Chapter 543 - Vs. Virillius Augustus IV

  The planet cracked as they kicked off its surface. Unable to handle the pressure, its crust completely broke apart, crumbling to pieces as they pumped their feet against it. Flapping their wings, they beat the air away with such incredible force that they left vacuums in their wake—not that any such phenomenon was able to manifest before their weapons clashed.

  The very first strike was reminiscent of all the ones that had preceded it. They bashed their weapons together, sword against spear, both held in a two-handed grip. Though heavy enough to form a crater around them, the impact was silent. There was no air to carry the sound.

  But that wasn’t to say that the clash was devoid of feedback.

  They felt the vibrations within their bodies; the raw energy coursed through their frames and into the ground, mangling the planet’s mantle.

  Perhaps sound might have returned to their world had it been a one-off exchange. At the very least, they would have heard the moment that the air returned to fill the void. But it was given no such opportunity.

  Claire hooked her sword on the back of her father’s speartip and yanked his weapon towards the ground, but he dislodged it before she could step on its edge and twisted the blade into a rising slash. Instantly sidestepping the lightspeed counter, Claire used one foot as a pivot and spun into a heavy, spinning blow.

  Virillius surely would have lowered his shieldlance and deflected the attack had they still been vying for first blood, but with it already drawn, he saw no reason to shy away from damage.

  He ignored the blade. Allowing it to dig into his side, he took the opportunity to bash his shieldlance straight into her shoulder.

  It was a standard exchange of blows—an all too common sight in a duel between two Cadrian warriors.

  And as was the norm in such a case, both hits proved too shallow.

  Claire had managed to cut through the thinnest part of the plating under Virillius’ shoulder and dig her blade into his ribs, but all she drew was a faint line of crimson that slowly dripped down the edge of her sword.

  Virillius’ attack was likewise ineffective. Being made of a thin, breathable leather, he’d expected her armour to be easier to shred than his own, but his shieldlance had barely gone any deeper than her sword. The nigh indestructible material that made up her bones had certainly played a role, but even then, he was expecting to do more damage. His lance would have slid down her body and ripped open her chest had her leather not done such a good job of catching and stopping his blade.

  He still wound up dealing more damage than he’d received, not that it mattered. Both fighters had already healed and transitioned into another set of swings.

  Claire spun a full 360 degrees. Tearing her greatsword from her father’s breast, she aimed a rising slash straight into his chin. Boosted by a powerful leap, the second attack was far heavier than the first.

  Virillius noted the attack but paid it no mind. He simply raised his shieldlance and bashed it into her shoulder again. Like hers, his second blow was much stronger. But while his daughter bolstered her physical strength, Virillius focused more on his magic.

  He pumped his shieldlance full of mana as he brought it down upon her. He did not cast any spell in particular and simply focused his power into the gem that was his weapon’s heart. From there, the energy radiated throughout its artificial circuits and multiplied its systemic damage while simultaneously becoming harder and heavier.

  The result was an even meatier strike than before—a crushing smash that would have destroyed anyone with an ordinary set of bones. Backed by yet another increase in speed, it landed directly on target and dislocated her shoulder right before she struck him.

  He knew that she had something up her sleeve. That much was obvious from the fact that she didn’t pull back. He knew that she was fast enough to process everything that was going on and smart enough not to commit to a flawed plan.

  And sure enough, she worked a spell of her own. But rather than casting it on him, as he thought she might, she chose to manipulate herself.

  She forced her arm back on its prior path and even bolstered its speed for good measure. Raising his brow at the spell’s use, Virillius moved his head to evade, but she followed his trajectory and buried her sword into his jaw. Without any armour to soften the blow, the weapon pierced straight through his mouthparts and nearly tore open his skull.

  She stepped closer and tried to press the attack, but he kicked her in the gut. Though the hoof didn’t quite pierce her flesh, it sank deep enough into her stomach that he felt his foot against her spine. Had she any guts, they surely would have ruptured as she was sent flying away.

  Again, neither of their wounds lasted for any more than a moment. They were both fully fixed the moment that they broke contact.

  Claire spent a few moments tumbling backwards, but quickly righted herself with a flap of the wings and closed the distance again. She led with a stab aimed right for his stomach. The mana radiating from her body was formed into a wedge as she charged—a giant mass that extended from the tip of her blade all the way past her wings. It wasn’t just raw, unprocessed magic, but some sort of explicit spell. It was difficult to tell what it did at a glance. She’d hid the magic circle, and Virillius couldn’t be bothered to scrutinize the flow. It only contained about a million points of mana; it wasn’t strong enough to merit an investigation.

  Moving to parry it with his shieldlance, he filled his spear with magic anew and drove it towards her chest. It was perfectly on track to run her through; her own momentum guaranteed that it would be driven into her flesh, but her body lurched unnaturally just before impact. She suddenly shifted to the right, despite not moving her wings or tail, and rotated right past both his weapons.

  Virillius darted in the opposite direction and avoided getting run through, but her blade still clipped his flank, tore through his armour, and left a bite-sized hole. The surrounding flesh and armour was frozen solid, encased in a block of true ice that prevented its immediate regeneration.

  He countered by smashing a shieldlance into her back. She blocked it with one of the many swords floating in the space behind her, but he powered through, smashed the blade against her spine, and sent her crashing into the ground. The spike was backed with so much force that she broke through the planet’s crust and crashed into its upper mantle.

  The world shook.

  The shockwave rumbled through the planet, causing avalanches and tsunamis throughout.

  The continental plate was cracked right in half. And all the rock in Claire’s vicinity, at least, was melted by the heat created by the resulting friction. But that didn’t stop her for a moment. She rose straight through the broken earth, punching another hole in the crust as she rose into the sky.

  Virillius took the opportunity to remove his frozen flesh. Grabbing it in his fist, he tore the whole icy chunk out from within and watched as both his body and armour regrew.

  The damage was far deeper than it looked. Her spell had started burrowing its way into his body and freezing more and more of his internals, using his own mana as fuel. It was a nasty trick, but seeing it once was enough to tip him off; he was already thinking about how he could see its bite tempered by his magic.

  Claire had been similarly restored. She’d fixed her dislocated vertebrae with a crack and healed her bruised flesh in the blink of an eye. Her armour, like his, had immediately regenerated, despite having been torn away by the force of the blow.

  It almost looked like they were still at square one—like nothing had changed, even after bolstering their speed and strength a thousandfold.

  At least, that was Virillius’ false impression.

  Brandishing Boris overhead, Claire revealed that her weapon was the one thing to have changed in the trade. He had not explicitly transformed or taken on another shape. Rather, the bottom of the lizard-shaped illustration running along his blade had started to glow with a faint blue light. Completely oblivious to the mechanism or its meaning, her father simply raised his weapon towards her once more as she stretched her wings in the sky above him.

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  He kicked into a charge, flapping his wings as he rose to meet her while she broke into a falling vertical slash.

  By all means, they should have clashed head-on. But again, Claire shifted her body with her vectors. Dodging his two-pronged stab, she delivered a blow that cut straight across his chest. Though Boris had only reached ten percent empowerment, the blow was an order of magnitude heavier than any she’d launched before it. Her sword ate straight through his armour, shattered his ribcage, and butchered half the organs hidden within it, all while accumulating another chunk of charge.

  Alas, it wasn’t quite the clean hit she’d wanted.

  Not relenting for a moment, her father kicked her in the stomach and drilled his spear into her back while she was mid-followthrough. The weapon’s tip passed right between her ribs and skewered her heart on its way out through the other side of her body.

  Lifting the polearm, and Claire with it, he raised it to just the right height to strike with his shieldlance.

  Another forced trade.

  They smashed their weapons straight into each other’s necks. But neither drew any blood. Virillius had formed a shield with the fluid that had just flowed from his chest.

  And copying him, Claire coated her skin with a layer of true ice.

  Almost not seeming to mind the fact that she was impaled, Claire struck again, putting more force behind the blow as she focused her efforts on breaking his shield. It was not a desperate measure, but a controlled one. She could see his defense cracking as she applied more pressure. A few moments would be all it took for her to break it.

  She held all the cards.

  Or at least, that would have been the case had Virillius not activated one of his signature abilities.

  There was no obvious tell.

  Only the confidence in his eyes.

  Still, Claire knew. Even with her bones made of true ice, he could easily cut straight through.

  But she wasn’t afraid.

  Raising her greatsword overhead, she focused her magic into her arms and brought her weapon down upon his skull.

  Both their heads were split open in tandem.

  His grey matter went everywhere as she crushed his face. While hers was simply split right in half.

  It should have been a fatality on both accounts, but neither fighter was even the slightest bit affected. They only continued to swing their weapons, mangling each other’s bodies with every subsequent attack. It wasn’t like they’d completely forgone defense. They still parried when it was convenient, just not when it took away from their ability to deliver a blow.

  With the focus on all-out offense, something eventually had to give.

  And it wasn’t one of the combatants.

  It was the planet.

  The increased weight that backed each blow had caused the vacuum around them to swell to the size of the continent. The air tried to rush back in, but it was repelled each time. With the pressure mounting and nowhere left to go, it eventually broke free of the atmosphere and rushed out into space.

  A result that the system could and would not allow.

  One of its protections kicked in and crafted a barrier that encapsulated the world. All of the air within it was suddenly and instantly redistributed. None of the expected side effects manifested; the system put a hold on everything to ensure that liveable conditions would be immediately restored. And Claire and Virillius were not exempt. Frozen in time, they watched as the world around them reset. The forests sprang up from nothing, the mountain was reconstructed, and even all critters whose lives they’d taken were immediately and losslessly restored.

  With that complete, the protection module targeted the pair responsible for causing the mess. It began by binding and restricting them—an effect that manifested as a pair of golden shackles around their wrists. And then, they were teleported, thrown to opposite sides of the planet.

  Claire was placed in the middle of a desert. There was nothing but sand all around, dusty, billowing dunes that stretched as far as the eye could see.

  But she didn’t mind at all.

  In fact, a soft smile appeared on her face as she flexed her forearms and shattered her bindings. A light flap of the wings took her up in the air, above the waterless wasteland, where she took a deep breath and filled her lungs.

  Her body crackled.

  Mana arced off of her body, dancing in the wind as she focused it within her otherwise vestigial lungs.

  She knew exactly where her father was.

  He’d unleashed enough of his power, over the course of the battle, that it was impossible not to trace him, even when he was ten thousand kilometers away.

  She waited for the moment that he kicked off before activating her spell and unleashing her breath.

  It started as a thin beam, a narrow string of blue and white mana. But unable to be contained in such a small space, it grew into a massive blast as it travelled. So bright was the laser that it turned the desert into a blinding mirror. But it was only for the briefest of moments. Because the biome was soon swallowed by the blast and completely erased.

  Claire hadn’t aimed towards the horizon.

  Her breath was directed through the planet, at the place where her math had claimed that her father would meet the light of destruction.

  Nothing slowed her breath.

  The crust.

  The mantle.

  The outer core.

  Everything in her path was consigned to oblivion.

  It was a straight shot to her target.

  At first, the projectile sat just shy of the speed of light. But it accelerated with each passing moment, every extra bit of mana further fed and enhanced the attack. A millionth of a second later, and it was superluminal.

  The world almost seemed to break.

  It almost looked like the breath was moving both to and away from Claire’s mouth at once.

  And at the same time, the beam expanded, exploding into a visible, cone-shaped flash.

  The light was clearly visible.

  Even though that wasn’t where the breath attack was.

  It was much further ahead of any of its visible effects; it’d already arrived at her father by the time it’d seemingly crossed the planet’s midpoint.

  And yet, he parried it with ease.

  He swatted it with his shieldlance and diverted its path. He’d mounted a perfect defense, even though he was seemingly swallowed by the beam that followed.

  Just as she’d known he would.

  She opened a pair of portals, one in the breath attack’s path, and another two feet in front of her father.

  They were on course to collide.

  He was moving so quickly that he didn’t have time to react.

  But he didn’t need to.

  For the first time since he kicked off, he changed his trajectory with a flap of the wings and avoided the magical gate with ease. It was only after he dodged it that he noted its presence and confirmed his prediction.

  Indeed, Claire wasn’t the only one capable of reading ahead.

  Having seen the portals and their effects already, Virillius had expected both from before he even took off. He hadn’t known of the breath attack’s details, but he figured she would use something, and the sheer amount of mana used in the draconic spell’s activation had immediately clued him in.

  Determining the attack’s speed was as easy as decompiling her magic, which the long wind-up had given him more than enough time to do.

  From there, it was a simple matter of execution.

  But while Cadria’s strongest warrior was completely unperturbed, the same could not be said for the world described as Eudysseus.

  A gash ran down the planet’s side. The gaping wound was a hundred kilometres wide and long enough to span half the celestial body’s circumference. And at least for a moment, a solid half second, that was how it remained. But the spell wasn’t quite over. Because Claire’s breath still worked the same way it always did—the initial blast was never meant to do much in the way of damage.

  Ice spread from the wound.

  It crept across the forests, the deserts, and the seas alike, swallowing everything in its path without a hint of mercy. Not even the atmosphere could escape the chilling finale.

  The planet fought back.

  Engaging the system, it drained the heat from its broken core and brought it all to the surface in a desperate, fruitless attempt to fight back the ice age. But even its rising magma was brought to absolute zero, seized by the impending apocalypse.

  And then, as Claire snapped her fingers, Eudysseus was turned to dust.

  It was then and there that the Cadrians came to truly understand the gravity of Flitzegarde’s claim.

  Because the breath was just one attack.

  And at least compared to the follow-ups that both fighters prepared, it may as well have well been a sneeze.