“A bard and battlemaster archetype pairing, against a cleric and wizard,” Hae-won announced to the stadium, though very few players remained in person to watch the match. It was the livestream viewers who served as her primary audience now.

Serenity’s music completely stopped as Aegis and Pyri moved into position to engage with Seraxus and Zuon, standing across the arena from them. It allowed the sounds of battle echoing across the cityscape to reach the combatants for a brief moment before their own sounds overtook the ambience.

“Can you deal enough damage to beat him?” Aegis asked in a whisper, so that only Pyri could hear him.

“Even if I get a cinderbolt on him, with his armor value and health, it’d take about 15 minutes to do the trick. I’d have to land a lot of other attacks as well to speed it along, and that’s not taking into account his lifesteal,” Pyri replied.

“If we wait out the match timer to 10 minutes, his healing will be disabled, but so will mine.”

“I doubt I can out-damage him before he gets through your health pool, even if you dodge and block everything. Then there is the fact that your wings won’t last much beyond the 10-minute mark.” Pyri explained.

“I’ll have to burst him with Virabhadra,” Aegis took a deep breath, tightening the straps on his shield as Seraxus moved closer. “Let’s focus on taking out Zuon first. If it’s two versus one, you could deal damage and assist in lowering his damage output on me, giving us more time to whittle him down after the 10-minute mark.”

“In theory,” Pyri said nervously. Her words were followed by a loud explosion coming from the streets outside the stadium.

“In theory. I’ll do all I can to keep you safe, so focus on taking out Zuon.”

“You can handle it? This boy is really good at PvP,” Pyri motioned to Seraxus as he picked up speed, power walking towards them as musical notes made of pink magic flowed out of Zuon’s weapons despite him playing horribly off-key.

“It’s gonna be hard.”

The music notes shot forward like bullets, soaring across the arena in all directions and warping around the pillars. A volley of Multishot arrows came with them, and the weapons of Seraxus after that.

Pyri exploded out her empowered Cinderbolt, glowing purple rather than red as it split into smaller balls and warped around Aegis to catch arrows, weapons, and music notes. An explosion of colorful lights erupted around Aegis and Seraxus as they met each other at the center of the arena.

The black sword of hatred was swung down onto the Star of Light shield, causing a burst of darkness and divinity that was supplemented with bright flashes of purple and pink on the outside. Pyri successfully intercepted all of Zuon’s first wave of attacks. He was able to follow up with a second wave fairly easily, though.

In the brief few seconds that the explosion of light took to fade from his clash, Seraxus sent the majority of his weapons after Pyri and instead used his held weapons on Aegis, tying him up for a few seconds.

Aegis prepared and cast guards to keep Pyri safe, but he saw her manage to send cinderbolt fragments to intercept Seraxus’ attacks on her own. It looked, for an ever so brief moment, that Pyri would be fine and would not even need his help to avoid their attacks despite how relentless they were.

That feeling was short-lived. Seraxus jumped into the air to get over him, completely ignoring his defensive formation to prepare and Charge Strike Pyri. Aegis had seen this enough times by now, though, and launched himself off the ground immediately after Seraxus had, flapping his wings of light elegantly to propel himself to the proper height needed in order to cut off any charges.

Once Seraxus had Aegis in the air, he silently used his switch skill to replace his axe with the sword of hatred. The axe appeared in Seraxus’ hand while the sword moved behind Aegis and was now barreling towards Pyri. Her attempts to redirect the moving sword’s momentum failed, as unlike other weapons, it was able to ignore the force of her spells.

Aegis turned to see the sword barreling towards Pyri. He flicked his fingers and projected a shield in front of the sword. The instant that Aegis turned around to look at the sword of hatred’s movements, Seraxus threw his axe downward. He controlled his axe and used it as a stepping stone to launch himself off of it to the side, getting around Aegis.

Aegis turned around at the last second and watched Seraxus do this, and panicked. With a clear line of sight on Pyri, he could execute a charge strike and repeat what he did to kill Rakkan and Lina.

Aegis responded fast, knowing that a shield projection wouldn’t stop it. He used a second shield projection for himself, forming at his feet to launch himself off of it. He was a moment slower than Seraxus, though, and Seraxus executed the charge strike.

Aegis responded by violently batting his closest wing of light downward at the aerial charging Seraxus, knocking him out of the charge and causing him to spin out and fall towards the ground.

“Aegis!” Pyri shouted frantically, causing Aegis’ mind to pulse with calculations. Milliseconds mattered, and he had to contemplate what Pyri would shout at him about without perceiving it. He spun around blindly with his shield at his back just in time to hear the sound of the black sword of hatred clashing with it, narrowly avoiding being hit by an unguarded strike from the sword.

Despite being hit by Aegis’ wing and falling out of the sky, Seraxus had used a switch on the axe again to swap it with the black sword and send it at Aegis.

Seraxus landed on the tiled floor of the arena, gained his footing, and prepared to charge at Pyri from the ground. Aegis used the momentum from the sword strike to propel him down to the ground fast enough to block it, but he was too slow to keep up. The momentum that Aegis had given to Seraxus by hitting him with his wing was too much. Such an easy-to-make mistake, but quite possibly the worst one.

Seraxus charged across the arena towards Pyri as she deflected Zuon’s bombardment of attacks, arrows, and music notes soaring all around her. She had also managed to land a cinderbolt on Zuon and was slowly whittling his health down, but Zuon had several songs that induced healing, which he used to offset her damage.

“He’s so damn fast!” Hae-won shouted in frustration as she watched Aegis lose control of Seraxus for a third time in one match. “His misdirects and skill timings are so perfect. Even though Aegis is doing his best to keep Pyri safe from the Sword of Hatred, he’s finding openings.”

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“As many have said before, the sword is not the only reason he’s won this many tournaments,” The VGN caster joined in.

Aegis was desperate. He had no choice but to try to block the charge with a guard, despite knowing it wouldn’t work. A projection of Aegis’ shield formed in front of the charging Seraxus, but he perfectly timed himself to stop his charge in front of the shield, then launch himself over it and cast charge again.

“Watch out!” Aegis warned her.

“I got it. Just get the bard off of me,” She shouted back, turning her focus away from Zuon’s attacks to focus on the approaching Seraxus. Aegis turned to Zuon, still standing on the opposite end of the arena, and broke into a wing-propelled sprint towards him.

Zuon saw Aegis coming and veered his attacks away from Pyri and aimed them at Aegis.

“Slow dance!” Zuon cast, sending out a pulsing wave of gray musical notes from his instruments that rippled along the floor of the arena in waves. Aegis jumped over them, only to be met by a mid-air barrage of arrows fired from Zuon’s bow. Aegis quickly identified which ones were glowing with the pinning shot spell that Zuon silently cast, and blocked them.

He allowed the rest of the arrows through in order to beef up the damage of his Virabhadra, but he still had some time left on the cooldown.

The announcement of 5 minutes passing in the match came and went, and Aegis thrust himself through the air using his wings while being sure not to touch the ground of the arena surrounding Zuon, where the slowing gray music notes were flowing out of his instruments. He knew that if he touched that spell, he’d get a debuff that would slow him down to the point that he’d never stand a chance at catching this bard player.

Across the arena, Seraxus had arrived at Pyri with all of his weapons surrounding her. He was relentless in his assault, and she was forced to pull back all of her cinderbolts to focus on defense.

She formed a water clone of herself by silently casting the simulacrum spell as Simon had done to her so many months ago, and gave the clone her staff. It acted on its own to briefly aid her defenses, attempting to encase Seraxus in water to drown him. He moved seamlessly to avoid the water clone's attempts, though, cutting through it to force it to lose its form anytime he’d needed to.

Simultaneously, Pyri was managing all of Seraxus’ floating weapons with ease using her cinderbolts, keeping them at a distance far enough away that she’d have time to dodge if one was switched for the Sword of Hatred. The sword itself was her only real threat, as she knew full well that it was ignoring her cinderbolts and could kill her in one hit.

Seraxus swapped to have the sword of hatred in his right hand, his spear in his left. His other weapons, including the axe, crossbow, maul, longsword, and bladed fists, swerved around Pyri wildly and unrelentingly.

Pyri empowered herself with haste to raise her movement speed enough that she could sidestep the swings from the sword of hatred, narrowly dodging several with impeccable footwork as the sword cleanly cut through the floor of the arena. No words were spoken between the pair, and they kept their eyes locked onto one another as if trying to anticipate each other's movements while hiding their own, and both were incredibly good at doing so.

“Pyri’s staying alive, but that sword is barely missing her. A single slip-up and she’s gone,” Hae-won said nervously.

Serenity gasped, covering her eyes. “I can’t watch.” Kenji stole a look or two, but his focus was on creating distracting illusions around the top of the arena to draw the attention of reapers, as more were appearing in the skies above with their flapping bat-like wings becoming harder and harder to spot due to the darkening clouds.

“Meanwhile, on the other side of the arena, Aegis is trying to catch Zuon, who is keeping up the pressure on him and throwing out all manner of crowd control spells. If Aegis gets hit by any of those, it’ll allow Zuon to widen the gap between them massively and provide Seraxus with time that, frankly, for Pyri’s sake, I don’t think Aegis can afford to give them. He has to take out Zuon so he can get back to helping Pyri as soon as possible.” Hae-won continued.

“I’m not even sure if peeling off from defending her from Seraxus was the right move here,” The VGN caster commented.

“It’s the only move they had. Seraxus has too many tools in his kit to allow him to circumvent Aegis’ attempts to protect Pyri. Even with the shield,” Hae-won replied.

“Yes, but with this formation, it’s turned the battle into a race. What will happen first? Will Zuon make a mistake and get caught by Aegis, or will Pyri make a mistake and get hit by the sword?”

Those in the arena heard none of this commentary. They were too focused on their tasks.

When the cooldown on Virabhadra came up, it became clear to Aegis that Zuon had been mentally keeping track of the timer because his playstyle shifted to be much more defensive.

With the slow music still pulsing across the ground, Aegis’ mobility was solely being created by him launching himself off of shield projections and flapping his wings. It allowed him to maneuver around Zuon to keep up, but it was clunky and made it hard to pin Zuon down. Anytime he’d almost had him, Zuon would use several bard skills to widen the gap that parred nicely with threatening waves of pinning shots.

Zuon wasn’t attempting to kill Aegis, but rather to conserve his mana and kite him long enough so that Seraxus could land a hit on Pyri.

One minute left before the 10-minute timer hit, and Seraxus finally made a mistake. He thrust his spear through the water simulacrum to attack Pyri through the clone. The moment he did, she wiggled several fingers to infuse the water clone with earth and ice magic, solidifying the clone and sealing the spear inside its solid stone body.

The stone version of the simulacrum, with the spear inside it, took off from their engagement. Seraxus attempted to use a switch to get the spear out of the stone and ice simulacrum, but it failed due to the weapon being considered restrained.

Pyri had successfully removed one of Seraxus’ weapons from his control, getting loud cheers from the casters, but Seraxus remained calm and broke off from Pyri to pursue the moving statue.

It moved slowly and clunkily, making it an easy target, and Pyri anticipated it wouldn’t last long. What she didn’t anticipate was Seraxus’ plan to use the simulacrum as bait himself, and he stopped midway towards it to spin towards Pyri and use a charge strike on her.

She created a wall of ice to block the charge at her feet, shards of white blue crystals piercing up from the ground to separate them, but Seraxus launched himself up over the wall and thrust his black sword of hatred at her from a distance.

“Piercing Darkness,” Seraxus cast, catching Pyri off guard. Her eyes went wide, and she failed to react. A black wave of shadow magic shot from the tip of the sword at her like a bullet.

It did not catch Darkwing off guard. Still nestled on her shoulder, he fluttered his wings and activated his Fae skill to negate the damage with a flash of light.

That flash of light was Seraxus’ target, though, and the moment it blinded Pyri, he used a switch to swap the sword in his hand with an axe off to the side while launching his body at Pyri.

Pyri rapidly moved her cinderbolts to try and keep up with the situation, but the ice wall in front of her and the flash of light caused her, for half a second, to lose track of the sword of hatred.

Combatant Pyri has been defeated.

Desperation rang through Aegis’ bones as he heard the arena caster’s robotic voice carry through the stadium. A smirk grew across Zuon’s face as he went all out in dodging Aegis’s attempts to close the gap. He no longer needed to hold back on using his mana, as Seraxus would be joining them on this side of the arena in a matter of seconds.

Two versus one, Aegis stood no chance. He rapidly mixed in uses of his wings, shield projections, and smites to lock down Zuon, narrowing him into one side of the arena. It wasn’t enough, though, and Zuon could still easily jump away as long as Aegis had to use his projections to move around instead of using them to cut off Zuon’s movement.

Suddenly, by some miracle, Zuon stopped moving.

A blank expression appeared on his face as Aegis got in close to him, and rather than jump away as he had been doing and fire arrows off to block Aegis, he stood still. Aegis wasn’t sure why or how it happened, nor did he have time to contemplate it. Desperation overpowered Aegis’s reasoning, and he took advantage of it, grabbing Zuon’s shoulder.

“Virabhadra!” Aegis cast frantically.

Combatant Zuon has been defeated.