted his teeth at the thought.
Stillness gripped the battlefield. Cainan's foot slid half an inch forward. He wanted to strike. Lynzelle's grip on her scythe tightened. They could all feel the edge of her resolve. This was their moment. But they hesitated. Not from pity. Not from mercy. Something deeper. Fear. Reverence. The unknowable weight of what they were witnessing. She wasn't just a monster now. She was memory. Grief incarnate.
Then her head snapped up—and in that instant, all doubt died.
She vanished.
In less than a blink, she was in Cainan's face, her tears still falling—but her eyes locked and empty. Two glowing crests had formed above her, warping the sky into spiraling symbols of death and devotion. From them darted vines of white light tainted with black veins, spinning rapidly as they launched down like divine spears, their bases invisible, like arms reaching down from a god's throne. Her hands swayed like a conductor lost in trance, and the vines moved with her, spiraling mid-air with brutal elegance.
Then the sky cracked open.
More crests bloomed across the heavens—dozens, maybe hundreds—each swirling with tainted holy energy. And from each, those twisting vines burst out, spiraling faster, slamming into the ground and detonating on contact. Each blast wasn't just power—it was reverse healing. The curses within them forced vitality to invert, ripping muscle from bone, blood from vein, and those struck wept thick black ichor from their eyes. The earth cratered with every impact, each spiral-formed vine gouging deep trenches into the terrain. Destruction rained like scripture, divine and venomous, spelling the end in searing light.
The group dove for cover—Cainan twisting chains into shields as the first barrage exploded around him, Lynzelle kicking off a falling sheep corpse mid-air and launching herself between two falling vines and spinning really fast to slash them to shreds mid air. Qorrak called out wind barriers but they shattered almost instantly, forcing him to grab Astrid and roll behind a stone ridge. Even then, glyph-bursts carved symbols into his skin. And amidst it all—Elsha was there, right in front of Cainan, face soaked in tears, mouth tight with anguish.