The battlefield no longer resembled a clearing; the fragments of exploded runes, the magical thorns sprouting from the ground, the broken mirrors, and the charred remains of vegetation formed a scene of ancient war, as if the very earth had been marked not only by force but by intent—the intent to erase, to rewrite, to subjugate anything that dared to survive on the edge of the order the System imposed.

  There, under the thin light escaping between dense clouds and floating enchantments, Kael staggered with ragged breath, his sword stained with blood, his clothes in tatters, yet still firm, his eyes burning with that contained light he would never admit was faith—not faith in the System or the Root, but faith in Lysa, faith in the choice to fight by her side, faith in the path that could no longer be undone.

  Andrel, kneeling a few meters away, dirtied his hands with wet earth as he drew new seals with his own blood, for there was no enchanted ink or valid charcoal left; the last runes of his grimoire had been consumed by the anti-magic spirals of Ilian Meret, who now advanced with pages floating like serpents of living logic, each word escaping his lips rewriting a fraction of the world around them.

  He did not fight with strength, nor with speed: Ilian dismantled, unmade, broke the very structure of the opposing magic with mathematical precision, a maestro of arcane decomposition reciting verses of purity as if the act of breaking were more sacred than the act of creating.

  And all around, hovering with the fixed gaze of an eternal predator, Sava Thir spun between shadows, replicating her illusory reflections with a mastery that made the air bend, forcing Kael to see images that did not exist, to hear pleas from people already dead, to react to threats that were not there—or were, but had already passed—while Rukk tried to protect him, but every time he advanced, he was diverted by the manipulation of Master Velro, who intoned poisoned chants, without melody, reciting litanies of emotional death, corroding the link between Selene and the titanic creature, weakening it from within.

  Toren Kaul, in turn, remained still, as if he were not in combat—and yet, perhaps, he was the most lethal of them. His body spun around itself in small dimensional displacements, always one step ahead of any assault, his hexagonal eyes deciphering future patterns with terrifying accuracy. He predicted every attack with seconds of advance, as if in conversation with time, as if the combat were a game of pieces on a board only he could see in its entirety.

  When Andrel managed to forge an unstable depolarization seal, Toren had already moved to a safe spot and launched a beam of reorganized data at him—which did not physically injure but scrambled memories, confusing the runes in Andrel's mind and making him recite incorrect combinations that exploded without form.

  Selene, standing with her mouth half-open and her body trembling, fought against the emotional fog Velro cast over her, her emotions distorted to the point of breaking. She saw Rukk bleeding where there were no wounds, saw herself in cages that no longer existed, heard her father's voice shouting her name as he was dragged away, and for a moment, she thought she would scream too—but instead, she dug her nails into the palm of her hand and let the warm blood fall over the spiral mark on her neck, restoring the bond with Rukk, even if just for moments, even if under extreme pain.

  Kael, in a desperate effort, charged at Ilian, cutting swords with enchanted pages, tearing part of the grimoire, but in return, received a direct strike from an anti-rune: an inverted symbol that hit his abdomen and threw him against a broken tree, shattering his magical armor and part of his rib. He spat blood, still standing. Andrel tried to cover him with an explosion of arcane runes, but Sava Thir reappeared behind him, whispering words that sounded like Lysa, and the mage hesitated for half a second—the enough time to take an illusory blade to the flank, which, even though not real, tore his flesh by the symbolic force of the fear it carried.

  Rukk roared, but the roar was low, muffled by Velro’s litanies, which seemed more like a specter than a man, enveloped by necro-knowledge runes, with words that faded hope and could stop hearts by the simple sound—and still, Selene did not yield. She was standing, as if a living statue among fragments of command, connected to Rukk by a tenuous thread of memory, desperately trying to maintain control, even when her thoughts were already confused with those of the monster, even when the pain was so great that the world began to blur.

  And it was at that moment—when defeat was unfolding in every strike, in every mistake, in every suffocated breath—that the ground exploded in the center of the field.

  A wave of broken runes and crystal shards rose in a vortex of crooked light, and from the earth emerged Lysa, her hair loose and stained with blood, her eyes white as a blade about to cut the sky, her clothes torn and burned by the trials of the Judgment of Mirrors, but her body firm, standing, filled with an energy that seemed to tear at the very limits of the Code.

  Behind her, emerging like a golden and cruel specter, walked Grenda Malvar, wrapped in a mantle of synthetic purity, the symbol of the Circle of Glass engraved at every point of the garment like a living accusation against the world.

  There were no words.

  There was no pause.

  Grenda advanced, and Lysa advanced with her.

  The fists collided before the words.

  Their battle was too old for protocols.

  It was an open wound.

  It was the past bleeding.

  Grenda conjured ancestral symbols, shaping the battlefield with mental structures that sought to redefine Lysa, to recreate her as the doll she once was. But Lysa responded with cuts—cuts of reality, of symbols, of memory.

  And then the chaos was complete. Five against five. Side by side, the heirs of collapse faced the architects of dominion.

  Kael against Toren. Selene and Rukk against Velro. Andrel against Ilian. Lysa against Grenda. Sava interfering in the fight between them.

  And the renegades were losing. Slowly, but losing. Rukk faltered. Kael bled. Andrel conjured more slowly. Selene began to lose focus. Lysa... resisted. But alone, she wouldn’t win.

  It was then that she shouted.

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  — SEPARATED!

  Everyone stopped for a second.

  — FOCUS ON ONE OF THEM EACH! ONE! NOW!

  And in that moment, the lines of the confrontation began to change. Because now, each renegade would become the mirror of a noble’s pain and fight until one of them fell.

  The echo of Lysa's voice still lingered on the battlefield like a sonic crack between the colliding forces. It was not just a command—it was a cut, a line drawn in the chaos, a redefinition of tactics and will, and each of the renegades, even wounded, even gasping, even bleeding, understood in the same breath that continuing together against the whole was ruin, but dividing the chaos, segmenting the battle, isolating each beast in its own mirror—that was chance, that was precision, that was survival.

  Kael spun to the left and launched himself at Toren Kaul, with the contained fury of someone who had been read like an open book for far too long, his eyes burning not with the pain of wounds, but with the repeated humiliation of being predicted, calculated, unfolded into probabilities by a man who saw the future not as fate, but as tactics. He charged without pattern, leaping between broken rocks, using the disorder itself as a weapon, letting the inner savagery command his movements—and still, Toren smiled, sidestepping with a short step, predicting with half a glance, murmuring percentages while tracing lines of aerial code with his fingertips. But Kael no longer backed down. He had learned to be improbable.

  Andrel, staggering, turned to Ilian Meret, his grimoire already in tatters and the runes on his body dirty with dust and blood, but still traceable. Ilian advanced calmly, surrounded by floating pages that unraveled any magic cast, the air around him pulsing with anti-progress, with pure negation, with raw logic. But Andrel had no intention of casting ordinary magic. He ripped his cloak with a tug and revealed hand-written seals on his own flesh, seals inscribed with pain and anger, forbidden seals—and activated them, one by one, invoking uncontrollable chaos of unstable effects. Ilian tried to undo them, but found that he could not deconstruct what did not follow form. It was a war of order against impulse. And Andrel, at last, had stopped following patterns.

  Selene knelt beside Rukk and whispered with a trembling voice. The titan, wounded inside and out, roared in response. Before them, Master Velro, still intoning litanies of emotional plague, advanced as if carrying the weight of the ages, each step a new field of affliction that distorted light and poisoned hope. But Selene embraced the pain. She made it her bond. She allowed Rukk to absorb the suffering and transmute it into raw strength. The creature rose, even amidst spasms, and charged at Velro with rune-claws, piercing the corners of reality. Velro tried to retreat, but discovered that not all cursed words could contain a monster born without a name, one that now responded to the voice of someone who would never be controlled again.

  Sava Thir tried to escape the chaos, but Lysa was already upon her.

  The two women spun between shards, Sava replicating images of herself in every broken mirror, every drop of water in the air, every gleam of a blade, and Lysa undoing them one by one with Veyla's dagger, whose runes had lit up with the rupture of the Judgment of Mirrors. Sava laughed as she multiplied illusions, saying that all truth was a mask, that all pain was editable—but Lysa did not fight for truth. She fought for impact. And each time she struck an image, she learned the pattern. She would not destroy Sava with strength. She would destroy with reading. And she was reading faster than the illusion could create. In the end, she struck so quickly that Sava fainted.

  And then there was Grenda.

  She and Lysa.

  Isolated by a spiral of runes that separated them from the rest of the battlefield.

  Grenda’s gaze was that of someone who had lost control of the experiment.

  Lysa’s... was that of someone who no longer needed to prove that she had survived.

  They moved like two colliding eras.

  Grenda used ancient seals, molded in judgment, in supremacy. The gestures were wide, grandiose, meant to inspire reverence, to crush.

  Lysa, on the other hand, fought with minimal cuts. Short strikes. Precise. Each one extracting a memory. Each one returning a scar.

  The first time Grenda used the word “shame.” The first time Lysa bled for guilt that was not hers. The first time Grenda’s voice sounded like truth.

  Now, Lysa returned it all.

  Grenda tried to seal the field.

  Lysa broke the ground.

  Grenda tried to bind her wrist with a symbolic chain.

  Lysa cut the chain—and the symbolism.

  Grenda tried to scream.

  Lysa smiled.

  And at some point in the battle, the five protagonists aligned in purpose.

  Divided, but in unison.

  Kael roaring against prediction.

  Andrel shouting against structure.

  Selene and Rukk dancing against emotional death.

  Lysa breaking the original mirror.

  And at the center of it all, the ancient clearing, now a field marked by five simultaneous duels, where each blow was not only magic, not only strength, but a living declaration that, against the System, there was not just resistance. There was response.

  The fight was not yet won, but for the first time, it was leveled. And then, one side began to see results.

  Among the multiple fronts of conflict, where each second seemed like a cycle and every choice could be the last, the clash between Kael and Toren Kaul took on its own contours—a battle not just of strength or technique, but of time, of reading, of possibilities unfolded to the limit of the absurd. Toren was everything Kael despised: cold, methodical, without hesitation. The kind of man who didn’t look at you, but at what you could do—or fail to do. And that was what made him dangerous. With his hexagonal eyes and the runes swirling around his head like crowns of calculation, Toren saw ten steps ahead, foresaw attacks before they were born, aborted offensives with a word, with a micrometric repositioning. He didn’t fight with a sword, but with geometry. With statistics.

  Kael, on the other hand, was not made of precision. He was instinct. He was weight. He was pain transformed into movement. Each of his strikes was a cut not only in flesh, but in order. It was chaos compressed into an enchanted blade—Trafal, the sword he had learned to wield when he had nothing, not even a name, a cause, or a purpose.

  But now he had one.

  And Toren was starting to feel it.

  “You waver,” said the noble, dodging once again with perfection. “You’re trying to deceive your own feet. An improvised pattern is still a pattern.”

  “And you still think you have control,” Kael replied, swinging the sword brutally. “But you’ve never faced someone who chooses to fail.”

  Toren smiled, as if he found the idea primitive.

  “Voluntary failure is pride disguised as fault.”

  “Not when it’s done to clear a path for the impossible.”

  Kael attacked again, but this time he wasn’t aiming to wound.

  He aimed to confuse.

  He jumped higher than he should.

  He spun too early.

  He struck with the blunt side of the blade.

  And Toren dodged… as predicted.

  But that’s what Kael wanted.

  Because by doing everything "wrong," he forced the noble to execute the most efficient dodge possible—and that dodge positioned him exactly where Kael had calculated through intuition.

  The point where Toren’s left leg, always delayed by half a second, touched the ground without the base of propulsion.

  There.

  Only there.

  Kael drove the tip of the sword into the ground and used it as a catapult, spinning around it with his whole body, propelled not by technique, but by weight and rage.

  And he struck Toren in the temple with his elbow reinforced by broken runes.

  The impact shattered his concentration. Shattered the flow of the runes and the foresight. And for a moment, Toren was blind to the future.

  “This... wasn’t... predicted,” he muttered, staggering.

  Kael retrieved Trafal, blood dripping down his arm.

  “It wasn’t supposed to be.”

  Toren tried to conjure something, but Kael was already on top of him. One strike. Another. One more. The prognosticator fell to his knees.

  “The future... is probabilistic...”

  Kael held him, his eyes burning.

  “The future is made of choices. And you... chose arrogance.”

  And he drove the blade straight into his chest without hesitation.

  Toren Kaul, the path reader, died without being able to predict his own end.

  Kael stood, panting, and shouted:

  “ONE!” — like a signal, a warning to his comrades.

  A crack opened in the Circle’s domain.

  The first noble had fallen.