’The energy off this guy now, it’s even worse than before.’
Noah felt it before the transformation finished. That sa pungent, sickening pressure from earlier had returned but compounded, layered over itself the way a wound gets worse when sothing reopens it with intent.
He’d felt sothing like this before. Not here, not in this tiline, but in the monts when Kruel had evolved mid battle, when a three horn Harbinger had torn itself apart and rebuilt into sothing with four, and the entire character of the fight had changed in the span of seconds. The air around a Harbinger mid evolution had felt exactly like this. Like reality itself was reconsidering the amount of space it was willing to share.
Whatever Gorrauth was becoming, it was not a second attempt at the sa thing.
The golden ca first. Ensembles of it, rising from the floor around the kneeling warden and adhering to the dark stone body like sothing being claid rather than applied. Pauldrons broad enough to make the already massive fra look architectural. Greaves that encased those hooved legs in layered gold plate that caught the light from the steam vents and threw it back across the chamber walls in shifting patterns.
A chestplate that covered the damage Noah had spent the entire first fight accumulating, sealing it beneath tal that looked less like armor and more like a declaration. The hood was gone. What sat above the golden armor was the warden’s face, dark stone features with those red eyes burning brighter than they had at any point before, the face of sothing that had decided courtesy was no longer a consideration.
The sword that ford was a different proposition entirely from its predecessor. Longer. Nearly as tall as Gorrauth itself, the blade wide enough that swinging it wasn’t a combat choice so much as a weather event. Red energy didn’t just seep from it. It rippled, running up and down the length of the blade in continuous waves that broke at the tip and dissipated into the air around it, the arcs building and releasing in a constant cycling rhythm like the weapon was breathing.
Gorrauth rose to full height.
The chamber felt smaller.
Noah rolled his shoulders and pulled dark chi from the fear soaking the air around him, felt it coat his hands in that reddish glow with the whitish tint burning at the edges, and thought with complete clarity that the first fight had been the introduction.
Then Gorrauth moved and thinking stopped being the priority.
The circular wave ca with no windup. No arc release, no sword swing that telegraphed direction. Gorrauth simply drove the blade into the floor and the energy traveled outward in every direction simultaneously, a ring of red destruction expanding across the stone at a height that made jumping the obvious answer and jumping the obvious answer made it the anticipated one, because the second wave ca imdiately after at twice the height, cutting off the airspace above the first.
Noah didn’t jump. He drove forward, straight at the origin point, inside the radius of both waves before either reached him, the stone floor cracking under his feet as he accelerated. He pulled white chi into his legs as he ran, the clean brilliant energy channeling down through his thighs and calves, and the speed increase was imdiate and visible. The steam from the nearest vents flattened sideways from his passage.
Behind the barrier Werner’s eyes tracked the white glow running up Noah’s legs and sothing happened in his expression that wasn’t simple surprise.
’That energy,’ Werner thought, his jaw tight. ’That can’t be what I think it is.’
Noah closed the distance to Gorrauth in under a second and drove both fists into the new chestplate simultaneously, switching to dark chi at the point of contact, the reddish detonation cracking the gold surface on the first exchange.
Gorrauth looked down at him.
"You are seen."
The backhand ca from the left with the new arm strength behind it and Noah took it across the shoulder rather than the jaw by dropping his head at the last fraction of a second, the impact still launching him sideways across the chamber with enough force that he skipped once off the floor before converting the montum into a roll that brought him back upright.
[-143 HP]
He checked his legs. Still functional. The white chi had already begun pulling the shoulder damage back together so fast that Pip was currently watching from behind the barrier with an expression of increasing bewildernt.
"Nami," Pip said, his voice very low. "That glow on his legs."
"I see it."
"That’s not enhancent magic. Enhancent magic doesn’t have a color. What is that?"
Nami said nothing because she didn’t have an answer that she was willing to say out loud.
Across the barrier Werner said nothing either. He was watching Noah and the look on his face had a specific focused attention of soone doing arithtic they didn’t like the shape of.
’King Arthur’s technique,’ Werner thought, the words arriving with a certainty that sat uncomfortably in his chest. ’The forbidden chi manipulation. The thing the order has been told for twenty years is only possible through dark allegiance. Only possible through the enemy’s thods.’
He watched Noah switch the energy in his hands from the reddish dark chi to the clean white as he closed on Gorrauth again, watched the colors shift with the specific intentionality of soone who knew exactly what they were doing, and felt sothing click into place in his understanding of everything the past weeks had shown him.
’The beetle massacre. The dragon scale board. The Vital Point Technique mastered in a day.It all makes sense now, doesn’t it?’
He watched the fight and said nothing and rooted for Noah to win because if Noah lost that thing behind him would kill every single person in this chamber and that was the only thought that mattered right now.
In the chamber Noah was working the distance problem. Gorrauth’s new weapon changed the geotry of every exchange. The longer blade ant the safe range for arc releases had extended outward, and the circular waves ant there was no longer a clean safe direction when they ca. He’d gotten inside the radius once. Gorrauth had already adjusted, the next two circular waves releasing the mont Noah’s feet left the ground for any reason, cutting off the aerial approach that had worked once.
’It learns,’ Noah thought, circling wide, reading the rhythm of those rippling energy waves running up and down the blade. ’Every approach I’ve used it’s catalogued. Which ans I stop approaching the sa way twice.’
He pulled dark chi into his right hand, let it build visibly, the reddish glow bright enough that Gorrauth could see it clearly from across the chamber. Committed to a straight line charge that telegraphed the strike entirely, his body language announcing exactly what was coming with the kind of obviousness that a fighter with his evident skill level would never actually show unless it was deliberate.
Gorrauth raised the sword to intercept.
Noah planted his left foot and cut ninety degrees, the white chi flooding his legs and the direction change happening at a speed that the committed sword position couldn’t follow, and ca in from the side with the dark chi fist driving into the joint between the new pauldron and the chestplate, the detonation finding the seam and running along it.
The pauldron cracked at the joint.
Gorrauth’s elbow ca around and caught him before he could disengage, the raw mass of the golden armored forearm connecting with Noah’s chest and driving him backward three full steps before he absorbed it.
[-98 HP]
"You would defy the crown?"
The sword rose and the energy waves running along its length intensified, the cycling rhythm accelerating until the ripples were overlapping, the whole blade one continuous expression of building charge. Gorrauth planted both feet and the circular wave that released was not one ring but three, concentric, expanding at different speeds, the gaps between them too narrow to stand in and too close together to clear by jumping the outermost.
Noah ran at the first ring and jumped it close to the source where the curvature was tightest and the gap to the second was at its widest, white chi in his legs compressing the jump into sothing more vertical than the waves were designed to account for, cleared the second ring by inches, and the third caught him across the shins as he ca down.
The energy bit through his boots and into skin and he felt it the way you feel sothing that has decided it doesn’t need to ask permission.
[-167 HP]
He landed badly, one knee touching the floor, and was upright before Gorrauth had finished tracking where he’d co down.
The recruits behind the barrier had stopped making sounds. They were just watching, their faces carrying the expression of people who have been afraid for a long ti and have moved past the point where fear presents as noise and into the place where it presents as absolute silence and absolute attention.
Noah pulled dark chi and white chi simultaneously into his legs, not combining them the way he had at the end of the first fight but running them in alternation, the dark and the white switching between steps, and the effect on his movent was imdiately different from either alone. Each stride that ran dark chi was heavier, the footfall carrying a concussive weight that cracked the already destroyed floor. Each stride running white chi was faster, lighter, the speed compounding off the montum the dark steps built.
He ca at Gorrauth from an angle that changed three tis in the approach, the alternating chi turning his movent pattern into sothing with no consistent geotry to read, and Gorrauth’s sword tracked him with the slight delay of sothing recalculating.
Noah went under the first sword swing and drove a dark chi detonation into the damaged pauldron joint, widening the crack. Rolled over the low sweep that followed, white chi in his legs getting him airborne over it, ca down on the sword arm and drove both fists into the elbow from above in rapid succession before the arm could retract.
The golden armor at the elbow buckled.
Gorrauth’s response was not the arm. It was the other hand, open palm, crashing down from above with the full weight of the warden’s mass behind it.
Noah took it across the back and the floor ca up hard.
[-234 HP]
He lay there for one breath. Two. The chamber ceiling above him was lost in steam and the sound of his own heartbeat was very loud and the system damage counter was climbing toward a number that warranted thinking about.
’Good news is I’m not using my void energy skills. Which ans I heal faster and as I heal faster, I can fight harder,’
Then Gorrauth began to speak.
"I am Gorrauth. Warden of the—"
"Shut up."
Noah pushed off the floor.
"Just shut up."
He was upright, his hands coming up, the dark chi rising reddish at his knuckles, the white chi flooding his legs, and whatever Gorrauth had been about to say it didn’t finish because Noah was already moving.
"SHUT UP!"
The scream ca out raw and genuine, the accumulated weight of the entire fight and the entire floor below and the entire day that had started with a bone staircase and a floor full of flas converting itself into pure forward montum.
Boom!!
He hit Gorrauth like sothing that had made a decision and was done deliberating about it. Dark chi detonation to the cracked chestplate. White chi speed carrying him around the sword swing before it arrived. Dark chi into the buckled elbow. White chi getting his legs under him for the upward drive into the undamaged pauldron. He wasn’t picking targets anymore. He was working the whole figure simultaneously, moving around it the way water moves around a stone, finding every damaged surface and hitting it with whatever chi was already loaded in the limb closest to it.
Gorrauth’s circular wave released mid exchange, the energy erupting outward from the warden’s own feet with Noah close enough that there was no outside to run to.
Noah jumped straight up, white chi in his legs converting the jump into sothing that cleared the full height of the expanding rings, and at the apex of the jump with Gorrauth directly below him he pulled dark chi into both fists and ca down.
Both fists drove into the top of the cracked chestplate from above, the combined weight of his body and the dark chi detonating simultaneously.
KRAAAK
The golden chestplate split.
Not cracked. Split. The fracture running from the impact point down the full length of the armor and finding the damage underneath, the accumulated cost of everything Noah had done across both fights arriving at once in the structural integrity of the surface holding it together.
Gorrauth staggered.
One step back. Two. The hooves finding the floor and cracking it with each forced movent. The red eyes dimming at their edges, the burning quality pulling inward.
The sword was still in its hand.
Noah looked at it.
The energy waves running along the blade were still cycling, still rippling from hilt to tip in those continuous arcs. The sa arcs that had carved trenches in the floor, that had cut off every retreat angle, that had caught him across the shins when the concentric rings had been too tight to fully clear.
He’d been treating the sword as the obstacle the entire fight. Every approach had been designed around getting past it to reach Gorrauth directly.
’What if the sword is the point,’ Noah thought, watching those rippling arcs, reading their rhythm. ’What if the energy in that blade is the sa energy keeping Gorrauth together. What if that’s not a weapon. That’s a power source.’
Gorrauth raised the sword.
"Co, claimant."
The blade charged, the rippling arcs accelerating toward another circular release, the energy building visibly along its length.
"Let us see."
Noah ran directly at the sword.
Not at Gorrauth. At the blade itself, at the point where the energy waves peaked before releasing, at the tip where each arc built to its highest concentration before dispersing into the air. He pulled white chi into his legs and dark chi into both hands and in the last half second before impact he applied the Vital Point Technique to sothing it had never been applied to before, compressing the dark chi in his right hand down from a detonation into the needle point concentration he’d used on the beetle beasts days ago, all the force of the dark chi squeezed into the smallest possible surface area.
His compressed fist hit the blade at the peak energy point.
The chi needle t the cycling arc at its highest concentration and the collision of the two energies did not produce a detonation. It produced a reversal. The arc that had been building to release back along the blade inverted, the energy turning back on itself, running down the length of the sword toward the hilt and into the hand holding it.
Gorrauth’s body absorbed its own weapon’s energy.
The red eyes went wide. The first genuine reaction the warden had produced across both fights, the first suggestion that sothing had happened outside the paraters of what it had encountered before.
Noah’s left hand closed around the hilt as Gorrauth’s grip failed.
The sword was heavier than anything he’d held before, the residual energy in it running up through his palm and into his arm with a heat that wasn’t quite pain, and he swung it with both hands and white chi flooding through his arms and shoulders and the blade ca around in the full horizontal arc that Gorrauth itself had used to open the fight.
It connected with the split chestplate.
THROOOMMMMMMM!!
The sound it made filled the chamber completely, a single enormous note that ran through the floor and up through the barrier and through every person standing behind it. The dark stone body that the golden armor had been covering ca apart from the impact, the accumulated damage across both fights finding its final expression all at once, and Gorrauth ca apart from the center outward, fragnts of dark stone and shattered gold plate separating and falling, the whole massive form ceasing to be a cohesive thing and becoming debris that settled across the cracked and ruined floor of the chamber with the finality of sothing that had been ended rather than rely stopped.
The red eyes went out.
Noah stood in the silence with Gorrauth’s sword in both hands and his chest heaving and the steam from the vents rising around him completely undisturbed, indifferent to everything that had just occurred.
He looked at the system screen.
[QUEST COMPLETE: SLAY THE WARDEN]
[REWARD: INSTANT LEVEL UP - SUSPENDED PENDING PRIMARY QUEST COMPLETION]
[ALL REWARDS WITHHELD PENDING: EXTINGUISH THE FLAS]
He read it twice. Then he lowered the sword and let it rest against the floor, his hands still wrapped around the hilt, and he breathed.
Then a second notification appeared beneath the first. Different formatting. A tab he hadn’t seen before, sitting separate from the standard system display with a border that pulsed once slowly before going still.
[YOU ARE IN POSSESSION OF A MYTHIC WEAPON]
[WOULD YOU LIKE TO CLAIM?]
Noah stared at it.
Behind the barrier the white energy field dissolved and the recruits spilled forward into the chamber, so of them stopping imdiately when they saw what the floor looked like, others moving toward Noah with expressions that were still processing the distance between what they’d expected and what they’d watched. Pip was already talking, his quick speech pattern running at full speed, sothing about the energy and the colors and had anyone else seen the thing Noah did with his fist at the end.
Werner said nothing. He stood at the edge of the group and looked at Noah holding a mythic weapon over the debris of sothing that had just introduced itself as eternal, and he thought about King Arthur, and he thought about forbidden techniques, and he thought about the instructors back at camp and what they would say when they found out.
Noah looked at the notification.
[WOULD YOU LIKE TO CLAIM?]
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