"So, how exactly do we do this?" Areia asked, walking a little distance away from Hevana. The uneven, rocky ground of the ravine scraped softly against her leather boots as she paced her steps.
"We will fight until one of us falls,or surrender" Hevana said simply, her long black cape fluttering sharply in the cold wind.
"When we passed Thranduil tending to Antrea back there, I honestly thought you'd take the opportunity to attack her," Areia said, shrugging her shoulders casually. "And also... shouldn't you be helping your frozen men? You're just leaving them there."
"Believe it or not, I am one of the highest-ranking beings in Utopia. I am a Holy Paladin, after all," Hevana said calmly, her face utterly serene as she twisted her shoulders, loosening her muscles in preparation for the impending combat. "This is just a mission to me. I bear no personal grudge toward Antrea. If anything, I actually like her. But alas... she is a fallen angel. As for my men, leave them be. They would only get in our way right now. I will free them myself after our battle is concluded."
"How exactly did someone like you even attain a paladin's status?" Areia asked, playfully hopping from one foot to the other to keep her circulation moving. Her purple eyes narrowed into cold, calculating slits. "I always thought paladins were supposed to be the absolute pinnacle of righteousness. I may be wrong, of course... but you don't exactly seem all that righteous to me."
"It entirely depends on how you choose to view righteousness," Hevana sighed, the heavy golden strands of her hair whipping across her silver chest plate. "I am not going to shamelessly claim the title of being the purest or most divine being like most angels do. That is nothing but pure hypocrisy. I know my shortcomings, and I actively abide by them. I follow the gospel, and I create my own strict warrior code accordingly. You could say I am defecting from the standard, rigid church you all know."
She shifted her stance, her winter-blue eyes fixed entirely on the white-haired knight before her. "Well, I think we should start fighting now. I am getting awfully tired of these discussions," she added, her expression turning slightly sleepy.
"I really like your straight-to-the-point spirit," Areia smiled, but the amusement didn't reach her hollow purple eyes.
She let both of her hands slack completely to her sides, standing absolutely still as her posture relaxed into a deceptively loose, lethal state. Around them, the rest of the world seemed to drop into a sudden, suffocating silence. The sub-zero wind howled violently, blowing hard against their hair—a striking contrast of spun-gold and stark white. The empty, rocky expanse between the two women roared with a sudden, suffocating tension.
"Well then," Areia murmured, her grip tightening on the hilt of her blade. "Let the duel begin."
Areia froze. The absolute millisecond the final word left her mouth, Hevana closed the distance like a flash of lightning. There was no warning, no wind-up—just the terrifying, instantaneous acceleration of a Holy Saintess.
Before Areia could even blink, Hevana's armored silver fist was inches from her face, tearing the air apart. Trusting her instinct, Areia tilted her head back with microscopic precision. The heavy fist brushed past her cheek, the sheer kinetic friction scorching her skin. Even though the punch missed, the compressed air pressure exploding from the strike shot backward, completely obliterating a massive cluster of ancient stone pillars behind her, reducing them to fine powder.
Areia spun dynamically on her heel, using the momentum of Hevana's miss. Her arm whipped outward in a blur, launching a lightning-fast, lethal jab directly aimed at the Paladin's exposed throat. But Hevana was unnaturally quick. Her winter-blue eyes tracked the strike, and she retreated in a seamless, fluid backstep, her armored boots violently chewing through the bedrock to break her momentum.
*She didn't even reach for her blade?* Areia thought, her purple eyes locking onto Hevana's relaxed hilt. *Well... if that's the case, let's do this bare-handed.*
Areia's boots bit hard into the earth beneath her feet as she tensed her leg muscles, her stance dropping low. Opposite her, Hevana stood perfectly still for a fraction of a heartbeat.
Then, both women completely disappeared.
The entire domain violently roared. To the naked eye, the ravine had become an empty wasteland of catastrophic sound. Blinding shockwaves erupted every millisecond, tearing craters into the ground as invisible fists collided. The air cracked and popped like a continuous thunderstorm from the sheer velocity of their parried attacks.
"Haki... who do you think has the upper hand right now?" Veronica asked from a safe distance, her silver eyes straining to track the conflict.
From the edge of the ravine, they could only watch in awe as streaks of pure gold and stark white pelted the earth and sky alike, painting the dark, overcast landscape with violent flashes of kinetic energy.
"Well... Areia is clearly stronger in terms of overall raw power," Haki analyzed, her blindfolded face tilting as her sharp ears mapped the sonic booms echoing through the canyon. "But that holy girl is a Paladin. They are genetically and spiritually engineered to be the absolute strongest of all knights. It's incredibly hard to say, really. To be completely honest, I don't know. Let's just keep watching."
High above the canyon floor, the invisible clash reached a brutal climax. Areia's hyper-reflexes found a microscopic gap in Hevana's unyielding barrage of heavy strikes. Slipping past a devastating left hook, Areia ducked inside the Paladin's guard and drove her fist squarely into Hevana's jaw.
*BOOM.*
The impact was cataclysmic. The raw force sent the Paladin rocketing backward into a nearby mountain. Hevana's body tore a continuous, horrific trail of shattered earth across the landscape before punching a clean, gaping hole straight through the center of the massive mountain peak, sending boulders raining down like an avalanche.
Areia landed heavily on the gravel, using her forearm to wipe her nose as a thin line of warm blood trickled down her lip. She looked toward the smoking hole in the mountain, her chest heaving slightly. Right at the exact millisecond she had landed her punch, Hevana had managed to slip a counter-strike of her own through the exchange.
*Damn,* Areia thought, gritting her teeth as her ribs throbbed. *She hits like a orc.*
Suddenly, the sky above them turned a blinding, radiant yellow. Like a descending pillar of absolute golden light, Hevana retaliated, striking the earth from the apex of the fractured mountain.
The resulting explosion reached the literal heavens. The sheer, divine heat radiating from Hevana's counter-attack violently detonated across the landscape. The catastrophic ice storm Areia had caused hours before was instantly obliterated; the frozen forest defrosted in a massive wave of steam, and every single dark cloud within the vicinity vanished into nothingness, exposing the bright afternoon sun once more.
Hevana stood firmly in the center of the massive, smoking crater she had just carved into the valley. Her golden hair flared like fire, and without a single word, she charged at Areia again.
Areia met her head-on. Both women's fists collided in the dead center of the valley.
*CRACK.*
The collision didn't just break the sound barrier—it literally cracked the atmosphere, sending a visible ripple through the air that shook the foundations of the entire country. The planet beneath them groaned. The localized shockwave was so immense that Areia was violently flung backward, her boots skidding through the air.
Hevana chased after her relentlessly, refusing to give her room to breathe.
Spinning mid-air with cataclysmic grace, Areia forcefully drove both feet into the ground. The land beneath her boots was instantly demolished, caving inward like paper, but she anchored her momentum completely.
With a terrifying burst of speed, Areia made a sweeping arc with both hands, took one massive step forward, and instantly materialized deep inside Hevana's personal space.
The Holy Saintess didn't even have time to react. Her winter-blue eyes widened in sheer shock as Areia's open palm slammed directly into the center of her silver chest plate.
It was a strike infused with the force of a ballistic missile.
The Paladin was sent flying backward like a literal rocket. She broke the sound barrier instantly, a succession of deafening sonic booms ripping through the territory. The sheer trajectory of her body split the very sky of the beast kingdom as she shot past the clouds, completely overshooting the ravine and landing hundreds of miles away from the designated coordinates they had agreed upon.
The exact millisecond her armored body struck a massive, distant lake, a colossal, apocalyptic explosion occurred. A giant mushroom cloud of steam erupted into the stratosphere as the entire lake completely evaporated into thin air within a single second.
"Wh-What the hell was that?!" Veronica yelled in complete, unadulterated shock, her jaw practically hitting the floor as she stared at the empty, split sky.
"Areia... the girl forged entirely for combat and born of combat," Haki muttered, her blindfolded face tracking the residual kinetic heat humming in the air. "That is the pinnacle of martial arts. What people in the eastern realms know as cultivation."
"She knows cultivation?!" Veronica muttered, her ears twitching in pure shock.
"Well, to be perfectly frank, she knows quite a lot of different martial systems. It wouldn't be far-fetched to say she knows almost all of them," Haki said firmly.
Before the Queen could even process that, Areia vanished in a violent distortion of air, rocketing directly toward the distant horizon where Hevana had struck.
Hundreds of miles away, the scene was absolute apocalypse. The lake was completely gone. In its place lay a massive, steaming crater that cut straight through the local geography—halfway between a dried-up marshland and a deep, exposed limestone sinkhole. The white steam rising from the cracked, baking mud was thick and choking, smelling heavily of sulfur and boiled mineral deposits.
Areia materialized at the edge of the crater. Her high-heeled boots sank slightly into the freshly baked, clay-like earth as she looked down into the abyss.
The heavy, metallic clanging of shifting plate armor echoed up from the fog, making it known that the Holy Saintess was still very much alive and functional. Hevana walked out from the center of the crater, her silver boots stepping over the cracked, sizzling shells of evaporated lake life. She spat out a thick glob of crimson. She tried to take another aggressive step forward, but her body violently resisted; a fresh stream of dark blood ran down her nose. She casually wiped it away with the back of her silver gauntlet, her winter-blue eyes looking incredibly tired.
I just want to go home, Hevana thought bitterly, her divine armor humming weakly.
I knew the moment I saw her, but she is still far stronger than I anticipated, Areia analyzed silently as she stared down at her opponent. It's like fighting an apex predator... like fighting Cyra. The dead-beat knights surrounding her earlier made me subconsciously lower my estimation of her actual strength.
Areia slid down the steep, muddy incline of the crater, her boots kicking up dust as she walked directly toward the Paladin.
The two women stood facing each other in the center of the evaporated lake bed. For a fraction of a second, the tension was suffocating. Then, both of their arms flew like supersonic whips.
CLANG! CLANG! SNAP!
It was a mesmerizing, lethal dance. Neither was using a weapon, yet their limbs moved with the precision of blades, each desperately trying to pry into the other's iron-clad defenses.
Areia found her opening. Slipping under a heavy right hook, she drove a devastating, uppercut straight into Hevana's jaw.
BOOM!
The localized shockwave echoed violently through the dried-up valley, shattering the remaining limestone ledges around them. Before Hevana could fly upward, Areia reached out with lightning reflexes, forcefully grabbing the Saintess by her golden hair and pulling her down into a brutal, rising knee straight to the face.
CRACK.
Blood sprayed instantly from Hevana's nose. Areia didn't give her a single microsecond to recover. She continued the merciless barrage, delivering a rapid-fire sequence of heavy, bone-crushing punches to the Paladin's face. The sheer, repetitive downward force of the strikes began digging both women deeper into the earth, fracturing the tectonic plate beneath them. Hevana's divine silver armor started giving way under the immense pressure—the metal groaned, spiderwebbing with deep, dark cracks, though it miraculously didn't shatter entirely.
Areia finally stopped, holding the girl almost limp by the collar of her broken armor. Her purple eyes looked down coldly.
"Do you surrender?"
But before Areia could even register the movement, Hevana's silver gauntlet violently shot upward, locking around Areia's face with a vice-like grip.
"Not to a devil," Hevana hissed through her bloody teeth.
The world completely blurred.
Channelling every ounce of her remaining holy core, Hevana took off with insane, catastrophic speed. Areia was completely trapped in her grip, used as a literal human wrecking ball. Hevana flew low to the ground, deliberately dragging and slamming Areia through the changing terrain.
They tore out of the dried lake bed, violently shattering through a dense, petrified stone forest. The ancient, crystalline tree trunks exploded into millions of flying shards as Areia's body was rammed through them. Hevana didn't stop—she veered sharply to the left, slamming Areia face-first through a jagged, terraced canyon of red shale, completely leveling the landscape into a flat plain of debris. The sheer kinetic friction turned the surrounding air into a vacuum of dust and sparks as they rocketed across the territory at terrifying speeds.
Areia's legs shot out with the terrifying speed of a striking spider, clamping tightly around the Paladin's neck in a brutal headscissors grip. The constricting pressure increased instantly. Hevana's silver neck guards groaned and dented under the sheer physical force as Areia squeezed relentlessly with her thighs, locking her throat in a vice.
The Paladin stopped moving, her forward momentum dying instantly as her oxygen was rapidly depleted.
The leveled terrain around them was completely choked by dense walls of billowing dust and pulverized stone debris. Hevana's once-immaculate golden hair was now heavily matted with black dirt and grey ash. The chaotic environment told even more on Areia—since her hair was literally a stark, pristine white, the soot and grim caked into her strands made her look like a phantom rising from a battlefield.
Hevana stood perfectly still in the center of the dust storm, her knees shaking as they almost gave out beneath her heavy armor. She gritted her teeth in pure agony. Areia was still fiercely attached to her like an unyielding, blood-sucking creature, refusing to break the chokehold. The muscles around the Saintess's neck tensed to their absolute limit as Areia continued to mount an unbearable, crushing pressure on her trachea.
Realizing she was seconds away from blacking out, Hevana forcefully forced her head to turn toward Areia's face. She opened her mouth.
Instantly, Hevana's winter-blue eyes turned a blinding, molten gold as a catastrophic beam of pure radiant light built up in her throat.
FWOOM!
Like a divine dragon unleashing hell, she spat an intense, concentrated torrent of holy heat directly at her attacker. The temperature was high enough to melt bedrock on contact. The apocalyptic blast dug a massive, gaping hole deep into the earth, liquefying the stone and turning the entire subterranean landscape into a bubbling, swirling cauldron of white-hot magma. The ambient air turned furnace-hot in a millisecond, scorching the atmosphere and distorting reality with heavy heat waves.
Coughing violently, Hevana pulled her arm away and staggered back.
When the blinding golden light and boiling steam finally cleared, Areia was nowhere to be found.