"Salman was always an old pragmatic fool. He chose the usurper's side after all the other generals switched sides, so he deemed it the best choice to follow. After decades, he dug himself into a hole too deep to escape from, for even should he declare his willingness to switch sides, the loyalists would not have trusted his words. He knows of it too, which led to his disastrous final stand in the capital." - Ren Hao-Xiang, Space Affinity Archmagus and head royal court mage of the Al-Shan Empire.

Al-Shan Archipelago, Al-Shan, Capital City, Autumn of Year 671 FP

Salman ibn Aziz, an old human man who neared his eighty-fifth year of age, pondered where everything went wrong. He stood alone in the center of the capital's noble district with his arms folded. The district had long been mostly emptied, many of the nobles had either fled or died by now.

He sighed as he watched a high tower crumble down, one of the traps he had set to delay the rebel army's march into the capital. Most of the southern and western sections of the city had been heavily trapped, as that was where the rebels attacked from. He remained where he was despite how the battle raged in the frontlines.

All that remained of the emperor's loyal soldiers were at the frontlines as they fought desperately against the rebels that outnumbered them. The old general.had realized it since they lost the Ice Phoenix general. The rebellion they had mostly thought of as a mere nuisance for three decades had bit them back over the last decade.

Normally, he would have switched to the winning side in such a case, but now it was an impossibility. The past three decades had made him too entrenched on the current emperor's side, and the rebels were unlikely to spare him either way.

It all mattered little by now. He was old. His children and grandchildren were all already swallowed by the maelstrom of this civil war. The once ambitious and extremely pragmatic old man had turned apathetic to most things, and as he stood alone in the mostly deserted noble district, he pondered his plan over in his mind.

The rebel's successes in their early decades - when they were constantly on the run and only occasionally struck back - were mostly attributed to their cadre of space mages. The entire cadre of court mages had defected to their side shortly after the coup, which gave the rebels a lifeline, since they had the option to just teleport their leaders away in emergencies.

Later on when they struck back with force, their cadre of space mages were combined with their ace in the hole, the blood mage. The space mages would simply just have the blood mage teleported over to the commanders of the emperor's army, whereupon carnage then ensued. It was a crude and simple tactic, yet also highly effective.

It was a risky maneuver to be sure, but when Salman considered how none of his fellow generals survived their encounter with the blood mage in question… it became a moot point. That was also the main reason he waited alone in the noble district, rather than fight with his men in the frontlines. He reserved his mana, for he would have need of every drop of it soon.

The grounds by the noble district were the most usable for his needs, and that was where he prepared to make his stand. The blood mage's record of invincibility had also made her into someone the rebels looked up to. Her mere presence alone raised rebel morale to the roof.

So Salman planned to fight her to the death at his chosen ground. Ideally with him at full power and the blood mage depleted from the effort it took to get here. If he could kill the blood mage and join the frontlines with her corpse to show, it might be possible still, to turn the tides of this losing battle.

If he failed? Well… the emperor would be doomed in that case, but it would no longer be his problem because he would be too dead to care about it.

He calmly waited, his old body shivered a bit as the cold autumn wind blew past, and he rubbed his hands together for some warmth. His long beard, once luxurious, had now grown sparse with age. He heard a strange sound, like what wind made when it was sucked forcefully through a narrow opening, and saw as a teleportation gate opened about a hundred meters to his left.

A figure curled in a fetal pose passed through the portal, which closed shortly after. Salman just watched and waited until the figure of the rebel blood mage made her way towards him. He noticed that the woman was tall, her body slim, yet it was a slenderness packed full of tones muscles. He saw blood all over the woman's unnaturally pale skin and white hair, and several injuries that looked fresh on her body.

He remembered that he saw the woman before, more than half a decade ago, when the previous emperor still reigned. Her father was a very old elf, who was a trusted healer and physician that often came to the service of the royal family. He had thought she would be a healer like her father. She clearly was not.

Salman erected a hasty shield of quartz - most earth affinity mages that pursued combative careers focused on stones, but he had polished his skill with quartz since young instead, the hard but brittle crystal a lethal tool in his hands - that stopped a handful of throwing daggers in their path. In the same motion a pillar of quartz rose from beneath him, and brought him aloft into the air, safe from his opponent's reach.

Spikes of sharp crystals rose from the ground from all angles, aimed at the woman beneath him. Salman's hands danced as if he conducted an orchestra, as he conveyed his magical power through the gestures like he was used to. The woman below proved annoyingly slippery, as she evaded most of his spikes with inhuman speed. Those that struck her, were shrugged off as if they did nothing, and the wounds he managed to score on her were shallow ones so far.

The woman leapt away from the ground, landed with one foot on a second story window sill, and used that leg as support to leap further to the roof of the house across the street. From the rooftops she was too far from the ground for Salman to attack her effectively, but at the same time she could not pose a threat to him either.

It was a stalemate, except time was not on his side.

With a thought and a gesture, Salman changed his strategy. He seemed to have fallen into the pillar of quartz, but the pillar soon remolded itself, and before long a five meter tall humanoid golem of quartz stood in the noble district, Salman encased in its center. His arms and legs were directly encased in the quartz, though an air bubble surrounded his torso.

His opponent apparently took his challenge as one, since she launched herself from her roof top perch and slammed the beaked hammer-spike of her halberd against the chest of the golem with horrific force. The force of the blow forced the golem to take a step back, and Salman chagrined when he saw how much damage the woman did.

Damage to his golem he could fix with an expenditure of mana, sure, but he would not be able to keep it up forever. The woman had leapt off his golem's chest after her strike, but he was fast enough that one of his arms swatted her into and through the wall of a nearby residence. He chagrined once more when he saw the woman walk out of the building, several fresh cuts on her, but otherwise she acted as if nothing of importance happened.

She flexed her next a little, before she charged at him once again.

What followed was an exchange of blows that left Salman frustrated. He swatted and kicked the woman successfully a few times, and a couple times even managed to catch her off guard as he sprouted spiked spontaneously out of his golem's fists, but nothing had even slowed the woman down. Not even a quartz spike the size of a human thigh through the middle of her chest had made her pause, and instead she took advantage of his surprise to cleave one of the golem's arms clean off.

Salman burnt quite a bit of his mana to repair his golem from that blow alone, while no matter what he did to the woman , - he had once managed to crush one of her legs between his fist and a wall, yet somehow the leg kept its shape despite being a mushy pile of meat, blood, and bones - nothing stopped her. Nothing he did seemed to even do more than mildly inconvenience the woman.

And his mana started to run low after they fought for thirty minutes.

Not fifteen minutes later Salman wheezed in fatigue as his gem crumbled beneath him from the woman's blows, his sight swam as the crystal clear torso of the golem turned into a blurry white when crack lines spread around it. He soon found himself held up in the air by the woman's hand, too fatigued to fight, and out of mana regardless.

The noble district around them had mostly been reduced to rubble during their duel, nary an intact building in sight. Under some of the rubble, crushed limbs protruded, relatives of nobles who were not smart enough to have evacuated beforehand.

He just gave a deep sigh, as he looked up at the blue sky, and gave an understanding nod to the woman who would be his killer soon.

She seemed to have understood his meaning as she snapped his neck swiftly, a relatively painless death. As his consciousness faded into the dark a dark humor overcame him when he considered how the emperor would soon accompany him to the afterlife.

He never liked that stuck-up ass, truth be told.