Chapter 299 - Vail
Scarlett’s eyes locked on Vail, her mind racing with questions. This woman wasn’t supposed to be part of this Memory. So how did she appear here? And what was the deal with those rifts that seemed to follow behind her?
Arlene stood motionless across from Vail, tension thick in the air. Vail tilted her head, studying Arlene like a predator sizing up prey. “You’re still injured,” she remarked, tone flat. “Disappointing.” She stepped forward, and with that single movement, the entire glade seemed to tremble beneath her as though the earth itself recoiled. “But it doesn’t matter. Face me.”
In a blink, Vail vanished and reappeared a short distance from Arlene. Scarlett’s eyes struggled to track the movement, and, frankly, she wasn’t sure it was possible. Despite that, Arlene wasn’t caught off guard, as she immediately unleashed a series of precise, fiery explosions that erupted around Vail — controlled, deadly, far beyond the rage-fueled attacks she’d used only moments earlier. Flames twisted into searing arcs, converging on Vail and igniting the ground in their wake. Scarlett doubted even her strongest defences and resistances could block those flames.
Yet Vail walked through the inferno entirely unscathed. Her hand shot towards Arlene’s throat, but a flaming serpent-like barrier twisted between them, pulling at Vail’s arm. The delay was fleeting, mere fractions of a second, but Arlene was already in motion, her hands tracing intricate patterns. A blazing sphere of molten energy formed, expanding rapidly, its glow illuminating the shadowed glade.
The fiery orb consumed both Vail and Arlene, its brilliance momentarily freezing the scene in stark relief. For a heartbeat, the world seemed still. Then the sphere exploded outward, a wave of heat and flame tearing through the glade and leaving a scorched path in its wake. When the smoke cleared, Arlene stood where she had been, while the sphere’s fire continued dozens of meters in front of her. There, it began to morph, twisting and stretching as it grew into the form of a towering elemental made entirely of roaring flames.
Underneath it was Vail’s half-obscured figure. The elemental raised its colossal arms and brought them down like a hammer. Vail lifted one arm to block, and the impact sent shockwaves rippling through the area. In a sharp, fluid motion, she raised her other arm and punched through the elemental’s midsection, scattering its flames with a thunderous crack. The elemental’s form quickly began to reconstitute, but before it could do so entirely, Vail was behind it. Her hand sliced through the air like a claw, her movements rending space itself, and the elemental’s fire fragmented into disarray.
Arlene launched a barrage of attacks — fiery spears that charred the earth, explosive blasts that cratered the ground, and whirling vortexes of molten flame. The relentless onslaught of spells shrouded Vail in a blazing purgatory, the sheer power of Arlene’s magic causing the air to sizzle with heat.
Scarlett could only watch in careful silence, witnessing the clash between these two. Unlike when she’d first arrived in this world and couldn’t tell one spell from another, she could actually grasp the magnitude of what Arlene was doing here. Vail was effectively immune to any evanescent-type magic, and Arlene had to be aware of this, which is why she was forced to rely entirely on manifest magic and pyrokinesis — both notoriously difficult and draining to wield for normal mages. Yet Arlene was pushing herself, casting in rapid succession, even after having expended herself in her previous fight.
But against Vail, that might not be enough.
As the flames died down, Vail emerged unscathed from the center of a blackened pit, regarding Arlene. Behind her, the remnants of the fire elemental struggled to reform again, but a casual swipe of the woman’s hand split it in two. The elemental dissipated entirely this time, and the distant treeline broke and shattered as if struck by an invisible force.
For a single heartbeat, the entire Memory flickered. Scarlett squinted as she spotted more tiny white rifts spreading across the ground and nearby buildings, some opening into ominous black nothingness rather than the white void she’d seen before. Was Vail’s power tearing the Memory itself apart? How was that even possible?
The ground quaked, and cries rang out as Scarlett realised Vail’s attack had ripped through parts of Freymeadow’s stone wall and the outskirts of its houses. The villagers who hadn’t already done so scrambled to distance themselves from the battle, and many gave up on their desperate attempts to extinguish the flames devouring their homes.