However, underestimating any leviathan would be foolish. Under the whirlwind of slashes, Rolan was kept dead long enough for Lao and the other leviathan to return with a gray body. It was slender and beautiful but drained of life
All vitality was gone from Elise's once vivacious visage. She was not dead, but possession by any form of shadow grayed the skin and appeared to hollow out its victims.
She was inert, fully under its control, as Lao threw her down from above the ring of fire. She was little more than a limp ragdoll with glassy eyes. The cool blue in her optics had mixed with black and become pale and empty.
As Lao approached Farron's deformed body, he dragged his beloved behind him, with his claws caught up in her hair and her legs being torn up on the debris on the floor.
Malicious and dark, Lao ordered, "Leave him be, Rolan! Let him recover. He needs to be conscious." From a satchel on his side granted by the empire, he produced a syringe. In it was a nebulous liquid mixed with a powerful drug.
It was designed to freeze the production of certain proteins necessary to interact with magical energies but was only effective for a few minutes, which was supposed to be just long enough to kill the drug's subject.
It was meant to be used when the objective was the death of the opponent, but Lao found another niche use for it here.
As soon as Farron was allowed to breathe again, the several inch long needle pierced his chest and the feeling of ice began to overtake him.
He could feel it spread slowly, each vein individually targeted by the poison and contaminating him with no sign of stopping. He screamed in rage, but then, he realized that Lao's return meant that he had achieved his objective. They found Elise.
He hadn't seen her before, but when he forced himself to regain cognizance of his surroundings, he saw that she was laying only a few feet away.
Fighting the feeling of spreading ice, he tried to rise but was forced into the ground by Lao, whose strength as a Noble Leviathan was far greater than his own. As he desperately tried to use magic, he realized that he couldn't interact with the energies the way he normally would.
It was as if they had gone rogue and became ephemeral and disobedient to his commands. He couldn't call them to himself or circulate them throughout his body.
He had a nascent control over the energies he was in direct contact with, but anything he formed quickly fell apart because nearly all spells had to be carefully engineered to serve a specific purpose, and without the balance from other energies, nothing could be engineered.
It was like trying to build an electronic keyboard but only being able to use the plastic coverings for the wires, the metal for the wires, the plastic coverings for the keyboard itself, and its other components one at a time and then watching whatever you just set up crumble if you weren't constantly touching it.
He could try creating some basic formations, but as the poison spread further, his grasp on his abilities became more and more tenuous.
When he realized that his magical abilities were restricted, he resorted to physical resistance, desperately kicking, wriggling, clawing, and biting, but Lao kept him entirely contained before growing tired of the game.
Just inside the entrance of a shallow cave, Lao threw him against the wall with his clawed left hand and drew a saber with his right before thrusting it through him and the stone behind him, just below the clavicle bone, pinning him to the wall.
But the pain only made Farron pause for a small moment before he renewed his frantic assault.
"Weapon!" Like a bug collector, Lao held out his left hand while keeping Farron against the wall with his right and commanding the others to hand him another pin to restrain the pitiful beetle and keep him secured to the metaphorical pin board.
Rolan took Malik's blade from his corpse and quickly handed it over. With a scream from the subject, another pin was put through him, this one on the other side of the sternum but still just below the clavicle.
With a scream, Farron struggled against the hilts and tried to yank the swords out of the dense stone behind him, but it only exacerbated the wounds as the edges cut further and further through the muscle and impacted his bones.
Elise lay in front of him, seemingly dead, but he couldn't do anything. He couldn't comfort her. He couldn't hold her. Their kiss from last night still lingered on his lips. He knew her loyalty was undying. If she were in his place, she would do anything to protect him, but he was helpless to do anything for her.
He remembered a conversation they had a week before the event, where he told her the truth about what he did in his past life and who he was. He remembered the guilt he felt about deceiving her about who he was before the contest.
He was, put crudely, a loser. He was a rotten individual spurned by society and a man who spurned society in turn. Few vices common to humanity could not be found in him, so he felt that she deserved to know the truth about who he was and what he did to the people in the fire that led him here.
He killed them. All twelve innocent lives were destroyed because of his apathy. Perhaps he didn't kill them directly, but he was the effective cause of their deaths. His inaction was to blame.
But when he revealed who he was, she refused to care, saying, "A rose by any other name is still a rose. Likewise, the man I love is still the man I love regardless of who he was. The essence of something is the same regardless of origin. A gold ring dug out from the trash is worth the same as a gold ring from a jewelry box." Still wearing her apron from their work in the kitchen, she hugged him tightly.
And he cried. He cried like never before and returned the embrace, muttering through his sobs, "Thank you, thank you. Thank you." But when he calmed down and the tears dried, he asked, "Why? Why do you love me so much? I don't understand. Why are you loyal to me? I don't deserve it."
She cooed, "Maybe. Maybe you didn't. But whether you didn't and whether you do are separate questions. I know who you are, and I love you. Who you were is someone else. I don't know him. I just know you."