Bella's heart was pounding with a mix of luck and thrill. The way this battlefield kept flipping back and forth was, frankly, exhilarating.
All her elaborate scheming—fierce as a tiger on paper—had ended with both sides competing to see whose plan was the bigger mess.
She had gone out of her way to suppress her centaur soldiers' instincts and stop them from charging. She had positioned the fauns in a phalanx where the front ranks would get cut down while the rear ranks fumed in useless rage. She had designed this whole defeat-into-victory reversal. Every step of the execution had been riddled with holes.
But taking a second look now? Ha! The White Witch, screaming red-faced for her troops to turn back and rescue her, was doing even worse than she was!
Bella was shouting for a counterattack. The White Witch was begging her own side for help.
Across the entire battlefield—from the allied forces sprinting westward toward the river mouth, to the evil army charging eastward in pursuit—every soldier along that long front line was utterly stunned.
What's happening?
What the hell?
What now?
By that point the soldiers' brains had simply crashed. Told to charge, they charged. Told to run, they ran.
In an instant, the situation reversed. The evil army turned on its heels and fled. The allied forces were now the ones doing the chasing.
"Creatures of Narnia, attack!" Bella was savoring her moment in the sun.
Mounted on her gryphon, soaring across the sky, a Light spell glowing around her like her own personal standard—she was a banner incarnate. Allied morale exploded. In that blurred, electric moment, it almost felt as though the land itself responded. Narnia's counterattack had begun.
"RAAAR!"
A roar that shook earth and sky rolled across the wilderness. Aslan the Great Lion had arrived on the battlefield, leading a few hundred reinforcements—resistance fighters the White Witch had turned to stone previously. Their numbers weren't huge, but every one of them was battle-hardened. They struck the evil army's flank and launched charge after charge.
In the distance, the White Witch—surrounded and pinned down by the Ashina samurai—spotted Bella rising like the sun itself.
The Ashina samurai had her boxed in three layers deep. She couldn't break out no matter how she tried.
"You little bitch!" The White Witch glared up at the sky, livid. She stabbed a finger upward. "Kill her for me!"
The harpies that had been guarding her shot skyward in a dense swarm—at least two hundred of them.
And on Bella's side, the air force now consisted of just a handful of gryphons.
"Hey, those filthy little vermin are coming!" her gryphon called out.
"Relax. They're a minor nuisance."
Bella unleashed Mind Blast. Her gryphon led the charge with beak and talon, tearing straight through the harpy swarm. The rest of the gryphons followed, widening the breach. Without the cyclops snipers to pick them off, the gryphons held an absolute advantage over the harpies.
The allied army was short on elite fighters. As supreme commander, Bella had to kill enemy air units and take down their heavy hitters herself.
One slash and she cut down a harpy with unusually vivid plumage. The thing had been strong—it had a sonic-shriek ability, and it took her several spells to finish it off.
"That big one down there! After it!" She pointed at the fleeing Minotaur General. The gryphon dropped its flight altitude and hugged the ground, closing the distance fast.
The Minotaur General truly had absurd stamina. The Centaur General had been hacking at him forever—the thing was limping, half-blind, gashed all over—but the brute still refused to die.
Bella conjured an ice spear in her hand. Staring down at the Minotaur General's broad back from above, she hurled it.
The Minotaur's armor was thick and his muscles denser still, but neither could shrug off magic damage. Bella had no interest in a fair duel. The ice spear punched straight through him, back to front, leaving a clean-through hole.
Even so, the Minotaur General didn't die. Only when the Centaur General lopped off his head did the massive creature finally stop breathing.
Astride her gryphon, Bella raced from hotspot to hotspot across the battlefield, picking off the evil army's elites one by one. As the allied forces' odds grew steadily better, her eyes turned toward the White Witch. The final duel was about to begin.
If the Ashina samurai committed fully and accepted casualties, fifteen hundred men could bury the White Witch under sheer weight of numbers. But the losses would be devastating. Bella's bond with Ashina hadn't reached the point where she could ask that of them.
She patted her gryphon's neck. "Friend, go help your kin. The rest of this fight belongs to me and her."
The gryphon understood. "Be careful, then."
"You too."
In the next instant, Bella reappeared five meters (about sixteen feet) in front of the White Witch. A cross-hilted sword in her right hand, a staff in her left—she thought for a moment, then sheathed the sword again. What came next was a magical duel, and holding a blade would only get in the way.
The White Witch was drenched in blood. Many of Ashina's senior commanders had fallen to her sword—over thirty named samurai killed, and even the fierce Oniwa Gyoubu Masataka had died in battle against her.
But her own losses were catastrophic. Her petrification wand had been shattered by Genichiro Ashina's Floating Passage. Wolf had driven a sword through her shoulder. Oniwa Gyoubu Masataka's cross spear had pierced her left leg. Her gorgeous dress was soaked red.
The White Witch's swordsmanship was, frankly, transcendent. She wielded twin blades, hacking left and slashing right, weaving frost magic seamlessly with sword work. When Bella arrived, she was locked blade-to-blade with Wolf.
She was conserving as much mana as possible for the final fight.
"Lord Ashina, thank you for your service. Leave the rest to me," Bella said.
The Ashina samurai pulled back from the melee and turned to meet the evil army elsewhere. Only Bella and the White Witch remained at the center.
Eyeing the White Witch's stance—left arm forward, right arm raised high with both swords—Bella cocked her head with interest. "Huh. I didn't know you could fight with a sword. Looks like you're pretty good at it, too?"
"Pretty good" was a massive understatement. The White Witch had inherited a great deal from the Ancient One. The way she'd cut down a field of Ashina samurai without using magic said it all—she was a true Sword Saint.
The White Witch's eyebrow twitched up slightly. The expression was a dead ringer for the Ancient One's.
"Pretty good, is it? You little bitch, your eye for this is terrible!"
She lunged with a thrust—but it was a feint. She hurled the sword at Bella, and in her now-empty right palm she gathered a swirling sphere of frost magic, then bowled it toward her like a cyclone.
"I was ready for that!" Bella batted the flying sword aside with her staff and threw up an ice shield.
The frost cyclone slammed into the ice barrier with a sharp crackling noise, like fingernails scraping glass. In the end, the White Witch's mana won out. The cyclone shattered the shield, and in the instant it broke, Bella's ice spear shot toward the White Witch. The wicked woman sidestepped three paces, delicately seized control of the mana inside the spear, forcibly redirected it, and prepared to hurl it back.
BOOM.
The ice spear detonated in midair. The poison sealed inside it burst outward.
"Hahahaha—you're too stupid! You fell for the same trick twice?"
Watching the White Witch hold the toxic mist at bay outside her mana barrier, Bella laughed in pure triumph.