Outside the collapsing catacombs, the battlefield at Sector 4 reached its brutal climax.
High Knight Xuka Astri pressed her attack against Relay, the 10th High Officer of the Western Cult. Stripped of her spatial support duties, Relay was rapidly running out of options. Her core ability was entirely supportive, her spatial gravitational pendulum offered almost zero direct offensive lethality, forcing her to rely heavily on a bizarre arsenal of physical weapons pulled from her spatial folds.
Halberds, broadswords, serrated daggers—Relay hurled weapon after weapon, desperately trying to keep the Royal Knight at bay.
Realizing she was losing the duel, Relay resorted to a vile, underhanded tactic. Shifting her stance toward the outer flank, she drew a heavy composite bow, aiming a volley of dark-tipped arrows not at Xuka, but directly at the surrounding injured soldiers and evacuating civilians.
"Let us see you block these, little knight!" Relay spat maliciously.
"You cowardly snake!" Xuka roared.
Pushing her body far beyond its natural limits, Xuka detonated a violent burst of wind mana beneath her boots. Driven by raw reaction speed and spatial intuition, she blurred across the cobblestones like a hurricane. Steel clashed against wood as her broadsword deflected every single arrow mid-flight, shielding the soldiers behind her back. But the desperate acceleration shattered her momentum—her armor cracked under the pressure, and she dropped to one knee, coughing up blood as her mana reserves hit absolute zero.
Her vision swam. She had reached her absolute limit.
Seeing the knight immobilized, Relay smiled grotesquely beneath her weeping demon mask. Pulling a ancient, glowing artifact from her spatial storage—the Gleaming Light Arrow—she loaded it onto her bowstring.
"Die in your useless chivalry," Relay sneered.
The bowstring snapped. The Gleaming Light Arrow shot forth at literal lightspeed, cutting through the atmosphere in a blinding, instantaneous beam of radiant destruction. There was no time to think, no time to cast a spell, and no time to dodge. Xuka's life flashed before her eyes.
Yet, bound by pure, instinctual survival reflexes, Xuka acted before her brain could process the movement. Raising her heavy broadsword at a razor-thin angle, she met the light speed beam head-on.
CLANG!
The broadsword's reinforced flat edge struck the tip of the light arrow, causing the beam to violently refract and bounce off the divine steel, reflecting straight back along its original trajectory!
"WHAT—?!" Relay gasped.
THWACK!
The reflected beam struck Relay cleanly through her left shoulder, tearing through her obsidian pauldrons and searing her flesh down to the bone. The intense, divine heat instantly cauterized the wound, leaving a sickening stench of burnt skin hanging in the air.
Relay was hurled backward onto her hands and knees. Clutching her charred, agonizingly burnt shoulder, she let out a piercing, hysterical shriek of unadulterated pain.
"AARGH! DAMN IT! MOTHERFUCKER!"
Relay screamed, her porcelain mask cracking down the middle to reveal a contorted face twisted in absolute, furious humiliation.