Chapter 1199. A Private Terror Tied to a Night She Never Spoke Of

Chapter 1199: 1199. A Private Terror Tied to a Night She Never Spoke Of

Xerollion considered her defiance for a long moment. The silence that followed was more oppressive than the sounds of battle, a heavy, ringing void that seemed to suck the oxygen from the corridor.

His head tilted with the mechanical curiosity of an apex predator examining a specimen that had proven more durable than expected.

Then, with a slow, deliberate motion, he rose to his feet.

WHOOSH.

The telekinetic pressure vanished instantly. Without the invisible force holding her up, Evelyn collapsed completely.

Her body hit the stone with a wet THUD, her lungs seizing as she gasped for air that felt like poison. Her ribs screamed in protest, each breath sending sharp, stabbing pain through her chest where the pressure had nearly crushed them.

Blood pooled beneath her cheek, mixing with the dust and debris to form a dark, viscous paste.

"I have no intention of killing you," Xerollion said, his voice echoing off the shattered walls with terrifying calm. "You’re far too interesting to end so simply, Evelyn..."

"Your death would give me nothing beyond a fleeting moment of satisfaction, and I’ve already had enough satisfaction for one day."

Evelyn didn’t move. She couldn’t.

Her fingers twitched against the stone, scraping weakly through the rubble as she tried to find purchase, tried to find the strength to rise again, to throw one last desperate strike.

But her mana system was fried; her circuits burned out from the seventy percent exertion. Her body felt like it was made of lead and broken glass.

’Is this it?’ Her mind screamed. ’After everything?’

’After Apollo? After all that power I hid?’

’I die on a filthy floor, staring at a monster who doesn’t even think I’m worth the effort of killing?’

She watched through blurred vision as Xerollion turned his back on her. The casualness of the gesture was the ultimate insult.

He wasn’t retreating; he was simply moving on to something more worthy of his time.

But before he could walk away, the remaining soldiers, driven by a desperate, suicidal courage born of seeing their comrades slaughtered, attempted one final, coordinated gambit.

"For Aethelgard!" one screamed, his voice cracking.

Three soldiers charged from the shadows, their weapons enchanted with residual light magic.

SHING! CLANG!

Xerollion didn’t even turn around. With a flick of his wrist, a wave of telekinetic force exploded outward.

BOOM.

The soldiers weren’t just knocked back; they were pulverized. One soldier’s arm snapped with an audible CRACK as he hit a pillar, his bone piercing through the skin in a spray of crimson.

Another was hurled against the ceiling with such velocity that his body crumpled like wet paper upon impact. The corridor was filled with the sounds of breaking bone and the wet gurgle of dying men.

Xerollion stepped through the carnage as if walking through a garden, his boots clicking softly on the blood-slicked stone. He didn’t spare them a glance.

He didn’t care. They were insects, and he had already finished swiping them away.

Evelyn lay there, battered and broken, but breathing, her eyes tracking his every movement with a volatile cocktail of relief and deepening hatred. The relief was involuntary, a biological response to not being dead; the hatred was conscious, a cold fire that refused to be extinguished.

The understanding settled over her like a shroud: she had been left alive not out of mercy, not out of compassion, but through the cold, detached calculation of a man who had already dismantled nearly everyone who mattered to Aethelgard that day.

Mercy required emotion.

He had none.

He had only interest.

Further down the corridor, the few remaining soldiers who still stood watched in horrified silence. They watched defeat after defeat unfold without end, each new casualty a hammer blow to their crumbling resolve.

Whatever hope they had carried into this corridor, whatever belief they had that they could win, that they could survive, was thinning, evaporating like mist in a furnace with every passing second.

The light of the corridor was fading, the torches guttering out, leaving only the glow of burning mana and the spreading darkness of inevitable defeat.

But then... somewhere...

Valentina moved first.

The motion was not sudden or panicked; it was the measured, inevitable movement of a tectonic plate shifting.

She stepped away from the position she had been holding since the moment Apollo fell, a frozen statue of grief, and replaced it with something far more dangerous: a hard, glacial resolve.

The pallor that had drained her face moments ago was gone, replaced by a terrifying clarity. The weight of Aethelgard’s survival now rested entirely on her shoulders.

As Headmaster and the strongest mage remaining in their crumbling ranks, she knew that if she did not act now, the last ember of hope would be snuffed out forever.

For one suspended heartbeat, time itself seemed to clot. Neither she nor Morwenna moved.

They stood like twin pillars of defiance amidst a landscape of absolute carnage.

Valentina’s eyes swept over the wreckage of their failure. Her gaze landed on Apollo, motionless and broken, a fallen god sprawled against the far wall.

Then to Elliot slumped against the jagged stone, his breathing shallow and wet, while Evelyn’s shaking, blood-slicked hands pressed futilely against his chest as if she could push the life back into him by sheer force of will.

The corridor was a tomb: shattered tiles, severed limbs, cracked pillars dripping with fresh blood, and the acrid smoke of spent enchantments.

FZZT... CRACKLE...

The magical residue in the air hummed with the death throes of their spells. Valentina catalogued every detail—the trajectory of the debris, the positioning of the enemy, and the exact magical signature of the devastation—with the cold efficiency of a scholar analyzing a hostile spell pattern.

Then, she forcibly shoved it away. She buried the horror in a dark corner of her mind.

There would be time to grieve later. If there was a later.

Beside her, Morwenna’s jaw tightened. The steel in the warrior’s expression mirrored Valentina’s own.

Morwenna had buried enough soldiers to fill a cathedral; she knew that to dwell on the dead mid-battle was to invite the grave to claim you next.

Valentina turned her head slightly toward Morwenna. No words were needed.

They exchanged a single, sharp nod, a silent pact forged in the blood of their comrades. They were the last two standing.

Two of the most seasoned veterans left on this godforsaken battlefield, both acutely aware of the terrifying truth: they had just watched Apollo, Elliot, and Evelyn be dismantled one by one like clockwork toys.

"The two of us," Valentina said, her voice cutting through the ringing silence like a honed blade.

Her grimoire snapped open in her left hand, its ancient pages fluttering violently as headmaster-tier magical energy began to manifest. A corona of brilliant, unstable violet light erupted around her, casting long, dancing shadows that made her appear larger than life.

VROOOOM.

The air began to vibrate with the sheer pressure of her gathering mana. "Together, we might actually have a chance."

Morwenna didn’t hesitate. Her hand went to the hilt of her combat blade, drawing it with a lethal SHING.

Her expression remained composed, a mask of military discipline, but beneath that surface, a cold unease writhed like a serpent. It was a private terror, a secret tied to a night she had never spoken of, a truth that made this entire confrontation infinitely more complicated than any battlefield strategy could account for.

If she failed here, she wasn’t just losing a war; she was failing the one thing she had sworn to protect in the dark.

The two women squared their shoulders, their eyes locking onto the silhouette of the enemy. The air between them and the approaching threat began to crackle with static, the tension so thick it felt as though the very atmosphere might shatter.