Crow looked at him in the eye, and Kelly felt as though it nodded in response. A second later, Crow vanished, dissolving back into his soul.
"Okay, so what's the plan?"
Kelly asked.
"Heh… no plan. Let's just say I've got a feeling this time."
Kei smirked, and Kelly smirked right back.
"Come on, are you flirting now… don't you think it's a little too late?"
"Ohh, you wish. You should be happy, at least, compared to your lacklustre life, you're going to die with a beauty by your side."
"Then I'm glad, I suppose."
They looked at each other and shared faint smiles. Then Kei spoke again, her tone turning mockingly playful.
"So, my prince, as promised, just stall them for a minute. I've recovered enough I still have my skill. It should be enough to kill them all… maybe us too."
Perhaps it was because they had both accepted that they wouldn't survive. Two very different people, yet similar in their own ways, finally let their guards down. In that fleeting moment, they spoke to each other like old friends, able to trust one another, even if that trust was meant to last only for that instant.
"You better do something good, I would hate to be disappointed"
"Heh…you do have a foul mouth…its time you stop using that and your hands more… hold them off, time, I use my skill if we are dying I am taking these bastards with me"
Kelly dove back into the horde, this time no longer caring about the injuries piling up across his body. With both knives in hand, he slashed through the skeletons, cutting them down one after another.
First, he slid forward and struck a skeleton in its rib cage with enough force to dismantle it entirely. At the same time, his other blade found its way into the skull of another. He shoved both aside, then hurled his knife at a skeleton that had slipped past him and was closing in on Kei.
Before it could react, he kicked away another that came too close. Using the momentum, he retreated a step, ripped his embedded knife free from the skeleton's back, and dove straight back into the fray.
From behind him, Kei watched and with relief focused on doing her part.
'It's a good thing they don't have muscles or blood. No resistance, no flesh to slow my blades. I don't need much force to cut them down. But there are just too many. At this rate, I'll be overwhelmed again in no time. Kei… you'd better do something soon.'
Meanwhile, Kei stood with her eyes closed, gathering an immense amount of mana in her hands. Her skill, Amalgamation, was considered one of the most broken abilities in existence. It was widely known that two attributes of opposing nature were nearly impossible to combine and fire and ice were the very definition of that contradiction, cancelling each other out completely.
Yet that was precisely where the true power of her skill shone, Amalgamation, didn't merely ignore the conflicting nature of the attributes, it forced them into perfect synchronization. Fire's overwhelming destructive force merged seamlessly with ice's freezing property, creating a flawless fusion of both. However, Kei's proficiency with the skill was still lacking, which was why it took so much time to stabilize. The mana in her hands felt like a hydrogen bomb barely being held together by sheer will. Slowly, flames began to frost over. Ice crept across the burning core, layer by layer, until the raging heat was sealed within a frozen shell. What formed in her hands was no longer fire or ice, it was a glowing blue orb, humming with contained annihilation. However still, Kei wasn't finished yet. Just as her attack reached completion, she invoked another one of her broken skill, Amplification. A mere D-rank skill, yet when wielded by someone truly talented, its true value became unmistakable. The skill amplified the user's magic output, and though it was her first time using it, boosting the spell by only twenty-five percent, the difference was anything but small. It was like the gap between a magnitude-six earthquake and a magnitude-seven one. And when everything was finally ready, Kei opened her eyes and shouted.
"Kelly FALL BACK NOW!!"
Kelly knew, deep in his heart, that he didn't want to be anywhere near the range of whatever attack he could feel forming behind him. Even the aftermath alone would be enough to turn him into meat paste. After smashing the last skeleton near him aside with his elbow, Kelly fell back to Kei's side. He could only stare in awe at the blue orb resting in her hands, overflowing with mana and raw, terrifying power.
'Fuck… better never make her angry…Who knows what she'd decide to hit me with next…'