Chapter 25: Cersy vs Devils
"What is happening?" Karn said.
"Do I look like I know? I want to know too."
Zangika pushed the drone zoom to maximum. The ice shard was still there — hanging in the air a foot from Cersy's chest, oriented at her heart, not falling, not advancing. Something was holding it.
Lucia tilted her head slightly. Her expression had gone from clinical to genuinely curious.
"Interesting," she said.
Cersy had not moved. She stood in the village square with the bodies of the three adventurers on the ground behind her and an ice shard hanging in front of her, and she was looking at Leon and Lucia the way someone looks at a thing they have decided to (fuck) means destroy.
"You devils," she said. Her voice was steady. "What did those children do to you? What did any of these people do? They were living their lives — just living. They weren't fighting you, they weren't threatening you. And you killed them. Why. Because you were hungry? Because you were hurt? Did any of them hurt you?"
"None of that happened," Leon said.
"Then why—"
"Are you dumb?" Leon said it without heat, genuinely puzzled. "I already told you. I needed energy. I was injured. You said it yourself. Why are you asking again?"
"Why is she asking again when she already has the answer?" Karn said.
"It's important for the character," Zangika said.
Cersy sniffed once. Then she reached for the bangle on her wrist — a flat band with numbers inset around the circumference. She looked at it, then moved the setting. From ten percent down to five.
"She did something," Karn said.
"Can you feel that?" Zangika said.
Lucia had already felt it. She took a step back — not from fear, but from the involuntary recalibration of someone who had just detected something much larger than the space suggested.
Mana poured out of Cersy's body. Not gradually — in a surge, like a gate opening, filling the air around her with a density that bent the light slightly at its edges. The ice shard in front of her cracked down the centre and fell in two pieces.
"She was hiding a pool that size," Karn said.
"The bangle is a limiter," Zangika said. "She was running at ten percent before. She's just taken it to five — double the output — and the reading is already this significant. I don't know what her actual ceiling looks like."
"I will show you," Cersy said, "what despair feels like. I will show you what it is to stand in front of something that can destroy you and be completely unable to do anything about it."
* * *
Cersy vs. LeonShe vanished.
Appeared in front of Leon.
Leon looked down — already too late. Her fist connected with his gut and the mana behind it discharged on contact, the energy driving inward through his body rather than across it. He folded around the impact and flew backward, boots dragging long furrows through the village dirt before he stopped.
"I had to slow the footage to see that," Zangika said. "That technique — the mana release on impact. It's the same principle as Fire Fist."
Cersy was already gone again — reappeared at Lucia's front, fist already moving. Lucia brought an ice shield up just fast enough. The shield held for a fraction of a second. Then it didn't. Lucia slid backward three steps as the barrier shattered around her knuckles.
"Leon," Lucia said, her voice carrying the specific flatness of someone rapidly revising their assessment. "We have a wind mage."
"Why is she a guild receptionist?" Karn said.
"We don't know. Focus on the fight."
"Don't call us that," Lucia said, righting herself. "We have names. I'm Lucia. He's Leon. What's yours?"
"I don't exchange greetings with devils."
Something enormous appeared in the air above the village — a glacier, condensing from nothing, the temperature around it dropping sharply enough to cloud the air beneath it with mist.
Cersy looked up.
Leon came in from the front — uppercut, aimed at her chin. She tilted her head and let it pass, countered with a left hook. He ducked under it and drove his right foot into her ribs. Wind gathered around Cersy's midsection at the moment of impact and deflected the kick — the force still reached her but at maybe a quarter of what it should have been.
Leon followed immediately — a rapid chain of strikes, both hands, targeting her guard and the gaps around it. She blocked some, deflected others, took a few across her arms and shoulder. Then Leon stepped back and Lucia dropped the glacier.
"She's got more than that," Zangika said.
Cersy pointed both hands upward and pushed. The wind column met the glacier mid-descent — struggled — and cracked it across the middle, splitting the mass into sections that fell wide on either side of her. She was breathing harder now, but her stance hadn't changed.
Lucia appeared from the side — fist covered in mana, the surface crackling with a cold that was more than just temperature. She drove it into Cersy's stomach and the mana discharged, forming a bloom of ice across the surface of Cersy's coat that shattered immediately under the kinetic force and launched her sideways. Cersy caught herself, slid, used the momentum.
"You are not the only one who can run mana through her fists," Lucia said.
Cersy exhaled slowly. She raised both hands overhead and brought them forward together.
"It won't work twice," Lucia said, already forming a three-layer ice shield between them.
"Bitch," Cersy said — and instead of the fist she had telegraphed, she slapped both palms flat against the surface of the first layer.
The shield shattered. The mana she had pushed into it converted on contact and the converted force kept moving — not a shockwave but a rotating pressure, a compressed tornado that formed between the layers and tore through all three simultaneously. Lucia got caught in the edges of the rotation as it passed her and was thrown off her feet.
Leon came back in. His hands were different now — four rings of condensed mana sitting around each set of knuckles, each one layered on top of the last, the outermost ring glowing faintly with built energy.
"Oh no," Cersy said.
Leon threw a punch. Cersy brought a wall of compressed wind up in front of her — a solid barrier, dense enough to stop the first ring from transmitting directly. It stopped the ring. The ring detonated on contact with the wind anyway, the shockwave spreading outward. She absorbed it, staggered. The second ring hit. Bigger shockwave — she was moving backward before it fully discharged. The third ring hit and her feet left the ground. The fourth hit while she was in the air and she was no longer moving backward so much as travelling.
She hit the first house wall and went through it. Hit the second house and went through that too. Hit the third house and the wall stopped her — plunged her into the stone up to her shoulders.
"She'll be alright?" Karn said.
"She appears to be," Zangika said. "Watch."
Rocks began rising from the ground around the impact site — loose stone, rubble, pieces of the houses she had gone through — pulling together, compressing, forming a mass that built itself into a boulder the size of a horse and came rolling forward toward the crater she was embedded in.
"Dam," Karn said.
The wall around Cersy exploded outward as she activated wind on her feet and body simultaneously and launched herself clear. She landed in the open ground between the buildings, absorbed the boulder's momentum by stepping sideways as it passed, and appeared directly in front of Leon a second later.
They exchanged six blows in close range — Cersy's wind deflections letting her redirect rather than block, trading speed for precision, covering her weaker physicality with positioning. Leon caught her once in the shoulder and once across the forearm but she was already building something in her right hand: a sphere of wind compressed down to a size smaller than her fist, spinning so fast it was visible as a distortion in the air rather than a distinct shape.
Leon threw a left hook. Cersy ducked under it and drove the compressed sphere into his ribs.
He left the ground. Flew. Rotating. Hit a building feet first, ricocheted off it, hit the ground rolling, and came to a stop face down in the dirt.
Ice arrows formed around Cersy from all directions — twenty, thirty, each one oriented inward. They launched simultaneously.
"Wind Sphere," Cersy said.
A larger sphere of rotating wind expanded around her body, the pressure wave meeting the arrows and deflecting them outward before they reached her. One had been hidden in the spread — smaller, denser, tucked between two of the visible ones — and it slipped through the outer edge of the deflection.
Cersy caught it. Read the mana on it in the half-second before it reached her, reversed the wind current at that specific point, and the hidden arrow decelerated and spun in place. She used the sphere's own pressure to accelerate it back the way it had come — the added force tripling its original velocity.
Lucia threw up three ice shields. The arrow burned through all three and hit her chest. Not a wound — she got her arms up and the impact went into her guard rather than her body — but the force drove her back and the ice that formed on contact from the arrow's mana frosted across her arms and cracked as it expanded.
"Die, bitch," Lucia said, and pulled lightning from the sky.
"You're not the only one with multiple elements."
Lucia launched a water sphere. Cersy called thunder and it met the water mid-arc, the electricity conducting through the mass and detonating it before it reached her.
Leon was back on his feet. His hand was shaking visibly. He raised it — four rings again, and a fifth now, the outermost barely holding its shape, the energy in it cycling unevenly.
"It hurts," he said, "but you're going to be dead."
He threw it.
Cersy turned her right hand toward the incoming strike and built as much wind as she had into a compressed point — everything she could push into one spot in the half second available to her. The two forces met head-on.
First ring discharged: absorbed. Second: absorbed. Third: absorbed — she felt it in her hand, deep and sharp. Fourth and fifth hit simultaneously. The sphere absorbed them. But the accumulated shockwave from all five rings releasing through the same point drove her backward off her feet, sliding across the ground and decelerating against the village wall at her back.
The sphere was still in her hand. All five shockwaves absorbed, held, spinning inside it.
She threw it at Lucia.
It hit her at hip height. Everything inside it delivered at once — five shockwaves discharging sequentially, each one compounding the motion of the one before it. Lucia went airborne and kept going, the detonations spinning her end over end, each impact visible as a shuddering jerk through her body.
"LUCY—"
Leon was already running toward where she landed.
"Are you okay? Lucy—"
"It hurts—" Lucia's voice was rough. "Leon — it hurts—"
Cersy was already moving. Her right hand was bruised dark and swollen, the knuckles split, but she was on her feet. She vanished with wind on her soles — appeared behind Leon — and drove a Wind Palm into the small of his back.
The air pressure hit his organs before the physical impact did. Leon coughed blood. His legs went unreliable under him. He backed off, one hand braced on his knee, intestines feeling like they'd been rearranged.
* * *
DeltaThe attack came from directly above.
Cersy tried to block it. Her barrier formed and the strike came through it anyway — piercing through the wind layer without interacting with it, the way a needle goes through fabric. The force hit the top of her guard and drove her straight down, the ground beneath her cracking in a spiderweb pattern under the impact.
Sharp pain in both hands. She screamed it out and blew herself clear with a burst of wind.
"Cersy." Zangika's voice, flat. "Who are you?"
Delta landed. Claw-mark mask. Familiar smirk.
"Oh, come on," she said. "Show me what you've got."
Cersy spat a tooth. Looked at the bangle on her wrist. Her expression moved through something private and then closed again. She shook her head — the specific motion of someone saying no to themselves.
She couldn't open it further. Not here. Not in public. Not without the exposure that would follow.
She raised her fists.
"Let's see, then."
Delta was faster than Leon in close-range. She was faster than Cersy overall and stronger in the exchange — every block cost Cersy ground, every deflection pushed her further back. Cersy's wind kept her in it, pulling force off strikes before they fully landed, but the aggregate was clear. She was holding. Not winning.
Delta hit her stomach. Cersy blocked it. Delta spun and hit her temple.
Cersy was in the air again. Hit the ground. Rolled.
"Oh man," Delta said. "I always love fighting combat mages."
"I'm not a combat mage," Cersy said, pushing herself up.
"Stop joking."
"I learnt something from your friend Leon."
Her right hand was different now. The residual mana from Leon's ring technique had left a pattern she had read during the exchange — not aura in its completed form, but something adjacent to it, the leading edge of what aura actually was before it was refined into a proper discipline. She had taken what was accidental and built it deliberately. Wind mana spun at the surface of her fist at a density and speed that made the air visible around her knuckles, the technique rough and freshly created but functional.
"What is that?" Karn said.
"She reverse-engineered part of Leon's technique in the middle of the fight and created a new version," Zangika said. A pause. "Leon's was closer to aura than pure mana — incomplete aura, traces of it, which is why the shockwaves were so disproportionate to the physical strike. The weapon he carried was amplifying and stabilising his natural aura output. Without it, his version was rougher. Cersy just built the wind equivalent from what she felt during the exchange." Another pause. "She created a spell in the middle of a fight. From observation alone."
Delta raised her guard. Cersy attacked. Delta blocked with her forearm, her own aura active across the surface of her arm — and the difference between a freshly created technique and a fully developed one was immediate. The shockwave detonated at the contact point, hit Delta's aura barrier, and pushed through it partially, not completely. Delta's arm bone dislocated at the elbow. She coughed blood, her arm dropping at a wrong angle, and the force threw her backward.
Cersy's hand went blue from the wrist down. The bones in it had taken the impact on the other side — every shockwave she had built into that technique detonated simultaneously outward in both directions. She screamed. It came out as a short, controlled sound and then she stopped making it.
"One more," Cersy said.
Delta stood back up. Her arm realigned with a sound that carried. Her nails had extended — grown into points long as a finger joint, the aura around her skin thickening visibly. She was going all out now.
She healed instantly. The arm settled back into the socket, the bruising fading.
What did you do? Delta said. Still smiling, but the smile had changed. It was the smile of someone who is enjoying themselves for real now rather than enjoying the idea of themselves.
Cersy turned backward to track her. Too slow.
Delta's nails raked across her in a diagonal — shoulder to stomach, tearing through the wind barrier and the coat and the skin underneath. A long mark opened across Cersy's chest (one boob) and down. Not deep enough to be fatal but far beyond a scratch — blood immediately, pain that changed her breathing.
Cersy went down on one knee. One hand on the ground. The other trying to hold the torn coat closed.
"Hold her," Luchion's voice — from somewhere above the village. He had been watching.
Delta stepped behind Cersy and grabbed both her wrists, pulling them back and up. She placed one foot in Cersy's lap, applying pressure downward, and leaned into it.
"All done," Delta called up.
Luchion descended. The black energy had already gathered in his hand — dense, condensed, the same kind that had carved a line through dungeon stone without slowing. Aimed at the centre of Cersy's exposed back.
"I will end this," he said.
* * *
Karn MovesKarn was already out of the treeline before Luchion finished the sentence.
"All jet nozzles," Zangika said. "Sky walk. Full output. Now."
He activated everything simultaneously — the foot propellers spinning at maximum, sky walk extending his movement through the air in the space between ground and sky, the suit pushing every available system into closing the distance.
The village came toward him at a speed that flattened everything into a blur. He entered the square aimed directly at Cersy's position.
Luchion's beam discharged.
End of Chapter 25