Lenna and Farlen's blades clashed once more and this time both swords hit a previously damaged part on each other. The two swords each nearly cleaved halfway through the other. When Farlen yanked his sword back to reengage, Lenna went with him in an attempt to throw him off balance and land an attack of some kind against the larger, older, and more experienced paladin. Farlen slammed his knee into the bottom of Lenna's breastplate so quickly it looked like he had been waiting for her to try something like that. The force felt like it was transferred directly into Lenna's shoulder and hips as she was tossed backwards. Her feet left the ground for a few feet and she landed on rubble. Her boots went out from under her and she went down. It was only because of her own centuries of experience that she was able to seamlessly transition into a backwards somersault.

Lenna barely got upright in time to clash swords with Farlen again. Her recovery speed was faster than he had anticipated so Lenna was able to shift the impact location on her own sword. His sword cleaved nearly halfway through hers, courtesy of its impact site being a place that had already been damaged, but Lenna's sword had hit Farlen's in the same place that it had just hit before. Her sword cleaved almost completely through his and when they separated she yanked downwards with everything she had. His blade broke in half.

Lenna had thought, and hoped, that she had just gotten a leg up on her opponent but it was soon made clear that he was only transitioning their battle into the next stage. Farlen's hand caught Lenna's sword by the end of the blade and his fist slammed into its side, equalizing their current weapon loadout in an instant. Lenna had seen what he was doing and capitalized on the brief moment where Farlen was open, the moment when his sword hand punched into the side of her own blade, and she managed to land an uppercut with everything she had into his breastplate on the side, right where it protected his kidney. The side armor on the breastplate was the weakest part for one reason, that was where the seam was located. The metal crunched inwards, not far enough to actually injure Farlen, but enough that moving would be uncomfortable.

Farlen swung wide in order to get her to back off so they could reengage their battle on equal footing once again. Isaac appeared at just that moment, whether it was luck or fate they would never know because Farlen reacted instantly. Isaac's Truth stabbed towards the large paladin who stood just as tall as Edward and half again as wide. Farlen used the momentum from his wide swing to transition perfectly into a roundhouse kick that nearly hit Isaac square in the ribs. It was only the mild boost that Isaac had active that allowed him to bend under it. As it was, the kick skipped off of Isaac's chest and threw the dark mage to the ground hard enough to knock the wind out of him, and send his world reeling from his head's impact against the stone ground. A handful of scales on his chest were sizzling from the imparted oath-backed power.

Normally, Lenna would have taken the opportunity to cast Hellflame Strike, but she knew that it would be worse than nothing against her mother's cousin. Farlen would have felt it coming, his aura would have slowed down the actual activation of the spell the closer it was to him, and Lenna would have wasted an entire fifth level spell's worth of mana on Hellflame Striking an empty spot on the cavern floor. Instead, Lenna dove at him. His kick had turned his back to her and put all of his weight on one foot.

Farlen planted his foot with enough force to crack the stone under it. He had been aiming for Isaac's arm but the dark mage had managed to tuck it right before impact. From his new position, with both feet firmly on the ground and his back to Lenna, Farlen only really had one option. His weight was too heavily placed on the foot he had just brought down to allow him to send a back kick directly into the charging Lenna's face so he stepped forwards and swung his main hand, the one with half of a sword in it, in a wide backhand. Farlen's backhand caught Lenna in the shoulder but she ignored the searing pain his power brought with the strike and tackled him at the waist. Farlen's back slammed into the ground. Stalagmite shrapnel and small rocks powdered under his back from his and Lenna's weight.

Isaac hopped to his feet and got ready to go after the enemy paladin again just as the two started grappling. There was nothing he could do directly as Farlen grabbed Lenna by the head and Lenna clamped her hand around his faceplate so hard it popped off of its rivets.

Lenna's other hand grabbed onto Farlen's collar and she pulled herself up to be eye to eye with him, despite his attempt to shove her off of him, as she ripped his faceplate off of his helmet. "Let my flames-" Lenna began and Farlen slammed the pommel of his sword into the side of her helmet. She threw his faceplate to the side and felt a wave of death flames murder their way through all of her injuries and exhaustion. "-consume all-" Farlen slammed his pommel into the side of her head again only for more death flames to wash through her. She could feel the two powers fighting a war across the side of her head. "-before me." She finished and grabbed Farlen by the face. He hit her again and his power fought to destroy her as Isaac's fought to destroy both his power and her injuries.

Flames poured out of Lenna's hand into Farlen's helmet and he grabbed her by both of her shoulders. With a mighty shove he tried to throw her off of him but her grip on his collar held, if only barely. Her hand that had been gripping his helmet was pulled free and for a moment she hung in the air, held up by his outstretched arms and the force of his shove but held down by her four fingered grip on the lip of his collar. Her flames continued to pour into Farlen's helmet as Isaac appeared in a low crouch just past Farlen's head. Truth stabbed downward and forwards in an attempt to end the fight once and for all but Farlen kicked off of the ground and let go of Lenna at the same time.

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Farlen rolled to the side as Truth impaled the ground directly where his head had been. One of Farlen's collar's straps finally gave out. Lenna's fingers slipped off of his collar and she fell, flames still pouring out of her hand and the flames were approaching a point where they would actually burn her skin despite it being her own spell. Lenna barely managed to get a grasp on his pauldron in time to get pulled along with his next sideways roll. She wrapped her arms around him as he tried to roll to his feet. She reached around and planted her flame spewing hand directly onto his face again as her other arm wrapped around his neck.

Isaac swiped his sword across Farlen's shins as the larger man tried desperately to pry Lenna off of him. Truth sliced deep into Farlen's shins but not as deeply as Isaac had intended. Isaac was sure that he had cut bone to some degree but it hadn't been enough to literally cut Farlen's legs out from under him. The paladin's armor was still high V'Nova quality after all. Farlen still went down, however, it was entirely on purpose as he slammed his entire weight down on top of Lenna in another vein attempt to dislodge his fellow level nineteen paladin. She was weaker, smaller, and less experienced than him but held him in a death grip.

Lenna had an offensive aura and all but two of her smaller than normal spell list were entirely offensive so she was far less versatile than he was. He was harder to bring down by all accounts and could dish out just as much damage in melee combat. Yet with the help of her husband, Lenna was winning and she would not give that up. Her head swam from the hard impact with the ground and the extremely loud ringing of her helmet being caught between Farlen's and the stone beneath them, but that only made her grab on harder so he couldn't dislodge her while she was disoriented. Farlen thrashed and tried with all of his strength but he couldn't dislodge her death grip.

"Ancestors! Hear my call!" Farlen began yelling through the flames still gushing into his face. Lenna tried to stuff her gauntleted fingers into his mouth to keep him from finishing the chant, which unfortunately moved the pouring flames away from his eyes where they had been doing an admirable job of cooking the freshest grilled eyeballs Isaac had ever seen. "Aid your child in crushing his enemies!"

Lenna had no idea how Farlen still had mana left. They both had to be scraping the bottom of the barrel. She knew that if she pushed for more than the next ten seconds, she would start inflicting soul damage to herself. There was no point in ending the fight quickly if it meant that she was stuck in recovery for weeks again, so she needed to either end the fight immediately or rely on Isaac to help her bring him down even more than she already was. His regular bursts of death flames had been keeping her in great physical condition but there was nothing that he could do about her bottoming out mana reserves.

Four purple and golden spectral forms poured out from Farlen and quickly realized what was going on. All four of them went for Lenna immediately but Isaac appeared and grabbed one of them out of the air. The entire atmosphere of their section of the cavern changed as a man grabbed a ghost by the throat with enough raw power that the form of the ghost began actively breaking apart.

"No! Let me go!" The ghost cried out as the true soul of the fallen elf started to crumble under the weight of Isaac's entire mana reserves, well, what was left of them. Isaac had about two thirds of his mana reserves left at that point, because he was specifically fighting in a way that allowed him to regain mana, and that was more than enough to lower the amount of available drow souls by one, permanently.

"Dispel us you fool!" One of the other ghosts cried out towards Farlen as the other two changed their target from Lenna to Isaac. They both slammed into him but didn't pass through as they were met by multiple layers of defense. Isaac's wedding ring was the first one and it tried to block the spirit directly with its soul warding property. The second was the black headband that Isaac now wore. The headband had come from Eliza's stock of random and weird items courtesy of Clayton. It worked by forcefully applying a shadowy property to incoming mental and soul based attacks to make them easier to handle. It didn't outright block anything but it lowered the effectiveness of everything by around seventy percent. The third thing was Isaac's power density, which was normally off the charts but even at that moment, he was taking in so much of the local mana that it disrupted their attack and then forced them to swim upstream though a river of mana just to finish getting to him. The final thing was Isaac's soul integrity that was connected to Lenna's. Their combined integrity was far beyond the poultry amount of power the ghosts attacks had by the time they impacted him.

"Disperse us now!" One of the ones that had failed to pass through Isaac cried out but Farlen was in far too bad of shape to listen, not that it mattered. Lenna had been melting his face off and he had finally run out of mana and strength. He had been trying to heal himself through the flames while he tried to dislodge Lenna and sustain the ghosts. Summoning his ancestors had been a last ditch effort to kill her before she actually succeeded in boiling his brain but it was too little too late.

Right before the ghost in Isaac's grasp shattered, Farlen's power finally died out and they were all instantly turned back into free flying souls and yanked back to the afterlife. Isaac's power faded as he stood over Lenna and Farlen. Lenna's flames died out a moment later. Isaac sent what little power he had just regained into Lenna to make sure she was in good shape. They both knew that she was entirely out of mana and her aura felt weaker than it usually did. She was exhausted on a soul level, even if she hadn't taken any damage, a day of rest would do her a lot of good.

Lenna looked up at him but before she could thank him or ask him to help move Farlen off of her, he nodded and gave her a quick order: "Make sure he's really dead." He said and then vanished. From those words she knew that Farlen's heart was somehow still beating or at least his soul hadn't completely left his body. Once she got him off of her, it wouldn't be hard for her to take one of the broken blades and cut off Farlen's head, but Isaac had left before he could help her do that. The fact that he had left immediately meant that whatever was going on in the middle of the cavern was not going well. And if the rolls of thunder that she had heard were anything to go by, the fight in the middle had not died down in the slightest.

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