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Hector led everyone outside. He would have preferred they not watch, but he supposed there was no helping it. He raised a hand, telling the small crowd of onlookers to wait there at the top of the ramp. He was a bit surprised to see his mother had also come to see. She was probably just bored, he figured. There wasn’t a whole lot to do here after all.

Lynn moved expectedly slow. She didn’t seem to be in much pain, but neither was she her normal, sharp-eyed self.

“H-how are you feeling?” he asked her.

She returned a lazy smirk. “Just don’t ask me to do a backflip yet.”

Whether or not she would participate in tomorrow’s battle had been a point of contention. Lynn said she could still fight if necessary, and when they called the Queen to ask about it, Helen deferred to her husband’s medical opinion. The King felt she was not yet in fighting shape and told her to remain here with everyone.

Hector had mixed feelings about the decision, himself. On the one hand, he certainly would’ve felt better if she was backing him up when the shit went down, and on the other hand, he was glad she would be here to protect everyone else in case something unexpected happened.

He raised a fat iron cylinder out of the ground, as tall as a bus. He left it unstrengthened by his soul and motioned toward it. “Uh--could you cut that in two for me?”

Lynn shrugged. Purple swirled around her, but she didn’t draw her sword. Instead, a violet blade formed on its own and slashed the metal cleanly. The two halves of the cylinder toppled apart, and Hector annihilated them.

He created a second one, then touched it with his hand and applied the strengthening technique. He bid her do the same thing again, and she did so, but this time, the shadow stopped about three-quarters of the way through. Lynn blinked at him, then reapplied the blade horizontally, stronger this time, and it cut cleanly through again.