Chapter 187: Rage baiting
She looked at him from above.
He looked at her from below.
Then he transformed back.
The dragon form dissolved and the Sovereign Shell took its place, humanoid and fast and considerably smaller than sixteen feet of dragon, and he felt the logic of it settle the moment the transformation completed. A bigger target was a worse target against something that could distort the ground beneath him and throw purple death from every angle. He needed to move.
She did not wait for him to finish thinking about it.
The first blast came from above, a compressed sphere of purple energy that hit the ground where he had been standing and excavated a crater the size of a small house. He was already moving sideways, boots hitting the earth and pushing off, and the second blast came before the first had finished detonating.
He read the angle and went under it.
She was not standing anymore. She was elevated, not flying with wings but simply existing at a height the ground could not challenge, the exoskeleton crown above her head catching what remained of the light, and the spider legs that extended from her body were not the biological things he had fought before. These were longer, more deliberate, each one capable of firing the purple slashes that came off them like someone had taken a blade and made it out of compressed divinity.
One came at him horizontal.
He ducked under it and it carved through six trees behind him without slowing.
Another came diagonal.
He stepped inside it, let it pass beside his ear, close enough that the energy displacement from it pushed at his face, and then he fired a compressed lightning bolt directly at her torso.
It hit.
She moved with it rather than against it, turning into the impact and letting it glance off the exoskeleton, and the ground beneath him responded before he could register that she had moved her hand.
The earth came up.
Not a wall, not a pillar, the ground itself warping, tilting and reshaping the terrain under his feet into something that was not flat anymore, and he had to adjust mid-stride or go down, the incline changing angle twice in the same second as she directed it.
"Okay," he said, jumping over a section that had inverted itself entirely. "That is new."
She slashed with three legs simultaneously.
He rolled under the first, let the second pass over him, and caught the third on his forearm with the Ironscale active, the impact throwing him sideways, and he used the sideways momentum to put a boulder between himself and the next incoming blast.
The boulder ceased to exist.
He was already past it.
The forest around them was taking losses that would take decades to recover from, trees coming down in every exchange, the ground beneath them no longer resembling anything it had been when the fight started, reshaped and scarred and still shifting under Ophelia's direction.
Something changed in the air.
He felt it before he saw it, a pressure that was not physical, and then her form rippled and a second version of her separated from the first, translucent and moving independently, and it was already mid-attack before he identified what it was.
Astral projection.
The projection hit him before he could fully account for it, the impact carrying divine weight despite being made of something that was not physically there in the conventional sense, and he flew backward and hit the ground and bounced and came up bleeding from his forearm and one shoulder.
He looked at both of her.
"Rude," he said.
He charged at the real one.
The projection intercepted.
He went through it with Dragon Rage active, forcing the projection to work against a body that was operating above its normal parameters, and the impact staggered him rather than stopping him, and then he was past it and the real Ophelia was directly in front of him and his fist connected with the exoskeleton across her jaw.
She moved with it.
But she moved with it meaning the hit had landed and the exoskeleton had cracked slightly at the point of contact and that was new information.
She looked at him.
The ground under his feet dropped.
He fell three meters before he caught himself, wings snapping out, and the blast that came from above him while he was falling he barely turned away from in time, the edge of it catching his wing and leaving a burn.
He landed on the new ground level and assessed.
She was still above him. Still directing the terrain. Still projecting. Still firing from the spider legs and slashing with the arm mounted extensions, and he was bleeding from four separate places and his wing was complaining, and the forest for three hundred meters in every direction was either on fire or no longer had a recognizable shape.
But the exoskeleton had cracked.
He filed that and moved.
He went at her again from a different angle, not the direct line she was expecting, cutting sideways through what remained of the trees and coming in from her left while he fired a lightning barrage from his right hand to pull her attention. She tracked the lightning and her left side was unguarded for a half second and he drove the Soul Eater into that gap, the blade finding the joint where two sections of exoskeleton met.
Blood.
She pulled back and the blade came with her and he let it go rather than be pulled off his feet, and the sword hung from her side for a moment before she pulled it free and dropped it.
He picked up a different approach.
He activated Primordial Roar at close range.
The wave hit her before she could fully account for how close he was and it drove her backward through the air, the compressed force of it cracking the exoskeleton across the chest and sending her into the destroyed tree line hard enough that three stumps shattered on impact.
She came out of the debris with rage written across the parts of her face the exoskeleton did not cover.
Good.
He caught a full projection hit while he was watching her come out of the debris and it drove him to one knee, the divine weight of it pressing through the Ironscale and finding the flesh underneath, and he gritted his teeth and stood back up.
She fired six legs simultaneously.
He moved through them with Dragon Rage burning through his system, the enhanced speed and strength making each dodge tighter than it should have been possible to be, and two of the six caught him anyway, one across the ribs and one across his back, and he registered both and kept moving.
He was bleeding from nine places now.
She was bleeding from three.
The math was not in his favor and he was doing better than the math suggested he should be.
She fired the astral projection again.
He went through it with his fist forward and the fist found the real one behind it because he had read her pattern, the projection always launching from the same shoulder, and the punch connected with her chest and the crack that spread across the exoskeleton from the impact point was significantly larger than the last one.
She stumbled.
He followed.
Two more hits, body shots, forcing her to absorb rather than redirect, and the exoskeleton was showing real damage now, the purple light behind it leaking slightly through the cracks, and her terrain manipulation became less precise as her attention split between maintaining it and managing what he was doing to her directly.
The ground stopped moving.
He pressed.
A combination of strikes, sword and fist alternating, the lightning threading through each hit to work against the exoskeleton's resistance, and she was moving backward under it, absorbing more than she was returning for the first time in the entire fight.
She fired a blast at point blank range.
He took it.
The Ironscale held most of it and the rest of it he absorbed with his body and stayed on his feet and hit her with the response while she was still watching the blast dissipate.
She hit the ground.
He stood in front of her, breathing hard, blood running freely from more places than he wanted to count, the forest around them a complete disaster in every direction, and he looked at her down there trying to get back up, the exoskeleton cracked across most of its surface, the projection dispersed, the terrain control gone.
He started laughing.
Not the polite kind. The genuine kind that came from somewhere that found the situation actually funny, which he did, because he was covered in his own blood and standing in the ruins of a forest and he had just punched a demigod in the face multiple times and she was the one on the ground.
She looked up at him.
Her expression had moved well past whatever anger had been there before and into something that had nothing left to mix with the rage.
He walked toward her.