"Consider this forest your burial ground. A slow and painful death is the only compassion you will be accorded." Durant roared, unleashing, first, his lightning elemental magic.

Like thunder clattering, the giant mirror Durant unveiled behind him loudly shattered into countless bolt-like shards that he ferociously unleashed at Shlain.

As confident as he was in his strength, upon realizing what was coming at him, Schlain, being as familiar as he is with lightning, immediately decided to back away as far away as possible from it. And fairly enough, the moment he did, sharded mirror parts like lightning strikes rained onto nearby trees, severing the tall trees' trunks, which had the misfortune to be in their path, spreading fog and blasting trees into countless wood splinters.

At that mere attack, hundreds of trees were blasted out of existence. If it weren’t for the hunch he felt, Shlain, though certain he wouldn’t have met a similar fate, or at the very least he would still have met some backlash from it.

"It was only an attack; it was so casually unleashed, yet the destructive force behind it was already such…"

Immediately after that failed attack, from the foaming in fog part of the forest from the earlier attack, another rain of that same ballistic attack rained on Shlain.

Shlain, with never before seen agility, deftly avoided each of the attacks and blocked each one that he couldn’t escape from. The rain of lightning coming upon him, despite its relentlessness, upon stopping, revealed, beyond the fog created, an untouched and unharmed Shlain.

It had only been two attacks, but the surroundings had already changed beyond recognition, with, to say, not a single tree remaining around them.

"So, this is an Archbishop…." Shlain mumbled to himself.

So far, in his many years of activity as the white ghost, he had fought many nobles and the church’s executives, and never once had any of them managed to make Shlain temporarily retreat from a mere opening attack.

"Thirty years! I have been waiting for this moment for thirty years! " Durant lashed out, while coming out of the smoke screen foamed area, "Yet you dare to run away like you always did, you damn rat!"

Once again, the Archbishop summoned behind him a large mirror, from which Shlain saw clearly his own reflection.

"Tsk."

Indeed, his attacks were impressive, but it was nothing Shlain wasn’t confident enough to handle, for the Archbishop wasn’t the only one to be gifted with magic, let alone lightning magic.

"I will show you what these bastards coveted about me and what led them to their deaths," yelled Schlain back.

As soon as these words were spoken, dark bestial snake-like lightning-based appendages sprouted from Shlain. The beasts shrieked and hissed zappingly, as if summoned from the depths of hell itself, their jaws wide open, barring razor-sharp fangs, longing to swallow the world.

It was the magic Shlain was born with, the source of all his misfortune, but also the thing he had learned to rely on to survive over the years; a strange lightning and darkness-based magic.

Shlain flocked his darkness lightning appendages into an orb, which he then, upon completion, unleashed at the Archbishop.

The monstrous flock devoured omnivorously everything in its path, but Durant, summoning yet another of his mirrors, which he turned, upon shattering, into lightning, intercepted just in time Shlain’s attack.

Shlain, aware that his magic gave him a better advantage at close range, stanced like an animal, charged at Durant at breakneck speed, thrusting his sword into his chest. But just as his sword was about to reach Durant, the latter summoned the mirror behind him, by splintering it into countless shards, to act as a shield.

The moment Shlain’s sword met the glass shield, it broke apart, but with no concern, Shlain kept trusting, shifting the blade, replacing his sword's blade with one of his magical appendages coming out of him.

And this time, unlike earlier, Shlain’s sword made its way through, cracking through the mirror into countless glass shards. Durant immediately attempted to dodge the thrust coming at him, but Shlain’s other weapon, an axe coated in his magic, was already swinging his way toward Durant’s side.

"Humph!" Durant exhaled condescendingly, raising his forearm to obstruct the ax's cleaving toward him.

Shlain’s ax was the first to reach Durant, but as it was about to make its way through, it met with some unexpected resistance.

Same thing happened with his thrusting sword.

" A battle armor?" Shlain wondered internally, perplexed, not expecting his magic to be resisted by anything, but he didn’t have time for these contemplations, for something else more urgent happened.

As a nefarious smile took shape on Durant’s face, lightning zapped from the shattered glass, Schlain's sword's thrust pierced through. Shlain could feel it to the bone that something was yet to occur again. And fairly enough, not even a split second later, an explosion took place.

Despite coating himself in his magic, Shlain’s body was nonetheless blasted away into the distance, but still, instead of rolling around clumsily, he used his appendages as leverage to land his two legs firmly on the ground.

Schlain was still a little shaken and recovering when he noticed Durant lunging at him with his glass shards.

"YOU THOUGHT I WOULDN’T BE READY!" The Archbishop roared, tearing away his black priestly outfit.

His priestly outfit torn, he was now seen clearly wearing beneath it a strange battle armor.

The armor was made of a snake-skin-like material, but Schlain, having sustained an attack that turned out ineffective on it, immediately could tell that it was not made of snake's skin of any sort but rather of a dragon's, one that is particularly resistant to lightning.

The battle armor, on its own, extended itself to cover the Archbishop's head and hands, forming a helmet and gloves.

"THIRTY FUCKING YEARS AND YOU THINK I WOULDN’T BE READY! MY WIFE… MY SON…"

Torrents of attacks flew at Shlain. This time it was too late to avoid them, so the best he could do was to protect himself to the best of his ability, but with the pace and the attack that was pouring at him, that would soon become a challenging task.

A powerful and deafening blast engulfed Schlain and the entire area around him

Hovering in the middair, above the screen of dust and roasted-smelling smoke, Durant, from the distance, summoned a lance of sparkling-white lightning, which he prepared to aim at where Shlain used to be, but before he could even unleash his attack, something pierced through the fog, reached Durant, and bit viciously onto his leg.

It was one of Shlain’s appendages, an appendage which, immediately after having got a firm grasp on Durant's legs, pulled him away, viciously dragging him away.

Despite all that was happening, Durant still charged his lance, which he unleashed upon completion toward where he sensed Shlain was.

The lance flew into the smoke screen, discarding it entirely, revealing within a bloodied yet not severely injured Shlain. Durant’s lance flew past Schlain, causing a large explosion in the background, as the latter, using his appendages, closed the distance to Durant.

Having lost all weapons, bare-fisted, Shlain landed on Durant with a punch, not onto his face but rather onto his armored chest. The punch blasted the Archbishop away, but using his appendage in a back and forth motion, Shlain dragged him back to his side to once again punch him.

Punches alone wouldn’t do much to Durant’s armor, but Shlain, using his lightning appendage, shaped his fist into a thrusting gladius. Though Shawn’s first thrusts didn’t seem effective, the two last blows clearly shattered their way through it. It was when on his way to landing yet another thrust that Durant finally, gathering himself up, managed to sever Shawn's appendage.

Propelling himself away from Schlain, Durant made a straight and heavy crash onto the ground, but much to his disarray, Shlain, akin to a mad beast, lunged at him from above.

"I WILL KILL YOU!! NOTHING WILL BE LEFT OF YOU!"

Pinning him to the ground, Schlain was about to thrust his appendage onto Durant's now bare-unarmoured chest when a punch flew into his face, followed by, from above, a rain of lightning bolts pouring its way straight into the two.

Leaping its way out of the attack trajectory, Shlain was caught midway through by Durant, who, with an ill-auspicious smile, didn’t let Shlain take shelter from the attack raining on them.

To have Schlain engulfed in the attack, Durant made it rain upon the two of them.

"Haaahhh-!"

Light filled the space and annihilated everything in the surrounding area. Chaos left the place in deathly silence. It was only a couple of minutes later, as the smoke dissipated away, the scenery left place to desolation, and standing there amidst that desolate battleground, though both heavily injured, stood two men, a few meters apart from each other, clothes torn apart, bloodied from countless wounds. They looked nothing like what they were a moment before the battle began.

Shlain clenched into inexistence a materialized lightning shard lodged on his shoulder, which prompted blood to gush out of the wound like water from a faucet, but using his magic to cauterize the wound, he put an end to the blood loss.

Durant, on his side too, just like Shlain, didn’t look well. Not only was he hurt by his own attack, but there was also nothing left of his earlier durable armor that saved him from the death of several of Shawn's close-ranged attacks. With the lethality of Schlain's magic, Durant understood that from now on, without his armor, a single mistake would be fatal for him now.

"Tell me, White Ghost," Durant yelled at Shlain, "what did they do to you?" He asked, anger painted above his exhausted face.

Schlain kept his mouth shut.

"ANSWER ME!" Durant roared.

Shlain answered the question of Black, sounding irritated, "WHAT DID THEY DO TO ME?! You know better than anyone what they did to me. You’re part of the Seven and the Fourteen. How wouldn’t you not know?!"

At these words, Durant remained silent. At least, until he heard from Schlain, laughing scornfully, "What so funny!?"

"It’s so stupid that now I realize…. You know what they did to me? You know what I reproached them, don't you? You also know why I was chosen. But do you know why ‘you’ were chosen?" Schlain asked, taunting.

"Lies! She …"

"-chose you, didn’t she, huh?"

As much as Shlain hated that person in front of him, he couldn’t deny that the magic they wielded had something in common, something that that damn family for years have always been after. The fact that the two of them wield that magic, couldn’t be a simple coincidence.

"She didn’t choose you. You and I, Zara and her fami-

"-Do not speak her name!"

Sounding irritated, but not to Durant, Shlain said, " ….To think that I lost my brother for such a stupid reason."

"Stupid?"

"… Yes, stupid."

"You, dogs, killed them… My wife, my son! He, at least, didn't have anything to do with whatever has been done to you. He was innocent!"

"SO WERE MY BROTHER!"

"You and your brothers are a corruption. One that doesn't know anything else but to destroy things, and it is my duty as an Archbishop to wipe you out of this earth’s surface. Today I’ll be done with you. I’ll be done with my promise. Only one left to go. And I will take my time to put you, brothers, down like the dogs you are. "

With these words spoken, Durant summoned a giant mirror, which size-wise, shape-wise and appearance-wise was different from the ones he summoned so far. This time, the mirror no longer reflected anything; it was just a giant blinding and zapping white-screen that hid away even the sun and the blue sky that were without a doubt there a moment before.

"Let’s settle this here and there." Durant proposed, levitating to the sky, making him seem, with the white background his white screen provided, like some sort of deity.

"Excellent, this whole masquerade has been kept ongoing for too long, let’s end it all, here and there," Shlain, followed, before turning, on the other hand, the ground into a black zapping puddle from which gouged out demonically countless spikes of dark lightning, each aiming viciously at Durant.

"Oleash Hati!"

Durant roared, unleashing his mightiest attack with every bit of mana, his body could muster.

"Devour Skôl!"

Shlain chanted, unleashing what was for him the equivalent of death onto Durant.

Light met, light and dark collided, attempted to devour each other in a grandiose finale, and ended in an otherworldly explosion that devoured the entire landscape.

What they both unleashed on each other wasn’t just magic, but decades' worth of unrepressed hatred. Who of the two was to overpower the other was a mystery, but whomever of the two were to win, it had been decided by both that "this" would decide who would today, in ashes, meet his end.

***

The outcome of the battle.

Amidst the incandescent wasteland left of the forest, a man, Schlain, heavily injured but still alive, crawled his way toward the only tree trunk that had survived the battle.

Heaving for air, Schlain pressed his back against the burnt trunk tree trunk, using the only limbs he had left to the best of his ability, as a silhouette, though limping, approached from a distance, one that he bitterly recognized as Durant’s.

"I won… I won…" Durant maniacally repeated.

Just like Shlain, the Archbishop was hard to look at, but unlike the former, this one at least still had all his limbs attached to him.

"My promise…finally! Today, I live you … and you, bastard, will finally die," Durant mumbled audibly, summoning lightning in his hand.

Schlain, knowing what was about to dawn on him, wondered about what happened to the boy and the others from earlier, but dismissed it since there was nothing he could do about it anyway.

Seeing Durant Silhouette to be a few steps away from him, Schlain closed his eyes, surrendering to fate.

He was done for. Or, at least, so he thought.

At a strange sound similar to someone backing away, Shlain opened his eyes to see standing between him and Durant, a boy he first thought was Aryan, but with how tall he was, Schlain realized it wasn't the case.

"I think that was enough for today," the young man said, throwing Schlain behind him a slight gaze.

Schlain, who only saw the young man's back as the boy over his shoulder peered back at him, finally took notice of the black faceless mask he was wearing.

Shlain felt himself assaulted by a strange feeling that he hadn't felt, even at death's door: the animal kingdom's most primal urge, the urge to flee.

"It has been a long time, Archbishop Sullivah. I hope you, with all of this, haven’t forgotten about ‘me’," the young man said suggestively, if not straight up tauntingly.

Durant mumbled in a trembling voice, "Faceless… One."