The impact of the horde’s rising could not be understated. Both the defenders and the Brightmoor army had been fighting over the battlefield where the horde had fallen, stamping and tripping and slicing through the corpses until everyone was in the thick of it, in arm’s reach of the zombies. But it was fine since the zombies had died properly this time. At least they had until they decided that actually death wasn’t near as enjoyable as they had thought it would be.

And so men and women were caught unawares as rotted fingers snatched around their ankles and yanked, hauling them to the ground for a savage beatdown. Or a feast. The battlefield, which had already been a riotous mess, dove further into chaos as allies were split and enemies separated and hope snuffed as the undead came for all.

Despite this, Lucian stared motionless at Kuraim, his features hinting at various emotions. He wore a finely sheathed sabre on his sword belt instead of wielding his usual glaive, and its mana signature outed the weapon as a potent manastone artifact. Yet the Warlord didn’t reach for it, nor did he launch into a reckless assault against his surprise opponent. Glints of sharp light reflected in his deep black eyes, and a thoughtful frown suddenly dominated his other expressions. “To think all my waiting around was for nothing.”

“Quite frankly, I’m offended you’d go out of your way to avoid me,” Kuraim replied, maintaining his smile. He appeared pleased with himself, and why wouldn’t he be when he had just outplayed both his rival factions.

Baerl of Time observed this scene from the side, grounding his fangs with frustration. He now knew what Kuraim’s hidden card had been, and evidently it had been concealed well enough to catch everyone off-guard. No one could interfere with Kuraim’s and Lucian’s showdown, which was why everyone was giving the Sovereigns massive breadth, and it was also the case that the victor between them would go on to win the war. Was there anyway the defenders could steal the win now?

Elisha was nearby, healing as many defenders as she could, and Klope and Broken Scale were holding up against the Brightmoor folk and horde. Hokul and Bobby were proving an impressive sight against Taika and his shock troops, but although they should have won, Taika had too many troops for them to beat. It was a losing scene, but there was still hope. The assassin named Katerina: she could kill the victor of the duel and pass the victory condition to the defenders instead. But where was she?

With how undetectable she was, she could be crouched beside Baerl or equally she could be miles away, having escaped at the first sighting of Kuraim’s resurrection. Should he do it now, then? There would only be one chance to do so, and therefore he wanted to leave it until the very end. Rushing and making a mistake would ruin everything, so Baerl resolved to watch for as long as he could. Perhaps there was hope still.

“Dahlia is dead,” Lucian said, almost tonelessly, but the corners of his lips gave him away.

Kuraim shrugged. “Dead or alive, it makes no difference to me. If anything, this will make her easier to control.”

The Warlord’s lips uncurled back into a thin line, and his face set. “Well, I had wanted to avoid this, but I guess this is fitting as one last hurdle.” He slowly reached for his hilt and pulled the sabre from its sheath, slowly revealing incandescent blue veins inside a slightly curved, translucent blade.

To the sides of the two leaders, Sophie and Zafeera too were preparing to brawl, evil eyes meeting amused ones. But before swords met flesh, a patter of distant peals interrupted the duels. Of course, this was hardly audible over the noise of war, barely noticeable for other soldiers, but the same couldn’t be said for the Sovereigns. Their additional Sovereign-detecting sense informed them of the source, and a sudden wind of apprehension whipped against them.

Even as good a duellist he was, he was overall only a middling Sovereign, and yet he had killed Dahlia. Moreover, Baerl recalled, he had killed Dying Light and Aengus within a flash second of each other, suggesting ominous powers and heartless ambition. And then he was in sight, a dot literally zipping through the fields, more easily followed by his trail of lightning and smoke than his figure. Silas was coming from behind the battlefield, heading right for where Kuraim’s entourage had been, where the Sovereigns currently were.

There appeared to be an implicit understanding between Kuraim and Lucian as they both paused their advances, turning to the horizon instead to track the Duellist moving wildly. That was the first thing Baerl noticed, that although he was moving in the general direction towards them, he wasn’t coming straight, rather snaking to the side and readjusting himself. From the looks of it, he was heavily injured too, his body so completely covered in blood, although he hardly seemed limited by this. And that lightning - Baerl knew Silas had lightning abilities, but what he was witnessing here was beyond what the Duellist should be capable of. Putting two and two together with his prior inscrutable backstabbing, the Magi quickly made sense of the situation. Silas was drugged up to the point of primal instincts. That was no man, simply a beast. A monster.

Reaching them, Silas came to Taika and his shock troops. The Bulwark turned from his current foes and charged the Duellist with his mates, a translucent, giant, curved shield rising above them. It was the same shield that had deflected countless of Bobby’s shots, and Silas was on it, the thunder of his steps booming now. He swung too fast to track, a flash of light blinding anyway, and when Baerl looked again with a black splatter burnt into his vision, he witnessed something which shocked him to the core.

Shattered fragments of the curved shield were glittering in the air, thin arcs of white lightning running between the shards, and Taika and his mates were clutching around their shoulders, some higher at the neck, some lower at their chests, but all gripping blackened flesh torn asunder. It was hardly visible in the bright light, but Baerl swore he saw puffs of smoke from their mouths too. As the Duellist advanced, Baerl confirmed it as steam billowed out of the corpses left behind, eyes rolled white; they were dead before they even knew it.

People were running away now, but it was futile as their backs became seared black. Silas clearly didn’t care for allies or enemies as his spear sliced through all, one second chopping down Hokul’s head, which the dwarf miraculously deflected to just his arm, then the next beheading a dozen Brightmoor soldiers. All fighting in the area seemed to stop as everyone instead fled the Duellist, who chased and slaughtered in blind glee. Baerl wasn’t exempt from this, as he was smart enough to understand that the Duellist would have no care for him if they met. He took off with Klope, who helped defend him, as Broken Scale had already fallen after attacking Silas in revenge for Dying Light.

But just as it appeared he would go uncontested, Lucian charged against the flow of people, his sabre straightening ahead of him like a spear. “Unstoppable Charge.” He raced into Silas, their clash of blades of causing deafening clamour, before the Duellist went flying backwards, flailing wildly. The Warlord chased valiantly, simultaneously breaking Silas’s image of invincibility, but almost as if having teleported, the Duellist disappeared from where he had fallen and appeared in front of Lucian with a resounding boom.

He thrust his spear like a needle, attacking lightly but so frequently that his arms blurred from motion. He drove Lucian back, who parried as well as he could, before the Warlord shouted, “Might of Ten Thousand.” He pulled his sword arm back, ignoring the light attacks, and swung forth, cleaving through the air with tremendous force. Silas leapt over this, stabbing his spear down into Lucian’s head, who sidestepped just in the nick of time, the spearpoint piercing through his back instead.

“Bloody Cleave,” said Zafeera, appearing from the behind them both, waving her blade of blood over the two Sovereigns’ chests. It chopped through Lucian’s shoulder and deflected up to chip through a portion of Silas’s neck. She was grinning manically, and the blood flow fed her lust. However, before she could follow-up, Lucian elbowed her face, causing her to stumble back. There was a flash of light and a peal of thunder, then Silas appeared behind her, thrusting into her chest and up, goring her like a pig on a stake. She flailed on its end as if trying to grab something to pull herself off with, but there was nothing but air there. Lightning flooded her insides, and she visibly fried, skin crackling and blackening and oozing and steaming.

Silas Wycliffe (human), the Duellist, has killed Zafeera Bazzi (human), the Blood Ripper.

23 Sovereigns remaining.

Meanwhile, Lucian sprinted away, and Baerl caught sight of black darts in the air, slicing through his vision for a frantic heartbeat before they embedded into Silas. “Detonate,” Sophie said, and both the Duellist and Blood Ripper disappeared under a cloak of smoke and fire, so thick and intense that Baerl thought him dead for a moment but the System sent no notices.

Meanwhile, Kuraim beckoned from behind his head. “Come.” Several hundred zombies from the battlefield bolted towards him, and Baerl noticed with great apprehension that they were tripping over each other in their frantic rush and fusing, their flesh and bones joining to make frightful abominations of death. They arrived just as Silas came out of the cloak of black smoke, looking three-quarters-dead. He started towards Sophie, even though Lucian was protecting her, before being distracted by the abominations closing in on him.

Ignore them and kill Kuraim. Kill Lucian. Kill Sophie, Baerl willed, and yet in his heart he knew the drugged-up Duellist didn’t have the mental capacity to do the slightest of critical thinking. And so it was, Silas bolting into the abominations and attacking them, searing flesh, sure, chopping limbs, sure, releasing floods of lightning, sure, but failing to kill the undead who clamped him down, ignoring all damage to their bodies.

The second this happened, Lucian surged forward again, shouting, “Might of Ten Thousand.” His cleave split half of the abominations’ functional torsos from their functional legs and ripped open Silas’s stomach. With a wound like that, he would be dead in seconds. Maybe Elisha could heal him? But as Baerl searched for the Primal Healer, he found her over a mile away, being harassed by other abominations. Kuraim had been thorough; it seemed this was it.

Lucian flung himself out of the way as Kuraim chopped his hand ahead towards the immobile Duellist. “Soul Ravage.” A thin stream of wisps fired from his fingers into Silas’s chest, tearing his heart out. His body convulsed for some seconds, before it froze up in the abominations’ grips.

Kuraim Jaffer (human), the Necromancer, has killed Silas Wycliffe (human), the Duellist.

22 Sovereigns remaining.

Lucian immediately headed for Kuraim, but the Necromancer was one step ahead once again as earlier he had called even more abominations from the battlefield to protect his front. They slowed the Warlord and scared the Demolitionist off - as the abominations which had dealt with Silas went after her. Lucian would break through, sure enough, and the abominations were unlikely to catch Sophie unless she stopped, and yet this was all inconsequential.

“Rise,” Kuraim screamed dramatically, raising his arms wide to the sky, and the corpses rose. Zafeera’s and Silas’s and every other person’s who Silas had killed, they all rose as one. Baerl’s spluttering hope hissed out, snuffed by the Necromancer’s grimy fingers pinching the wick. It was over; there was nothing Lucian or Sophie or Katerina could do now to stop Kuraim. But Baerl could.

“Stop!” the Chronomancer yelled, and time paused for him. He glanced about, scanning the battlefield. He had thought the defenders were winning at some point, then Brightmoor, but now he could well and truly see that Kuraim had bested them both, his zombies dominating the surroundings. It reminded Baerl of when the drakkar had fought Silas and co, how he had also paused time then and seen the situation as being hopeless on his side. That was the case here, too, and yet it wasn’t at the same time.

Here, they had pieces strong enough to win the game, but they had lost completely in strategy and guile. There would only be one chance to correct that. Baerl addressed time again, which was now tapping on its wristwatch with a raised eyebrow. “Go back,” and so time trickled back, thick and syrupy, draining his mana, motion going in reverse, the undead going back to dead then alive, and he kept pulling time against its nature until finally his last drop of mana evaporated.

He was frail and defenceless as he stepped back into the present, easily killable by a level 10 with a sword, but Baerl wasn’t so keen on an early death. Not yet, at least. “Klope, to me,” he shouted out, his voice quivering. He was wobbling on his feet, near tripping, when Klope caught him by the shoulders. She didn’t hesitate or appear confused as this wasn’t her first time.

“Great Dragon, what future lies ahead of us?” she asked, forming a mana barrier around them. However, her attention shot away to the side as Ajit’s shades shattered Kuraim’s barrier into glittering shards which promptly melted into the air.

They zipped towards the Necromancer, who gaped in shock, backstepping in fear, and Baerl saw humour in the expression now, the crooked smile underneath that no one else here could see. But the Magi could as the first shade reached Kuraim, thrusting one triangular arm into his stomach and up while the other arm chopped his neck off. His head came staked on the first arm, eyes still moving in surprise and mouth attempting to force out some final words which they drawled, before stilling.

Ajit Ghost (human), the Warlock, has killed Kuraim Jaffer (human), the Necromancer.

24 Sovereigns remaining.

It was such a realistic death, but what else could Baerl expect from someone who specialised in death, someone who made his living in death and lived through it too. Hopefully, however, he hadn’t expected this.