It was a sight she'd never forget.
She was already aware how frighteningly powerful Quinlan's capabilities were. But exactly because of that, Quinlan almost always fought advantageously. Dropping on his enemies through [Warp Gate], overpowering them with his elements the mechanics of which they couldn't understand, the might of his soul armies they couldn't contend with.
He fought smart because he could afford to.
Rarely had she seen him pushed, and never quite like this.
The fury rolling off him was a physical thing. It bled past his immediate surroundings and pressed the air across the battlefield, an oppressive force that sank into the bones of everyone within range. His allies felt his outrage like a war drum in their chests. His enemies felt it like a hand closing around their throats.
For the first time, she saw the man who had been trying to win her heart for a reason she still couldn't quite prehend, fighting not because he was strong enough to win but because he was too furious to stop, and something in her expression shifted.
Kaede's katana came for her throat and Black Fang parried without looking, her eyes still on the center for one heartbeat longer than she should have allowed herself.
Then she was back in her own war, and the moment passed.
...
The dwarven wedge's death reached Ragnar in the middle of a clash with Alexios.
The Warrior King's golden longsword had just carved a fresh line across Ragnar's thighs and the dwarven king was pulling back to reset when the screaming from the center reached him. He looked. Twenty of his elites, dead in a pocket of burned air, and the Primordial Villain already harvesting their souls while the pale flames on his saber burned brighter with every body he claimed.
'If that thing gets to live, we are all dead.'
He stopped fighting Alexios.
The warhammer came around in a wild swing designed to buy space rather than connect, and Ragnar threw himself sideways toward his own lines before the Warrior King could press.
"Forget the humans! Converge on the Primordial Villain! He's already dying and weakened, I want him fully dead! NOW!"
...
Quinlan felt the pressure shift.
The dwarven line that had been fragmenting suddenly consolidated. Fresh units poured in from the flanks, soldiers who had been fighting humans and elves abandoning their positions to close on him. Wyvern riders overhead banked hard and their heavy crossbow volleys concentrated on Rosie's root network. The elven loyalists under Aelindra carved into his soul army's perimeter from the west with the coordination of millennia.
Ragnar was burning his position to kill one man.
Ayame's voice broke through the link.
No reply.
Ayame's words came as a cold, unapologetic declaration.
Blossom crashed into the ground, rolled, and did an acrobatic backflip, landing on the roots next to Quinlan.
Her breathing was ragged. One gauntlet was broken beyond usability. Blood ran from a fresh wound above her left ear where an elven blade had found a gap in her defenses.
She looked up at him with big blue eyes.
"Master wants vengeance." Her voice rasped. "Blossom understands. Blossom wants it too. But must it happen right now?"
"…"
"Blossom knows blood must flow. Blood will flow. But Master is hurt. His girls are hurt. And the enemy has more bodies than Blossom can count."
Quinlan's teeth ground together.
He reached for Vex.
The [Master's Link] was a line he could always feel. He pulled on it the way he'd done a hundred times, asking for more mana.
But for the first time, the link didn't establish.
Nothing. The connection's architecture was there, but the other end was muted. Dead air where her presence should have been. And through the link itself, pain pulsed where there should have been none.
Hers.
His gaze snapped across the dirt and the bodies.
Sixty meters away, beyond the dwarven line, two women stood over a third. Orianna's flower summons were scattered in a defensive perimeter, petals burning with bat enchantments. Raika stood beside her with fists raised and blood on her brow, stance wide, guarding.
Between them, Vex was on the ground, unmoving. White hair fanned across the dirt, matted with blood that had run from her nose and ears and the corners of her eyes. Her crimson tattoos were dark. Her chest rose in shallow, uneven intervals that said alive the way a guttering candle said lit.
"Vex..."
The name left his mouth, quiet and broken.
The link still existed, and he could mand her as he could mand all his Subjugated people, but it couldn't establish properly because she wasn't conscious. She wasn't conscious because something had hit her hard enough to put her down, and Quinlan hadn't realized that it happened, which most likely meant it hadn't e from the outside.
She'd done something to herself. For him.
Knowing Vex and what just happened to him, Quinlan understood the truth instantly.
"Vex…" He couldn't help but repeat as his red eyes moved across the battlefield.
Aurora's shields failing. Serika dimming. Lucille slowing. Iris too exhausted to dodge. Seraphiel working frantically to heal wounds that kept piling far too quick. Ayame holding the western flank through sheer stubbornness. Rosie flinching on his shoulder every time a root was severed.
They were all hurting. Every one of them, bleeding and breaking and fighting an unwinnable war.
Because of him.
'Pathetic.'
The word surfaced and he didn't fight it.
Rosie's small hand gripped his pauldron tighter.
"Father." Her voice was tense, teeth gritted from strain. "I will fight with you until the end. If you want to stay, I stay." She hesitated. "But I am still a little tree. I'm growing as fast as I can, but… I'm not powerful enough to contend with millions of enemies. We're so far from my trunk too… My roots are being cut faster than I can regrow them."
A concentrated volley struck a major root on the western side and Rosie flinched hard enough that her grip on his pauldron slipped. She caught herself, amber eyes wet, full of frustration and guilt.
"…"
His girls, all of them fighting, all of them wounded, all of them doing it for him without plaint.
"Rosie." His voice was rough. "Can I leave this to you?"
The dryad's amber eyes widened. Then her eyes lit up.
"Yes."
Rosie's roots surged with purpose.
But leaving a continental battlefield was not the same as entering one.
In this cruel, unforgiving world, things couldn't always go your way.
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