Empires | Arc 3 | Chapter 3 | Reunion

Jarrod watches the two massive griffins crash into the dirt. They do not just fall; they collapse into pieces, their hind legs and heads cleanly severed by the shadowless Z-slash.

He stares at the corpses for a fraction of a second before dropping his gaze to find the thing who cut them. The voice hasn’t even registered in his head yet.

Standing directly in front of him is Makisa.

Her short frame is bent slightly forward from the momentum of the kill. She slowly stands upright, pulls a small napkin from her jacket pocket, and begins wiping the thick blood off her katana. Jarrod realizes with clarity that this little girl—who just butchered two prime male griffins with a single leap—is treating the group as if they don’t even exist.

A few feet away, Friling aborts his breaks off his aerial dive, landing softly in the grass. His silver Raphael’s Wings dissolve into the air as he steps up beside Jarrod, his eyes locked on the young swordswoman.

Then, another voice echoes from the west.

Friling, Jarrod, and Lesca snap their heads toward the tree line. It is a tone they know intimately—casual, annoyed, and aloof.

“Yeah, yeah. Big deal.”

The voice belongs to Taglia. He strolls casually out of the deep jungles of the Royal City side, still wearing his olive duster and khaki pants, his right hand buried in his coat pocket.

Jarrod and Friling freeze. They marched into these grasslands, leaving Titan City behind, explicitly to find him, but seeing him in flesh-and-blood instantly exhumes the dread of their last encounter.

Lesca whips around, not to see who is speaking, but to confirm if it is the same man who promised he would return for her.

Taglia stops a few paces away.

Makisa stands in the center of the group —Lesca at her back, Jarrod and Friling at her front.

But Taglia doesn’t look at the three Heat users. He stares directly at the severed griffin corpses. Like Makisa it looks like Taglia himself hasn’t registered the group yet.

“You killed two males!” he says, genuine annoyance bleeding into his voice.

“So?” Makisa replies.

“Male meat is hard. It’s the females who have that squishy feeling.”

“Hey, you are the one who scared them off, I didn’t have a choice….” Makisa retorts. She points her katana at the dead griffins. “…These two jumped on this bitch—” she aggressively points the blade at Lesca “—and I took my shot.”

With a slick click, she sheathes her blade.

Taglia keeps his focus perfectly locked on Makisa. “You are eating them alone. I am not touching this.”

Their bizarre, domestic bickering plays out squarely in the middle of this broken ground, dead griffins, and still trying to figure out what happened group.

Lesca’s eyes go impossibly wide. No one calls her a bitch. For a fraction of a second, she is stunned, but the shock violently morphs into cold, calculating rage. She glares at the young girl in front of her.

Jarrod, meanwhile, forgets to swallow. The man standing ten feet away broke his bones and nearly killed him in Titan City, yet Taglia is currently treating him like a rock or a tree.

Friling is the only one keeping a running mind; having witnessed this bizarrely casual side of Taglia in the cafe, he recognizes that he is not currently in a hostile state.

Further back, Maven and Leon are limping toward the group. Leon is physically disoriented from the beast’s throw, leaning heavily on Maven for support.

As they clear the tall grass, Maven spots the olive duster.

An involuntary, deeply uncharacteristic smile breaks across her face. Like she is calling out to a beloved ghost from her past, she shouts, “Taglia.”

Taglia‘s head snaps toward the sound.

Bypassing Jarrod, Lesca, and Friling entirely, his half-shut eyes widen. A massive, warm smile spreads across his face as he pulls his right hand from his pocket and waves at Maven in complete silence. A clear sign like Maven, Taglia is also happy to see her.

Lesca watches the exchange. The only thing keeping her from going absolutely berserk is the fact that she hadn’t call out to him first, maybe that is why he hasn’t noticed her yet. But there is a deeper, terrifying mechanical reason for her restraint—a reason only Friling and Jarrod can currently understand. When the griffins attacked, the air was wild. When Makisa appeared, the air was natural. But the moment Taglia stepped out of the jungle, it felt as though a massive, invisible lid had been slammed over the battlefield. He isn’t even trying, but his sheer presence actively pins down the malice and presence in broader sense of every Heat user in his vicinity. That is why Lesca‘s lethal aura isn’t leaking. Because it is being hold on a leash, suffocated.

Maven returns the smile as she and Leon finally join the circle.

Lesca, deciding it is time to make her presence known, lets out a dramatic huff.

“Finally. Hello to you too.”

Taglia and Makisa finally turn to look at her.

As Taglia‘s brain registers the profile of the beautiful, terrifying necromancer who threatened to rip his heart out, a genuine, subtle blush touches his cheeks.

Makisa watches him.

In her heavily biased, fiercely possessive mind, she doesn’t see a subtle reaction. She sees a pathetic, huffing, red-hot chibi version of Taglia blushing like an idiot while Lesca simply stares back with a smug, knowing smile. It is her default psychological response whenever he interacts with a woman.

Disgusted, Makisa breaks the silence. “One of your whores?”

Taglia looks at her, but before he can defuse the insult, Lesca steps forward.

“Who are you calling whore, you gremlin bitch!”

Makisa slowly turns her head. Her eye twitches. Nobody has ever called her names, and those who dared speak to her like that usually ended up buried.

“What did you call me….. you CUNT!” She replies her voice cold.

Sensing the atmosphere about to violently detonate, Jarrod steps forward. “Please stop.”

The subtle blush vanishes from Taglia‘s face, replaced by an amused smirk. But the moment Jarrod intervenes, Taglia closes his eyes and whispers into the grass.

“Bad move.”

The words haven’t even left his lips before the air current around them splits.

Operating in pure microseconds, Makisa pivots her entire body weight towards her right. She bends her knees, leans into the side Jarrod‘s was coming to intervene, and draws her blade.

SLIIIICK.

There is no concussive gust of wind, only the terrifying sound of steel separating the air molecules. Because she is shorter, she angles the katana diagonally upward, pinning the razor-sharp tip directly under Jarrod‘s jaw. If she had lifted the blade for one millimeter higher, the blade would have pierced up through the bottom of his mouth, into his tongue.

The aftermath ripples through the entire group’s synchronized nervous systems.

Jarrod glances down, only moving his eyes. Directly in front of his boots, pieces of shattered bone dissolve into dust, mixing with maroon blood.

Lesca stands frozen, her hand still raised towards Makisa and Jarrod; she had summoned a skeleton in between Makisa and Jarrod, the exact millisecond she turned towards him, but the Iaijutsu strike was so impossibly fast that the blade cleaved right through the bone before the construct could even fully form.

The sheer speed of the draw triggers Friling‘s survival instincts, forcing his Raphael’s Wings to violently erupt from his back.

Maven only manages to manifest three of her Holy Blades; Leon, standing further back, didn’t even see the girl move. And because he was leaning onto Maven for support, his focus was mostly onto his own body rather than the bickering that was going in front of him.

Only Taglia remains entirely unmoved, his hair gently ruffled by the displaced air of the strike.

Jarrod‘s lower jaw vibrates uncontrollably against the cold steel. If he speaks, he impales himself.

Keeping the blade perfectly locked against his lower jaw, Makisa glares up into his eyes. “Don’t tell me what to do, you dumb fuck.”

The shattered bones dissolve into the air, the maroon blood slithering across the grass like living snakes to absorb silently back into the soles of Lesca‘s boots. Lowering her hand, the Goddess of Death takes a slow, deliberate step toward the young swordswoman. She isn’t scared. She is deeply, violently angry that this little bitch is faster than her reflex.

“Okay enough, you and me, let’s go,” Lesca challenges.

“Fine by me,” Makisa smirks.

Before either can take their fighting stand and draw each other’s blood, Taglia claps his hands.

“Now, now….. we have a meal in front of us, ladies,” Taglia says, gesturing to Lesca, Makisa, and Maven. His tone instantly drops into absolute boredom as he points vaguely at Leon, Jarrod, and Friling. “…..And you guys. Why not roast these meats and talk… what do you say?”

Lesca and Makisa freeze, snapping their heads back to Taglia. He offers them both a cheeky, disarming wink. The tension hangs in the air like thick honey. The entire group feels entirely irrelevant to the chaotic dynamic of these monsters, yet they are physically paralyzed by the sheer violence they just witnessed.

Finally, Makisa scoffs, turning her back and walking to stand at Taglia‘s right side.

Lesca‘s eyes turn into a cold blizzard of pure, profound jealousy, seeing Makisa stand on his side so casually.

Seeing the de-escalation hold, Taglia smiles. “Let’s take it from the top, shall we? My name is Taglia. This is Makisa….. and you are?”

Before anyone can introduce themselves, he interrupts his own question, pointing a finger. “I know the ladies!”

Lesca actually smirks. Taglia recognizing her directly, while refusing to acknowledge the men, is a victory she is willing to savor, even if she has to share the pedestal with Maven.

Hearing the name, Leon shoves his body to the front, standing upright. “So you are the guy. I have a—”

“You know us,” Jarrod cuts in, seizing the window. “You came to Titan City, wrecked havoc, and almost killed me and him!” He points firmly at Friling.

Taglia squeezes his eyes shut, concentrating hard. He snaps them open with a bright, innocent smile. “Oh yeah, right. Sorry for the inconvenience.”

The casual dismissal makes something snap in Leon‘s head. “You are the asshole who called me little boy that day!” he snarls, his voice dripping with venom.

Taglia looks at Leon, his expression perfectly blank. “Sorry mate, don’t remember.”

Leon‘s face violently twitches. If his muscles weren’t already screaming in agony from the griffin attack, he would have charged at him right here and now.

“You know these assholes?” Makisa asks, glancing up at him.

“Yes….. intimately, even,” Lesca purrs, taking a bold step forward. She stares dead into Makisa‘s eyes with a smug, victorious smile, then breaks eye contact to wink directly at Taglia.

Taglia returns it with a slight smirk.

Utterly disgusted, Makisa looks away.

Refusing to be ignored, Leon pushes forward even more, pointing toward the open field. “Taglia…… you and me. One on one, let’s go.”

Maven steps up to hold Leon back. Completely ignoring his anger and his desire for a deathmatch, Taglia looks right past him towards her.

“Hey Mave, how are you doing?”

Maven offers him a quiet, warm smile. “Better now that I have seen you here.”

The simple exchange instantly spikes the atmospheric pressure. Lesca glares, deeply jealous of Maven‘s established history with him.

Leon seethes, humiliated that his mentor respects this lethargic stranger more than his own raw potential.

The combined, heavy presence of Leon and Lesca pushes back against Taglia‘s suffocating lid.

Seeing the powder keg about to ignite again, Friling finally steps in.

“You said something about sitting and eating. Let’s do that first…. and Leon, you need to heal before your announced duel.”

Taglia claps his hands together once. “Fine then, let’s go. I know a great place.”

Without another word, Taglia bends down, casually hoists the two massive, stallion-sized griffin corpses over his shoulders like sacks of potatoes, and begins walking west.

Makisa lingers for a heartbeat. Her eyes sweep the group, silently calculating if any of them are stupid enough to strike Taglia‘s back. Finding no immediate threat, she falls into step at his right side.

Refusing to be relegated to second place, Lesca immediately hops into step on his left.

Leon grunts in pain, stubbornly marching after them because he knows following him is the only way he will ever get his fight. Maven walks quietly at his side.

Left standing in the ruined grass, Jarrod and Friling exchange a long, exhausted look that clearly says, God help us all.

“This is going to be good,” Jarrod mutters to himself as they begin the march.

“Anything but that,” Friling replies.