Legend of the Empyrean Blacksmith Chapter 145

Chapter 145

CHAPTER 145

WOKEN FROM SLUMBER

A crimson flash of flame erupted momentarily within the chaos as Lino tightly withdrew his breath and grasped at the handle of a short sword . Its metallic sheen vibrated faint red, warmth of flames at its core traversing through its structure into Lino's hand . A familiar feeling assailed him profoundly, a memory of the time where fighting was his everyday reality . A light smile escaped him as his eyes veered off of the smiling Relish in the distance and onto Gustav .

The latter quickly felt someone's eyes on him and pushed the construct he was fighting away, turning toward the source . His eyes met a pair of black ones, and a face hidden beneath the troves of hair . He immediately recognized the strange beggar and couldn't help but grin in excitement for a moment . Almost immediately abandoning Althone and leaving the latter to fend for himself against the strange machine, he waved through the dusty clouds while holding onto a two-handed hammer rising up at nearly two meters, its head reaching over a meter in diameter, thicker than a grown man's thigh, with two spiked endings .

Lino replied the challenge with the same enthusiasm and kicked forth, leaving behind a dusty silhouette . The two largely ignored the battlefield at large, causing both Eggor and Althone to curse at them as they tried to shift the battlefield sideways to avoid interference . Damian as well as the woman acpanying him, on the other hand, chose to withdraw from the fray and, much like Relish, observe from the distance .

A pair of growls akin to beasts' bellowed out from the kicked up dust storm as Gustav and Lino met at a halfway point, one swinging his hammer with full force downward, while the other bending his body as though it's made out of rubber while slicing his sword upwardly . The two heaved past each other and missed, using the recoil of the momentum to shift their feet back and propel themselves at each other yet again almost without pausing .

Lino's style was a bit more refined and balanced than Gustav's, who largely relied on pure, brutal strength to overwhelm his opposition . While Lino was nearly the same in his spear arts, he relied a bit more on speed and the flexibility of his body while wielding a sword . As he saw the hammer barreling toward his head - which would no doubt be splattered into brain matter and gore should he get hit - he infused his right leg with sudden surge of Qi, nearly breaking his bones in the process, to sidestep half a meter to the left and thrust his sword with full force, breaking past the speed of sound .

Gustav was unable to respond as quickly, merely managing to shift his body slightly as to not get hit in any vital point . The sword stabbed right through the right side of his abdomen, leaving a bleeding hole behind . Lino didn't linger as he immediately withdrew his sword and shifted back, an arced hammer strike brushing past his cheeks, startling him greatly .

Old man, he mused, really wasn't averse to getting injured if he could inflict injury himself . Lino realized he would have to take that into account the next time he went on the offensive . The two paused for a moment, distanced around ten meters, as Gustav reached with his hand and wiped the blood from his abdomen, smiling faintly . The faint smile, however, quickly shifted upwards into a massive grin of excitement, as though he was a boy who's just been given his favorite toy after being apart from it for a long time .

Lino smiled in kind, swinging his sword freely around as though to warm his arm . He decided to at least try the forms of to get a feeling for them; though he didn't understand the underlying forms and techniques, he could at the very least duplicate them somewhat . Perhaps that would allow him to find the crux of the path he should go down in order to understand it wholly .