Chapter 167: demonic form
Ken staggered backwards. He looked at his arm, ripped off, blood dripping from it.
"How... how are you over the bane already?" he asked in anger while holding his arm. Blood gushed from it and poured onto the ground, but his arm began healing slowly.
Ren looked at the healing arm and immediately moved. He crossed the distance, going to the side like he was about to attack. Ken reacted, only for Ren to fake it and move to the other side before proceeding to kick Ken right in the side, a kick so powerful it forcefully snapped the bone and hurled Ken back.
Ken staggered, clutching the stump where his arm had been, dark blood hitting the ground in heavy drops.
He looked at it. Looked at Ren.
"How are you over the bane already?" he demanded, the words coming out with more anger than disbelief. "How?"
Ren was already moving.
He crossed the distance at an angle that made it look like he was going left, and Ken reacted to the left, his weight shifting, his sword coming around to cover that side, and then Ren was on the right instead.
The kick landed in Ken’s ribs with a force that snapped bone audibly, the sound of it sharp and clean in the mountain air, and Ken left the ground sideways before slamming back into it several meters away, skidding across the stone.
He pushed himself up.
His arm was already beginning to knit itself back together, the healing working from the inside out, and he looked at Ren with eyes that had gone somewhere past rational and were operating entirely on something that had nothing left to do but move forward.
He screamed and rushed.
His arm was still healing as he moved, the flesh rebuilding itself mid-charge, and he came with everything the demon deal had left him, the black flames surging around him as he crossed the distance, his speed carrying the kind of desperation that sometimes looked like power from the outside.
Ren spread his arms.
The energy spheres formed around him, not a few, not a dozen, but over a hundred of them materializing in the air in the space of a breath, each one humming with the particular density of something that had been compressed rather than simply gathered.
Ken thought it clearly even as he ran toward it.
’He is completely free of the bane. Fully active. All of it.’
"Why won’t you just go down?" Ken screamed, the words tearing out of him. "Why won’t you stay down?"
Ren said nothing.
He released the spheres.
They went in every direction simultaneously, not aimed at Ken specifically but at the ground around him, the air beside him, the space in front of him, each one detonating on contact and filling the mountain pass with overlapping explosions that left craters in the stone and sent fire and smoke rolling outward in every direction.
Ken moved through them.
He dodged the first cluster, weaved around the second, pushed through the edge of a third with the black flames absorbing most of the impact, but the fourth one he did not see coming from below, and it caught him directly and threw him up and back, his body spinning through the air before he came down hard.
He looked up.
Ren was above him, already descending, sword angled down, the speed of the dive carrying real intent behind it.
Ken raised both hands.
The arm had finished healing.
He pushed everything he had into the blast, a massive concentrated torrent of black flame that went upward with the force of something that had nothing left to save for later.
Ren opened his jaws.
The compressed Chaos Dragon Breath came out in a single tight column, and it hit the flame torrent and went through it, the chaos energy parting everything in its path, and what came out the other side hit Ken in the chest and drove him into the ground with a force that did not leave room for argument.
The explosion that followed scorched the stone black for thirty meters in every direction.
When it cleared, Ken lay in the center of it.
Burnt. Still. The kind of still that sat very close to the edge of something that did not come back from.
Ren landed and walked toward him, his footsteps quiet against the scorched ground.
Then Ken’s skin moved.
Not the slow rise and fall of breathing. Something underneath it, pushing against the surface, the skin bubbling in places like something beneath it had decided the shape it had been given was no longer appropriate.
Ren stopped.
The hole in Ken’s chest opened.
Black tendrils burst from it, not one or two but dozens, flailing upward into the air above him, and the dark energy that poured out with them was not the black flame he had been using throughout the fight. This was something older and less controlled, the kind of power that had been sitting in that hole since the moment Ken made the deal that put it there, waiting for the moment the rest of him ran out of options.
The tendrils wrapped around him.
They moved fast and with purpose, pulling and reshaping, and when they finished what they had started, the thing that stood in Ken’s place was seven feet tall with four red eyes set in a face that carried too many teeth and demon horns that curved back from a skull that was no longer entirely Ken’s. Wings spread behind it, dark and leathery. A tail cut the air. The hole was still there, still open, right in the center of the chest, unchanged through the transformation.
Ren looked at it.
’The side effect,’ he thought. ’Whatever he bought the power from finished its side of the deal.’
The thing that had been Ken pulled its head back.
Above the open mouth, a ball of black and purple energy began to gather, dense and spinning, pulling the air toward it as it grew.