Two men came rushing from both sides with their swords in a favourable striking position, while the woman charged straight down the centre with her own blade already lifted for a crushing diagonal strike. Behind Aeloria there was only empty ground. Any sane recruit would have stumbled backward to buy even a fraction of a second. But Aeloria was no sane person.
She lunged forward instead.
The three soldiers had coordinated perfectly for the expected retreat. When the cannibal suddenly surged toward them, their entire plan shattered against raw, unpredictable instinct.
Aeloria swung the borrowed sword in a wild, clumsy downward arc at the woman directly in front of her. The female soldier had drilled blade-work for six solid years; surprise alone could not undo that training. She snapped her own weapon up in a crisp parry. Steel rang against steel with a sharp, singing note. The force of the block lifted Aeloria's arms high and sent her stumbling backwards, guard torn wide open.
She never had time to recover.
The two flankers struck at the exact same instant. One practice sword drove toward her exposed neck; the other slashed across toward her unprotected ribs. The neck blow clipped the side of her jaw as she twisted desperately at the last possible heartbeat, pain shot through her face, teeth clacking together hard enough to draw blood. The rib strike landed clean and perfect. All the air blasted from her lungs. The world spun. She crashed face-first into the dirt, sword skittering from numb fingers.
They may be blunt practice swords, but that didn't change the damage it dealt.
Mocking laughter rolled across the training ground like a wave.
"She swings a sword like a blindfolded farmer!"
"All that monster knows how to do is bite, looks like."
Orin stood motionless beside the weapon racks, arms folded and eyes locked on the girl bleeding in the dirt. His face gave away nothing—no disappointment, no satisfaction, only the cold patience of a man waiting for ore to show its true colour in the fire.
No matter how savage she had been in the wilderness, these three had trained with steel since they could walk. The outcome had never been in question.
'Yet Lady Nyxelene herself had sent her with those words. There must be something she saw in her.' Orin thought, expression still unreadable.
The female soldier seized the opening without hesitation. She leapt high, both hands gripping her sword, and drove it downward toward Aeloria's unguarded lower abdomen with enough force to crack ribs and end the fight.
Aeloria rolled at the last possible heartbeat. The blade smashed into the ground exactly where her stomach had been, sending up a spray of dirt.
"She knows how to move, I'll give her that," a nearby female soldier muttered, fingers drumming restlessly on her own sword hilt as she watched Aeloria scramble.
An old veteran with a grey-streaked beard and scars across both cheeks spat to the side and gave a slow, grudging nod. "Put the insults aside for a moment. First time ever touching a sword, three seasoned opponents, and she's still breathing. That's not something just anyone manages."
A few soldiers around him shifted their stance uncomfortably. They felt the same reluctant flicker of respect but would sooner swallow their own tongues than voice it aloud.
Aeloria ducked, twisted, weaved, blocked with desperate, ugly movements that belonged to no school of swordplay ever taught. Every parry came late, every step a half-second behind. She fought only to keep steel away from her skin, nothing more.
Then she felt it.
The throbbing agony in her jaw was already fading.
The crushing pain in her ribs had vanished completely, as though the blows had never landed.
Ever since the night she had eaten her child to survive the wilderness, her body had become something else. Stronger than any woman had a right to be. Faster. Jaws that could shear through flesh and tendon like wet parchment. Wounds that closed almost as quickly as they opened. She had thought the healing was merely fast before; now, under real pressure, she realized it was instant when survival demanded it.
She wore nothing but a thin orange dress that offered no protection at all.
They were padded head to toe in gambeson and steel-reinforced leather.
She had never held a sword until this morning.
They had trained for years.
She was one against three.
But if every wound vanished the moment it was given, the entire scale of the fight had just been rewritten.
Aeloria's eyes narrowed.
She picked her target, the female soldier, smallest frame, lightest armour, and charged straight at her, ignoring the two men completely.
She brought the sword down from overhead with every shred of unnatural strength now consciously flooding her body.
The woman threw her own blade up in a frantic high block.
Steel crashed against steel.
The impact rang out like a blacksmith's hammer striking true on the anvil. Shock raced up the soldier's arms; her knees buckled under the impossible force. She dropped hard to one knee, teeth jarring together, sword trembling violently in shaking hands as the cannibal bore down without mercy.
A ghost of a smile touched Commander Orin's mouth for the briefest instant before it vanished again, as though it had never existed.
"She just overpowered Yoru in pure strength?" a soldier muttered, voice filled with disbelief.
"Is that thing even human?" another whispered, taking an involuntary step back.
"She ate her own child," a third spat, contempt dripping from every word. "I heard her bragging this morning about chewing off a chef's ear. Tell me a normal human can do that."
While Aeloria's blade was still locked against the female soldier's in that brutal contest of strength, the two men saw their opening and struck without hesitation.
One practice sword cracked across her forehead with enough force to split a normal skull.
The other drove forward, viciously aiming to shatter her spine and drop her for good.
Practice swords or not, the blows carried the full weight and intent of seasoned killers.
Aeloria reeled. Blood poured from the gash above her brow, and her back arched in agony. She staggered two steps, vision swimming.
Then, in the space of a single heartbeat, the pain simply disappeared.
The deep cut on her forehead sealed itself shut, leaving only a smear of crimson as evidence. The crushed feeling in her spine faded like smoke.
"What the… it healed?" the soldier who had aimed for her skull breathed, eyes wide, sword still raised.
"Hey, am I seeing this right? That wound just closed on its own?" a younger recruit stammered, pointing with a shaking finger.
Orin's brows drew together the tiniest fraction as he stared at the streak of blood on Aeloria's forehead.
'So that's the queen's interest,' he thought.
Aeloria's lips peeled back in a wide, blood-smeared grin that made half the watching ranks feel suddenly cold.
She charged the female soldier again.
Her strategy was brutally simple: focus everything on one target, reduce the numbers, no matter what it cost her own flesh.
She raised the sword high overhead once more, still the only attack she knew, and brought it down with every ounce of monstrous strength now coursing through her.
This time the woman refused to block. She twisted aside at the last second, whipping her own blade across Aeloria's right knee with a hard crack. Her joint buckled but Aeloria didn't even slow.
The leg healed mid-stride as she kept moving through the pain, her eyes locked on the terrified woman, ignoring the two men already swinging at her exposed sides.
Two more strikes hammered into her back hard enough to cave in a normal ribcage.
She didn't flinch. Didn't even seem to feel them.
The female soldier's courage cracked wide open.
She had never faced anyone who simply did not care what happened to their own body. Every single one of Aeloria's attacks came straight down from above with mindless, murderous intent: split the skull, end it, nothing else mattered.
The woman's mind raced for an answer as she faced the cannibal.
'She heals from everything else, but she still bleeds. Eyes and throat, I doubt those would close in an instant.
And she only ever attacks from overhead. Completely predictable.'
The two men reached the exact same conclusion at the exact same moment.
They had trained together for years. Be it wood, paper or steel, the motion was the same. Killing was killing.
Left soldier: 'As she raises high again, I drive through the third rib gap on her left side, straight to the heart.'
Right soldier: 'As she raises high again, I take the throat.'
They moved like twin wolves closing on wounded prey.
Aeloria lifted the sword high overhead, exactly as they knew she would.
All three soldiers surged forward from perfect killing angles, their blades already in motion.
Halfway through the downward swing, Aeloria simply opened her hands and let the sword fall.
It spun away behind her.
She pivoted hard to her right, straight into the man aiming for her throat.
He saw the feint far too late.
He jerked his sword upward in panic, smashing the heavy hilt into her brow. Fresh blood gushed over her left eye, blinding her instantly.
It didn't matter.
She had already closed the distance.
Her right index finger was already less than an inch from his left eyeball.
"You fell for it," she whispered, voice soft and sweet and utterly insane.
The grin that split her blood-drenched face was the most terrifying thing the man had ever seen in fifteen years of war.