Zypharion fought Almond and Lily simultaneously.
He should have been winning. His combat power exceeded either of them by nearly thirty million. His deck was Tier-32 and fully refined. His rupture waves were not the kind of attack that could be answered by ordinary defenses.
He was losing.
Slowly. Carefully. By incrents small enough that he had not yet noticed.
Every rupture wave he released was absorbed by Lily’s Dreadling barriers and converted into Dreadling growth. Every ti he attempted to close the distance, Almond’s Grimblades intercepted at angles that forced him to reposition. Every defensive structure he ford weakened slightly under the constant pressure of Grim Severam, and the weakening did not recover between his attacks because the field never lifted.
He was being processed.
The Dreadling barriers grew thicker. The Grimblade strikes carried more weight. The Fabricated Spirit beside Almond rotated slightly faster as it integrated more of the battlefield into its rewriting pattern.
And Zypharion’s combat power, when he finally checked it in a mont between exchanges, had dropped from two hundred and ninety-eight million to two hundred and seventy-one million.
He laughed again, but the laugh had a different quality this ti.
"What is your deck," he said. "What is it actually."
Almond did not answer.
Lily did. "Sorry. Trade secret."
She struck.
Her blade traced three intersecting lines across Zypharion’s left flank. Each line embedded a different debuff. Each debuff stacked. Zypharion attempted to clear them with a pulse of his rupture power, and the pulse triggered them prematurely instead.
His left arm went numb from the shoulder down.
His left flank lost structural integrity.
His ability to draw on his deck dropped by an estimated thirty percent across the affected region.
He raised his remaining arm, ford a fresh rupture wave, and threw it directly at Almond’s center mass.
Almond raised Abyssbreaker.
The Grimblade’s Axiom of Denial activated as the wave struck the blade.
The wave did not dissipate. It accepted the denial. Triad Denial took hold across its propagation pattern, and the wave attempted to regenerate its conceptual edge, and the regeneration was denied.
The wave collapsed into kinetic force again.
Almond redirected the force back along its origin vector.
Zypharion was struck by his own rupture, now stripped of its conceptual layer and reduced to simple impact. The impact caught him across the chest at velocity, and Zypharion was driven backward through the air for forty ters before he stabilized his position.
He stared at Almond across the gap.
The stare lasted three full seconds.
"...this is not a fair engagent," he said quietly. ’Even one of them is perfectly capable of holding back, but now I have to face two of them?’
---
The Suryax-Ananta Allied Force began to push.
It did not happen as a single dramatic surge. It happened the way water rises against a wall that has been quietly weakening. The eastern fleet’s storm pressure faltered for the first ti as Jaskrit was forced to commit more of his attention to Rudra and less to the broader battlefield coordination. The northwestern fleet’s chaos lost coherence as Zypharion’s resources thinned. The resurrection network on the eastern side had collapsed entirely, and the resurrection network on the northwestern side, run by an Oblivion Tyrant priestess nad Drashka, was already being targeted by a coordinated Maya-Lily approach that would conclude in approximately ninety seconds.
The ga Dreadships advanced.
Their formations tightened. The Skydread Crafts above them shifted into denser aerial patterns that no longer needed to defend and could finally begin to press. The Suryax soldiers along the deck lines released coordinated solar barrages that carved through the weakening enemy formations like sunlight through wet paper.
Marcus’s shield expanded again. This ti it did not defend. It led. He pushed forward across the gap between the leading ga Dreadship and the closest Kezryx assault platform, and where his shield struck, the assault platform folded backward and broke. His sword followed in a wide arc that cleaved through two flanking interceptors in the sa motion.
Silvester and Hiroshi tore through three more fleet wings within the next minute, working in such tight synchronization that observers could not tell where one blade ended and the other began.
Maya’s signature appeared on the Oblivion priestess’s command vessel approximately one minute earlier than predicted. The northwestern resurrection network collapsed.
Natalia opened her eyes fully.
Across the battlefield, every one of her spheres aligned simultaneously and fired.
The barrage did not target individual enemies. It targeted the seams of the enemy formations. Every point where two fleet wings t. Every junction in their command structure. Every link between their advancing platforms.
The seams broke.
The two enemy alliances, which had moved as cohesive forces for the past hour, suddenly stopped being able to coordinate at the unit level. Their advance fragnted. Their retreats began to overlap with their advances. Their fire patterns lost mutual support.
Kayla’s threads tightened.
Every Suryax-Ananta vessel adjusted simultaneously.
The push beca a wave.
The wave did not break.
---
In the central platform, Ainen lifted the next dish from the cooking array.
It was a single bowl. The contents were unremarkable to look at. Steam rose from the surface in slow, deliberate curls, and the sll that reached the surrounding deck was rich, warm, and entirely unfamiliar.
He did not serve it himself.
Lily’s Dreadlings carried it.
Two thousand Dreadlings detached from the central formation and distributed portions of the dish to the frontline. Suryax soldiers received it. Asura Executives received it. The Spirit Lords received it. Even the Dreadling Monarchs received it, which was sothing that had not happened before.
The buff that took hold across the allied force was difficult to na.
It was not a strength increase. It was not a speed increase. It was not a defense increase.
It was a refusal to lose.
Every mber of the Suryax-Ananta line who consud the dish found their combat capacity stabilized at peak efficiency, and the stabilization did not degrade under sustained engagent. Fatigue stopped accumulating. Reaction tis stopped slipping. The slow, invisible drain that long battles imposed on every fighter present simply stopped applying.
For one hour, the allied force would not get tired.
For one hour, they would fight at full capacity from the first mont to the last.
Ainen set the empty bowl down and rolled his shoulders.
"Alright," he said to no one in particular. "Let’s finish this round."
---
Jaskrit Kezinos was the first to feel the actual shift.
It was a subtle thing. He was still even with Rudra in their personal exchange. He had not lost ground in that engagent. But everything around them had changed, and the storm he was drawing power from had thinned without his noticing, because the storm required his attention to maintain at full intensity, and his attention had been elsewhere.
His next strike at Rudra carried slightly less weight than the previous one.
Rudra noticed imdiately.
He stopped trading and pushed.
For the first ti since they had begun, Jaskrit was forced backward through the air.
Only by a ter.
But the ter mattered.
The ter beca two ters within the next exchange. Two beca four. Four beca ten. Rudra did not accelerate his own attacks. He simply stopped giving ground each ti Jaskrit struck, and when an opponent stops giving ground, the only place left for the engagent to move is in the opposite direction.
Jaskrit’s storm-armor reford thinner each ti.
The smoke rising from Rudra’s arm had stopped.
Across the battlefield, Zypharion noticed his own situation at approximately the sa mont, and the laugh he produced this ti was no longer amused.
"...we should withdraw," he said quietly.
The voice did not carry to anyone except his own command vessel, but Lily heard it anyway. She always heard the mont they started thinking that. She could read that face and eyes.
She smiled.
"Not yet," she said. "We were just getting started."
The Allied Force pressed harder.
The ga Dreadships closed distance on the eastern fleet. The Skydread Crafts swept the northwestern airspace clean of resistance and turned inward to compress the remaining Oblivion forces against the Suryax frontline. The do behind them brightened and began to push outward, extending its coverage forward across the advancing fleet in a slow, inexorable expansion.
The enemy fleets, for the first ti in the engagent, began to give ground.
The line that had been a stalemate for two hours had finally bent in one direction, and the direction was forward.
Above the battlefield, the Suryax-Ananta banner rose on the lead ga Dreadship.
Far in the distant, a loud horn rang.
The enemy alliance made a sound and quick decision based on the latest reports.
"RETREAT!"
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