Chapter 109: War goes on 2

Chapter 109: War goes on 2 The assassin charged anyway—and died with her chest cavity hollowed out by a water drill that punched through armor, bone, and vital organs before dissipating into harmless droplets. In the northwestern corner, Queen Elysia orchestrated death with elegant gestures. Air-blades invisible to the naked eye severed limbs and opened throats wherever she directed her attention. Four royal guards moved in perfect synchronization with her, creating a lethal zone around their sovereign that none could penetrate. A squad of ten black-robed warriors attempted to rush their position from multiple angles. Seven died before covering half the distance, falling to precisely targeted air strikes that sliced through vulnerable points in their armor. The remaining three were lifted bodily into the air, held suspended by Elysia’s power. "Moonlight sends you to the next life," she stated calmly, then closed her fist. The air pressure around the suspended warriors increased a hundredfold in an instant. Their armor imploded, followed immediately by their bodies. What rained down onto the snow was a fine mist of blood and fragmented bone. The battle continued its grim work, neither side clearly prevailing as the courtyard became a monument to shared brutality. *** Commander Maria circled her opponent with measured steps, her expression betraying nothing of the calculations racing through her mind. Vex’s form continued to blur and multiply, each duplicate mimicking her movements with perfect precision. "How will you fight what isn’t fully there?" Vex taunted, her voice coming from multiple locations simultaneously. "Your mind cannot grasp what your eyes cannot properly see." Maria remained silent, her hands moving in subtle patterns at her sides. The air between them thickened visibly, light bending around her fingers. Vex struck first—or rather, all her duplicates attacked at once, converging on Maria from twelve different angles. Blades materialized in their hands, edges gleaming with unnatural sharpness. Maria didn’t attempt to dodge. Instead, she slammed her palm into the ground. Reality rippled outward from the point of impact, distorting everything it touched. Eleven of the duplicates dissipated like smoke, leaving only the true Vex—her blade inches from Maria’s throat. "Found me," Vex acknowledged with a cruel smile, completing her strike. Maria’s form suddenly frayed at the edges, revealing it as an illusion. The real Maria appeared behind Vex, driving a crystalline dagger toward her kidney. ’Too predictable,’ Maria thought as Vex twisted away, the blade scoring only a shallow cut across her armor. ’She’s anticipating standard countermoves.’ Vex laughed, the sound fragmenting into disturbing harmonics. "Did you think you’re the only one who can play with perception?" She split again into multiple forms, each one moving independently this time, attacking from different angles with different weapons. Maria closed her eyes, relying on other senses. ’The snow crunches under real weight. The air displaces around solid matter.’ She pivoted sharply, her dagger finding flesh—a thin slice across Vex’s forearm that drew first blood. "Clever witch," Vex hissed, her duplicates momentarily flickering as her concentration wavered. Maria pressed her advantage, spinning into a low attack that should have hamstrung her opponent. But her blade met only air as Vex phased partially out of reality, becoming semi-transparent. "Reality is more flexible than you’ve been taught," Vex said, resolidifying behind Maria. Maria barely blocked the downward strike aimed at her skull, her own weapon materializing from compressed air just in time. The impact still drove her to one knee in the blood-soaked snow. "I was destroying minds when you were learning to crawl," Vex snarled, pressing down with unnatural strength. "Your techniques are child’s play compared to—" Maria headbutted her mid-sentence, the unexpected physical attack catching Vex off-guard. As she staggered back, Maria unleashed her power fully. The air around them shimmered as she rewrote local reality, creating a bubble where physics obeyed her will rather than natural law. "What—" Vex began, but found herself suddenly fighting in a space where up and down had reversed. She flailed momentarily before adjusting, landing in a crouch on what had been the sky moments before. "Impressive," she conceded, blood from her nose now running upward toward her hairline. "Most illusion-casters work with perception only. You’re actually bending localized reality." Maria didn’t waste energy responding. She launched herself upward—or what appeared as upward within her altered pocket of existence. Her blade elongated mid-strike, forming a scythe of solidified thought that curved toward Vex’s midsection. Vex phased partially again, the blade passing through her with minimal damage. She retaliated with a spinning kick that connected solidly with Maria’s temple, sending her tumbling across the inverted battlefield. ’She adapts too quickly,’ Maria thought, tasting blood. ’Time to introduce chaos.’ She slammed both palms together, and the bubble of altered reality fragmented into a dozen interconnected but contradictory zones. In one segment gravity pulled sideways, in another time flowed backward, in a third light behaved as a solid substance. Vex stumbled as she crossed boundaries between zones, her form flickering erratically as she struggled to maintain her own manipulations amid Maria’s reality distortions. "You think chaos favors you?" Vex snarled, blood now flowing from her nose and ears as the strain of navigating the fractured reality took its toll. "I am chaos incarnate!" Her form suddenly expanded, splitting not into duplicates but into fragmented aspects of herself. Each piece—an arm, a torso, a head—operated independently, attacking from positions that defied conventional space. Maria met the bizarre assault with cold calculation, each movement precise despite the impossible battlefield. When a disembodied arm swung a blade at her back, she caught it without looking, twisted until bones snapped, then used the captured limb to block a strike from a floating torso. "You’re strong," Maria acknowledged, blood streaming from her own ears as maintaining the reality distortions taxed her limits. "But you rely too heavily on disorientation." She closed the distance to what appeared to be Vex’s primary consciousness, the fragment containing her eyes. Their blades met in a shower of impossible sparks that froze in midair, suspended in one of the time-distorted zones. "And you rely too much on control," Vex countered, her fragmented mouth speaking from three different locations at once. "There’s power in embracing madness." Their deadlock held, neither able to overcome the other as reality itself groaned under the weight of their conflicting manipulations. Blood ran from both their eyes now, the strain of their contest etching fresh lines of pain across their faces. "This ends only one way," Vex whispered, her voice simultaneously distant and intimately close. Maria’s smile was savage with determination. "Yes. With one of us broken." She increased the power flowing through her constructed reality, pushing both of them toward that breaking point.