Jax realized the difference immediately.
Not when Roric moved—movement could be learned, predicted—but when the forest answered him.
Roots tightened beneath the soil. Ancient trunks groaned as if bracing for impact. Flow surged instinctively toward Roric's presence, thickening the air until it felt viscous, almost liquid. The man hadn't even struck yet, and already the world was bending around him.
'So this is why,' Jax thought grimly.
'No wonder she fell.'
Roric stood a few paces away, axe angled low, shoulders tense with a fury that had not yet found release. His eyes were locked forward, blazing—not with madness, but with something far more dangerous: focus. This wasn't blind rage. This was a man who knew exactly what he wanted to destroy and was choosing, moment by moment, not to destroy everything else along with it.
Their captain had loved this man. That truth sat awkwardly in Jax's chest, heavy and uninvited.
Orders whispered in the back of his mind, precise and merciless. This mission mattered. Completing it—succeeding in capturing the only perrson who could fully unlock the ancient relics—could restore him to his former station as an Azure Knight in service of the Queen. His name cleared. His command returned. A path back to the center of things, instead of the quiet edges he'd been pushed to.
And yet...
There was something about Roric that made the thought taste wrong.
Not desire. Not loyalty. Something stranger. Familiar. The way something dear to your friend becomes dear to you too in a sense—not by choice, but by proximity. Shared spaces. Shared laughter. A bond formed sideways, inherited through someone else you trusted.
That was what made this difficult.
Roric took a step forward.
The ground cracked.
Jax exhaled slowly and shifted his grip on the spear that manifested in his hand, angling the shaft across his body. "You don't want to do this," he said, even as he knew how hollow it sounded.
Roric's aura flared in response, a raw and incandescent yellow. Jax did the same, his energy the opposite of Rorics, a menacing dark blue.The pressure spiked as Flow and Anti-Flow clashed, so violently that birds screamed and fled in every direction, wings tearing through branches in blind panic.
Two saints clashing was not a duel. It was a natural disaster wearing human skin.
One serious exchange—just one—would flatten the forest. Trees reduced to splinters, wildlife erased in an instant. Two clashes and the shockwaves would reach the city, tearing stone from mortar. Three—
Three would wipe it off the map.
Roric knew this.
Jax could see it in the way the man's stance subtly adjusted, how his blade never fully committed to its arc. The Flow pouring through him was vast, furious—but leashed. Subconscious restraint, born not of mercy, but of responsibility.
Jax mirrored him.
He let the warmth in his chest gutter out.
Energy inverted.
The gentle hum of restorative resonance collapsed inward, folding over itself until it curdled into something colder, sharper. The force of each blow was blunted as a result. Where Flow created, Anti-Flow erased. Where Flow harmonized, Anti-Flow nullified.
The forest hated it.
As the two exchanged blows the world shook, branches shattered where the energy brushed them. Plants shriveled. The air itself seemed to recoil, sound dampening unnaturally around them as they moved. this battle wasn't limited to a physical exhchange but conceptually as their authorities clashed.
Unlike the norm, their Traits resonated instantly they were Complementary.
Complementary Trait Classes did not cancel one another; they fed each other. Like the Taoist principle of Wood and Fire—where Wood gave Fire substance and Fire gave Wood purpose—certain Traits intensified through interaction rather than opposition. Cognitive Traits shaped the mind, while Soulfire Traits governed the soul. Where opposing Traits would have given one of them the clear advantage, these two where rather meant to strenghten one another consequently giving them immunity to each others authorities.
Jax's Trait was 'The Moon' which granted him authority over Dreams and Illusions. He applied his first Resonant, the ability to induce forced slumber. He tried to knock Roric into a deep sleep, but the man's willpower enabled him to shrug it off though his movements became slugish. Jax himself was under Rorics influence as he tried to tug on his own bonds to bring him down. Memories and emotions of fondness for certain people flared up but he two was able to shrug it off. Jax's second Resonant was the conscious navigation of another's dreams, a plane he could subtly influence. However it was useless as he couldn't put Roric to sleep.
He dodged a swing from the axe that cleaved through several meters of trees behind him. He lunged pivoting to the side and aiming a high kick at Roric who stepped back and raised the weapon to land a hit. It was then that Jax employed his third Resonant, the ability to manifest the targets most recent dream as an illusion.
Rorics pupils dilated as he saw a woman in a sundress amid a sea of silverbell flowers. For a heartbeat, Roric hesitated, his silver threads of Flow faltering. Jax parried the axe midswing and punched Roric in the gut sending him flying.
Roric skidded backward, boots carving deep trenches through snow. He blew air through his nose and lunged foward , faster this time.
Steel flashed, impossibly bright.
Jax parried with the haft, Anti-Flow chewing through the excess power before it could bloom. He twisted, redirected, absorbed—trying to contain the excess force.
He didn't know if it was his current mission or simply the oath carved into his bones as a knight, but he could not bring himself to let innocent things die for this. The animals fleeing in terror. The ancient trees that had stood here before either of them were born.
These things had nothing to do with their sins.
"Stop holding back," Roric snarled, driving Jax to one knee with a brutal downward slash that carving the earth.
Jax grimaced. "You first."
Their resonants clashed again, the forest shuddering under the strain. As they fought his eyes flicked, just once, to the pendant that freed itself from Roric's clothes at some point. He recognised it instantly, it belonged to their captain.
'If I take this, there will be no proof of the girls identity as the Prima Donna. Let me just...'
He feinted high and lunged—not with the spear, but with his free hand—fingers brushing the chain.
Roric reacted instantly. He caught the hand and pulled him closer.
Pain exploded across Jax's face as steel carved a brutal arc, slicing flesh to the bone. Blood poured down in a hot flood, blinding him, soaking into his hood as it tore free and fluttered uselessly to the ground.
Jax staggered back with a strangled hiss.
Roric stared at him with a cold expression, unable to see the face beneath the crimson mask. He spun the axe and went for a decisive blow.
Jax used that heartbeat.
Anti-Flow twisted—not outward, but sideways—and illusion bloomed.
Raizelle stood between them.
Whole. Unhurt. Eyes wide and terrified, reaching out as if begging him to stop.
Roric's breath caught. "No—"
The illusion shattered.
Another took its place.
Jamie.
She smiled softly, the way she used to—unguarded, alive.
Roric's blade trembled.
Jax felt the hesitation ripple through him, sharp and unmistakable.
'I'm sorry,' Jax thought.
And struck anyway.
Not at her. Never at her.
At Roric.
Spear met axe, resonance detonating in a blinding shockwave that tore a crater into the earth and hurled both men apart like discarded dolls. Trees leaned dangerously, roots tearing free as the ground buckled.
Roric roared, fury ripping through grief, and surged forward—
Then he heard it.
Screams.
Wilcris. Lysle. Fenn. Garett.
Roric spun, terror eclipsing rage, and vanished in a blur of restrained annihilation.
Jax collapsed backward, Anti-Flow dissipating as exhaustion hit him like a hammer.
Another presence appeared beside him.
Torvin.
He took one look at Jax's blood-drenched face and snorted.
"You look like crap."
Jax let out a weak chuckle. "I've been in worse shape."
"You should've tried harder."
Jax wiped uselessly at his ruined face. The wound cut his nose running from one side of his face to the other.
"It's no big deal. I don't know Accelerated Heal. But It'll heal in no time."
Torvin sighed and extended a hand.
"Lets get out of here."
Jax took it and they vanished in a burst of speed.
Roric returned to devastation.
His men were alive but injured. They were each given wounds that would immobilize them but would not be fatal. Garett lay on his back, a branch protruding from his side.
"Well," he wheezed, "on the bright side, I think we scared him off."
He turned his head and noticed Roric.
"Oh hi chief, have fun out there?"
Roric's attention was elsewhere. The body was gone.
Roric clenched his fists until the metal groaned.
'I've made up my mind. I'll deal with this myself.'
This was his burden.
And he would end it himself.