Chapter 397: 397. They Are Fighting With Their Own Strategy, And I’m Still Processing It

CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!

What followed was a sword exchange that created a distinct sound in the stone chamber. It’s not the dramatic clash of heavy weapons, but the rapid, precise impact of blades meeting at controlled points.

Each contact was brief and purposeful, with both fighters reading the other’s weight distribution and footwork in real time, adjusting their next moves before the current ones concluded. Virella held a reach advantage over Iris, using it to maintain the engagement at the outer edge of Iris’s comfort zone.

Additionally, Virella’s off-hand casting demanded Iris’s ongoing attention, splitting her defensive awareness across two threat registers simultaneously.

Iris did this by constantly moving, never giving a static target for the off-hand to aim at, and by positioning herself using features of the chamber’s walls and floor as reference points to force Virella to turn, which threw the off-hand’s casting angle off every time. 𝑓𝘳𝘦𝑒𝑤𝑒𝘣𝘯ℴ𝘷𝘦𝓁.𝑐𝑜𝑚

Twice she got inside Virella’s guard. The first time Virella grabbed Iris’s wrist with her free hand and threw her sideways.

This was a valid solution, since it put distance between them. The second time Iris was faster, and her left blade drew a clean line across Virella’s forearm, drawing blood and making Virella’s off-hand twitch reflexively.

Then Virella planted her back foot and pressed her off-hand flat against the chamber floor. A stone structure emerged from the ground instead of descending from the air with a compressed upward spike formation that caught Iris mid-stride, leaving her with no option for lateral movement.

The impact sent Iris sideways into the wall, generating momentum approximately double her own body weight. In response, the wall activated Virella’s secondary working, triggering a shaped-stone trap that had been pre-set within the stone face.

Stone spurs shot out from the surface, driving into Iris’s back in three places. While the spurs did not penetrate deep enough to reach any vital organs, they were sufficiently embedded to pin her in place.

The pain was intense enough to elicit a sharp, involuntary sound from her that cut through the noise of the chamber.

"GAGGGHHH...!" Iris starts to spit a lot of blood from her mouth.

"Hang on, Iris!" Elizabeth said.

Elizabeth had the response prepared in approximately two seconds, which Rex recognized as genuinely fast under combat conditions, using a shearing energy blade that cut the stone spurs flush with the wall, freeing Iris from her pinned position and allowing her to drop to the ground.

The cuts were still there, still bleeding, but she could move.

Alexander was already crossing the chamber floor toward Virella.

He didn’t draw a weapon. His hands came up in the open-palmed guard of someone trained in unarmed combat to a professional level, and he sent two fire workings ahead of himself as he closed the distance, not at Virella specifically but at the floor space in front of her, forcing her to step back and break the ground connection that her stone casting required.

When she stepped back, he was inside her sword range.

Alexander’s unarmed combat style was different from Iris’s because it was heavier, built around leverage and body mass, with the elemental enhancement integrated into contact rather than standing separate from it.

His first strike was a palm heel to Virella’s guard arm, the fire coating flaring on contact and delivering a thermal shock to the forearm muscle that made her grip loosen on the sword. His second was a crossing grip on the sword arm itself, turning the weapon away and stepping into her center line, and his third was a knee drive into her hip that was supposed to put her on the ground.

Virella didn’t go on the ground. She took the hip strike, let her weight collapse with it rather than against it, and used the momentum to roll away from his grip and come back up three meters further back with her sword still in hand.

"Wind Blast," she said, and her offhand moved.

A lateral wind blast hit Alexander across the chest and drove him back two steps, and while he was recovering, she sent a stone fragment cluster from the chamber wall, a dozen pieces of sharp mineral-dense rock moving at projectile velocity, aimed at the spaces between his limbs where armor would have been if he were wearing any.

Alexander raised his arms in front of his face and torched the fragments coming at him, the fire burning around his forearms hot enough that the mineral rock turned to powder when it hit the thermal field instead of passing through. The powder cloud was blinding at close range for an instant, and Virella used the blinded second to drive forward instead of back.

She was good at that, Rex noticed. She understood that a blinded opponent who expects you to retreat is more vulnerable than one who has time to prepare for your advance.

The sword emerged from the powder cloud aimed at Alexander’s guard line. He caught the flat of it against his crossed forearms and redirected it into the chamber floor.

At that moment, they were in close range, with her blade pointed down and his body positioned advantageously. He swung his elbow toward her temple, utilizing the earth affinity that Rex had observed him use once before.

This brief but significant hardening of his impact surface made the elbow strike feel considerably more forceful.

The strike landed, causing Virella’s head to rock to the side as she stepped hard to regain her balance. Alexander seized the opportunity, driving his shoulder into her and forcing her back against the chamber wall.

From there, Elizabeth implemented a binding working, effectively managing Virella, though it did not fully resolve the situation.

Rex was observing all of this in the compressed, continuous manner he used to process combat information. This meant he was fully attentive, without the luxury of allowing any single engagement to monopolize his focus.

He had been piecing together his understanding of the unfolding situation.

...

Nerith was at the far end of the chamber, which was where she needed to be.

The two Legion members who had engaged her were named Varek, a compact man in his thirties who moved with the fluidity characteristic of a pure mage caster, trusting his power to do the heavy lifting, and Seris, a woman of approximately the same age with a clearly fire-based elemental affinity.

Seris employed her magic in dense, layered constructions rather than the broad-stroke approach most fire users defaulted to. They had separated to create casting angles that covered the space between them, complicating Nerith’s druidic work.

The nature channel on the third level required more concentration to access than it did on the surface.

She was managing. Rex observed the leaves performing the deep-signal motion she used when drawing from the stone’s root memory instead of the living surface.

Her workings, though slower than they would have been above ground, were still manifesting with vine complexes emerging from the mineral deposits, root pressure building from below the floor, and atmospheric moisture being drawn up from the deep stone layers.

This moisture was directed as a mist that disrupted the visual clarity necessary for the other two to maintain precision in their casting.

Aisella was positioned slightly to the left and behind her, managing two simultaneous workings. The first was a healing support field that sustained Nerith’s physical stamina and addressed the lingering effects from the previous day’s encounters.

The second was a disruption working aimed at Varek’s casting sequence, targeting the energy thread between his initiation and delivery. This interference caused his workings to arrive at irregular intervals rather than as he intended.

While it wasn’t outright damage, interference in casting is often more disruptive than damage itself; it erodes confidence and forces continuous recalculation.

Talyra had positioned herself on top of a natural stone shelf that ran along the chamber’s left wall about four meters above the floor. ’Alright... I’ll get a good shot from this angle.’

From there she had coverage angles on most of the chamber’s combat zones, and she was reading the engagement with the full-field awareness that Rex had catalogued as one of her most useful qualities.

She’d put three arrows into the fight already, two at Varek and one at Seris, none of them landing because the Legion’s primordial energy base was deflecting incoming attacks, but she’d been reading the deflection pattern and was adjusting her approach accordingly.

’Even if that primordial energy can make them immune to the reincarnator’s attacks... their defense is not to be underestimated at all.’ Rex thought. ’I need to use Elemental Magic Creation and Elemantal Mastery at the same time to create my own primordial energy and magic at this point...’

Rex focused on the fifth Legion member, Kael, who was positioned in the rear triangle. He had caught Kregg’s attention when the mage’s death was mentioned.

Kael had been holding back from the main engagements, which Rex had previously categorized as either a tactical reserve positioning or something more specific to his role. Now, he was advancing toward Talyra’s elevated position, employing a stone-working technique aimed at reshaping the shelf where she stood.

’Let me just do this for a second...’

Rex assessed the distance, the angle, and the time available.

He pulled a boulder from the chamber wall.

The section of the upper wall he pulled away was not small. It was about the size of a large piece of furniture, weighing at least two hundred kilograms.

He lifted it with telekinesis at full output and drove it horizontally across the chamber toward Kael’s back.

’Heads up!’

BAM!