Chapter 63: Don’t Go To Far
Ren and Tempest clashed in the air with one more attack, a powerful thunderous clash that pushed them both back.
Tempest slammed into the mountain and rolled down. He spun his sword and stabbed it right into the hard surface, deep enough until it forced him to a stop.
Ren flapped his wings hard and came to a stop in the air. His breathing was heavy from the small clash that they had. It showed how powerful Tempest was.
’This dude is terrifying. I can tell that he is definitely stronger than the orc, but that does not mean that I’ll allow myself to lose.’
[Quest Triggered: Survive Against Tempest, the Ogre King]
’The Ogre King? This means he is one of the Forest Lords. Ahhh, this finally makes sense.’
Ren landed on the mountain as well. He looked at Tempest, who was standing there, and then spoke. "You’re a Forest Lord," Ren said. "I’m guessing you’re pissed that I took down the piggy." He shrugged. "Sorry about that. I just don’t like bullies."
Tempest’s expression shifted.
The lightning came before he moved, surging up from the ground around his feet in thick red bolts that climbed his body and spread across his sword, and his front foot twisted into the ground, a small motion that cracked the rock beneath it before he had even pushed off.
Then he pushed off.
The trail of red lightning followed him across the mountain face like something that had been waiting for permission, and the blade came around in a clean arc aimed at Ren’s chest, fast and flat and carrying everything the lightning had fed into it.
Ren leaned back.
The blade passed close enough that he felt the charge of it across his chin, and he tracked it past him, making sure it had fully cleared, and that was exactly when Tempest let go of it.
The punch came from the hand that had been holding the sword, already moving, already committed, and it connected with Ren’s face before he had finished accounting for the blade.
The world spun.
He hit the mountain and bounced, and Tempest was already after him, sword caught back in his grip mid-pursuit, the blade already raised for the follow-through.
Ren gritted his teeth and drove one hand into the rock, claws digging in, forcing himself to a stop with the scraping protest of stone giving way under the pressure. His feet found the ground a half second later.
He threw his other hand up.
Boulders tore free of the mountain around them, pulled hard and fast by the gravity manipulation, and launched at Tempest in a tight, rapid cluster.
Tempest read the first one and cut diagonally through it, the blade carrying enough force and lightning that the rock simply ceased to be in its path. He stepped through the falling halves and cut the second one at a different angle, the motion clean and continuous, no pause between the strikes.
The third came from his left, and he rolled under it, came up into the fourth, and split it with an upward slash, the lightning discharging on impact and sending debris scattering in every direction.
He kept moving through all of it, never stopping, the sword finding each rock in sequence with the particular efficiency of someone for whom this was not a challenge but simply a hallway to walk through.
Ren was already in the air.
He gathered everything he had into a single point and fired, the compressed Chaos Flame Breath coming out tight and devastating, a beam of crimson and dark that covered the distance between them in less than a second.
Tempest swung.
The lightning slash that came off the blade was enormous, a crescent of red that expanded as it traveled, and it hit the flame beam dead center with a collision that neither of them had calculated would end that way.
They cancelled each other out.
The shockwave from the cancellation rolled across the mountain and into the forest below, shaking trees and sending loose rock tumbling down the face in every direction.
Ren stared at the dissipating cloud where the two attacks had met.
’That’s a first,’ he thought. ’Guess he is insanely strong.’
They went back at each other.
What followed was not a fight with a readable shape to it anymore. It was two forces moving across and around the mountain at a speed that turned the terrain into a casualty, craters forming where attacks hit stone, sections of the mountain face shearing off from impact and falling, the red lightning and the chaos fire leaving scorch marks across everything they touched.
Ren hit Tempest twice and felt the attacks land without the satisfaction of them actually doing what they should have done. Tempest hit Ren three times, and each one carried the accumulated weight of someone who had been holding back and was running out of reasons to continue doing so.
They separated.
Both of them breathing harder than during the last pause.
Tempest looked at him across the gap, the lightning around his sword dimming slightly before it rebuilt itself, and something in his expression had changed, the wicked smile from earlier gone, replaced by something more serious and more dangerous.
"Fine," Tempest said. He shifted his grip on the sword. "I’ll go all out."
Ren rolled his neck.
"Bring it on. You’ve not made me even try yet. I’m starting to think that was your best," he said.
Tempest’s foot moved.
"Tempest."
The voice came from above.
Both of them looked up simultaneously.
She was seated on a rock near the peak of the mountain, legs crossed, looking at her nails with the expression of someone who had been there for some time and had found the view acceptable but not particularly impressive. Her hair moved slightly in the wind. She did not look at either of them when she spoke.
"That’s enough," Aris said. She looked up. "Don’t go too far. We want to meet him, not kill him. Do not forget that."