Chapter 686: The Crimson

Moon couldn’t believe the sight in front of him.

The archer elf emerged from its spire with a crimson trail coating its lips, and it dragged its tongue across them slowly, licking the red clean, a look of pure ecstasy flashing across its pale face.

"Wait..." Vela’s eyes went wide as the pieces snapped together in her mind, recognizing the same thing Moon had.

A moment later, the others caught up.

Elsa’s lips parted in shock, "Wait. Did it just eat the true elf’s heart? Its own spire’s heart?"

She asked the question sitting at the front of every mind.

The answer began to unravel a heartbeat later.

Behind the northern commander, the black spire began to collapse, folding downward into itself, tons of black ice crashing to the wasteland floor in a slow, thunderous descent. The towering monument that had dominated the northern horizon since they’d arrived crumbled into a heap of shattered ice, sinking into the snow until it was nothing more than a speck of the past, no longer reaching for the sky.

Its heart was gone, and so its spire had died, the same way the white one had.

"Seems like it did," Moon muttered, his eyes locked on the northern elf, on the ecstasy still fading from its face, on the crimson smeared at the corner of its mouth.

He didn’t fully understand what he was looking at yet. But he understood the significance was enormous.

A lesser elf, degraded from a true elf’s bloodline, had just consumed the preserved heart of its ancestral race. And judging by the way it had willingly destroyed its own home to do it, the moment its rival arrived begging for help, whatever that heart granted was worth more than the spire.

The blademaster stood frozen before its rival, and even from this distance, Moon could read the dark expression settling across its pale face.

The realization of what it had walked into finally dawned upon it.

Moon’s hands clenched into a tight fist. He’d wanted that second heart. He’d come north half-hoping to find a way to claim it the way he’d claimed the first, but he had never expected this outcome.

The two elves had almost certainly guarded these hearts for years, decades or maybe longer.

For the northern commander to devour its own, the instant its rival came asking for aid, meant the heart served some purpose beyond a mere treasure, something related to whatever these creatures were and where they came from.

But Moon had no way to translate their language, no access to their history, and no thread to pull that would explain it.

He could only work with what he could see.

And what he could see was the archer’s aura rising.

Its previously pale white aura gained a faint edge of crimson, and then it began to climb, swelling outward, growing denser and heavier by the second.

It didn’t plateau or slow down, it kept building, the red going deeper into the white, even at this distance the team could feel the aura.

"Its strength is still increasing," Marek said, and he swallowed the lump of saliva that had gathered unconsciously in his throat. "It’s not stopping. It’s just... it keeps going."

The southern commander made its decision.

It understood, better than anyone, that every second it waited made its rival stronger. If it was going to strike, it had to strike now, while the transformation was still incomplete, while there was still a chance.

It brandished both blades and rushed forward, closing the distance in a blur, its twin swords sweeping toward the archer in a killing arc.

The archer moved at the last second.

Even mid-transformation, with its aura still churning and rising, it flowed around the swordsman’s strike with a grace that hadn’t been there before. The blades passed through the space it had occupied, and the archer twisted away but not entirely.

The swordsman’s follow-up caught it, one blade grazing across the archer’s arm, opening a thin line of crimson. The southern commander was still a threat, its speed formidable, and it had drawn blood.

Yet the wound was shallow. A graze where, minutes ago, that same exchange would have opened the archer to the bone. Before eating the heart, a strike like that would have seriously injured the northern commander. Now it barely scored the skin, and the archer was already recovering, its balance perfect, its aura still climbing, its wound already beginning to close.

The southern commander pressed the attack, blades flashing, because it knew the truth now.

Every second the swordsman failed to land a killing blow, the gap widened, and its window to win closed a little more.

"Why are they fighting?" Marek asked, confusion crossing his face. "They were civil a few minutes ago, what changed?"

"Because the southern commander finally understood what it walked into, it woke up from its emotional state..." Moon said, his eyes never leaving the duel. "It came here weak, asking for an alliance against the enemy that took its spire. Instead it watched its rival eat a true elf’s heart and start becoming something else. And it realized that once that transformation finishes, it won’t have an ally. It’ll have a stronger enemy. It’s going to be the first thing that new, evolved elf turns on. So it’s striking now, while it still can, because waiting means dying."

"But what if the archer just wanted to power up?" Marek pressed. "Keep the heart safe, away from you, and swallow it before you came back for it. Maybe it wasn’t about the swordsman at all."

Moon shook his head.

"If that were it, it would have eaten the heart inside its spire, quietly, and dealt with the swordsman after but it didn’t. It came back out, in front of its rival, and licked the blood off its face where the other one could see every drop." Moon said as he watched the archer weave around another strike.

"That was a display of dominance. It was telling the swordsman that the rivalry was over, that it had won, that it stood above the other now. They aren’t rivals anymore. One of them just declared itself the superior, and the other one refuses to accept it. That’s what this fight is."

"Oh," Marek breathed, the picture settling into place.

Vela interrupted the exchange, "That’s all very interesting theories, but it doesn’t tell us what we do. So let’s decide, do we join the fight? Help the southern commander take down the north before that transformation finishes? Two against one, with us as the tiebreaker, while the archer’s still mid-change and vulnerable?"

Her eyes moved to Moon. "Because if we’re going to move, the window for it is closing as fast as the swordsman’s is. Your call..."