As the sun cardinal evaded the night god slashed he felt fear for the amount of destruction it caused. Every hit was able to split the cave. Wiht a constant slashing the sword tore a whole from the cave to the outside world.
Through that, the cardinal manage to last through the battle without much difficulty. First of all, they were not going at it with all their full power. both testing each other power out. By this point, the emperor and Cardinal got an idea of what power they had.
The Cardinal's guess was that the emperor had some kind of power that let him turn his subordinate into a weapon. He came to this conclusion after observing that the emperor not using more power than sending mystic slashes at him. However he could not be sure, the ancient pile of bone might have something up its sleeves. There's no way of reaching this level of power by being dumb.
