Chapter 509: All Dogs
Michael spat golden blood and replied with a headbutt. Konstantine only half dodged it.
Gabriel, still dazed by the collision caused by the Targeted Attraction, stood up and joined his hands. "< Celestial Magic: Temporal Acceleration >!" He cast the spell not on himself, but on Raphael, whose movements suddenly became three times faster than normal. Raphael materialized behind Konstantine and planted a blade of condensed light between his shoulder blades.
The pain was real. Konstantine felt the blade pierce a lung, his breath failing for a fraction of a second. He did not scream. He grabbed the hilt of the light blade with bare hands, despite the burn eating at his palm, and tore it from his own back in a sharp gesture.
"Arcane Art: Accelerated Cellular Regeneration," he murmured.
The silver runes on his forearm lit up, and the wound closed with a hiss, leaving a thin gray scar that would never fully heal. He turned toward Raphael, still accelerated by Gabriel’s spell, and anticipated his next position rather than his current movement.
"< Arcane Art: Fractal Prediction >," he said simply.
When Raphael reappeared to deliver a second blow, Konstantine was already where he was going to materialize. He seized him by the throat before the Seraph had even finished rematerializing, physically preventing him from completing his movement, and slammed him to the ground in a crash that carved a crater in the pocket dimension.
Gabriel, horrified to see his spell turned against his own side, invoked a golden hourglass shield between him and Konstantine. "< Celestial Magic: Out-of-Time Bubble >!"
Konstantine raised his hand, palm open, and let a thin stream of gray flame filter through the bubble. Gabriel’s spell was not broken in one go: it was eroded, second after second, the temporal energy gnawed from the inside until the shield dissolved in a silent sigh.
"Your shields slow the inevitable," said Konstantine. "They do not stop it."
Michael was the first to break the stillness. He threw himself forward, unarmed but still alive with rage, and aimed for Konstantine’s throat with the edge of his right hand. Konstantine deflected the blow with a simple wrist movement, redirecting the trajectory into empty space, then followed with a straight punch to the plexus. Michael took it, bent at the knees, but did not fall. He immediately replied with an uppercut from his left arm, the one that remained intact.
Konstantine pulled his head back one centimeter, enough to let the fist brush his chin without touching it. He then caught Michael’s forearm in mid-air, pivoted on his hip, and hurled him over his shoulder in a sharp throw. The Seraph of Judgment crashed back-first onto the ground, his breath cut short, his already weakened ribs cracking under the impact.
Gabriel did not wait for his brother to get up. He swooped down on Konstantine from the left, both hands joined in a mass of compressed temporal energy that he brought down like a hammer. Konstantine raised his forearm to block. The shock drew a grimace from him, the bone holding by a thread, and he felt a crack run up to his elbow.
He closed his free hand on Gabriel’s collar and delivered a frontal headbutt. The Seraph’s nose cracked, a flow of golden light pouring instead of blood. Gabriel, stunned, still tried a knee to Konstantine’s ribs. The blow landed, a dull pain crossing the sorcerer’s side, but he responded in the same second with a descending elbow to his opponent’s neck.
Gabriel collapsed to his knees, one hand pressed against his bloodied face.
Michael, on his feet again despite his broken ribs, charged a third time, this time with a feint: a hook from his valid arm that was only a diversion for a rising knee toward Konstantine’s abdomen. The sorcerer took the knee head-on, expelling all the air from his lungs, and doubled over despite himself.
Michael took the opportunity to chain, a descending elbow straight to Konstantine’s shoulder blade, which made him stagger forward. Konstantine, half bent, countered from below: an uppercut launched from the ground that rose directly under Michael’s chin. The Seraph’s jaw slammed shut, his teeth clashing with a violence that tore a strangled grunt from him.
The two men stepped back, short of breath, sizing each other up.
Raphael, still kneeling farther away, spat a stream of golden light and stood up leaning on what strength he had left. He charged from the flank, silent, and wrapped both hands around Konstantine’s neck from behind, attempting a pure stranglehold.
Konstantine felt his trachea compress. He did not panic. He bent his knees, shifted his weight forward, and hurled Raphael over his shoulder in a brutal hip movement. The Seraph of Healing fell heavily onto his back, right in front of Michael, the two bodies colliding in a tangle of limbs.
Konstantine coughed, his hand pressed against his throat marked with red traces. "You hit well, guys..." he said, his voice hoarse.
Michael freed himself from Raphael and went back on the assault, alone this time, both fists clenched despite the missing arm that unbalanced him slightly. He chained three close blows, left, right, left, each targeting a different zone: the temple, the ribs, the sternum. Konstantine blocked the first with his forearm, dodged the second with a side step, and deliberately let the third hit him square in the chest.
The impact made him retreat two meters, but he stayed on his feet. "You can keep that one," he said while wiping a trickle of blood from the corner of his lips.
He went back on the attack before Michael had even finished his motion, chaining a jab to the face followed by a hook to the liver. Michael doubled over from the second blow, a searing pain cutting off his breath, and Konstantine finished with a knee strike straight to the face that sent him rolling to the ground.
Michael, his armor still cracked, came back charging with his two swords crossed in scissors, aiming for Konstantine’s neck in a movement meant to slice clean through. Konstantine dove under the trajectory, rolled on his shoulder, and rose by striking the base of Michael’s sternum with the flat of his hand. The impact sent the Seraph backward, his feet scraping the ground of the pocket dimension for several meters.
Raphael, still on the ground, tried to invoke emergency healing magic on himself. "< Healing Magic: Restoration >..." The spell began, a white light enveloping his broken ribs. Konstantine did not let him finish. He crossed the distance in one stride, closed his hand on Raphael’s skull and directly injected an impulse of gray flame into his mana flow.
The healing spell faded before it could close. Raphael screamed, a pure pain, that of a body that can no longer be repaired by the laws that usually govern it.
"This is not a wound your magic can heal," said Konstantine, with a tired look.
Gabriel and Michael looked at each other for a fraction of a second, a tacit agreement passing between them. They converged simultaneously, Michael on the ground with his two blades, Gabriel in the air invoking a rain of temporal arrows that struck their target even before being fired, each materializing directly at the intended impact point.
Konstantine had, for the first time since the start of the confrontation, to retreat several steps. An arrow pierced his shoulder, another gashed his thigh. Blood flowed, black at the edges where the mana corrupted the wound.
< Supreme Arcane Art >
Michael seized the opening and dove in, his two blades forming an angle meant to sever Konstantine at the waist. The sorcerer joined his hands at the very last possible fraction of a second.
"< Mudra of Spatial Rupture: partial version >."
A circle of nothingness opened between the two blades and Konstantine’s torso, swallowing the arcane energy before it could touch his flesh. Michael, carried by his momentum, plunged his arm into the circle up to the elbow. He withdrew his arm immediately, but the hand that came out was now only a smoking stump, particles of light crumbling into the void like sand in a broken hourglass.
"AAAAH!" Michael’s cry echoed throughout the pocket dimension, a sound that neither Gabriel nor Raphael, still shaken by his own injury, had ever heard come from the mouth of the Seraph of Judgment.
Konstantine, out of breath, blood flowing from his shoulder and thigh, looked at the three diminished Seraphs: one without an arm, one unable to heal himself, one exhausted.
"Three against one," he said, "and yet... You cannot stop me. We do not know each other and you want to kill me..."
Konstantine shook his head: "Angel, demon... Mortal... We are all dogs barking for our masters."