Chapter 1203. Hope Is Dangerous When Fighting a Predator Who Learns

Chapter 1203: 1203. Hope Is Dangerous When Fighting a Predator Who Learns

Valentina meant it, or at least, she screamed it into the void of the corridor until the words became a shield. But beneath the defiance, a cold, honest sliver of her consciousness had already begun to calculate the impossible.

She saw the way his wounds closed; she saw the way his eyes never faltered. Finishing this wasn’t a tactical objective anymore; it was a desperate prayer she had to recite aloud just to keep her muscles from seizing in terror.

But she buried that realization under a mountain of magical fury. A headmaster who allowed the taste of defeat to linger on her tongue mid-battle was already a corpse walking.

FZZZT WHIRRRR!

"Don’t you dare stop!" Valentina roared, her voice cracking with the strain. "Morwenna, now! Push him into the next circle!"

Morwenna heard the raw desperation beneath the command, the way Valentina’s voice wavered like a candle in a hurricane.

She responded not with words, but with a ferocious escalation of violence. She drove in low, her boots skidding across the blood-slicked stone with a SHHHH THUD, her blade becoming a silver blur aimed at his kneecaps.

SHING!

Xerollion was forced into a nightmare of divided focus. He had to split his consciousness between the lethal steel threatening to sever his tendons at his legs and the apocalyptic storm of elemental energy Valentina was conjuring directly above his skull.

CRACKLE BOOM!

Bolts of violet lightning arched around him like angry serpents, forcing him to raise a telekinetic shield that groaned under the pressure.

GRRRR NKKKK.

The sound of his barrier straining against the magical onslaught sounded like grinding tectonic plates.

Then, something miraculous happened: they found the rhythm.

It was a brutal, beautiful synchronization born of necessity. Valentina’s spellwork became the anvil, her devastating castings forcing Xerollion to retreat, to brace, to expend his precious adaptive energy on defense.

Her magic bought Morwenna the precious inches of space needed to close the distance. And in return, Morwenna’s blade became the hammer, her relentless, bone-crushing pressure forcing Xerollion to focus on his immediate survival, which in turn bought Valentina the precious seconds she needed to inhale, to steady her hands, and to weave the next impossible spell.

THUD. SLICE. CRACK.

To the soldiers watching from the safety of the far archway, the scene was terrifying. They saw their leaders, the untouchable Headmaster and the legendary Commander, dismantling a godlike entity.

For the first time since the slaughter began, the air didn’t smell just of death; it smelled of hope.

"Hold the line!" one soldier whispered hoarsely, his knuckles white around his spear. "Look at them... they’re actually doing it!"

Valentina seized the moment.

"This is for everyone you’ve taken!" she screamed, her eyes glowing with pure arcane light.

Instead of a bolt, she channeled a compressed wind, casting a vacuum sphere designed to collapse inward with the force of a collapsing star.

WHOOOOOO SHHHH!

The spell struck Xerollion’s left flank like a physical fist. The air was violently ripped from around his lungs, leaving him gasping in a momentary void of oxygen.

HUUUGH!

His ribs creaked under the sudden pressure differential, and his head snapped sideways as the vacuum staggered him half a step.

"Now, Morwenna! END IT!" Valentina’s voice was almost gone, spent from the exertion.

Morwenna didn’t hesitate. She was already mid-leap, her body coiled like a spring unleashed.

She drove her blade in at a vicious, diagonal angle, a strike designed to bypass his guard and sever his carotid artery in one clean motion. It was the perfect killing blow.

SHHHH TCH!

The blade whistled through the air, mere millimeters from his exposed throat. But the air suddenly froze.

CLANG.

In a display of speed that defied human comprehension, Xerollion’s hand shot up. His fingers clamped around Morwenna’s wrist like a vice made of enchanted steel.

CRUNCH.

The sound of her bones grinding against the pressure of his grip echoed in the sudden silence. The blade stopped dead, the razor-sharp tip trembling violently in the microscopic gap between the steel and his jugular.

Both women froze. Morwenna’s breath came in ragged, burning gasps, her sweat dripping onto the blade.

Xerollion’s masked face was inches from hers, his breath cold against her cheek. The tension in the corridor was so thick it felt as though the next heartbeat would shatter the very foundations of the castle.

Time seemed to solidify into something physical, a suspended amber moment where nothing existed but the friction between Morwenna’s blade and Xerollion’s pulse.

Morwenna’s entire body was coiled, every muscle fiber screaming as she threw her weight forward, trying to force those final, fatal millimeters.

Her arm shook violently, not from weakness, but from the sheer impossibility of moving an immovable object.

GRRRRR...

The sound came from Morwenna’s own teeth gritted in agony. Xerollion’s grip was absolute.

His fingers didn’t just hold her wrist; they seemed to fuse with it, his supernatural strength threatening to splinter her radius and ulna like dry kindling.

CRACKLE.

The tendons in her forearm strained to the point of tearing.

Yet, beneath the violence of the hold, something deeply unsettling stirred in Morwenna’s mind. In that terrifying stillness, she looked into the hollow darkness of his mask and saw something that wasn’t rage.

It was... consideration. As if he weren’t resisting her attack but weighing it as if a part of him were genuinely contemplating whether to simply step aside and let her finish what she started.

’Is he... hesitating?’ The thought flashed through her mind like lightning. ’Is he letting me win?’

ZAP BOOOOOM!!!

The question was answered by a scream of displaced air. Valentina, seeing the opening created by the locked blades, didn’t hesitate. She channeled every remaining spark of her willpower into a narrow, hyper-focused spear of concentrated lightning.

SHHHHHHH THWACK!

The bolt streaked across the corridor like a lance of pure white wrath, aimed precisely at the exposed gap in Xerollion’s ribs.

He couldn’t block it without exposing his throat to Morwenna, and he couldn’t stay still without being incinerated. With a fluid, almost disdainful twist of his torso, he released Morwenna’s wrist and spun away.

WHOOSH.

Morwenna stumbled backward from the sudden loss of resistance, her boots skidding on blood and stone. She caught herself against a crumbling wall, her chest heaving in ragged, desperate gulps.

For one heartbeat, across the smoking wreckage of the corridor, she and Valentina locked eyes. In that shared glance, there was something fragile and terrifying: hope.

But hope is a dangerous thing when fighting a predator who learns.

VROOOOOOM.

The air began to hum again, but this time the sound was different—deeper, more predatory. Xerollion wasn’t reacting anymore; he was anticipating. His foresight and divine perception had fused into a singular, flawless engine of calculation.

He was no longer fighting two women; he was solving a puzzle. He watched the micro fluctuations in Valentina’s mana reserves; he measured the precise millisecond Morwenna’s footing faltered after her last lunge.

Then, he found it.

The seam.

The microscopic flaw in their perfect synchronization.

It was a moment that lasted less than a heartbeat. Valentina’s lungs burned as she drew a ragged breath, her grimoire’s pages fluttering down to rest like dead leaves around her.

Morwenna, still reeling from the bone-deep ache in her wrist, was caught half a step off balance, her center of gravity betrayed by her own momentum.

To a mortal, it was a blink.

To Xerollion, it was an eternity.

WHAM!

Before Morwenna could even register his movement, he was inside her guard. His hand shot out like a striking viper, seizing her wrist again, but this time there was no hesitation.

He twisted, using her own momentum against her, and slammed her bodily into the stone floor.

CRUNCH.

The impact was brutal. Morwenna’s back hit the masonry with a sound like breaking timber. The air fled her lungs in a pained "GAK" as her vision swam with black spots.

Her consciousness flickered like a dying flame, the world tilting into darkness.

But he didn’t stop. He couldn’t.

Xerollion pivoted on his heel with terrifying grace, his boots kicking up sparks from the stone. He moved toward Valentina before her next spell could even form in her mind.

His hand shot forward, fingers closing around her throat with the inevitability of a closing trap.

THUD.

He lifted her off the ground. Valentina’s boots dangled uselessly inches above the blood-stained tiles.

Her hands clawed weakly at his forearm, her face flushing a dangerous crimson as her airway collapsed.

GASP... HHHH...

"You’ve held back long enough, Valentina," Xerollion said.

His voice was terrifyingly calm, devoid of any heat, echoing off the ruined walls. Behind the mask, his eyes burned with a cold, ancient light as he stared down at the weakening woman in his grasp.

"It’s time you learned what happens when my patience finally runs out."