Novel Full Chapter 1551 Difficult Questions
Chapter 1551 Difficult Questions
“‘Kill the Enemy’ and ‘Protect the Master,'” Lilith said through her teeth, and a grimace pulled at the corner of her mouth. “So crude yet so efficient. That’s exactly the kind of thing you would come up with.”
Scar’s expression didn’t shift behind the mask.
“I told you to stay away.”
The daggers came up. Scar’s stance was low and balanced, the same fighting posture Lilith had watched her use in a thousand encounters, and the familiarity of it was a knife in the chest.
“I told you what would happen if you pursued this.” Scar’s voice was flat and cold. “So now I will harvest your soul and present it to my Master.”
Lilith raised her sword.
“And I will defeat your master.”
They crashed together.
Scar’s daggers met Lilith’s spellblade in a shower of sparks and the impact rang across the battlefield. Scar fought the way she’d always fought, fast and surgical, her daggers probing Lilith’s guard from angles that exploited every opening the taller woman’s longer weapon created at close range.
She knew where Lilith dropped her elbow after an overhead swing. She knew the half-step reset Lilith took between exchanges, the one that left her left side open for a quarter-second. She knew these things because she’d watched Lilith fight for four hundred years and had catalogued every habit and micro-tell that the white-haired swordswoman had never bothered to correct because there was no need to. These were not mistakes per se, just tendencies that could be exploited if one was fast enough.
Scar was fast enough.
Her dagger slipped through the gap after Lilith’s overhead and carved a line across the Spellblade’s forearm that drew blood. Lilith hissed, adjusted, and her counter swept Scar’s guard wide with a force that launched the smaller woman off her feet.
Scar hit the ground rolling and came up with both daggers raised, but Lilith was already closing, spellblade burning white, and the next exchange lasted less than a second. Three strikes, each one driving Scar backward, each one rattling through the daggers and into the arms holding them with the kind of raw power that couldn’t be faked or finessed around.
Every blow reminded Scar’s body of the gap between them.
But Scar read the fourth strike before it came. Lilith’s wrist rotated a fraction early, the same tell she’d had since her level thirties, and Scar was already moving when the blade swept through the space she’d occupied. She redirected instead of blocking, letting Lilith’s power carry past her while her dagger carved at the wrist that had just overcommitted.
Lilith pulled back in time. Barely.
“You’re stronger,” Lilith said between strikes, and despite the blood running down her forearm there was a warmth buried under the grief in her voice that she couldn’t kill.
Scar deflected a thrust that would have taken her through the shoulder and countered with a sequence of short thrusts that forced Lilith to reset. She was breathing hard. Blue-tinged blood ran freely from a gash across her left bicep where Lilith’s blade had caught her mid-dodge, and a second cut along her ribs was leaking through the leather.
“My Master upgraded me,” Scar replied. Calm. Matter-of-fact. The way someone described a promotion she’d earned.
Lilith grimaced.
‘My Master’ rolled off Scar’s tongue with the ease of something she’d said a thousand times and meant every single one, and when she spoke about him there was a light behind those cold eyes. A brightness, a certainty, the look of a woman who had found a cause worth fighting for and couldn’t imagine serving anyone else.
That was the thing that twisted the knife.
Scar was proud.
Lilith pressed harder. Her blade came down in a combination that Scar knew, the same sequence Lilith had used to carve through dungeon bosses when the Scarlet Lilies were still taking contracts together, and Scar deflected the first two strikes on pure memory before the third caught her across the shoulder and sent her skidding.
She rolled with it. Rose bleeding. And her eyes narrowed behind the mask.
Lilith’s stance was wrong.
Her feet were too wide. Her follow-throughs were pulling short. The combination she’d just thrown was a training-speed version of the real thing, and Scar had sparred with her enough times to know the difference between Lilith fighting to kill and Lilith fighting to not kill someone she loved.
“You’re holding back.”
Lilith’s grip tightened on her sword.
“Four hundred years.” Scar straightened from her crouch, daggers still raised, blood running from her shoulder. “Did you think I wouldn’t notice?”
Scar came at her again, pressing into the close range where her speed could offset Lilith’s power, and her daggers found the same gaps they’d always found. Lilith parried each one, but the margin was thinner now.
“Why are you here?” Scar asked between strikes. “I warned you. I told you exactly what would happen.”
“Because you’re my cherished friend.”
Scar redirected a slash and the force of it drove her back two steps. “The least you can do is stop insulting me by fighting at half strength.”
Lilith came at her again, the same sequence at full speed now, and Scar read the first two strikes, dodged the third, and the fourth caught her across the chest hard enough to send her airborne.
She hit the ground and rolled and stopped on one knee, coughing blood, one dagger lost somewhere behind her.
Lilith stood over her with the spellblade aimed at her throat.
“I am not leaving without you.”
Scar looked up at her from the dirt, bloodied and outmatched, but the steadiness in those eyes hadn’t wavered.
“Then what?”
Lilith’s sword didn’t move.
“You kill my Master.” Scar wiped blood from the corner of her mouth with the back of her wrist. “Then what happens?”
“I free you.”
“Free me into what? I’m dead. I died on that field and the being you’re looking at exists because he willed it to. If you kill him, what do you think happens to me? I miraculously revive back into my human body? No, that’s not what will happen.”
Lilith’s jaw worked.
“You don’t know that,” she said. “There is no precedent. No one has killed a wielder of True Necromancy before. The only way to find out what happens is to make one.”
“And if what happens is that I dissolve?” Scar tilted her head. “Are you willing to gamble my existence on a theory?”
Lilith’s fingers flexed on the hilt. The answer sat in her chest like a stone because Scar was right, and they both knew it. There was no manual, no scholar’s text, no ancient record that said what happened to the souls bound inside the blade when the hand holding it went cold.
“Killing him is a last-ditch effort.” Her grip shifted on the sword. “We capture him. We restrain him and we question him until he tells us how to reverse what he did to you. He’s the necromancer. He knows how the binding works. If anyone can undo it, it’s him.”
“And me?” she asked. “While you have him chained and interrogated, do you think I’ll sit quietly and wait? I will fight to free him. Every second of every day, with every soldier under my command, I will come for him. You would have to chain me beside him.” She looked Lilith in the eye. “And then what is the point? You’d have your friend in a cage, and you’d have to keep her there because the moment you look away, she’s cutting her master loose.”
“That’s the spell talking.”
“Is it?” Scar’s voice dropped, and for the first time since the fight began the flatness cracked and the frustration underneath bled through. “You, Void, Jallen, and Bronnya were the only ones who ever made me feel like I belonged anywhere. You four are my best friends, and I will carry that with me until whatever end I meet.”
Lilith’s sword arm trembled.
“But I am happy now.” Scar said it simply, the way someone stated a fact they’d examined from every angle and found unshakable. “I lead. I command. Men and women follow me because I earned it, and I serve a man who looked at a city full of people about to be chained or worse, and said ‘no.’ A hundred thousand people who would have been slaves or fuel for the undead are alive and fed and protected because my Master decided their lives mattered.”
Scar’s expression changed.