Ersia: Raven Dawn

People fled from the Great Gardenia Arena.

Those fortunate enough—those who still had breath left in their lungs after the colossal eruption of fire from the heart of the battlefield between Randia and Vito—now did nothing but run. Survival eclipsed all other thought. There was only one certainty clawing at their minds: they had to leave this place, immediately, or the madness unleashed here would finish what the flames had begun.

Blackened corpses carpeted the ground, crushed beneath frantic feet. No one stopped. No one could afford to. The stench of scorched flesh clung to the air, thick and nauseating, while screams for help—raw, broken, soaked in agony—rose and dissolved into the greater cacophony of panic. Individual suffering lost all distinction, swallowed whole by the roar of thousands trying not to die.

And it was not only the spectators—most of whom were ordinary men and women, untrained, unprepared—who trembled in terror.

Even the knights of Rosmayne faltered.

Steel-clad and sworn, they shook with a fear they could neither name nor master. Confusion hollowed their expressions; discipline fractured beneath the weight of what they had witnessed. Those still able to stand dragged the wounded, hauled fallen comrades to their feet, shouting orders that no longer carried authority—trying, at the very least, to ensure their fellow knights were not trampled into anonymity by the human tide surging through the corridors.

Yet, even so, within the cavea of Great Gardenia, there were also many who did not move at all.

They remained seated, unmoving figures amid the chaos—not out of bravery, but paralysis. Some could not decide what action to take; others were too stunned to process the enormity of what had just occurred. And some, perhaps the most honest of all, had simply surrendered—having glimpsed, for one unbearable instant, how insignificant they were before the forces now revealed before their eyes.

They sat still, clutching their own bodies, each person attempting to secure what little safety they could for themselves, as if stillness alone might spare them.

Then—

the sound arrived.

A detonation so violent it seemed to rupture reality itself.

Blood burst from ears in an instant, most violently from the knights whose steel helmets turned the shock into a killing chamber. Balance vanished. Direction ceased to exist. The world tilted and spun as inner ears failed, and people collapsed—falling over one another, bodies piling into bodies, human weight becoming lethal.

The consequences were immediate and catastrophic.

Many died where they stood—not from wounds, but from sheer, overwhelming shock, their bodies unable to endure such a sudden annihilation of the senses. Others perished moments later, crushed and suffocated within corridors that had narrowed into choke points of flesh and panic, their final cries lost beneath newer ones.

Everything dissolved into absolute disorder.

There was no command, no structure, no refuge—only motion without meaning, fear without edge. It was as though the world itself had slipped its reins, plunging into chaos ungoverned by reason or mercy.

And in that moment, amid fire, blood, and the ruin of human will, one truth became painfully clear: only miracle could keep them alive.

---

At the very center of the arena, an image emerged that was at once absurd and awe-inducing.

While the world beyond unraveled—while screams and death devoured one another in endless motion—clarity descended upon Randia.

His entire body began to glow, not with blinding radiance, but with a contained, deliberate light, as though a thousand candleflames burned beneath every inch of his skin. The illumination did not spill outward recklessly; it obeyed him, clinging close, outlining muscle and bone with quiet reverence. Against the surrounding devastation, he looked unreal—like a figure painted onto the world rather than born from it.

The wind gathered.

Not as a storm that battered and tore, but as a sovereign presence that recognized its master.

Air coiled around Randia in layered currents, dense and deliberate, rotating in slow, predatory arcs—much like the windy mantle of San Mia Mountain. Invisible pressure bent the space around him; dust, ash, and fragments of stone never touched his body, diverted away by unseen walls of compressed wind. Each step he took caused the currents to adjust, recalibrating themselves instinctively, as if the atmosphere itself were breathing in rhythm with him.

His white cloak transformed.

From it unfurled eight long strips of white cloth, suspended and alive in the wind—

a pair trailing from each wrist,

a pair from each elbow,

a pair flowing from behind each shoulder blade,

and the final pair cascading from the back of his waist.

They did not flutter chaotically. They moved with purpose, describing arcs and spirals in the air like ritual banners or the vestments of a war-god descending into form. The wind carried them not as decoration, but as extensions of Randia’s presence—markers of dominion, heralds of something no longer human.

Upon his head rested a white circlet, pristine and unblemished, crowned at its center by a single blue gemstone. The gem glowed faintly, like a frozen star, deep and unfathomable, reflecting neither fire nor fear—only resolve.

And in his hand—

There was a sword.

If it could be called such.

It was forged of lightning—not wild, not feral—but tempered, disciplined, hammered into obedience by divine will. The blade hummed with restrained violence, its edges constantly reforming, alive with coiled energy. Rain vanished the instant it neared the weapon, erased without sound or steam, as though reality itself refused to allow water to profane it.

The storm acknowledged its superior.

Then—without declaration, without ceremony—

Randia attacked.

There was no warning, no gathering of strength, no dramatic pause. One moment he stood at the center of the arena, serene and luminous—

—and the next, he was gone.

His movement defied perception, collapsing distance as if space itself had been folded aside for him. He struck with a speed that rivaled lightning, perhaps surpassed it—each motion precise, merciless, inevitable.

Clearly, Vito was no longer facing a wounded hero. He was facing the stillness at the heart of a storm, finally allowed to move.

Vito reacted on instinct.

The dagger in his grasp flared as he triggered its power, and his body seemed to vanish, peeled out of existence like a misremembered thought. In the same fractured instant, he reappeared on the far side of the arena—space folding obediently around him, distance rendered meaningless.

But his escape came at a cost.

As Vito reformed, pain followed.

Two joints of the little finger on his right hand were gone—cleanly severed, as if erased rather than cut. There was no hesitation in the wound, no tearing. Only absence.

Then the blood came.

It streamed freely from his hand, vivid and dark against the pallor of rain, spilling into the air in long, trembling arcs. Yet before even the first drop could complete its fall—before gravity could claim it—

Randia was already there.

He struck again.

Not as pursuit, but as continuation, as though the space between his attacks had never truly existed. Randia’s presence collapsed toward Vito in a flash of white and blue, the thunderblade carving a line through the rain itself. Water parted, vaporized, fled from the path of the strike, leaving a momentary vacuum where sound itself faltered.

Vito barely twisted away.

The blade passed so close that the air screamed, and the pressure alone sent him skidding across the stone. He felt it then—not just speed, but certainty. Randia was no longer guessing where Vito would be.

He calculated him, and was already there.

Randia attacked again.

And again.

Each strike arrived faster than thought, faster than intention. Vito’s teleportation—once an absolute defense—now betrayed him, every reappearance greeted by a blade that seemed to anticipate the future. He dodged not by strategy, but sole grit and determination, burning through distance, through stamina, through focus.

Rain hammered down, washing blood across the arena floor, but Randia moved through it untouched—an axis around which the storm bent and yielded. His white banners of cloth streamed behind him like the wake of a falling star, marking each instant where death had almost, but not quite, arrived.

With every exchange, with every desperate escape, Vito still managed to survive.

But survival was being measured.

Each time he vanished and reappeared, each time space bent to spare him from death, a price was quietly exacted. One by one, the fingers of the hand gripping the dagger were taken—not hacked apart in frenzy, but severed with surgical intent. Clean cuts. Precise. Deliberate.

It was unmistakable now.

Randia was not merely striking at Vito.

He was trying to disarm him, piece by piece.

Another flash—another reappearance—and another finger was gone. The arena floor became a scattered testament of bone and flesh, pale fragments half-washed by rain, half-seared by lingering lightning. Vito’s breath grew ragged, his focus splintering as pain clawed its way through the layers of his discipline.

The dagger—once an extension of Vito’s will—now hung pitifully in his hand, cradled by nothing but the hook of his thumb. The remaining grip was not strength, nor control, but stubborn refusal—a relic of defiance trembling under the weight of certainty.

Blood streamed freely, soaking his gauntlet, slickening the weapon’s hilt. One wrong movement, one more forced escape, and even that final hold would be gone.

---

What unfolded within Randia’s vision was perfectly clear, mirrored with ruthless fidelity in both of his eyes.

Bathed in the overwhelming supernatural force flooding his body, his senses had sharpened beyond mortal thresholds. Sight, sound, intuition—each was honed into something cruelly precise. He could now see how the dagger’s power truly functioned.

The weapon did not merely allow Vito to teleport.

It allowed him to inhabit the rain itself.

And he was clever with them.

At times, Vito deceived Randia by varying the rhythm and distance of his jumps—short, erratic bursts followed by long, sweeping relocations. Other times, he leapt into droplets already shining faintly due to environmental distortions: reflections, refracted light, even the radiance bleeding from Randia himself. Illusions layered atop physics. Misdirection refined into art.

But patterns, no matter how elaborate, eventually confess themselves.

The longer the exchange continued, the more clearly Randia could read him.

By the time twenty-five seconds had passed, the status quo was sealed: every finger of Vito’s dagger hand had been severed, save for the thumb alone. Randia felt the end within reach—close enough to taste.

Yet at the same time, the cost of this borrowed divinity began to roar.

The power was burning him from the inside out.

Lightning did not merely course through his veins—it scorched them. His nerves screamed as if dipped into molten metal, his muscles spasmed under forces they were never meant to endure. Even his thoughts began to fray, reason singed at the edges by raw, celestial excess.

If he prolonged this state any further, Randia knew—with terrifying certainty—that the grim consequences would destroy him.

And Vito knew this too.

As he had admitted time and again, Vito had studied Randia obsessively. This strength, this incarnation of ruin and judgment, had never lasted more than a minute—even in Randia’s prime, when he still stood as the Great Hero unbroken.

Now?

With nearly half of his former power sealed away, Vito understood that he did not need to win.

He only needed to endure.

The exchanges continued—blinding, near-invisible flashes of death and escape—until Randia made his decision.

He would end it.

Drawing back his lightning-forged blade, Randia gathered what remained of his strength and unleashed it outward. The heat alone was catastrophic. Every raindrop within a wide radius evaporated instantly, erased into steam by the immense thermal surge radiating from his body.

[Second 28]

Randia swung.

And what followed shattered his expectation.

Vito did not flee across the arena. Instead, he reappeared upon the surface of one of Lady Morwenn’s ravens’ eyes, perched high above, its obsidian gaze gleaming.

[Second 29]

Randia pursued without hesitation.

He amplified the superheated plasma channeling from his form, weaving into it a purification sorcery—directly bestowed by Ruala, a divine smite capable of annihilating magical beings of certain level down to their essence.

This time, it was not only water that vanished. Lady Morwenn’s ravens were erased mid-flight, unmade in flashes of light and sanctified annihilation.

And yet—

Again, the impossible.

Vito reappeared directly before Randia’s face.

At that instant, the agony Randia had suppressed throughout the battle surged violently to the surface. His vision trembled. His mind reeled. The divine fire inside him raged out of control.

[Second 30]

High above the arena floor, suspended in the air, the decisive moment arrived.

Randia’s lightning blade pierced Vito’s heart, clean and true, thunder roaring as divinity fulfilled its promise of destruction.

But at the very same moment—

Vito’s transformed gauntlet, the inexplicable construct of bone, gears, and unfathomable sigils, pressed against Randia’s chest. His left hand was open, palm flat, touching him fully.

Two strikes.

One heartbeat.

One breath.

And in that frozen instant, victory and ruin stood indistinguishable.