Maggie walked closer to my side as he summoned his Spirit. I might have been enthusiastic about fighting the man but I wasn’t about his damn fire spirit.
She didn’t look at and certainly didn’t seem to care about my astonishing accomplishnts from her, I’d be damned if I said I was expecting any complints from her.
Her deathly crimson eyes locked onto the Fire Lord and stayed there, and the faintest trace of a strange glee of interest crossed her face.
’Oh? She’s excited?’
"About ti," I muttered, stepping back.
"Shut up."
Her habit billowed as she walked past , each step asured and unhurried, and I noticed that the heat from the Fire Lord, the sa heat that had been cooking the air in my lungs, parted around her like water around stone. The white flas that clung to the edges of her habit pushed it away.
The Fire Lord turned its massive head downward to regard her. It was easily three storey tall, its body a structure of molten muscle wrapped in flas so deep red they bled into black at the edges. A crown of fire sat above its brow, flickering with a geotric precision that looked less like combustion and more like architecture. Heat distortion rippled the air around it in layers, and where its gaze fell, the ground began to glow.
There was presence to it. And an authority that existed in old things, things that had burned since before cities had nas.
And walking toward it was a petite-thick woman in a nun’s habit.
The summoner watched from behind his spirit with an expression I couldn’t read. Whether he expected the Fire Lord to end this quickly or whether he was testing what we had, I didn’t know. Either way, he didn’t speak.
Neither did Maggie.
Ifrit moved first.
Its arm swept down in a crescent arc, trailing a wall of crimson fire that turned the air opaque. The motion was deceptively fast for sothing that large. The heat alone should have driven a person to their knees.
Maggie sidestepped it like soone avoiding a puddle.
She didn’t leap, didn’t roll. Instead she shifted her weight two inches to the left, and the burning arm passed close enough to singe the trailing edge of her habit. The displaced air snapped the fabric like a flag in a gale.
Ifrit followed with the other arm, a backhanded sweep that ca lower, faster. Maggie ducked under it without dropping her posture, her spine bending at an angle that shouldn’t have been comfortable, and ca up on the inside of the Fire Lord’s reach.
She drove her fist into its forearm.
The sound was wrong. It wasn’t a thud or a crack. It was sothing heavier, denser, like a hamr striking an anvil wrapped in cloth. A shockwave rippled outward from the impact point and scattered the surrounding flas. Ifrit’s arm jerked. Not much. A few inches, maybe. But the Fire Lord’s burning eyes widened.
It had felt that.
The Pyre Saint had just punched a Heroic Spirit in the arm and made it flinch.
’That’s my girl.’
Ifrit roared. The sound was less a voice and more a pressure event, a detonation of heat and noise that flattened the grass in a thirty-ter radius and split the bark of every tree still standing nearby. I took another step back, shielding my face with my forearm.
The Fire Lord brought both fists down in a hamring strike aid directly at where Maggie stood. The ground detonated. Stone and soil erupted upward in a plu of superheated debris, and for a mont Maggie was gone, swallowed by dust and fire.
Then she was on its shoulder.
I hadn’t seen her move. One second she was in the crater, and the next she was perched on the Fire Lord’s collarbone like she’d been standing there all along. She drove her elbow down into the junction where its neck t its torso, and the spirit staggered.
A building-sized elental lurching sideways from a hit delivered by soone who weighed a hundred and thirty pounds soaking wet.
Ifrit swiped at her. She dropped from its shoulder, caught the edge of its arm as it passed, and swung herself under it like a gymnast on a bar. Her feet connected with its ribs in a double kick that sent another shockwave rippling through its body. Where her feet struck, the deep red flas flickered and died for an instant, leaving dull black patches on the spirit’s torso.
’Insane!’
She was hurting it. Her size against its size made this almost unbelievable!
The Fire Lord seed to realize this at the sa ti I did. Its attacks shifted from broad sweeps to tighter, more focused strikes. Fists instead of arms. Direct punches instead of arcing slashes. Faster and more deliberate. Like a fighter adjusting to an opponent who’d gotten inside their guard.
And the flas intensified. The deep red darkened further, the black edges spreading until the heat rolling off the spirit crossed from painful into sothing else entirely. The iron fence beside us began to glow. The nearest lamppost sagged at its base, the tal softening.
Maggie blocked a downward strike with crossed forearms and the impact drove her into the ground to her ankles. Cracks radiated outward from where she stood, the pavent splitting in jagged lines.
Her habit tore at the shoulders. For the first ti, she slid backward, her feet carving trenches through the dirt.
Ifrit pressed the advantage. A knee ca up, and Maggie caught it with both palms. The collision produced a sound like a cannon shot, and the shockwave blew out every window on the Company building’s ground floor. Glass rained down across the courtyard.
The Fire Lord was strong. Genuinely, viciously strong. And it was getting more aggressive, more precise, channeling the full weight of its fla body into each strike. Maggie was blocking, deflecting, redirecting, but she was being pushed back. Step by step, the Fire Lord was gaining ground, and the temperature was climbing toward sothing that would beco a problem for everything within a hundred ters.
Including .
Then Maggie stopped retreating.
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