How is she doing this? We are both Dracos... Why is the gap between us so absurdly huge?!
The true leader of Dublinn stared at Talulah, who looked like a mythic dragon of pure flame, and cursed bitterly under her breath. She couldn't bring herself to believe what her own eyes were showing her!
She was being suppressed single-handedly—and utterly crushed. The difference between them felt like an adult standing over a helpless toddler.
Talulah's Originium Arts possessed no tricky side effects or intricate properties; her power was raw, terrifying destruction, an overwhelming force that shattered any defense in its path.
It had reached a point where mere numbers meant nothing. Before the Dublinn soldiers could even get close, the fierce heat radiated by her Arts melted their steel weapons into useless slag.
And Talulah showed no mercy in combat. She watched the surrounding soldiers indifferently as her roaring flames consumed them, extinguishing their lives in seconds.
"Why force this?" Talulah said, a faint note of regret in her voice. "When I came to Victoria, I had no intention of killing anyone. Even if I had to fight, I never wanted it to be in a place like this. Was all this really necessary?"
Hearing those words only stoked the woman's rage. To her, Talulah's heavy sigh sounded less like mourning for the dead and more like condescending pity—a casual insult to her entire cause.
Her purple flames spread across the cobblestones. Under the cover of that eerie, ghostly glow, the fallen soldiers suddenly twitched. One by one, men who should have been dead dragged themselves back to their feet, staring forward like lifeless puppets.
Talulah raised an eyebrow at the grotesque sight. The fact that her opponent's Arts could produce such a phantom-like display caught her off guard. Until now, she had assumed the only difference between their abilities was the color of their fire.
"I have to admit, I'm curious," Talulah said, studying the undead thralls with cool detachment. "How exactly does your spell work?"
The surrounding Dublinn soldiers cheered at the sight, clearly accustomed to their Leader's morbid displays. But for the watching Taran residents, it was pure terror. To the uninformed, seeing a mass resurrect like ghastly puppets was the stuff of nightmares.
A weaker-willed onlooker would have lost any desire to fight on the spot. Talulah, however, was only interested in the mechanics behind the phenomenon.
She had encountered similar Arts before—a member within Reunion also commanded power that could raised or manipulated the fallen—but she had never known a Draco capable of such a trick.
"If you're so curious, feel free to experience it yourself!" the Dublinn leader called out, her voice cold and strained. "Let's see if my march of the dead breaks your spirit first!"
At her command, the ghastly thralls lunged forward, throwing themselves into the roaring heat like moths drawn to a flame.
Yet behind her confident words, the leader was panting heavily, forced to unleash everything she had just to keep Talulah at bay. Maintaining high-intensity Arts for this long was draining her stamina at an alarming rate. If this dragged on, she would collapse long before her opponent.
How did these two grow to be so monstrous? She looked across the square, watching Jeanne and Talulah tear through her lines, and felt a sudden, sickening doubt in her own strength.
If she had been beaten back like this by a full military battalion, she could have blamed tactical errors or superior siege weaponry. No warrior could stand against the cold steel of a regular army's war engines with flesh and blood alone.
But there were only two of them! Even with the sudden arrival of that Sankta, three people had obliterated hundreds of her troops—and numerical superiority hadn't slowed them down for a second.
Panic began to claw at her mind. Was she really going to be forced to retreat here, right under the eyes of the Taran populace? If she fled like a whipped dog, her reputation and Dublinn's authority would be ruined forever—unless she slaughtered every Taran witness in the city.
Suddenly, her comms device crackled to life with a sharp, urgent hiss. Harmony's voice came through, unusually tense.
"Leader, I deeply regret having to say this, but we must fall back immediately."
The officer who usually stayed in the shadows was reaching out directly, which meant something catastrophic had happened.
"What went wrong?!" the leader snapped, her patience at its absolute end. Her years of careful planning had been shattered by two total strangers, and now her own officer was telling her to run?
"The Steam Knights are here! The worst-case scenario has come to pass!"
The words hit her like a thunderclap.
"The landship transporting them altered its course days ago, claiming to bypass a Catastrophe," Harmony explained rapidly. "A major Catastrophe did strike that path, so our intelligence operatives dismissed the movement. But after remaining in radio silence for days, those knights suddenly appeared right outside County Hillock! They've already taken over command from the local garrison and are marching into the city now!"
The news left the leader stunned. Everything had been moving toward her victory, only to flip upside down in a single instant, dragging her grand ambition down into the abyss.
In the distance, she could almost hear the heavy, metallic thrum of steam-powered armor—though it was only a dread-fueled hallucination brought on by the chaotic noise around her. The knights were still some distance away, but time had completely run out.
Facing no other choice, she issued a final order for the local Taran recruits to charge, using them as a shield while she and her core lieutenants fell back into the shadows.
Talulah immediately spotted the retreating figure. But as she tried to give chase, a swarm of fanatical Dublinn soldiers threw themselves into her path, blocking her way with frantic, suicidal desperate attacks.
Realizing there was no reasoning with these men, Talulah stopped holding back, blasting a path through the mob to pursue the fleeing leader.
Meanwhile, Mandragora saw Talulah leave and turned toward Jeanne with a sneer. "Looks like your dragon friend abandoned you—GAH!"
Before she could finish her taunt, Jeanne hurled her heavy standard like a javelin, grazing Mandragora's shoulder and nearly knocking her out of the sky!
Staring at the deep gash left in the stone ledge beside her, Mandragora's face went pale. She backed away in sheer terror, not daring to get anywhere near the golden-haired woman again.
"You should worry about yourself," Jeanne said calmly. A golden light flickered in her palm, and the standard she had thrown materialized right back into her hand. She raised it again, aiming straight for the floating Feline. "Talulah left because she trusts me to handle things here. Your leader, on the other hand? She just threw you away."
Jeanne didn't have the space to summon her wyverns in these tight city streets, but her raw strength was more than enough.
She threw the standard a second time. The heavy butt of the shaft struck Mandragora squarely in the chest, breaking through her stone barrier and blasting the Feline backward through the air. She slammed into a far wall and crumpled to the ground, motionless.
Around them, the remaining Dublinn soldiers went completely berserk, charging Jeanne and Outcast in a blind panic.
At that exact moment, a thunderous roar echoed from the sky above County Hillock. The Victorian forces taking control of the city were descending upon the battlefield!