Keiser panted, chest heaving raggedly, blood spilling freely from the rents in his flesh. His breaths came out hot and wet, like every inhale was dragging through his lungs. His knees buckled as he reached for the short blade, its edge still wedged in the brittle coal-black branch he had pinned into the dirt.
His fingers trembled around the hilt, slick with sweat and blood, but the moment he tried to wrench it free his strength gave way. His arms shook violently, muscles seizing, and he almost toppled forward into the smoldering remains.
The ground beneath him throbbed... the writhing sound of a living root clawing through soil... and in the instant he thought it would lash out, the hiss of steel cut the air.
A blade buried itself into the root, purple fire sparking from the impact. The thing writhed, splintering and twisting before it blackened and curled upon itself, flaking to ash.
The princess panted as she leaned heavily on her short blade, its tip still buried in the root she had just pinned and scorched into ash. Her shoulders trembled under the weight of exertion, her chest heaving with smoke-roughened breaths.
"Shit…" Her voice rasped as she spat blood into the dirt. "Some of the other beasts got away."
Her gaze flicked, sharp, to the area where Keiser had set his sigils... a boundary that should have held, should have trapped the beasts. But he hadn't been able to spread them far enough. He had trusted her to defend one half, while he tried to anchor the other with wards, forcing the beasts into her blades and fire. And she had done it, hacking, burning, stabbing as if her very veins burned violet with fury.
She fought like an inferno, and he…
Keiser ground his teeth. He had thought... hoped... that Muzio's body could hold out even against an Arbores. And somehow, impossibly, it had.
No one in their right mind would believe it if they saw, a lanky boy standing against with one of the oldest, toughest horrors born from the forest. But the truth was written all over him, blood soaking his clothes, skin torn raw, sigils carved into his flesh bleeding fresh crimson. A feat, yes... but one bought with a toll so heavy it made his vision stutter and his bones scream.
He could almost hear Lenko's voice in his mind... terrified,breaking, if the boy ever saw the state of Muzio now.
Muzio's body was a ruin, a map of scars that no one could fully erase.
And it infuriated Keiser.
To be locked in someone else's frame, to push it beyond its natural limit, and still feel it crumble beneath him. This wasn't how he fought. Not as Keiser. His own flesh, his own strength, would never have faltered like this.
But there was no way back.
The sigils burned hotter than his blood. Each line he had seared into Muzio's skin screamed as though alive, gnawing at muscle and sinew, trying to tear him apart from the inside.
They weren't meant for him.
They weren't his craft, nor his art. He had no affinity for magic... never did. All his life, his role had been to understand it. To study it, speak of it, twist it for political games, not to wield it.
Knowledge, not power.
And yet here he was, fighting not as a Sir Keiser, not as the betrayed would-be ruler his faction once shaped him into, but as Muzio who was hiding but got forced into battle he could barely control.
His knowledge of combat kept him alive, barely.
He knew exactly where Muzio's body needed reinforcement... how to brace the neck so it didn't snap under the recoil of mana surging down his spine, how to ground his calves so they didn't collapse under the strain of explosive bursts, how to hold his shoulders tight to keep the weight of wards from shattering bone.
He knew how far a body should bend before breaking.
And Muzio's body bent further than it had any right to. More than Muzio himself could probably have managed, Keiser thought grimly.
The boy had never known this kind of war.
Never should have.
Still, even with every scrap of knowledge pressed into practice, Muzio's body was failing.
Keiser could feel it in every tremor of his legs, every shuddering gasp, every crackle of skin splitting around over-burnt sigils. It was enough to keep them alive, yes. But not enough to be Keiser.
Not enough to reclaim what he had lost.
And in that gap... in that bitterness... he almost faltered.
Almost.
Keiser dragged his gaze over the carnage, vision blurring at the edges. Smoke and ash curled around them, stinging his eyes.
The princess had driven her short blade into another writhing root... if left alone, it would only fester, split, and grow again, twisting into another Arbores or else corrupting some nearby tree into a host.
In Sheol, nothing was safe from becoming a beast. Living or dead, flesh or stone, even carcasses and skeletal remains could be warped into something monstrous.
The only way to end them was to destroy the core that animated them… or burn them until nothing but ash remained.
"We got too busy with this one," the princess rasped, gesturing toward the gouged scars carved into the ground. The marks dragged long and deep, as if the Arbores had torn itself forward inch by inch, dragging its impossible weight across the earth.
Keiser's jaw tightened.
He knew she was right. An Arbores was never meant to move like that, not with such sudden force. In all the times he had encountered one, their terror lay not in speed but in endurance... their branches were unyielding, strong enough to crush a knight in steel to pulp, their roots so entrenched you could hardly dream of pulling them out.
Usually, when you met one, you didn't waste strength trying to strike the core straightaway. The only workable tactic was to topple it, drag it down, make it lose its balance. And even then, it could take hours and a squadron to wear it down.
But this one…
Keiser's thoughts curdled with frustration.
Even now, even with Muzio's body straining on the edge of collapse, he couldn't do half the things he could have done in his own skin.
He was forced to lean on warding, on borrowed mana and scars that bled for every ounce of power, while she fought on the front with fire and steel.
He knew the theory... every inch of Muzio's body he had studied and forced into motion, every muscle he had learned to brace, every strike carried by knowledge rather than instinct... but it was still a borrowed shell.
Not his strength.
Not his body.
And that ate at him.
Still, one truth remained. The same truth it had always been with beasts like these.
Burn it.
Burn it until it was nothing.
Keiser's vision swam, the edges of the world sinking into black.
His knees buckled for a moment before a steadying hand caught him. The princess's grip clamped down on his shoulder... and he hissed sharply, the sudden burn lancing through him.
Her gasp was immediate.
The squelching wetness beneath her palm spread far too quickly, soaking through the fabric of his already dark shirt until it was nearly blackened with blood. It seeped down his side in rivulets, dripping from her fingers as she pulled back, and her eyes widened at the sheer volume of what he was losing.
"Hey... " her voice was unsteady, torn between command and fear, "we're not done. Don't you collapse on me. Can you still move? We need to check those people, make sure they made it before the beasts get them."
She cast a sharp glance toward the direction where the underground settlement was, where more of the beast had skittered off instead of being trapped in the clearing.
Keiser's breathing rasped. He could see it too...
The other remaining beasts had avoided the obvious routes, guided by their instinct. They hadn't dared take the area of the barn, where his wards still burned faintly, nor the opposite path, where fire and steel waited with the princess.
Instead, they had broken off through the dense undergrowth, where the wards before had confused them and have sent them stumbling away.
But that ward has been long dispelled.
He grimaced.
Muzio's sigils had been clever things, feeding off mana in strands, probably painting the forest with illusions that turned predators astray. But when Keiser severed that connection... when the string of mana had gone slack... those protections had collapsed into nothing but meaningless marks on bark.
To the beasts, the route had become an open road again, an invitation instead of a warning due to the scent of preys around.
That meant the path to the settlement lay bare.
The princess's expression tightened, the weight of it setting in.
"If they reach them…" She didn't finish. She didn't need to. Keiser already pictured it. The shrieks, the tearing roots and snapping bones, the shelters underground caving in as the beasts burrowed straight through.
His jaw clenched, though his body trembled from blood loss. The world tilted when he shifted his weight, and yet he forced himself upright, leaning on the half-burnt blade.
He couldn't afford to stop... not yet, not while there were lives left to lose.
Keiser shook his head weakly, his lips curling in a dry, pained smile.
"I won't… be able to move my body for a while." His voice broke into a ragged cough, spattering more blood down his chin as his fingers dug into the torn fabric of his chest. He felt both fever-hot and ice-cold at once, every nerve confused, screaming.
The cloak he'd shed earlier in the fight was gone... scattered, consumed, or forgotten. Around him now was only a sea of shifting black blotches, remnants quivering like spilled ink in the dirt.
The princess's brow furrowed, panic flashing beneath her steel composure.
"But we need to go... the beasts are already---"
"So I won't do that," Keiser interrupted, his grin crooked, delirious.
Before she could ask what he meant, the back of his hand lit up.
The glow was not the soft shimmer but something jagged, sinister... an eerie, pulsing red that burned brighter than any of the lesser runes scattered across his body.
The wound-slicked blood at their feet stirred unnaturally. It writhed and coiled, creeping into deliberate shapes, carving sigils into the ground itself beneath their boots.
"What... ?" the princess's breath caught. "How did you---"
She saw it then. Not just on the ground, but etched into his skin...
Keiser's backhand blistered with welts, each line of the rune raw and bleeding, the magic had branded itself into flesh. The smell of iron and seared skin filled the air, acrid and heavy.
Her eyes widened. "You---"
The rune flared, swallowing sound and air alike. For a heartbeat, there was only silence, a suffocating void as if the world itself had inhaled.
Then the ground beneath them cracked, light ruptured, and the blood-forged circle devoured them both whole...
silence first, then absolute mayhem.
The princess recognized it at once, the sigil Keiser has on his hand that he had burnt onto Lenko before the boy left.
'take-me-where-he-is'
And so, when the world snapped back, it was anything but calm.