[2] WEEPING MONK║you're not what I was looking for

72| Arianne and Lancelot - I

[TW/ Blood. Major wounds. More blood. Major character death]

Pieces of her heart fell from her as Ari sprinted for higher ground, fuelled completely by the instincts in her veins when all that her body begged her to do was to fall to the ground.

She'd left Lancelot behind. Left him. And now there was no time to look back over her shoulder, not when her feet stumbled through the mess of blood, mud, and trampled grass, dodging lifeless bodies on the ground and individual fights between her fighters and theirs.

Her lungs heaved, her sight upon the singular strange rock that jutted out of the ground a few dozen yards away from the edge of the forest. She didn't know how she was going to get the attention of the field again, she just needed to. Or else she would have left Lancelot to die for nothing. He was alive. She had to believe it.

Releasing her power like that to make the earth shake when she saw him fall made her feel like there was none left within her. Completely drained. Legs barely carrying her, her body still thrummed from the shock of what she didn't know she had the power to do, and she prayed to the gods that she never did it again.

Raiders rammed their way through a cluster of Paladins ten feet in front of her. Ari couldn't see the Red Spear anywhere but she wasn't trying to look. She was covering more ground but with every diversion that she had to make, that jutting rock felt further and further away.

A shining sliver of silver shot over her shoulder and past her ear.

"Ah! Fucking—" Her one glance back, and two red cloaks chased behind her.

She should have picked up her sword from where she'd dropped it engulfed in flames. There was too much risk in dropping to snatch the one knife that was still in her boot, but the dip in the sodden ground that she didn't see in time took that risk for her.

Ari's knees crashed into the earth before she could recover the misstep. Fingers shooting to her boot and grabbing the knife as her heart pounded warnings in her chest. She whirled and released the blade right to where instinct and years of training for this knew innately that the closest red cloak would be, expecting to hear an agonised wail.

But he was frozen. The both of them with their red faces and teeth bared mid-sprint.

The blade struck the first Paladin right in the centre of his stomach, but— "What the fuck..." He didn't fall. He didn't even flinch as his sword reached semi-raised above where she'd been forced to stay low.

Panting with exertion, Ari's eyes blew wide. Nothing and nobody around the battlefield moved at all. The world had slowed down to a heartbeat.

"Arianne."

Her gasp split the silence. She scrambled to turn, scraping her palms over the small, hard clumps of dirt beneath her.

"Zurah?" The name fell desperately from her lips. "Zurah!"