Chapter 597: One Final Exchange [2]
Tom exhaled slowly.
His voice came out low and apologetic. Consoling himself more than his dead subordinates that couldn’t hear him.
"Do it for their sake."
His golden fire changed shape.
The burst became a wide, sweeping curtain of concentrated flame that spread outward across the surrounding rubble. His fire became a cremator, reducing any corpse it touched to ash in a matter of moments.
Whether it was the bodies of his followers, the bodies of Association responders or the bodies of tournament competitors he had watched fight not so long ago.
All of them became dust.
The wind carried the ashes across the ruined arena in slow, drifting streams.
Immediately after losing their host, the bones stopped glowing and fell to the ground from their airborne position.
Sierra and Farid’s attacks swept across the surrounding areas, incinerating any body the flames hadn’t yet reached. Klein tried to interfere, sending walls of water to shield the corpses from the fires, but he was fighting three Ascenders at once, and his reserves were already stretched.
Some of the bodies he protected were preserved. Most were not.
The bones fell across the arena in dead, quiet clatter.
Samuel cursed under his breath. His expression stayed dark.
Ace had still absorbed a significant portion of the harvested energy before the drain was cut off. The assassin behind him had reformed to nearly full density. Not quite what it had been during the first exchange, but close enough that the difference was going to be marginal.
Samuel’s samurai rose behind him.
The assassin’s daggers rose to meet it.
~BOOM~
The clash of the second exchange mirrored the first. Both fighters put most of the energy they had left into the strike, and both fighters had come into the exchange knowing they would not be able to prepare a third.
The two met in the center.
The detonation this time had no barrier to hold it back.
The dome was gone. There was no layer to absorb the shockwave that followed.
The shockwave spread across the entire zone unrestricted, expanding at speeds that outpaced anything below Surpasser tier to react to. Red-gold flame and dark crimson energy tore each other apart in overlapping bursts that spread outward for kilometers.
The remaining buildings within a five-kilometer radius came apart.
Whole city blocks that had survived the earlier fighting collapsed together. Buildings that had lost their upper floors during the first exchange lost their foundations during the second.
Roads split down their centers. Underground utility lines burst upward through the streets in fountains of debris.
The natural fault lines that had been quietly present beneath New Avalon’s downtown shifted under the pressure, and a series of tremors rippled outward through the city’s substructure.
The shockwave continued outward for another three kilometers before finally dissipating against the residential districts.
By the time it stopped, the ruined arena zone had become a crater.
Twenty meters deep at its center, in the aftermath of two ascended fighters pushing their absolute limits against each other.
The atmosphere hung thick with dust.
Silence settled across the ruined zone.
Nothing moved for a few seconds.
Then, high in the skies above the ruined zone, orbitals began to appear.
They came in waves. First a scattered handful, then dozens, then a full formation of association craft that spread across the sky in an organized covering pattern. The Association’s central command had clearly caught a breather after hours of coordinating responses to the city-wide attacks, and had now committed some of its remaining resources to supporting the main combat zone.
The orbitals didn’t land.
Not one of them dared.
They hovered at altitudes safely above the destruction, their pilots and passengers watching the crater below through reinforced observation ports.
The two figures still standing at the center of the ruined arena were something that no Surpasser or Evolver in the aerial force could hope to intervene in without instantly dying.
There was also, from a purely tactical standpoint, no one left for them to fight.
The dark organization’s elites had all been drained or killed. Their Surpasser assassins were either dead or had fled. The only combatants still active at the arena’s center were two Ascenders, and no reinforcement short of a fifth Ascender would meaningfully affect that exchange.
The orbitals maintained their positions and watched.
On one of the higher-altitude craft, two Surpassers stood at the observation port, looking down at the ruined zone.
The younger of the two exhaled slowly.
"The entire region is gone. Look at it. There isn’t a building left standing within five kilometers of the arena. This morning it was lively with hundreds of thousands of people... now it’s a crater... a massive graveyard."
The older Surpasser stood beside him, arms folded across his chest.
"That’s what Ascender combat looks like. When they hold back, cities stand. When they don’t, they don’t."
"I’ve been an Ascender-track candidate for thirty years. Ascending is difficult, really difficult. I’ve studied every recorded engagement I could get access to, in hopes of gaining some enlightenment."
"You can watch every recording hundreds of times. You can rehearse every technique. Until you’re standing above one, you don’t understand what being an Ascender actually means."
The younger Surpasser was quiet for a long moment.
"Do you still want to make the breakthrough?"
The older one didn’t answer immediately.
Then he shrugged.
"More than ever. Do you know why?"
"Why?"
"Because I’d rather be the one standing in the crater than the one watching from an orbital helplessly."
♢♢♢♢
Across the city, in every zone not directly touched by the shockwave, screens showed the live feeds.
The news orbitals finally arrived, and began to capture everything. Every household still watching, every emergency shelter, every underground bunker had received the coverage.
The camera drones zoomed in through the settling smoke.
Ace was the first to appear in view.
The commentary networks had been silent for the past several minutes. When Ace’s image resolved on the screens, a soft, collective murmur ran through millions of viewers watching from safety.
He was still standing.
But he was missing an arm.
His left arm was gone at the shoulder. The cut was clean, like Moon’s cut had been earlier in the day. His remaining robes were black with soot and red with drying blood. His remaining hand still held one of his daggers.
His expression was pale but composed.
Across the kingdom, viewers erupted.
"He’s down to one arm!"
"He can be beaten! Look at him!"
"Samuel got him! Samuel Sky, the unrivaled strongest swordsman of the North!""
"He got the master! He actually got him!"
"Come on, Samuel! Finish him! End this!"
The chatter grew loud and excited. People who had been holding their breath for hours finally exhaled, letting the tension out in shouted encouragement toward a screen that couldn’t hear them.
Then the cameras panned across the crater to Samuel.
And the chatter died instantly.