Reincarnated as an Elf Prince

The blade fell like a guillotine, straight, merciless, impossible to dodge in time.

Lindarion's body moved before his thoughts caught up, divine affinity flooding his limbs in a golden surge. His own sword came up crosswise, steel against obsidian—

—and it didn't matter.

The saint's strike hammered down with such monstrous force that Lindarion's knees buckled. The ground beneath him split in two, cracks racing outward like spiderwebs.

Pain shot up his arms, the tendons in his wrists screaming from the impact. His feet were being driven deeper into the cobblestones with every heartbeat the blade pressed down.

"You resist well," the saint said, voice like the rasp of steel on stone. "But strength alone is meaningless."

Lindarion's answer was a sudden, vicious flare of lightning that wrapped around his blade and crackled up the saint's weapon. The street lit in searing blue—

—but the saint didn't even flinch.

The next instant, Lindarion's sword was gone. Not knocked away—cut apart.

The edges of the astral-forged steel sizzled, fading into smoke as the magic holding it together unraveled.

The saint moved into the opening with terrifying precision, elbow smashing into Lindarion's ribs. Something gave inside him with a dull crack, and the air left his lungs in a strangled gasp.

Before he could recover, the saint's massive gauntlet clamped around his throat and slammed him into the nearest wall. Stone shattered under the impact, dust raining down around them.

Lindarion clawed at the demon's grip, darkness affinity flooding into his hand in a desperate attempt to corrode the armor. Black smoke curled and hissed against the metal, and then simply dispersed, burned away by a pulse of the saint's own aura.

"Your darkness is stronger than most," the saint said evenly, tightening his hold, "but compared to mine, it's nothing."

Lindarion's vision tunneled. Blood pounded in his ears. His fingers twitched, cycling through affinities, fire, ice, lightning, each one flaring briefly before the saint cut them down with a single flash of his blade or pulse of raw will.

Every counter, every strike, smothered before it even began.

And in that moment, Lindarion realized something cold:

This wasn't a fight the saint was straining in.

This was the saint holding back.

—

The saint's grip was an iron vise on his throat, but the moment the demon shifted his stance to drive the sword through Lindarion's chest, Lindarion acted.

Not with a single affinity, with all of them at once.

A surge of ice exploded from his palm, not to harm, but to coat the saint's gauntlet in a slick, frozen layer. Before the frost could shatter under the demon's strength, lightning arced over it, racing through the cracks in the armor to jolt muscles into a fraction-of-a-second hesitation.

It was enough.

Lindarion wrenched free, boots hitting the cobblestones. His lungs drank in air like it was molten fire, every breath sharp against his ribs.

The saint was already moving again, blade sweeping sideways with killing intent, but Lindarion was gone, blurring backward in a burst of astral energy, leaving only a scattering of blood from his torn shoulder.

"You adapt quickly," the saint said, his tone still maddeningly calm. "But adaptation without supremacy… changes nothing."

Lindarion's eyes narrowed. "We'll see."

Fire and darkness flared together in his hands, the flames burning a deep crimson as they drank in the shadows. The resulting blast wasn't meant to be a neat projectile, it was chaos incarnate, a roiling mass of heat and void that tore up half the street as it barreled toward the demon.

The saint didn't dodge. He stepped into it, cutting the attack in half with one vertical swing. But Lindarion was already moving through the smoke, ice forming beneath his boots for momentum as lightning rippled up his sword's new, hastily-forged blade.

Their weapons met with a flash that seared the air.

For the first time, the saint's stance shifted, not from effort, but from genuine reaction. Lindarion pressed harder, weaving affinities in ways that made each strike unpredictable: lightning hidden within the edge of ice, divine light flaring only to blind before a surge of darkness closed in from the flank.

The saint began to parry faster, his blade's song sharper, the rhythm of the fight accelerating until every impact was a detonation.

Lindarion's ribs ached. His breathing burned. His vision blurred. But the faintest, almost imperceptible thing happened—

The saint smiled.

—

The smile lingered on the saint's face, cold, faint, but undeniable.

It was the smile of a predator who had tasted blood and decided the prey might be worth eating after all.

Lindarion tightened his grip on his makeshift blade, ice lacing the hilt to reinforce the structure while lightning crackled beneath the frozen surface.

The mixture stung against his skin, tiny shocks snapping up his forearm, but he welcomed the pain, it was proof that he still held the weapon, that his body hadn't given in yet.

Ashwing, still in his lizard form in Lindarion's pocket, stirred uneasily. He feels it too, Lindarion thought. The weight in the air.

The oppressive rhythm of a fight that had stopped being a contest of speed and strength, and had become something deeper, an unspoken war for dominance.

The saint moved first.

It wasn't a charge, or a lunge, or any of the obvious things Lindarion's instincts screamed to expect. It was a single, almost casual step forward, so slow it might have been mistaken for hesitation, until the space between them folded away in a blink, and the saint's sword was already descending toward his collarbone.

Lindarion's knees bent on instinct, dropping him lower as a wall of darkness erupted from his free hand. It wasn't meant to stop the blow, it was bait. As the saint's blade sliced through the shadow like smoke, Lindarion surged upward, divine light bursting from the cracks in the darkness, blinding for half a heartbeat.

Half a heartbeat was all he needed.

His sword's edge caught the saint across the chest, the ice-blade reinforced with blood affinity to give it a weight that could crush bone. It should have split him open, should have ended this fight, but the saint pivoted at the last instant, letting the blow carve deep into armor instead of flesh.

The clang was deafening. Sparks hissed and died between them.

"You hide skill under chaos," the saint murmured, his voice disturbingly steady. "But chaos without intent is noise."

Lindarion didn't answer. He couldn't. His breathing had already turned ragged, and his ribs throbbed where the earlier strikes had connected. The saint was right about one thing, Lindarion was mixing affinities wildly, burning through them like oil in a storm. The difference was… he intended to burn it all.