They heard their footsteps before they emerged.
Lucius's divine sense caught their energy patterns first, all then of them, spaced in a deliberate pattern through the trees on both sides of the road, positioned with the kind of spacing that didn't happen by accident. A coordinated ambush, already in position, waiting for them to walk into the middle of it.
He had half a second to process this before they came out of the trees.
They moved fast, closing in from both flanks simultaneously, blessed warriors in heaven's field armour with weapons already drawn. The formation was clean and practised, designed to overwhelm before the target could orient.
Five from the left, five from the right.
Lucius reached for his solar energy. Beside him, Valeria was already gone.
He didn't see her move. One moment, she was at his right shoulder, and the next, she was simply somewhere else inside the group of five on the left flank before any of them had finished closing the distance.
She hit the first one with an open palm strike to the chest that sounded like a door being slammed very hard and sent him off his feet in a straight horizontal line before he landed in the ditch at the roadside and stayed there.
Lucius stopped watching her because the five on his side arrived.
The first one came in high with a divine blade trailing light, and Lucius ducked under it, catching the warrior's forearm and redirecting the momentum sideways. He followed with a solar burst to the body, not a full skill activation, just focused output released in the right direction. The warrior's divine radiance flickered, and he went down to one knee.
The second was already there before he knew it.
Lucius took the strike across his left shoulder before he could turn fully, the blessed edge cutting through his outer layer and drawing a line of holy-charged pain across the meat of his upper arm. He hit back with Smite, the golden light carving through the warrior's shield, cracking it but not shattering it.
It was not enough power output to fully break the armour coated with divine blessing.
The third came in from the side he wasn't watching.
He sensed it late, his divine sense catching the movement half a second after he should have caught it, and twisted to take the blow on his side rather than his back.
The impact was heavy and deliberate, a shield bash that sent him skidding sideways across the road surface. His boots found purchase before he went down fully and he came back upright to find the first warrior back on his feet and the second regrouping and the third already repositioning.
'Five people,' he thought. 'This should not be this difficult.'
He pulled solar energy up and pushed it outward in a controlled burst, not Blazing Sun, he learned from last time, a more focused wave that cost less and hit harder in a narrow angle.
It caught two of them and staggered them back. He closed on the nearest one immediately, inside the weapon's range before the man could reset, and hit him three times fast in the gaps between the armor plates, and the warrior dropped to the ground.
'Two down, three more to go.'
He turned and caught a blade across his forearm, the cut shallow but immediate, holy charge crawling unpleasantly across the wound.
From the tree line on the left side of the road, Valeria watched him.
She was leaning against an oak with her arms crossed, one boot propped against the bark behind her, the casual arrangement of someone waiting for a slow process to complete itself.
Her five were behind her on the road. All of them down, all of them unconscious, the entire left flank handled in the time it had taken Lucius to put two of his on the ground.
She watched him work through the third.
Her expression moved through several things in sequence. Something that might have been assessment when he caught the blade angle correctly and redirected instead of absorbing it.
Something that might have been mild impatience when he telegraphed the solar burst a full beat before it fired and gave the warrior time to partially brace for it. Something unreadable when he took a hit he shouldn't have taken because he was managing three threat vectors at once and prioritizing them in the wrong order.
She didn't move, nor did she intervene.
She simply just calmly waited and watched.
On the far side of the road, Seraphine had her hands raised.
The corrupted divine energy was there when she reached for it, thin and unreliable, answering at a fraction of what it should have been. She built it anyway, pulling what she could from the depleted core, shaping it into something she could direct at the warrior currently giving Lucius the most trouble on his right side.
She pushed it out.
It dissipated before it reached him. Not enough output, not enough energy from her core to sustain it at range. The ability faded into the air between them like smoke in the wind.
The warriors didn't notice, neither did Lucius.
She tried again, smaller, targeting the one directly in front of him, the one he was currently occupied with. She got further this time, the energy reaching the edge of the engagement before it thinned and scattered, too weak to land with any meaningful force.
She lowered her hands.
Stood with them at her sides.
Lucius moved through the fight three meters away from her, managing it, handling it, and there was nothing she could add to it that wouldn't slow him down or give him something else to track.
She could see it clearly. The calculations he was running, the angles he was covering, the way adding her unpredictable diminished output into that equation would create more problems than it solved.
She was a liability in this fight.
The understanding arrived without drama, settled quietly into her chest like something that had been waiting for a moment to sit down, and stayed there.
She watched him take another hit and push through it and keep moving.
She said nothing, and did nothing. Stood at the edge of the road with her hands at her sides and watched him.
On her left, at some point she couldn't precisely identify, Valeria was standing nearby.
She hadn't heard her approach. She didn't know how long she'd been there.
Valeria wasn't looking at her. Her eyes were on Lucius, tracking the fight with that flat attentive expression. But something in her peripheral awareness had recognized Seraphine's lowered hands, the shift in her posture, the small still quality of someone who had made a decision about themselves and hadn't liked it.
She didn't say anything about it.
She looked at the fight and waited for it all to play out
The fourth warrior was the worst of them.
Faster than the others, better trained, carrying a divine blessing that was fresher and stronger than the field-standard energy signature Lucius had been used to.
He didn't come in straight. He angled, probing, testing the response before committing, and every time Lucius moved to close distance he gave ground and reset.
Lucius burned more energy than he wanted to, trying to pin him down. Solar output to pressure him left, physical pursuit right, trying to create an angle the warrior couldn't retreat from cleanly. The warrior read each one and adjusted.
He was good.
Lucius took two more cuts earning the position he needed, one across the ribs and one along his outer thigh, neither deep but both costing him dearly, the holy charge from both wounds sitting in his system like gravel in a joint.
He stopped trying to chase and stopped moving entirely.
The warrior paused, reading the stillness, uncertain about his next movements.
Lucius let the solar energy build without releasing it. Just pressure, slow and accumulating, radiating outward without direction. The warrior felt it, he could see the adjustment in his stance, the recalibration of threat assessment.
He came forward.
Lucius hit him with everything he had built up, point blank, both hands, the full focused output without a skill name attached to it, just raw solar force directed into the center of the warrior's chest.
The divine radiance on the man went out completely.
He folded and didn't get up.
Four down.
Lucius straightened. His arm was bleeding from two cuts. His ribs had a deep ache that suggested the graze from earlier in the week hadn't fully healed before this one added to it. His solar core was running lower than he'd like, not critical but noticeably reduced.
He turned to the fifth.
The fifth warrior had been hanging back, watching. Lucius had included him as the lowest threat in the group at the start, youngest maybe, least experienced in the way he'd held his position during the opening formation. But he had watched the other four go down and he had time to think about it, which had turned him cautious in a way the others hadn't been.
Cautious, in Lucius's current condition, was worse than aggressive.
It took longer than it should have. The warrior refused to commit, forcing Lucius to spend energy he didn't want to spend driving him into positions where he had to engage, and every exchange cost something, a cut, a blocked strike that sent pain up his arm, a heavy kick that caught him in the hip when his footwork wasn't where it needed to be.
By the end of it Lucius was breathing hard, working on accumulated damage from a week of fighting, his movement rougher than it had started.
He got inside the warrior's guard on the fourth exchange, locked his arm, and hit him twice in the body with the last of what he had in his right hand. The warrior went to his knees. Lucius hit him once more, a measured, final punch to the face, and the man went down and stayed there.
Lucius straightened up slowly.
Stood over the last one with his chest heaving, blood running from the cut on his forearm, his ribs making their ongoing complaints loudly known.
He let out a long, heavy breath.
"Phew." He looked down at the unconscious warrior. "That's the last one."
He became aware of Valeria.
She was still by the tree. Still in the same position she had been in since she finished, one boot against the bark, arms crossed, watching him with that amber gaze. She had been there for the better part of thirty minutes. She had watched him work through all five of them from start to finish.
He didn't know what he expected her expression to look like.
Something moved at the corner of her mouth. Brief, genuine, and immediately suppressed, smoothed back into the flat neutral she wore as a default before it had properly arrived.
She pushed off the tree and walked toward him.
"You're sloppy," she said. "Your new body is powerful but you don't know how to use it."
Lucius looked at her. Looked at the five unconscious warriors behind her on the road, all of them put there in the time it had taken him to handle three of his. Looked at the five behind him that had cost him thirty minutes and several cuts he was going to feel for days.
He was tired, his arm was bleeding and worst of all his ribs hurt.
'Maybe not now…..'
"May I have the honour of you teaching me then?," he blurted out without a filter.
Valeria looked at him for a moment. The flat expression shifted, something coming through it that was neither the suppressed smile from before nor the clinical assessment she wore when she was analysing his mistakes.
She grinned. It arrived quickly and sat on her face like it knew what it was doing there.
"Maybe I will," she said.
Behind them, the system notifications came through in a quiet sequence.
[Absorbing Defeated Targets...]
[10 targets absorbed.]
[Combat Data Updated.]
Lucius read none of them.
He was looking at the road ahead and thinking about thirty minutes and five warriors and what the gap between himself and the woman standing in front of him actually meant.
A lot of work was what it meant.
He picked up his pack and started walking.