Leon stood at the edge of the gathered crowd, arms folded, watching the combatants with the expression of a man trying to understand how he'd ended up here.
General Goren - or Marshal Goren, or Commander Goren, Leon couldn't remember the exact title and had stopped trying - was warming up with the kind of focused intensity that suggested this wasn't a man who took challenges lightly. His sword cut practiced arcs through the morning air, each swing precise, controlled. He moved well. Leon could see that much, even without any meaningful frame of reference for what that actually looked like in this world's terms.
He was tall. Broad-shouldered. His Solmaran armor had been set aside for the bout but the physique beneath it spoke clearly enough. Campaign-scarred hands. A jaw set with the particular determination of someone who'd won enough fights to be genuinely dangerous.
He probably had a dozen worthy victories to his name.
Leon almost felt bad for him.
The Sword Saint stood on the opposite side of the marked circle, her armor removed down to a simple fitted underlayer, sword still sheathed at her hip. She hadn't bothered to warm up. Hadn't stretched. Hadn't even adjusted her stance from the relaxed, neutral posture she wore like a second skin.
The helmet remained, as always.
Leon had long since stopped hoping to see her face. The helmet was as much a part of her as the sword. He'd learned to read her through posture and movement alone, and right now both communicated exactly nothing. She was as unreadable as carved stone.
He still couldn't quite believe they were doing this.
The whole thing had started, as most diplomatic incidents did, with someone saying something polite that wasn't polite at all.
The Solmaran general - marshal - whatever - had stood before the assembled royal court three days ago with the bearing of a man delivering a compliment and the tone of a man delivering a challenge. He'd said something to the effect of: he had no doubt whatsoever about the High Archmage's legendary power, absolutely no doubt, tremendous respect for the stories - but the other stories, the ones Aldoria seemed so eager to circulate about this mysterious swordswoman in their midst, he simply couldn't reconcile those with anything he'd personally witnessed.
He'd worded it so carefully. So diplomatically.
It was, Leon had thought at the time, one of the most arrogant things he'd ever heard delivered with a straight face.
The court had no grounds to refuse the challenge. The Sword Saint had accepted without changing her expression.
And now here they were.
A makeshift arena marked out in the grass, just inside the gate's threshold where the ground was firm and the light was good. Nearly a thousand in attendance -Aldorian soldiers packed on one side, Solmaran troops on the other, the gap between them charged with the kind of tension that had been building for weeks.
That was the real problem, Leon knew. Not this bout specifically. The weeks of waiting with no answers had done what waiting always did to large groups of armed people: fermented the unease into something sharper. Brawls had broken out between soldiers. Arguments over command authority, over supply distribution, over everything. The Solmarans were allies, not subordinates, and they'd begun behaving accordingly - challenging Aldorian decisions, testing the edges of the joint command arrangement.
This bout was just the most visible symptom.
Leon watched the general settle into his opening stance and had to admit, reluctantly, that the man looked formidable. The way he planted his feet. The way he held the sword - not rigidly, but with that loose readiness that meant he'd learned to absorb impact rather than resist it.
For just a moment, one brief, entirely unreasonable moment, Leon found himself thinking-
What if she loses?
The referee called the start.
The general began to pace the circle's edge. Slow, deliberate. His sword swung in a rhythm that was part intimidation, part calculation, reading angles, reading distance, reading the opponent. A controlled opening. No recklessness.
Smart, Leon thought.
The Sword Saint didn't move.
The general's pacing tightened. He was finding his moment, Leon could see it - the slight change in the rhythm of his steps, the almost imperceptible shift in his weight-
Then the sword was in the grass.
Then the general was in the ground.
Not a dent, exactly. More like the earth had embraced him. He lay there, face down, in a depression that definitely hadn't existed three seconds ago.
Leon hadn't seen it happen.
He was certain he'd been watching. But between the moment the general began his strike and the moment he was flat down, there was simply nothing. No movement he could track.
Just: standing. Then: not standing.
Around him, the same silence had fallen over everyone else.
No one spoke. No one cheered. The Solmaran soldiers stared at their general with expressions caught between disbelief and the dawning, uncomfortable realization that they'd perhaps miscalculated something significant.
The referee stood frozen, mouth slightly open.
One second passed. Two. Five.
Leon counted. Nine. Ten.
"Match to the Sword Saint," the referee finally announced, as if he'd needed those ten seconds to process what his eyes were telling him.
The Aldorian side erupted.
The sound hit like a wave - soldiers who'd spent weeks losing ground in every argument suddenly finding their voice all at once, cheering with the particular enthusiasm of people who'd just been vindicated. The Solmaran side stayed quiet.
The general had been helped to his feet by his aides, apparently uninjured beyond dignity. He was staring at the Sword Saint with an expression Leon recognized - he'd worn it himself, the first time he'd properly understood what she was capable of. It was the expression of someone fundamentally revising their model of the world.
The Sword Saint hadn't sheathed her sword.
Because she'd never drawn it.
Leon sighed. Rubbed the bridge of his nose. He didn't know what he'd been worried about. He genuinely, in retrospect, had no idea what he'd expected.
He turned away from the crowd, giving the celebration a moment to run its course before the inevitable diplomatic smoothing-over would need to begin-
Something caught his eye.
A disturbance in the distance. Far across the plains, toward the horizon where the shapes of distant landforms blurred into sky.
Clouds moving.
Not the natural drift of weather. Something moving through them. Something parting the cloud cover with the casual authority of an object so large the atmosphere simply yielded before it.
Leon's breath stopped.
He knew that silhouette.
The camp cleared in seconds.
He'd never seen anything empty that fast. Soldiers who'd been celebrating, generals conferring, mages taking readings - all of it dissolved instantaneously into a single unified response: get to the gate, get through the gate, get back to the swamp, get out.
It was almost impressive, in a horrible way. A thousand people achieving consensus in under three seconds.
Leon couldn't keep up with it. People streamed past him - Aldorian soldiers, Solmaran troops, camp followers, commanders - all moving with the same singular focus. No one was stopping to give orders. No one needed to. The orders were self-evident.
Leave.
Within twenty seconds, he was alone.
The entire camp, the entire sprawling infrastructure of tents and platforms and supply depots and command posts, completely vacated. Even the horses were gone. He could see the last of the Solmaran cavalry disappearing through the gate's threshold in a thundering mass.
Leon stood in the silence they left behind.
The clouds continued to part in the distance. Growing closer. The shape becoming clearer - not all at once, not as a sudden revelation, but in pieces. A wing there. The vast curve of a neck. The suggestion of something indescribably large.
He should run.
Every rational thought he possessed was in complete agreement on this point. Run. Follow the others. Get through the gate, get back to the swamp, get behind the towers with eighty thousand other people who'd collectively had the good sense to not stand alone in an open field waiting for a mountain to arrive.
He didn't run.
He couldn't have explained why, not with any precision. Something kept him there. Not courage - he was reasonably certain it wasn't courage, because his hands were shaking and his heart was attempting to exit his ribcage.
Maybe it was the memory. That moment, weeks ago, when the head had descended through the clouds and those amber eyes had swept across the camp and the dragon had-
Curious. Visitors?
And he'd said nothing.
Leon turned around slowly.
The dragon was close enough now that he could see the shape of it properly. The impossible scope of it. Those jagged horns thrust forward like spears, each one scarred and darkened at the tips. The scales, ancient beyond reckoning.
Getting closer.
The ground had started to tremble faintly.
Leon stood in the middle of a field that suddenly seemed very small, and made himself stay.
His voice, when he finally found it, came out steadier than he had any right to expect.
"Alright," Leon said quietly, to himself, to the empty camp, to the approaching shape that was currently blocking out a meaningful portion of the horizon.
"Let's try this again."