The first shockwaves of the battle struck us a half-second later. The Primal Guardian brought its fists down in an overheaded slam that shattered the earth, sending aftershocks rippling through the earth. Borealis shrieked, flapping his wings as brutal gusts of wind slapped their undersides. My stomach flipped into my throat as it shoved us higher, but he quickly stabilized.

An explosion of red frothed in the rising cloud of dust and debris. and a figure shot between the guardian’s fists. It reared back, but he closed in on R’lissea, his sword raised for a downward strike.

R’lissea waved her staff, and the trees bristling across the elemental’s torso erupted, firing like ballistae bolts at him. Dozens missed, but one landed on his shoulder. The trunk shattered off his armor, but the force of it altered his path.

Ronin grunted in frustration as his leap went wide, and he landed on the elemental’s shoulder. Vines erupted from beneath the surface, lashing at him with thorny tendrils. He dodged and cut his way through them, earning countless more small scratches as thorns and razor thistles sliced through his skin in the unprotected regions of his armor.

"Shambling Guardian!"

R’lissae’s voice split the air. Dozens of fifth-level elementals formed from the burning forests and landscape of the Primal Guardian. They were ten, maybe fifteen feet tall, and built with powerful bodies more bear than man. Lengths of jagged stone and thorny vines protruded from their fingerless limbs like makeshift morning stars.

The shambling guardians moved with a speed that belied their cumbersome shape, charging at Ronin. He split the first with an almost casual swing of his sword, releasing a seventh-level technique that obliterated thirty feet of the forest, and another seven elementals. He wheeled about, carrying the strike in a circle, but the mana dwindled by the end, and one reached him. He dove under its first swipe, aiming for its leg with a vicious cut, but it raised its foot and brought it down heavily on his chest.

Ronin twisted out of the way, narrowly avoiding being crushed, but as he rolled to his feet, another guardian loomed behind him. A heavy fist caught him in the side. A fifth-level blow wasn’t powerful enough to crush his armor, but it left him reeling, right into another fist. This one broke his stance, and he went spinning through the air, slamming into a thick trunk of flaming birch. The tree shuddered from the impact and twisted, wrapping around his torso. It held him just long enough for the shamblers to rush to his position, beating down on him with impunity.

I winced as his sword flashed in their midst, tearing through wood and rock in a burst of crimson light. He broke free, his chest heaving as he got his bearings, a wild look in his eye. Blood streamed from a deep cut on his forehead, and his body was covered in scrapes and bruises. One of his pauldrons had cracked, but it was all superficial damage.

Letting out a furious shout, he dove into the remaining elementals, but they scattered, many melting back into the Primal Guardian. Ronin’s frustration only grew as he smashed them apart one by one, slowly working his way across the behemoth’s shoulder, toward R’lissea.

Just as he reached its neck, fighting forest and elemental, R’lissea streaked away from the Primal Guardian, hovering a thousand feet away. Before Ronin could adjust, the guardian’s form disrupted, forming several multi-joined tendrils from its upper body mass. The shift caught him totally off-guard, one of the tendrils smashing down on him, crushing him against what had once been its shoulder. The rock and earth, reinforced by her magic, broke against his strength, but the debris reshaped into hundreds of smaller tendrils, their ends pointed with jagged barbs. They joined more tree lances, piercing the rising clouds of dust and cinders, hunting him across its surface.

"R’lissea!" Ronin screamed as one stabbed his shoulder, punching through the broken pauldron and drawing blood. "Come, fight me yourself!"

Her magic answered for her, and another score of Shambling Guardians emerged to join the chaos. As they continued to wear the war hero down, she began casting again, creating a trio of seventh-level life dragons to join the fight. The serpentine-shaped elementals crawled across the Primal Guardian like stalking cats, dwarfed by its size. They pounced upon Ronin, slapping him around with claws the size of boulders.

I shook my head in awe, watching it all from the safety of the sky. For me, controlling so many elementals at once would have been impossible. The most I could handle was maybe ten, and that wasn’t even counting manipulating the Primal Guardian’s endless attacks and ever-shifting form. R’lissea’s Soul of the Forest ability was certainly powerful, but there was no denying her sheer skill. When she’d fought against Connor, she’d only won because he’d intentionally sabotaged his own strength incrementally throughout the war. But if she’d faced him like this...I wasn’t certain she’d lose against his peak.

Yet she didn’t lower her guard, continuing to reinforce her army even as he crushed through them. Occasionally, she found an opportunity to slip in an Iron Leaves to strengthen her elementals’ durability, or a Taste of Roses to sap Ronin’s strength and slow him with sprouting vines. It was clear he was weakening, that even his eighth-level constitution was nearing its limit, but her expression grew grim. She knew better than I that the longer things drew out, the worse it got.

A war of attrition never favored mages, whose mana was infinitely more finite than a warrior’s strength, much less against Ronin’s blood reckoning. With every passing second, the aura around him grew angrier, thickening until it oozed around him like flowing blood. His sword grew sharper, his techniques more powerful despite his weakening soul. Worse, his regeneration also increased, maintaining his physical condition even as his armor cracked and his defensive techniques failed.

The ground rumbled again as the Primal Guardian finally caught Ronin with another massive limb of earth and stone, sending him flying off its body. He crashed into the mountain, forming a crater a hundred feet into the slope. The mountain crumbled, crashing down atop him, but he was already moving. He punched through the avalanche of rock, his eyes blazing with fury.

One of the elemental dragons lunged at him on wings of leaf and ivy, but he met its maw with his sword, cleaving through its skull in a single hit. Windblades shot out of his technique, shearing through half of its hundred-foot length before dying down. It fell apart as it plummeted from the air, collapsing into inanimate earth and biomass.

Ronin landed, panting heavily as he surveyed the destruction around them. The entire landscape had changed, several miles of rugged mountains leveled by the strength of their conflict. R’lissea’s elementals had washed over the ruins of the skydocks, slaughtering any of the soldiers or sailors who had survived the explosion, silencing the remaining cannons and reducing the battle to just the two of them.

R’lissea floated in front of the Primal Guardian, her features solemn. She strengthened her voice with magic, projecting it. "You’ve lost, Ronin. Please, we don’t have to finish this."

He bared his teeth, his anger transforming into something more primal and vicious. "You’re trembling, exhausted. Your time with the filthblood traitor has strengthened you, but you can’t keep this up for much longer. You couldn’t kill me with everything you had when this fight started. What hope do you have now?" His tone softened a little, almost too quiet for me to make out. "Just surrender, R’lissea. Even after everything you’ve done, all the atrocities you allowed to be committed, it doesn’t have to end this way. You can still come back to me."

"Ronin, I..." She bit her lip. "I meant what I said back then, when we parted. I can’t stand idly by while the gods hurt and enslave their people. People deserve a chance to live as they wish, for good or ill. Trying to stop that is unnatural. It goes against everything I believe. You know that."

"Even if innocent people get hurt, there’s always collateral damage in war," he growled. "You can’t seriously expect me to believe that handing them over to demons is a better alternative. Is destroying everyone and everything this world has built better than letting a few of the weak and meaningless suffer?"

"I saw what they did to the northern continent. I saw what they let Connor do." Her tone was quiet, but her eyes blazed with conviction. "Ronin, he killed millions. Millions. Not a few ’weak or meaningless.’ And all for what? So the church could hold the war off for a few months? So the demons might be a little weaker? How can they claim to protect the world when they’ve done more damage than the hordes ever will?"

"You’re refusing to see logic. They were right, I guess. It’s futile to reason with one tainted by that filthblood," he muttered. He let out a sigh, raising his sword. "If you won’t listen to words, then I’m afraid you leave me no choice. I won’t see your innocence twisted any longer, R’lissea. I’ll bring you back, by force if I have to."

R’lissea raised her staff. "I made a promise, Ronin, and I won’t betray it. If you wish to see this to the end, I can’t promise you’ll survive. But, please, whatever happens, know that I never wanted to hurt you. I...am glad we had some time together, even if..." Her voice wavered, then firmed. "I just wish things had been different. I’m sorry."