Liam looked across the clearing at Wrath standing on the other side with his hands loose at his sides and his face carrying nothing.
’Okay,’ he thought. ’His ability grows with anger. Which ans the longer this goes the worse it gets for .’ He turned it over quickly. ’So the play is simple. Hit him fast, hit him hard, end it before he has anything to get angry about.’
He activated Pulse Bound Might.
The familiar surge moved through him, his muscles tightening, the ground under his feet feeling more available than it had a second ago.
Then Silent Stride on top of it, his weight redistributing, his footwork going silent, every step from here forward arriving without sound or telegraph.
Wrath looked at him across the clearing. "Would you like to go first?"
Liam scratched the back of his head. "I figured either of us could just go whenever."
Wrath considered this. "I see." He paused. "I’ll go first then just out of respect."
Liam looked at him. "Okay."
’He’s being polite about it,’ Liam thought, watching Wrath settle into a neutral stance across the grass. ’I need to stop thinking about this like I’m about to fight soone in an alleyway because this man has a number on his back.’
He blinked.
And Wrath was already there.
Not crossing the clearing. Not closing the distance.
Just there, to the left of Liam’s face, his fist already moving in a wide arc that had started sowhere Liam hadn’t been watching because he had blinked and the man had covered twenty ters of grass in the ti it took his eyelids to et and separate.
Liam’s hands ca up on instinct.
*THWOOM.*
The punch connected with his arm instead of his face.
The impact went through his hand and up his arm and into his shoulder and then through his entire body in one continuous wave that lifted his feet off the grass and sent him sliding backward across the clearing, his shoes tearing through the turf, the ground cracking in a long line beneath him as he tried to find sothing to push against and couldn’t.
He went down on one knee.
He stayed there for a second, his hand throbbing, his teeth pressed together.
He looked at the hand.
It had cracked. Not broken, not visibly, but sothing in the bones had shifted and was making itself known with a deep and interior *tck* that he felt more than heard, sitting sowhere in the middle of his arm like a warning.
’That must be what being hit by a truck feels like and i have now experienced that.’
Wrath was standing where he had been, his arms at his sides again, watching Liam with that sa mild expression. "Are you alright? We can stop if you need to."
Liam’s teeth ca apart.
He pushed off the ground and moved.
Silent Stride carrying him across the clearing in a straight line, no sound, no warning, and he drove a kick directly into the side of Wrath’s neck with everything the Pulse Bound Might was giving him.
The ground under his planted foot cracked from the force of the launch, a spider web of it spreading outward from the point.
The kick landed.
*CRACK.*
Sharp and imdiate and total, the sound of it going through the clearing and into the trees like sothing had snapped in half.
Wrath did not move.
Not a step not even a sway.
Nothing.
He stood exactly where he had been standing and absorbed the full force of the kick through his neck and stayed there.
Liam held his position, his leg still extended, his foot still in contact with the side of Wrath’s neck, and looked at the man’s face.
Then he looked at the rest of him.
Sothing was happening to Wrath’s skin.
It was changing.
Starting at the chest and moving outward, a reddish color spreading across the surface of him, faint at first and then deepening, the way heat spreads through tal.
And with the color sothing else was happening, his fra was shifting, the already considerable width of his shoulders pushing further outward, the muscle across his chest and arms swelling visibly, his whole body expanding by degrees like sothing inside him was waking up and needed more space.
Liam pulled his leg back.
He moved to get clear of the space between them.
He was half a step into it when Wrath’s hand ca down and closed around his ankle.
Liam had exactly one thought.
’Oh no.’
Wrath lifted him.
Not with effort.
With the ease of picking up sothing that weighed nothing, his arm swinging upward in a single arc that took Liam off the ground entirely and brought him down face first into the grass
*BOOM.*
The impact cracking the earth beneath him, the shudder going through everything from his jaw to his knees, a low resonant sound that he felt in his back teeth.
"Ah—"
Before he could process any of it Wrath swung him up again.
And brought him down again.
*BOOM.*
Harder this ti.
Deeper.
The earth giving way beneath the point of impact, his vision jumping, sothing in his chest going *crk* on the way down and staying wrong.
’This hurts so much,’ he thought, sowhere between the second and third impact, his body registering the information and having no useful suggestions about what to do with it.
Up again.
*BOOM.*
Down again.
*BOOM.*
Each one harder than the last, each one with more behind it than the previous, and now there was a secondary sound underneath the impacts was wet and dense, the sound of a body hitting ground that had already been broken.
*thud, thud*
Wrath’s body continuing to change as his anger built, the red deepening across his skin, his fra wider with every passing second.
On the sixth swing Liam ca down and his face hit the grass and his hands went flat and he felt the earth under them.
Sand. Loose and dry at the surface under the grass near the edge of the clearing.
He grabbed a fistful of it.
Wrath’s grip shifted, repositioning to swing again, and in the half second of adjustnt Liam twisted and threw the sand directly upward at his face.
It landed across both eyes.
Wrath let go.
Liam hit the ground
*thmp*
And rolled and ca up several feet away, breathing hard, his vision slightly off from the impacts, his whole body cataloging damage it would deal with later.
Wrath stood where he was, both hands going to his face, rubbing his eyes, his head turning away from Liam.
’Now,’ Liam thought.
He dropped low to the ground, both palms pressing flat into the grass, and he held every piece of force available to him in one place, feeling the ground crack slightly beneath his hands and legs from the pressure of containing it.
Then he released it all forward.
He crossed the clearing like sothing fired from a gun, covering the distance between them in a fraction of a second, and drove his fist into Wrath’s stomach —
*BOOM!!!.*
The sound of the impact went through the clearing and into the trees and kept going.
Wrath left the ground.
He went backward through the treeline at the far edge of the clearing, his body hitting the first tree and the tree losing, the trunk splintering and going over.
*CRACK-CRACK-CRACK*
His montum carrying him through the second tree and the third, the sound of breaking wood coming back through the forest in a continuous crackling line that went further than Liam could see before finally stopping sowhere in the dark between the trunks.
Silence.
Liam stood in the middle of the clearing, his chest heaving, one hand still extended from the punch.
He went down on one knee, his legs informing him that they had done quite enough for the mont and were taking a brief rest whether he agreed or not.
’I won,’ he thought. He looked toward the treeline where Wrath had disappeared. ’I actually won.’
He looked at Elena on the log at the edge of the clearing.
She was smiling.
Not the reserved composed version.
The full one.
Wide and genuine and sitting on her face like it had been waiting for the right mont.
Liam looked at her smile and felt sothing uncertain arrive in his chest.
She raised one hand and pointed.
Past him. Into the treeline.
He turned around.
Wrath was walking back through the trees.
He was not the sa size he had been when he went in.
His body had expanded significantly, his shoulders now wide enough that he had to angle slightly to move between the remaining trunks, his chest deep and broad, the red of his skin vivid and dark and spreading to his neck and jaw and the backs of his hands.
His eyes had gone fully red, the whites of them gone completely, just two points of red rage looking across the clearing at Liam.
The ground cracked under each step he took.
He opened his mouth.
The sound that ca out of him was not a word.
It started sowhere in his chest and ca out as sothing between a roar and the sound a building makes when sothing structural inside it gives way, loud enough that the trees at the near edge of the clearing shook with it and birds sowhere in the canopy above scattered in every direction at once.
Then he started running.
Liam looked at the size of him coming across the clearing. At the red eyes. At the ground cracking under his feet with each stride.
At the fact that he was accelerating and showed no sign of slowing.
Every ability he had available ran through his head in quick succession and none of them felt like enough.
’Oh shit,’ he thought.
Liam tried moving or doing anything but his body won’t listen.
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