Lana stayed perfectly still even after the signal. Axe in hand, she watched as the butler slowly walked across the ship. Her eyes were focused on his lower body. He had a steady core, but he was not a sailor. Rather than watching the ocean and predicting the waves or at least mirroring his opponent's movements, he only reacted to the rocking and adjusted his body after the fact.

It was a classic mistake made by land dwellers all around. And oftentimes, even seafaring folk that only lived below the waves.

Neither fighter did anything until they were just fifty paces apart. That was when Graham finally drew the bow off his back. Rather than pulling an accompanying arrow from his quiver, he raised the weapon overhead and snapped it over his knee. Despite appearing as an act of senseless violence, it was a carefully executed maneuver. He made sure to part it at exactly the halfway point so that it would be perfectly balanced, and the break itself was clean enough to be mistaken for a cut.

One breath later, and the distance between them was gone. The butler kicked off the deck with both weapons ready to go. Perhaps thinking that she would get moving, his individual bounds weren't too far, each covering only about a fifth of the distance.

But that too was because he was unaccustomed to fighting aboard a ship.

The best place to be was right by the railing. That was where it was easiest to catch one's opponent off guard.

Lana waited until the very last second to act. She stomped on a long plank just as the elf placed his weight upon it and flipped him into the air with all his forward momentum preserved. His diagonal sweep went completely off target as his body went flying overboard. A last second reaction, a flick of the bow, allowed him to grab onto a cannon just in time to find it locked and loaded.

Lana had cut open a hole in the floor, dropped into the space below, and fired the weapon right as he hoisted himself up. The giant iron projectile landed square in his chest and ripped straight through his ribs. If he were anything but Cadrian, that would've been the end of the battle, but the elf regenerated in a heartbeat and continued to climb undeterred.

Biting her lips, Lana hopped up onto the deck and swung her axe right as he was about to get over the railing. She took all the necessary precautions—she checked the sea, steadied her footing, and aimed at his projected location—but to her chagrin, her strike was anything but true.

He drew an arrow on his way up and easily parried the blow. Naturally, the flimsy projectile weapon did not survive the encounter, but it lasted for just long enough to throw off her aim. From there, he burst through the railing with a kick and drove his feet toward her neck.

Lana ducked under the dropkick and retaliated with a swing of the axe, but the elf parried with his bowstring.

That was when she deployed her domain. Crafting a perfect sphere around her, she made a space where, at least for her, time flowed at a tiny fraction of its usual speed. She could see the elf slowly spinning around as he prepared to shift into a heavy blow with one of his bow's splintered halves. And she could easily deliver a counter whilst he was stuck in the motion.

Somehow, the elf caught on. His weapon snaked through the air so incredibly quickly that it nearly parried the axe.

Nearly, however, was not quite good enough.

The Illustrious Evernight Cleaver sank into his shoulder. It tore open his gut and even ripped a chunk out of his right leg. But he healed all the damage in an instant and continued completely unbothered. In fact, he used the impact's momentum to slide under her feet and nip at her heels. She barely jumped out of the way in time, and only because she was still faster within the bounds that she'd defined.

Had her magic kicked in even a moment later, she surely would have suffered the attack head on.

It was a terrifying thought, but hardly a new one.

The orniferin had been much faster than her, even under the influence of her magic.

She took a breath.

Everything was fine.

She still had it all under control.

Tightening her grip on her weapon, Lana spun around and met Graham's next attack with one of her own. Her axe's sharpened edge cut straight through the bone that made up his bow and arced towards his jaw. He backed off just far enough to avoid losing his front teeth and weaved back into range with his shorter handle flying toward her face.

Lana took half a step back, but was struck regardless. The bow extended at the last second and flew into her chest. The jab wasn't quite powerful enough to break any ribs, but it forced her to stumble. Graham immediately seized the opening to strike again, but she deflected it with a snarl and pivoted into a whirlwind slash. The elf was able to block the first attack, but the second threw him off balance and the third broke his guard.

He leapt backwards, squared up, and got on his toes thinking that she would certainly press the advantage. But much to his confusion, all she did was skid to a halt and return to a neutral stance. His mind raced as he questioned her lack of action. There were any number of reasons as to why she might've opted for the otherwise suboptimal choice. It was probably a trap. She probably had something in mind for the next time he approached. Still, he launched himself forward.

He wasn't about to yield the battle's pace on account of a faint hint of some underhanded scheme.

He paid closer attention during his second rush, watching her feet and the planks as he shrunk the distance, but a massive wave hit the boat and threw him off balance just before he came within range to strike.

Lana's axe came swinging down. It was aimed to split his head in two, but he grappled a nearby pillar and used it to stall just long enough for the weapon to fall short of striking him. The wooden mast, however, was unable to withstand the force. Ripped apart by the bowstring, it fell right between them, sails, flag, and all. The old butler didn't mind it. Cracking his neck, he knocked the debris aside, half-dodged a diagonal strike, and regenerated his arm again before shifting into an underhand swing.

If not for the bolt of lightning that suddenly fell from the heavens, he surely would have struck her jaw and rattled her brainstem.

It was not a magical phenomenon, but a physical one. The sky was dark. Dozens of storm clouds blotted out the world around them. Rain started to fall and the waves that rocked the boat grew wilder. The stage was shifting. That part was normal. The colosseum often spiced up its encounters by changing the terms of the engagement throughout. What wasn't normal was the way that his foe interacted with the lightning. It almost seemed to heed her call. It crackled as it surrounded but never touched her, moving with her body as she stepped toward him.

Raising his eyes, Graham quickly glanced at the display overhead and noted her classes again. She was stormblessed; the stage was going to be on her side.

The butler frowned, but quickly righted himself again.

Being a simple natural phenomenon, the lightning had done little in the way of damage. It'd only thrown him off because it caught him off guard, much like the pain that came with stubbing a toe.

It did, however, buy Lana just enough time to land her next attack.

Anchoring her feet to the ship, she delivered a diagonal swing straight to his neck and took his head off his shoulders. The steep angle caused the weapon to rip through his lower jaw and rattle his brain. Tightening her grip, she twisted into an uppercut. Her axe glided through the bottom of his skull, glowing as it threatened a violent lobotomy. It almost seemed impossible for the attack to miss. And yet, that was exactly what it did.

The elf's fist moved.

It arced toward her axe and knocked it away from his face while he flicked his wrist and sent his bow crashing into her side.

Lana staggered backwards.

One of her ribs had been shattered.

But, gritting her teeth, she activated the very same skill that the Cadrian was using to pull his body back together.

She wasn't quite as fast to recover and the repair took most of her focus. Between the pain and the mandatory moment of meditation, her brain was nearly overloaded. But she managed it, despite not having shown the ability to use the skill in battle before.

It was thanks to Panda's training.

The time she'd spent as a cockroach had instructed her on the arts of pain tolerance and forced recovery. Still, it dulled her movements just enough for the elf to dodge her lightning bolts, back away, and restore his flesh. Even though his head was off his shoulders. It was hard for her to tell through her bleary eyes, but for a second, she saw something that seemed to explain his bodily manipulation.

There was an impossibly thin web of material connecting the otherwise separate pieces. Evidently, the first thing that he'd regenerated was a network of nerves. She couldn't even begin to imagine how much pain he endured every time the salty wind blew—not that she was given the opportunity. It'd only taken him a heartbeat to fully repair his body.

Having had enough of the relatively basic exchange, Graham tightened his grip, dug his feet into the ground, and launched into a spinning attack.

But again, he fell victim to a lack of experience.

Without the right technique, it was impossible for him to dig in aboard a boat.

Hell, it was impossible for someone a quarter his level.

The fragile wood shattered beneath his stomp and sent him halfway through the deck. He immediately pulled it back out, but not before Lana parted his legs from his torso. She kicked his upper half away when he tried to put his body back together and transitioned into another overhead smash.

He surely would have been split in half had he not caught the axe with his bowstring again.

It didn't make sense. Her axe was more than sharp enough to cut through the thin little fiber like it was nothing. But somehow, it stopped her in her tracks. Even with his lower body in the midst of reforming, he was able to beat her out with brute strength.

The myraen adjusted her stance and pressed down harder, angling the blade to tear through his bowstring. But in one swift motion, he relinquished his grip on her blade, kicked her with his reformed legs, and appeared directly behind her with his weapon around her throat. He squeezed so hard she thought that he would break her neck. And perhaps, if she hadn't activated the evernight cleaver's effect, it might have done just that.

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Every wound she'd inflicted in the past five seconds—which was to say every wound since the battle began—began to glow. The glimmer was soft and pale at first but it rapidly intensified into a brilliant beacon.

Smoke drifted from the marks as his body was seared, burned by Griselda's holy light.

The pain itself was no problem. He handled it in stride and continued to strangle her, but his flesh melted away before the goddess' power.

Gritting her teeth, Lana knocked him back with an elbow, headbutted him in the chin, and took a second to reset her posture. She clutched her neck, panting and wheezing as she checked her wounds. The skin was notably burned and her fur was wet with blood. Had she been a furless species, he very well might have killed her.

The moonlight faded from the elf's body as Lana brandished her weapon. Though he had to don a flag to preserve his decency, the butler was unfazed. He briefly adjusted his obviously fake moustache, launched into a charge, and attempted his prior attack again. The second time around, he learned from his mistake and avoided shattering the wooden planks. Stomping just hard enough, and adjusting his hips to account for the ship's sudden lurch, he delivered a flurry of strikes so fast that they blurred, even in Lana's domain.

Not all of them landed on target. In fact, a solid third didn't even come close to striking her. But they didn't need to. There was a deafening crack every time the bow-turned-nunchucks changed direction, a sonic boom that seeped into her flesh and ripped open her organs as they threw her off balance. The hits that came closer to landing—the ones that she parried—were even worse. The heavy blows travelled up through her arms and rattled her bones.

And then there were the attacks that smacked her dead-on. They ripped large chunks from her fur and flesh, puncturing more like a blade than a broken shaft.

And that was just the opener.

His arms only continued to accelerate. To the point where not even his own body held. His wrists snapped every time he had to kill his momentum, and his fingers constantly bent in random directions, but his wounds never weakened his assault. If anything, he only seemed to grow more fierce.

Because he did.

That was just the sort of skill he'd used.

As long as he kept attacking, every point of damage he took would boost his speed, regardless of its source.

Lana groaned. She was struggling to block; more and more attacks were piercing her guard and whittling away at her flesh. Though reluctant, she eventually bit her lips and revealed her hand.

By activating her axe's ability again.

Every single wound that she'd inflicted glowed and burned away. Including the ones she'd already triggered and the ones dealt by the ability itself. Because unlike an ordinary enchanted weapon, the Illustrious Evernight Cleaver was crafted by a goddess who had never cared much for fairness.

It didn't matter if the axe's ability was complete and utter bullshit.

If anything, that was the point. She'd bestowed her relics upon Vel'khan's champions because she'd wanted them to win.

Graham's arms, once again, gave out. The wounds were even deeper than they were before and the burning moonlight fried his nerves every time he tried to reconnect them. Unlike the first time, they didn't give out.

Because Lana was continuing to trigger her marks. Over and over and over again, she activated the axe's ability.

But she didn't simply rely upon it.

She advanced, swinging her axe as quickly as she could. Not all the wounds were deep. But they didn't need to be, for they too were ignited by the cleaver's activation.

Only when she was confident that his whole body was dysfunctional did she go for the kill. She raised the axe overhead and brought it down on his skull with the mightiest blow she could muster.

Alas, he grabbed the shaft before the blade could reach him and stopped it shy of splitting his head in two.

Lana opened her eyes wide. The man shouldn't have had any strength left. Griselda's axe was still burning away at his body. The muscles in his arm were disconnected from the rest of his frame. And yet, he pushed her back, easily overpowering her with just one of his hands.

His weapon crashed into her gut a moment later, knocking her back so far that she flew across the ship and nearly went overboard. And completely unbothered, he approached her again.

The trick that he'd done with the nerve and his head was just that: a trick. It was a silly little bluff made for the sole purpose of throwing her off. In reality, his ability to perfectly control his body, even without his head attached, came from one of his ars magnae. Belonging to his butler class, it was called Perfection, and it allowed him to order his body to flawlessly replicate any motion he'd practiced for over five hundred hours in total.

And as a veteran of a thousand years, especially one that kept up with his drills each morning, he'd long put in enough practice to reproduce every combat-related motion he knew.

So long as he gave the order, his body would always follow through.

No matter the obstacles in its path or the wounds that it suffered, both before and as a result of the guaranteed action. After all, a perfect butler had no room for mistakes.

Lana's one saving grace was that none of his orders worked perfectly aboard a ship. He had to order his body to perform a rebalancing every time the waves hit the boat. With his actions made sluggish, she was given just enough time to pull herself together and forcibly heal her wounds.

Wiping the blood from her lips, she stood back up with her axe as a crutch, spat out a broken tooth, and activated two of her most powerful techniques at once. The capstone skills from both her Shipcrusher and Skysplitter classes focused on the enhancement of her brute force. One would briefly multiply her strength against the class' level, while the other was assured to turn any hit into a telling, central wound, regardless of its strength or location.

Further bolstering her power was the axe's second active. Calling upon the marks, and finally consuming them, Lana bolstered all of her systemic stats by a multiplier equal to the number of times that she had damaged her foe.

She didn't know exactly how many hits she'd landed. But considering all of the times she'd detonated the marks, it would certainly be more than just a few.

Graham too prepared a more invested attack.

He repaired his body as soon as the marks went away. Grabbing all the arrows still stuck in his quiver, he shattered them between his fingers and likewise bolstered his stats. Or more accurately, restored them.

Such was the effect of his secondary class. As a Rangeless Ranger, his power scaled inversely with his ammo. For each projectile he carried, he would lose 10% of his total combat prowess, scaling multiplicatively; the 49 shots still carried on his back left him with only 0.57% of his base performance.

When the two fighters clashed, it was at the edge of the ship again. One whipped his bow with such speed that its broken handle caught fire, while the other wreathed herself in lightning and delivered a cataclysmic downward smash.

The resulting explosion sent the terraformed sea crashing into the arena's barrier. The water went so high that it completely eclipsed the dome. If not for the colosseum's multiperspective recording, the spectators would have been left with nothing to witness but the murky depths. Though, even if the audience missed the countless slashes exchanged, the aftermath would have readily told the tale.

The HMS Trident did not survive the encounter.

Bits of shattered wood were scattered all over the arena.

There weren't quite enough broken planks to account for all the ship's pieces. But of course there weren't. Half the ship had been ground to dust, either by the clashing weapons or the shockwaves that followed.

And yet, they continued trading blows.

It was bone against moonstone at first, but even with its wielder's incredible skill, the butler's bow was soon destroyed. Just like the ship, it splintered apart, unable to tolerate the stresses of the rapid exchange.

But that was fine.

Graham simply resorted to using his bare hands. He slammed them against her axe, sometimes even meeting the blade head on. It didn't matter. His fists were tougher than steel and the little damage they took was regenerated in full with every punch he threw.

He could have easily kept up the barrage forever, if not for a pair of minor setbacks.

The first was the lack of footing. The ship's broken pieces were large enough to stand on, but they shook unsteadily in the waves and would capsize any time he put any strength into his legs. But more importantly was the relative change in their numbers.

Lana's enhancements were far superior. She was overpowering and outspeeding him, putting him on the backfoot even without her realm—she didn't have the chance to set it up whilst constantly hopping around. Within their brief exchange, she'd put thousands of wounds on his body. They'd all healed, of course, but the man had long become more moonlight than flesh.

And that was where Lana found her opportunity.

She landed on a larger piece of wood right as it floated beside him, summoned her domain again, and condensed a million strikes into a tenth of a second.

The wolfgirl was out of breath by the time she undid her spell. Panting, she hopped onto another platform and took a moment to steady her breathing. Her body was aching. The goddess' enhancement had worn off, and she was feeling all the consequences of pushing her limits.

But so too was her opponent cut to pieces, completely obliterated by the searing radiance.

And yet, Graham was undying.

He too was wheezing. Blood, flesh, and guts leaked into the sea around him, dyeing it in a sickly crimson as his regeneration fought against the goddess' might. It was a wonder how he managed even that in the first place when his nose, his throat, and his lungs were constantly burned away. Still, he clenched his fists.

Slowly but surely, he brought one of his hands to the sword on his waist and drew it from its sheath.

Mumbling its name under his breath, he unleashed the power sealed within the blade. Practically blossoming to life, it erupted in a swirling mass of mana that lifted the simulated sea into a giant swirling waterspout. And it didn't stop there. Everything within the arena was sucked into Vausticka's unsealing spell. The rainclouds, the waves, and sandy beach beneath it were condensed into a single swirling mass that, again, clouded the spectators' vision.

Only the sky above was clear. That, and the bare stone beneath their feet.

It was damp at first, but it rapidly dried as it reflected the moonlight. Though, even then, it was often rehydrated, thanks to everything that spilled from Graham's body.

Sticking the sword in the stone, he raised his fists and stumbled toward his foe. It was a slow, gradual walk at first, but he ramped his speed as he closed the distance, eventually breaking into a mad dash.

Lana steadied her axe. Digging her feet into the bedrock, she waited until he was in range, deployed her domain, and met him with another set of fierce attacks. Her body wasn't fully healed, but she took a breath and triggered her buffs as the whole world slowed to a crawl again.

It took her a moment to adjust, as it always did, to the way that everything was suddenly distorted. Suddenly, sound had no meaning and scents were much slower to process. The already strange but familiar sensation was further compounded by the extreme boost to her ability scores. She'd cashed in every single hit she landed on her opponent and turned it into a further enhancement.

She raised her axe overhead, lined up the perfect strike, and roared as she carved at his body.

He was so bright that it hurt to look at him.

But she struck nonetheless.

She knew the problem.

He was too durable for her to kill without a more powerful attack. For Graham of the Old Marinus March, there was no such thing as death by a thousand cuts. Traditionally fatal injuries proved no more than fleshwounds. But for the most part, they were all Lana knew how to deliver. She'd wrongly assumed, entering the battle, that Cadria's champions would be just like the warriors they'd fought on their northbound journey and that destroying their heads would be enough to finish them though she'd already seen plenty of evidence to the contrary. Claire's former guardian had quite literally regenerated from a few scant brain cells. She'd seen it in person. But she had wrongly assumed that he was special.

Graham too was burning bright. His whole body was made of moonlight and the little flesh he had was all freshly restored.

Still, she swung her axe, again and again. He had to have a limit. His body would have to give out eventually.

But hers was the first to go.

There was a crack, and then another and another and another.

Stress fractures.

It was only natural. Griselda's boons had pushed her far beyond her capabilities. She immediately focused on the wounds and attempted to regenerate them, but they only multiplied with every exchange.

She bit her lips.

It was so frustrating.

Combining her abilities with the evernight cleaver's had clearly put her above him. She was faster and stronger, and 99% of all attacks landed were hers. She tried everything to keep him away. She shredded his fist one, ten, a million times, but it continued to close the distance.

There was nothing that she could do before his infinite tenacity.

Eventually, inevitably, he struck her.

And for her already crumbling flesh, that was the very last straw.

The last tendons in her arms finally gave out, and the ones in her legs soon followed.

Blood pouring from her lips, she fell to her knees and dropped her axe. She could fight no longer.

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