Part Ninety-One — What They Actually Were

Elsewhere, at roughly the same hour, two thousand soldiers and six hundred mages were beginning to understand exactly how badly they'd underestimated the people waiting for them. I'll get to that properly soon. For now — the plain, the pillar, and everything that happened once my blade actually came out.

　Ignivar, from what I heard afterward, took one look at the Ashford army's opening formation and decided the whole engagement wasn't worth his personal attention.

"Too boring," he apparently said, and settled somewhere nearby to watch Eris and the others handle it instead.

Sounds about right, honestly.

"Kai," Anti-Subconsciousness said, just as the Church's formation began advancing properly. "I am detecting something anomalous in the composition of their forces."

Anomalous how?

"Several of the knights, and a number of the Holy Knights, carry an energy signature inconsistent with human physiology. Demonic in origin, masked beneath what I assess to be a disguising working."

...Wait, what?

"Demons?" I said out loud, genuinely thrown. "In the Church? Aren't they supposed to be the ones fighting demons, not employing them? Can demons even enter a church, of all places?"

This is new information. No wonder something felt off the whole time I was talking to Sophia — some of it, at least.

"How many," I asked.

"All of them," Anti-Subconsciousness said, "excluding the head commander, Sophia Aurelain."

"Are you fu—" I caught myself, mostly. "That much? If it was just the ordinary knights, fine, I could understand that. But Holy Knights too? This world just keeps finding new ways to surprise me."

"How strong?" I asked.

"Lesser demons. Individually unremarkable."

Well. Now I have an actual reason to enjoy this.

　None of them saw me coming.

　I want to be honest about how the next several minutes actually went, because it wasn't a fight in any real sense — it was closer to weather, indifferent and total, moving through their formation faster than any of them had a chance to properly register.

　Some put up genuine resistance.

　None of them lasted past ten seconds against it.

Sixty knights. Thirty Holy Knights. All demons wearing borrowed faces, apparently, and none of them worth slowing down for.

　I reached the commanders' position before the bulk of them had even understood the shape of what was happening.

　They'd braced for a frontal approach, weapons raised toward where I'd been standing a heartbeat earlier.

　I wasn't there anymore.

　I was behind them.

　Nine heads hit the ground before a single one of the nine commanders finished turning around.

　Sophia's expression, when I finally faced her properly, had gone somewhere well past shock and settled into something colder, sharper.

"You just killed nine of my commanders," she said, quiet, fury barely restrained beneath the professional calm.

"Nine demons wearing your commanders' faces," I said. "I'd check that claim before you get too attached to mourning them."

　She didn't believe me — not yet, not with the anger already moving her forward, blade drawn, aura flaring gold and clean.

Alright. Guess we're actually doing this properly now.

　She came at me faster than I expected, and I want to be honest: the first exchange genuinely surprised me.

　Her strikes landed with a precision that felt less like skill and more like foreknowledge — as though she already understood, a half-second before it happened, exactly where I'd be.

What—

　I caught the second strike late, a shallow cut opening along my forearm before I'd fully processed how she'd gotten past my guard.

"You're better than the others," I admitted, resetting my stance.

"I'm not like the others," she said, flat, already pressing forward again.

No. No, you're really not.

　I'd assumed, walking into this, that she was simply a mana user — strong for her kind, certainly, but nothing my own anti-mana couldn't handle without much concern.

　I understood, watching her aura properly for the first time mid-exchange, exactly how wrong that assumption actually was.

　Pure, unbroken gold.

　Complete.

　Nothing partial about it at all.

"She has achieved the absolute peak a mana user can obtain," Anti-Subconsciousness reported, careful.

Crap. This is going to be considerably harder than I thought.