Sixty-One

Lilith confirmed that the current Eve could use those dark-violet vortices to swallow any mana they touched, and every bit turned into a bright stripe on the gray vortex.

It felt wrong to count by total energy; was the stripe tallying the number of absorptions instead?

Caution tightened her chest; she didn’t dare judge the whorls behind the woman’s back with so little knowledge. She shelved spell output and pressed in close, using jittering footwork to pry open a gap.

She lunged again.

The Little White Dragon dropped her stance; a thin white veil wrapped her whole body. The Void Command Seat resonated, and her speed rose like wind skimming a lake; she blew toward the Black Demon.

In a blink she was beside Eve. She swung her Broken Sword on a rising diagonal; the edge flashed petal-pink, a crisp hum rippling through the air.

Eve let her long knife drift down, light as a falling leaf; the blades kissed. With a small sideways push, the Demon bled off the force and erased the strike.

She blocked, then called a dark-red whirlpool; a handful of locusts flew out, wings clattering like rain, diving for the Little White Dragon.

Lilith had felt those bites before; dread pricked like thorns. She didn’t dare ignore them; she stepped back, opening the distance.

That one breath handed Eve an opening. Unlike Lilith, the Demon had no qualms about magic; as Lilith retreated, she lifted her hand and snapped a quick incantation.

“Flame!”

The simplest attack spell, a trick even novice apprentices used to coax fire from the air.

Eve used exactly that basic cantrip. Yet what rolled at Lilith wasn’t a damp spark that couldn’t light wet kindling, but a wall of fire big enough to swallow her whole.

“How is that ‘Flame’?!”

Her complaint tore out like a wounded bird. The Little White Dragon had no time to reach the Astrolabe on her back; she spread her hands and dragged all her gathered Star Energy to her palms, throwing magic to meet the blaze.

“Blizzard!”

She called a huge snowball; it leaped from her palm and drove straight into the fire-wall.

The greedy fire didn’t care what it devoured; it roared to burn anything in its domain. But when the snowball burst, ice-water drenched it clean; steam rose and hung like ghosts, and the flames couldn’t climb again.

“Ugh!” As soon as she finished the spell, a heavy blow slammed into her belly.

The Little White Dragon’s slight body got swatted away, a sparrow hit by a gale. Her dusk-blue-and-white cloak flashed; a dazzling burst cut through the air. A white cross bloomed where Eve’s strike landed, the Holy Cloak stepping in to take the hit.

“Holy Cloak?” Eve stared at her hand, brows pinched. “So you took it. I was wondering how those people lost so fast with a thing like that.”

“Guh!” Lilith crashed hard, pain ringing like iron; she fought to her feet, one hand pressed to the spot that got hit.

The cloak had bled off most of the impact, but some force still punched through. Add the brutal fall, and Lilith’s condition wasn’t great.

She saw another stripe light up on the dark-violet vortex behind Eve.

She pieced it together: throw a spell to bait me to counter, absorb the magic I release, then strike when my focus splits.

She understood what Eve had done, and the thought bit bitterly: we used the same idea, so why did my two ambushes barely scratch, while Eve almost ended it in a heartbeat?

Lilith exhaled; the breath came heavy, like mist off cold stone. She shook her head and dragged her focus back to the Demon in front of her.

Her close-quarters wasn’t on par with this Demon; strength and skill both tilted to the other side.

She hated admitting it, but she lacked experience fighting people. The enemies she’d faced before—few kept a human shape, fewer still fought like humans.

In the Kingdom, your tactics for fighting people just got you killed faster against beasts.

Monsters don’t feel pain, don’t fear; against them, raw survival instinct matters more than craft.

So right now Lilith didn’t have many tools to handle Eve. But the Little White Dragon wasn’t alone.

She couldn’t fight people well, but she knew someone who could.

“Time to use it.” She’d sworn not to lean on their power, yet she missed fighting beside her old companions. With Abaddon’s heart still gripped in this Demon woman’s hand, she had to use every lever and end this fast.

Black mist poured from Lilith like midnight smoke and knit itself into the shape of a Black Knight. In his hands sat a rust-scabbed longsword; he gave Eve a formal knight’s salute, then settled into a ready stance.

“Lilith. Next move. I guard, you strike.” The Black Swordsman whispered by the Little White Dragon’s ear. Lilith nodded, face tight, fingers locking around her sword.

“Oh? Finally willing to show your trump card?” Eve toyed with a falling lock, cool eyes appraising the Black Swordsman at Lilith’s side.

The answer wasn’t words, but a blade’s cold edge.

Lilith cranked up her resonance with the constellations; deep azure replaced pale starlight. She and the knight flickered to the Demon’s side; his pitch-black rusted sword met the Demon’s long blade.

Forced to defend, Eve exposed a gap Lilith could take.

The Little White Dragon wouldn’t miss it. She brought her sword down—