Chapter 541 - Vs. Virillius Augustus II

  The first thing Claire did, after Flitzegarde whisked her away, was raise her ears overhead. Channeling her divinity into the oversized organs, she took in the new world. The goddess had placed them in a wide-open space atop a dormant volcano. The crater, which was about a kilometer across, stood above a jungle that was equal parts eerie and beautiful.

  It was a sparkling verdant carpet filled with trees, shrubs, bushes and grasses. Fungi of all different shapes and sizes sprouted in every dark corner while mosses and lichens slowly crept their way across the forest floor. Insects and small furry critters alike flew through the undergrowth while a rainbow of birds flooded the canopy with colour. Only, none of them were even the slightest bit familiar. The individual trees were tall and thin. Their leaves only grew from their uppermost parts, and their trunks were made of an odd, segmented material made of hundreds of green layers. The insects were far longer and more misshapen than anything she was accustomed to. Most had bodies that spiraled or curled and their bright red shells almost reminded her of the orniferins. But while the insects were certainly curious, none were quite so strange as the critters. The most common species were fuzzy, floating orbs. They had no true limbs or faces, only tiny nubs that protruded from the corners of their bodies. Their air exchange came from their soft-looking protrusions and they ate by smooshing insects straight into their flesh. Watching one such critter revealed that they were consumed in turn by the fuzzy ropes hanging around the canopy. Long and thin, the creatures resembled elongated ferrets, only they too were like the orbs in their lack of explicit faces. Their consumption was done through touch—the furry ropes sucked the balloon-like creatures dry like mosquitos.

  And then, finally, there were the so-called birds.

  It was only really their iridescence, their perching behaviour, and their winged structure that classed them as birds. In reality, they looked more like tiny stone slabs with wings—their bodies would have been dysfunctional without the system's support. And even then, she called them into question. They hunted by dropping out of the sky and plummeting upon whatever it was that they were meant to consume. That, in and of itself, was not entirely unreasonable, but the way that they dropped was nothing short of absurd. Rather than retracting their wings, they shed them, completely purging the body parts and slowly growing them anew following the aerial bombardment. By the system's estimates, it was a process that would take the average individual the better part of a day.

  She couldn't help but feel like Flitzegarde was right.

  Perhaps, there truly was endless entertainment to derive from omnipotent observation.

  It was a comforting thought, albeit one she'd have to save for another time. Lowering her ears, she turned to her father, who had been similarly examining their surroundings.

  That was the moment the bell chimed.

  An obvious, audible mark to the start of the battle.

  And yet, neither fighter immediately engaged. Virillius simply stood his ground, his expression as blank and cold as ever, while Claire flashed a playful smile and raised a loose fist in front of her.

  Taking her sweet time, she slowly, meticulously forged a spear in the standard Cadrian style. It was not made of true ice, but its ordinary counterpart; she had no intention of giving it her all coming straight out of the gate.

  Showmanship certainly played a role in the decision, but it was nowhere near the driving factor that it'd been for so many of the other combatants. Claire simply wanted to make use of everything that she'd learned in the time she'd spent away from home. Because he was likely the only one who she'd be able to test her whole kit against.

  "Are you ready, Father?" She asked the question even knowing the answer. He wasn't just ready, he was itching to fight—excited to see just how much his daughter had grown.

  It was silly, honestly, how she was so blind to it before.

  "I am."

  "Then come."

  They kicked off the ground on the very same beat. Launching from their prior positions, they met in the middle of the ring after no more than a thousandth of a second. She swept her spear diagonally and aimed for his midsection while he delivered a thrust with his.

  Their blades met with a thud, a dull, heavy sound that almost seemed unthinkable for a clash of ice and mithril.

  A second set of trades followed right after. A smash against an upwards sweep, a winding strike parried by a forward step, and a frozen pommel met with an upwards spin. Every exchange was faster than the last, and perhaps more notably, a dozen times heavier; they quickly went from whimsical jabs to heavy strikes that left the observers with their jaws agape.

  The mountain rumbled whenever their weapons met, as if ready to erupt into a tower of fire. Alas, it was not the volcano that first succumbed to the building pressure.

  It was Claire’s icy weapon.

  Cracks ran down its length, spreading like weeds in a garden. Though she’d condensed the ice and bolstered its density, it grew weaker with every exchange, only to snap in half as she raised it to parry an overhead strike.

  Her father’s blade gunned straight for her shoulder. It looked ready to pierce her collar and split her in two.

  So she lazily raised her other hand and caught its neck between her fingers. The ground beneath her gave out; with its force undiverted, her father’s strike had completely broken the mountain’s uppermost layer.

  Claire frowned as she inspected the metal killing tool. Like her own weapon, it was already beyond the point of repair. Covered in cracks and hairline fractures, it was ready to fall apart. And in fact, it did just that when he tried to yank it from her hands. Snapping in half, it became a useless pile of splinters.

  But he didn’t miss a beat.

  He’d already grabbed his shieldlance by the time she seized his spear and aimed it right at her chest. He dug his feet into the broken mountain, worked his hips, and twisted his arm like a drill as he thrust it. But Claire caught its tip between her fingers and stopped it before it could reach her. She didn’t bother coating her digits in any sort of protective material. It was unnecessary; mithril was far too flimsy to pierce her scales.

  Case in point, how the weapon distorted when she squeezed its blade. Her talons left visible dents in the metal, folding in its edges and effectively transforming it into a piece of irreparable garbage.

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  But that, of course, was not enough to stop the man that she had always feared. He snapped the blade’s tip with a flick of the wrist and snaked the rest towards her neck. She was ready. Parrying it with a shieldlance made from a mass of ice, she stepped into his range and elbowed him straight in the chest.

  He caught the blow in his empty hand, but allowed himself to be pushed back. Using the force, he opened up a distance of about ten meters and cracked his neck and shoulders.

  “You seem to be out of weapons,” teased Claire. “Would you like to borrow one of mine?”

  “I am never out of weapons.” He pierced one of his fingers with a nail and swiped the bleeding digit from left to right, leaving a crimson line in the space between them. Glowing bright, it hardened, expanded, and transformed into a halberd. He gripped it in his right hand while tracing his left through the air again. The blood that poured from the open wound became a double-headed battleaxe as long as his body and wide enough to swallow his daughter whole.

  “And here I was hoping we’d fight barehanded.”

  “It would be remiss of me to allow you such an advantage.” His eyes were fixed on her claws. Evidently, he knew that they could grow.

  “Don’t be like that, Father. You’re ruining the fun.” Claire closed the distance as the words left her mouth and struck again before they reached him. The resulting sonic boom completely obfuscated her speech, but she knew that he had understood. After all, he was the one who’d taught her to read lips.

  Fixing the shieldlance in her hands, she’d led with a spinning, diagonal strike. He immediately caught it with his axe and swiped at her with his halberd, but she kicked it away before it reached her and slammed his shoulder with her tail. Unsurprisingly, he took the attack in stride. He neither budged nor flinched as he dug his feet into the mountain and swung his polearm again.

  Forging a hammer in her other hand, Claire matched it with a cleave of her own—a heavy blow with just enough power behind it to completely negate his attack.

  The clouds vanished the moment their weapons met, exploding outwards to form a circle where the sky was nothing but blue. Any unfortunate birds caught in the shockwave were disintegrated, obliterated by the sheer force of the attack—a fate that the armaments themselves had mirrored. Unable to withstand their absurd strength, they detonated on contact, leaving no evidence of their existence beyond the wuthering wind.

  The mountain hardly fared any better. It shook, it trembled, and it cracked apart; broken rocks and shattered boulders tumbled down its sides, uprooting the odd-looking trees and crushing anything unfortunate enough to be caught in the igneous avalanche.

  But neither of the fighters paid it any attention. Claire gripped her shieldlance with both hands and aimed for her father’s neck while he drove his axe towards hers. They both infused their strikes with mana. It was just a scant few points, no more than ten thousand on either side—barely enough for their weapons to leave glowing trails as they arced through the air.

  Red and blue met in an explosion of frost and blood.

  Unable to handle the impact, Virillius’ barding shattered; his helm, crinet, and peytral broke to pieces. Only his crupper was still intact—not because it was sturdier or absorbed less of the shock, but because his daughter kept it together with her vectors so as to avoid the accompanying mental damage.

  The same could not be said for the world around them. The mountain completely gave out. It wasn’t just the caldera that crumbled; a giant slab of rock that spanned about half its width slid down its broken side.

  But neither royal was displaced; both had maintained their positions by spreading their wings. Claire’s were an ethereal, translucent blue, a sparkling gateway into the sky, while Virillius were a glowing vermillion. Unlike his daughter’s, his were perfectly opaque and traditionally centaurian; where she had leathery membranes and jagged hooks, he had a set of brilliant feathers.

  Virillius took the moment to discard his broken armour and throw on a fresh suit. Like his newly formed weapons—he had a bladed bow in one hand and a sharktoothed dagger in the other—the protectors were made of blood. They were thicker and denser than his last set; a deep, rusted colour gave away the blood’s intense compression.

  Claire briefly observed them before crafting a similar set of equipment. She turned her dress into a suit of diamond armour and poured more magic into the weapons that’d appeared in her hands. One was a thick, primitive club shaped like an oversized femur. It was difficult to say exactly what the bone had come from, but its length and reach were about the same as a sword’s. Somehow, it was still less peculiar than her other weapon, which, according to the system, was also technically a club. Anyone with eyes, however, would likely have called it a chair instead. Specifically, it was a chair with four legs and a boxy seat, reminiscent of the one she’d found at the start of her adventure.

  The battle resumed as soon as Virillius raised his bow. He never touched the string, but thousands of arrows erupted from the space around its sight, each as thin as a needle, but long as a spear. Soaring at roughly a thousand times the speed of sound, they crossed the sky in an instant. But they were still too slow. Claire smashed them with her mace, deliberately destroying just one at a time even though they were so closely clumped that she could have easily swatted them by the dozen.

  Virillius closed the distance in the meantime and delivered a strike with his dagger, but Claire parried the weapon with her chair, catching it between two of the seat's pseudo-wooden planks as she yanked it aside.

  The bow's bladed edge followed soon after, but she evaded it with a sidestep and returned a wild swing. It grew ever brighter as it closed in on his flank. There was so much magic that the ice couldn't contain it; had the previous clash not created what was effectively a vacuum, it surely would have left a trail of frost in its wake.

  Twisting his wrist, Virillius countered with his dagger's serrated edge. He too had filled his weapon with mana, but it lacked the mace's outward expression. His blood was a far superior medium to an ordinary piece of ice.

  That was why it shattered the femur on contact.

  The dagger continued towards Claire's collar, but she smashed it away with one of the chair’s legs. Gripping the awkwardly-shaped weapon in both hands, she twisted its backrest towards his chest, only for him to cut it in half with his bow. It was an act that would have readily spelled disaster had she wielded an ordinary weapon. But frankly, with the chair being what it was, the damage had only helped her; it was split into two equally-sized parts, both of which looked just a little more weapon-like than the furniture she’d started with.

  She used them almost exactly like a pair of shortswords—specifically a pair with a set of oversized handguards—and started dancing around him whilst delivering a chain of haphazard blows. He matched them in turn and met each head-on with a magic-laced strike. Every collision tempered her weapons, eventually wearing them down to a shape that matched their apparent use.

  The violent head-to-head was a complete departure from the standard Cadrian style. Neither bothered with anything in the way of prediction and dexterity had gone straight out the window. All they used was violence.

  And it was the mountain that paid the price.

  Just seventy clashes later, and the already half-destroyed landform was gone without a trace.

  And with no more stage to bind them, their strikes grew even longer and heavier.

  Claire was the first to up the ante. Flapping her wings, she twisted her blades into a sliding slash that, even parried, sent her flying past her father. She slammed her feet into the ground, but didn’t grind to a halt until she ploughed through a hundred metres of debris.

  Kicking off, Virillius pressed the attack with a winged charge of his own. Launching another wave of easily-deflected arrows, he crashed his bow straight into her shortswords and bisected them yet again. He’d aimed for her wrists right after, but she reversed her grip on the broken blades, stopped his bow in place, and yanked it right past her.

  She raised a knee towards his face, but he flapped his wings, flipped over her, and lashed out with his dagger, only for a shattered sword to pull his blade downward and open him up to a counter.

  But swinging his bow again, he parried at just the right angle to send himself back into the air.

  A smile crossed both their lips in tandem.

  Technique had finally entered the fray.