The deadly warning had been duly given. There was no escape now.

Tonight, Tristessa's fate will finally be decided.

Whether she would survive and see the Dullahan fall defeated, or be destroyed and allow herself to be embraced by the unknown, for she didn't know if she would be able to return from Death this time.

"Ord Lumen!"

Severus had enough serenity in his head, even after losing his only friends in that world and being mentally attacked by the Dullahan's eldritch voice, to stand up and use his thaumaturgy to summon a glyph of light that generated a source of sunlight throughout the area.

"Tessa!"

The elf went to assist the gray-eyed girl. She couldn't tear her gaze away from the imposing, dark-armored phantom knightess who, to their misfortune, was completely ignoring the light.

"Get up, come on! I don't think the same trick will work a second time!" he yelled at her.

"Y-yes, but I-I can't hold out for long…" she let him know, accepting the elf's arm and standing up. "What is that…?"

Severus had taken out one of the small vials he carried in a sort of leather pouch tied to his belt. Without previous warning, he basically forced the glistening white contents down Tristessa's throat.

"Spirit potion, made with ghost lotus! It will help you for a short time!" he explained, as the Dullahan dropped down to the ground floor and turned the charred remains of the witches into frosty ash. "Come on, we can't stay here!"

Indeed, that liquid, which had left a horrible taste in her mouth, spread a sensation of lightness and freshness throughout her body. The fatigue that stretched beyond muscle and bone receded, incrementing her speed and reaction time. And at the center of her being, where the core of her soul shone like a dark sun amidst the solitude of the cosmos, the burden and agony imposed by using her Divinity were anesthetized.

"What can we do, Severus?!" she asked him, outside the hellish house and greeted by the night chilly winds. "Where are we going?!"

There wasn't a soul nearby, not even members of the Coven who had survived Daiana's massive sacrifice to appease the partial failure of the prophecy of the [Lord of Forbidden Knowledge]. They were completely alone.

"We? For Kantrus, Tessa…" Severus released Tristessa, amidst that field of charred corpses, and could do nothing but give her a broken smile. "You are the one who must run as fast as you can. I'll delay the Dullahan."

Hearing that broke her rejuvenated spirit into a thousand pieces.

"Are you out of your mind?! No, I won't leave you alone!" she screamed, her desperation sharpening her voice and making it extremely fragile. "We're in this together!"

In contrast to Tristessa's pessimism, the blood elf burst out laughing.

"You are incredible, Tessa… You came into my life and in two days everything changed. You gave me a chance to try and save my loved ones, and test myself against the Darkness that looms over Nekrom. For that, I thank you," he told her with the utmost sincerity, and took her right hand—reddened from burns— to leave a kiss on her swollen, bloodied knuckles. "If I can't overcome this threat, I have no hope of ever slaying the Shadow Queen and avenge my people. It will prove that I am weak and unworthy of carrying the legacy of the elves on my shoulders."

Severus turned his back on the disheartened Tristessa. As he walked away in the direction of that both burning and icing hell, took two spirit potions that quickly began to restore all the magical energy he had expended throughout the day.

He straightened his shirt and tie, then assumed a fighting stance, pointing his wand at the dark knightess who emerged from the fading flames of the Mercer-Archeos house.

"And with all due respect, you're no good for this kind of situation..." he said to the girl, glancing at her without stopping smiling. "If you can't support me with one of your three Divinities, you'd better start running."

"S-Sev..."

But the elf wasn't listening anymore: he had begun gesturing with his free hand and reciting the spell that summoned the storms.

"Marwel Voltis Irit!" he bellowed, his powerful voice reaching high above, along with the blue glow of the catalyst crystal.

A halo of glyphs charged with elemental thaumaturgy of electricity appeared dozens of meters above. Large in diameter, swirling and taking on the mathematical configurations the elf demanded.

"Get smitten by the fury of the storm, Dullahan!"

The glyphs collapsed upon themselves as the spell was completed. From each pool of light generated by those ethereal symbols, lightning bolts fell to the ground. Hundreds of them, forcing the Dullahan to leap over a torrent of shadows that turned into the physical manifestation of her black steed, and she began to dodge the magical attacks.

"You cannot escape me!" The Dullahan's supernatural scream was followed by a mind-breaking shriek that made both Severus and Tristessa's ears bleed, as her steed dodged the hail of lightning that crashed down upon the scorched earth. "There is no barrier between us now, my Nemesis! Tonight, you will defeat me, or you will die!"

Tristessa couldn't stop trembling, her gaze darting from the elf's back to the Dullahan, who was struck by a couple of those bolts. Electrical conductivity was a merciless physical phenomenon; damage was done, by the way she and her dark, armored horse screeched, but it was not enough to stop her progress.

"What do I do?!" she thought, so scared she couldn't even move her legs. The Dullahan's voice had been enough to fill her spirit with extreme terror, and if it weren't for the potion's effect, she would have already collapsed like a sandcastle against the waves of the sea. "Something, anything!"

She felt the abundance of corpses around her; receptacles for the false light of Life granted by her Divinity aligned with the Goddess of Order, Xiliarra. But their bodies were so scorched that they wouldn't even serve as cannon fodder…

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How long could they resist standing? How useful could they be for Severus?

"Arise!"

With her right hand, she aimed at the corpse of the nearest witch and activated her [Divinity of Accursed Existence]. The connection was formed, and the strain was placed on her spirit, but as soon as the revenant tried to use her arms to push herself off the ground, they disintegrated, and the minimal impact with the ground caused the rest of her body to suffer the same fate, just like poor Lucahn...

The dark ethereal thread and the false light of Life disappeared, leaving Tristessa chewing bitter frustration.

"I'm so useless, I can't do anything to help!" she screamed inside her head, looking around in desperation.

Her eyes showed her nothing but burnt grass, smoke and bodies charred to a crisp… But her Divinity was able to look beyond what mortal sight could, and it let her know that there was another dead body nearby to gift it a dark light of false Life.

"…Auron."

She whispered his name and looked at the hills that were quite in the distance, almost covered in darkness.

Deep guilt burned within her. For causing his death, and for what she was about to do…

"Please, Auron… Help me one last time!" she begged, reaching for that metaphysical light-switch cord hanging in the dark. "Arise!"

She pulled it and the burden of that false light weighed on her soul in an instant.

"Agh, fuck! Hurry!"

The veil of hatred and Discord that flowed from the top of the hills was as strong as when she raised the wraith Stormcrow from Death. And the strain over her soul, monumental.

Auron and Stormcrow's broken souls were different from the other souls she had to capture from the void to raise revenants. There was a difference in something that Tristessa could not identify, but that it made them heavier, denser and proportional to the painful strain they triggered.

The spirit potion was what was keeping her on her feet, and Auron needed to reach the battlefield and help Severus before the effect worn out…

"Please Auron, please… please hurry and help us!" she commanded the revenant, the source of that darkness still far away, while at the same time she realized that Severus had begun to bleed from his arms. "Sev…"

The crimson threads of liquid floated and spiraled around his arms, but not touching them, until they stopped near his hands.

"Ensis Plasmos!" the blood elf shouted, the instant the Dullahan leaped from her mount and swung her sword straight at the elf, intending to sever his head with a single slash.

The blood thaumaturgy glyph conjured a crimson blade that blocked the dark knightess' attack, thanks to the magic that enveloped every particle of blood. Slash after slash, Severus was forced to step back and repeat the spell once the former lost its power.

"…!"

The Dullahan's final attack was so powerful that it broke both the blood sword and the spell's stability, causing the glyph to collapse prematurely. Without losing momentum, she raised her severed head to be at the same height as Severus's face and let out a Discord-saturated shriek.

The miasma was drowning his soul in a sea of doom. His eyes wept tears of blood and threatened to go blank, unconscious…

"SEVERUS!" Tristessa cried, seeing him stumble and nearly fall backward.

A second of hesitation. A second in which the blood elf felt the gaze of his ancestors upon him. The countless souls lost to the Dark Lady's malice, the oceans of blood and tears shed... The weight of a legacy that wouldn't allow him to give up so easily.

Severus's right foot broke his fall, stepping hard over the disintegrating head of one of the charred witches.

"SYCOMA!" The blood elf pointed his wand at the Dullahan and, with the non-elemental spell, generated a shockwave that knocked her back, sending her several feet into the air.

The dark knightess landed on her feet and skidded against the scorched earth for a few feet before coming to a stop, kicking up dust and ash alike. Her cloak of shadows billowed like the wings of a black dragon, majestic and terrifying alike.

"Ah…uff…" Tristessa heard Severus breathing with difficulty. He raised both hands and, with gestures and movements of his wand, began to recite a new non-elemental spell: "Cemerentio Erasil Vinley!"

Three rings of glyphs emitting a bluish glow appeared in front of Severus and, as they began to spin on the same concentric axis, they lifted the ashes across the field like a horizontal whirlwind, heading straight for the Dullahan. Before getting into contact, the ashes began to transmute into thousands of pieces of solid crystal, colliding with their enemy and knocking her back.

But the Dullahan used her own sword as a barrier, and with her armor withstanding the countless impacts, she slowly advanced above that torrent of magical energy.

She wasn't taking any damage from that attack… Because that had never been Severus's intention: he needed time to recite an very difficult and dangerous spell.

"Tessa… Move aside, or you'll burn to Death," the elf warned her, and the girl could see his tired gaze brimming with uncontrolled anger. "NOW!"

Indeed, the ambient temperature began to rise rapidly. The sacrificial fires that were about to go out flared up again, and as she stepped back, Tristessa saw the drops of blood falling from his arms burning against the ground, leaving bright red marks with the luminical intensity of lava. The elf's shirt was scorched in several places, exposing gaping wounds that oozed hot blood. His crimson mane shined like the brightest sun in the cosmos, and his heart on fire spread the stifling heat to the point that even breathing hurt.

"Fireon Ensis Plasmos!"

Severus's bellow unleashed such a massive, fiery blast of magical energy that Tristessa felt the heat like the shockwave of an explosion. Both his wand and catalyst shattered in an instant; his arms, torso, and legs spewed out large amounts of blood that converged on his right arm in the form of dozens of glowing crimson glyphs that quickly collapsed into bloodfire.

"Ahhh!" Severus resisted the excruciating pain that flowed through his arm, engulfed in blood blazing; his gaze fixed on his opponent, who advanced ever faster, surpassing the power of the already-declining non-elemental transformation spell. "Let's dance, harlot in black!"

All that bloodfire took the form of a sword just in time for Severus to gain momentum and lunge at the Dullahan, who had closed the distance enough to raise her head, enveloped in an enormous amount of shadow, and break the spell using dark thaumaturgy.

Bloodsword and curved sword clashed with inhuman violence, causing physical Discord to burst into flames, and the flames being extinguished by the cold darkness. These blows were exchanged between an elf who couldn't effectively block his enemy and had difficulty deflecting the force of the attacks to the sides. The Dullahan was far more proficient than him, but the cursed fire, charged with the wrath of an entire species, tore at her, raising the temperature of her armor and burning away the tangible shadows that made up her body.

"M-my arm!" Tristessa heard Severus groan as they clashed swords again, forced back by the mutual recoil. She tried to see the condition of that limb, engulfed in fire, burning with the malice necessary for revenge. The brilliance was so great and the heat so stifling that it even reached where she stood, making her eyes ache. "Damn it…!"

BANG! BANG!

At that moment, as the blood elf staggered and the Dullahan recovered before him to unleash the killing blow, several echoes of explosions overcame the sound of boiling blood.

Red-hot parts of the Dullahan's breastplate were hit by armor-piercing bullets, causing her to shriek in pain.

"Grrr…!"

Smell of burnt gunpowder joined the toxic blend of seared flesh, hair, and skin, alongside that inhuman growl. A threatening sound coming from a dark silhouette in the middle of the field, created from hatred towards that cursed existence and towards Tristessa herself.

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