Ervadelle couldn't help but notice how empty the night sky felt without a moon. The darkness didn't suffocate the land though, because the starlight reflected faintly off the countless bones scattered across the terrain. She walked beside Veneri in silence. Her grip occasionally tightened around the hilt of her newly given weapon as she adjusted to its presence. The wind brushed past them in slow, dry currents, carrying nothing but dust.
In the distance, the ground itself began to shake. The Krepsunas came into view in overwhelming numbers. There were thousands of them, all surging forward with relentless momentum. Their Sunderer Rank bodies collided against each other as they advanced without hesitation. Ervadelle felt her breath hitch slightly as she took in the sheer scale of it. Even if they were all Sunderer Rank, the number alone made it a threat that couldn't be ignored or taken lightly. She instinctively glanced at Veneri, expecting some kind of reaction or urgency but instead, he remained completely composed.
Without any visible effort, Veneri summoned his glaive. The moment it appeared in his hand, the atmosphere shifted so abruptly that Ervadelle felt it physically. A sharp, overwhelming pressure ran down her spine and made her body tense. The weapon itself radiated a presence that went beyond just being powerful.
"Watch closely. The Plenituse Technique has four forms and I'll show you all of them. They seem more than enough so they should last long enough."
He didn't run, charge or even quicken his pace. Instead he simply walked forward. As he raised his glaive, the air felt cold.
"It's been a while since I've used this. Plenituse Technique, First Form, Viridescence."
He brought the glaive down in a single, clean vertical slash. From Ervadelle's perspective, her vision split into two. A thin sapphire line cut its way through the lands, extending far beyond what should have been possible. The force behind it tore through the ground as well, causing the air displacement to trigger a massive earthquake that shook the entire area. The land split open along that vertical sapphire line, forming a massive valley in an instant. Everything caught within its range disintegrated into ash.
Ervadelle stood frozen for a moment. Her mind was struggling to process what she had just witnessed. Before she could even react, Veneri moved again as he transitioned into the next form without any pause or buildup.
"Plenituse Technique, Second Form, Calm Gale."
Instead of a single overwhelming strike, his figure blurred and split into hundreds of afterimages. Each one moved with the same precision as the original, using their glaives to cut through the Krepsunas. They created a storm of slashes that tore through the horde. The Krepsunas didn't stand a chance against something that moved faster than they could react. Within seconds, nearly half of the remaining horde had been reduced to nothing. Just as quickly as they had appeared, the afterimages dissolved into water that flowed back towards Veneri, gathering and condensing into his glaive as if the entire attack had been absorbed back into the weapon itself.
Ervadelle's breath came out unsteadily as she watched the water settle. The Krepsunas that remained were still advancing but their numbers had been cut down so drastically that the overwhelming pressure from before had been reduced to something almost manageable. She forced herself to stay focused,
Veneri didn't rush into the next form.
"Third Plenituse Technique, Scattered Scales."
Faint ripples spread across the dry, cracked surface before droplets of water began to emerge from nowhere, rising upward slowly as if gravity had decided to reverse itself just for them. Those droplets didn't stay for long in their original form because as they ascended, they stretched and flattened, reshaping into sharp, glimmering scales.
For a brief moment, everything looked beautiful.
The scales shot forward all at once. Their speed was so overwhelming that Ervadelle's eyes struggled to track even a fraction of them as they tore through the remaining Krepsunas. Thousands of streaks of sapphire light sliced through the darkness with each one passing cleanly through its target. Krepsunas began to fall one after another. The scales didn't collide with each other, didn't lose momentum and didn't even slow down. They simply continued cutting through everything in their path until there was nothing left in their immediate range.
From where she stood, it looked like the night itself had been filled with moving stars. Ervadelle could only try and fail to keep up with the sheer scale and speed of the technique.
Veneri didn't move during any of it. The Krepsunas that remained began to falter. Even though their shared consciousness dulled their emotional responses, something about what was happening broke through that limitation just enough to make their behavior change. Veneri exhaled softly, almost as if he had expected this outcome from the start, before speaking again without turning around.
"This is the first time I'm using the last form since before I obtained The Maiden's Path. Oh well."
Ervadelle barely had time to process what that meant before he raised his glaive again. For a single disorienting moment, Ervadelle felt herself split apart. It was as if her existence had been divided into separate pieces that no longer occupied the same space. Her vision fractured into multiple perspectives at once, with each one showing a different angle of herself, her limbs, her eyes, even her own mouth and ears appearing in separate positions.
She felt like she had been turned into shards of glass scattered across an invisible surface. She could see herself from angles that shouldn't have been possible and feel herself in places that didn't align. For that brief moment, reality itself lost all sense of direction and meaning.
There was no time to react to it because just as suddenly as it began, everything snapped back into place. The fractured perspectives collapsed into a single point as her body returned to normal. The force of that transition made her gasp sharply as she instinctively steadied herself.
Slowly, her eyes lifted from herself to the battlefield around her. The moment she saw it, every thought in her mind came to a complete stop.
The entire area had been divided into dozens of fragments. The space itself had been shattered and rearranged into separate pieces that no longer aligned with each other. Sections of land floated slightly out of place and the edges were misaligned as if someone had taken the world and broken it apart before putting it back together incorrectly. Within those fragments, the Krepsunas had been caught in positions that didn't make sense. Their bodies were split across different segments of space.
Some of them were cut cleanly with their forms divided along invisible lines that matched the fractures in the environment. Others seemed to exist partially in one fragment and partially in another. The ground itself bore the same marks with massive sections shifted out of alignment as deep separations carved through the landscape in patterns that didn't follow any natural logic.
The star light reflected off the fragmented surfaces in uneven ways, creating a distorted view of the battlefield that made everything look like a shattered mirror reflecting a world that no longer fit together properly. And in the center of all of it stood Veneri.
Ervadelle couldn't find the words to respond. Her mind was still trying to process the scale of what she had just witnessed.
"That's the Fourth Plenituse Technique, Inverse Deviation."