The battlefield was a pandemonium of sounds and sensations attacking every sense. The predominant smell now was no longer of wet earth, but of burnt gunpowder, flesh charred by fire attacks, and the metallic, sweet odor of blood beginning to stain the mud. Cries of pain, shouted orders, and the hiss of magical projectiles filled the air, drowning out even the sound of the relentless rain. The sight was one of absolute chaos: shadows clashing, orange flames against earthen walls that rose and collapsed, bluish ice rays crossing the space.

  At the center of this storm, his shirt drenched and face smeared with soot and sweat, Pedro felt the original plan disintegrate along with the defensive line. They were being crushed by the brute force of numbers.

  Pedro filled his lungs with the acrid, icy air and roared with a force that surprised even himself, a thunderous voice cutting through the noise:

  "PLAN B! NOW! CONTROLLED RETREAT!"

  The blind panic beginning to grip some was momentarily contained by an instinct for obedience.

  What followed wasn't a rout. It was a macabre, perfectly choreographed dance, where every wrong step meant death.

  The men and women with muskets, many now with burned or cut arms, executed the first part. Instead of reloading, they raised their weapons one last time. A final, less coordinated, more desperate volley exploded from the Republican line.

  POW! POW! POW!

  The shots weren't as effective as before, but they made the front attackers dive to the ground or seek cover, creating a brief respite.

  "FALL BACK! THREE BY THREE!" Corporal Arlindo shouted, his voice hoarse.

  They began to move. Not a run, but a backward retreat in small groups, one covering the other, dragging the more seriously wounded. It was slow. It was agonizing.

  Meanwhile, Tainá and the other earth adepts, Iara and Joana, their faces contorted with effort and the pain of seeing Lívia taken, performed their role. With groans of exhaustion, they slammed their staffs into the ground. Not to raise a great wall, but to create obstacles. Small one-meter-high walls rose behind the retreating groups, sudden holes opened in the path of the most eager pursuers. It wasn't to stop the advance, but to delay it, to channel it.

  But the price was high. While they concentrated their magic on the ground behind their companions, they were exposed. An arrow lodged in Joana's leg, making her fall with a scream. Iara was hit in the shoulder by an ice shard she couldn't dodge. Tainá, helping to drag a young female soldier with a charred arm, saw a fireball coming her way. She raised one last slab of earth to protect herself, but the impact threw her back, wrenching the staff from her hands.

  The retreat was a constant hemorrhage. Every meter gained toward Pedro, who remained firm in his position on the large stone near the creek, was paid for with sweat, blood, and pain.

  Pedro watched, his face a mask of ice colder than his magic. He calculated, waited. When he saw that most of the survivors—perhaps two-thirds of those who started—were within a perimeter of twenty meters around him, and that the wave of attackers, though slow, was about to swallow the last stragglers, he acted.

  "TO ME!" he shouted, raising the ice dagger already pulsing with a breathless blue light.

  He then knelt, and with a movement that seemed to cost a part of his soul, drove the blade deep into the soaked ground at his feet.

  It wasn't a simple strike. It was an injection.

  A complex, iridescent pattern of frost, like a spiderweb made of crystal, exploded from the blade and spread across the ground with terrifying speed. It didn't cover his allies. It skirted them, passing between their feet, a cold, harmless line. Its target was the ground ahead, the soil where the first wave of bandeirantes and mercenaries were treading triumphantly.

  The soil, already drenched by the rain and water from the nearby creek, transformed instantly into a trap. A thin layer of black ice, almost invisible, formed over puddles and muddy areas. Under the attackers' feet, the seemingly solid earth became a deadly slide. Men running with raised machetes slipped and fell with dull thuds, arms and legs twisting at unnatural angles. Others, more cautious, stopped short, creating a jam of bodies and confusion in the enemy front line.

  It was the signal Isabela, the Water Adept, had been waiting for. She was exhausted, the rain dome had failed, her magical umbrella weighed like an anchor in her trembling hands. But she still had one last trick. A trick taught in conjunction with Pedro.

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  Taking a deep breath, she closed her eyes and began to spin the open umbrella horizontally, like a giant top. The blue gem in the handle glowed with an intense, breathless light. The rainwater falling around her, the puddles on the ground, even the moisture in the air, seemed to respond. Droplets coalesced, forming currents. Suddenly, from the nearby creek, a thick jet of water was pulled as if by a magnet, joining the rain.

  She didn't create a simple jet. She created a whirlpool. A roaring, spinning column of muddy water, full of torn branches and leaves, about two meters in diameter. With a final cry of effort, she directed the umbrella forward, launching the aquatic whirlpool at the group of attackers trying to get back up on Pedro's slippery ice.

  The impact wasn't brute force, but coverage. The whirlpool exploded over them like a dirty wave, soaking dozens of men, drenching their clothes, their weapons, their faces.

  And then Pedro, still with the dagger driven into the ground, clenched his fist around the hilt.

  The ice he had injected into the soil, which had created the slippery trap, reactivated. But this time, not to freeze the ground. To rise.

  The intense cold, contained and concentrated, leaped from the soaked ground to the water now covering the attackers. A dry, collective crack, like a thousand bones breaking at once, echoed across the field. In less than three seconds, where there had been soaked, confused men, there was now a field of grotesque ice statues. Men frozen mid-step, in gestures of attack, in attempts to rise. The late afternoon light, refracted through the dirty ice, created a surreal and horribly beautiful scene of amber and shadows.

  A brief, profound silence fell over that part of the battlefield. The roar of the fight continued on the flanks, but at the heart of the assault, there was a pause. Breath held in Republican lungs, disbelief in those of the attackers coming from behind.

  It was in this charged silence that the shadow cast by the very stone Pedro leaned against, elongated by the low sun that pierced the clouds for an instant, seemed to move. Not a movement of light, but of the darkness itself. It thickened, gained volume. A human form began to detach from it, silent as death, a short, matte knife appearing first, aimed at Pedro's kidneys as he stood with his back turned, panting and drained from the double ice effort.

  Pedro didn't see. He didn't feel.

  But someone saw.

  On a wooded hill about a hundred and fifty meters away, on the other side of the creek, Whisper was lying prone under camouflage of leaves and branches. Rain ran down her waxed cloth hood, but her world had been reduced to the sight circle of the scope mounted on the long barrel of her rifle. The weapon, a monster of dark wood and bluish metal she had carried with such care, was not a musket. It was a sniper rifle, one of the precious items bought from the Church and adapted by Carlos with the church's help. And the scope didn't contain glass, but a Vision gem, of inferior quality to Albuquerque's, but sufficient.

  Her eye was glued to the ocular. She didn't just see the magnified battlefield. The gem, tuned to her intention, projected ghostly lines, possible trajectories, wind and drop calculations only her trained brain could interpret. She had spent the last minutes not shooting randomly, but tracking. Searching for a dark aura, mixed with green, a signature of movement between the shadows. And now, she saw it. Under Pedro's shadow.

  Her finger, covered by a thin, patched glove, was already on the trigger. She didn't think. Adjusted the aim a millimeter, compensated for the moisture in the air, felt the almost imperceptible lateral breeze.

  And pulled.

  CRACK!

  The sound of the sniper rifle's discharge was different from anything else on the battlefield. A dry, loud, authoritative crack that seemed to split the very air for a split second.

  At the rock, the bullet, a heavy, precise sliver of lead, didn't hit the form emerging from the shadow. It hit the shadow itself, at the exact point where the assassin's torso was emerging. The Vision gem had allowed her to see not just the target, but the bullet's trajectory.

  A scream of agony, surprise, and pure rage tore through the silence—a masculine scream of pain. Typhoon, who had probably been in the shadow, fled from there immediately, leaping from shadow to shadow out of the battlefield.

  On the hill, Whisper ejected the smoking cartridge with an automatic motion. A fierce, tired smile appeared on her lips.

  "Take that, you worm," she murmured to herself, her voice hoarse from tension. "Did you really think you'd escape me? Shooting someone in mid-air today was a good warm-up." She looked at the scope almost fondly. "These artifacts are truly devilish; I wonder what kind of wars exist in Carlos's world. And this lens with the Vision gem... it's not just about seeing far. It's seeing where the bullet will go before it even leaves the barrel."

  She swept the field quickly, seeking other targets of opportunity, but her vision was already beginning to blur at the edges. The effort of maintaining the connection with the gem, the extreme concentration... it was taking its toll.

  What a shame I couldn't kill him for good, she thought, a bitter frustration mixing with her relief. But at least he fled. And with that... almost all my mana is gone. A wave of nausea and weakness washed over her, and she had to brace herself more firmly on the ground to avoid fainting. Her work of precision, for today, was done.

  Back on the battlefield, Pedro, who had turned at the sound of the scream and the distant shot, took a deep breath. An intense, almost dizzying relief washed through him. Whisper. She was there. She was covering them.

  But the relief was a flower that withered the moment it bloomed. The silence of the field of ice statues was already being broken.

  With renewed shouts of rage, new bandeirantes, more cautious now, began to skirt the ice block, not over the slippery ground, but around the edges. Among them, fire adepts. Men with smoking gloves and burning eyes advanced. They didn't attack people. They attacked the ice.

  Jets of concentrated, white-hot flame shot from their hands, impeding their ice and water attacks.