Chapter 93: Clash of Martial Lords [5]
"You are here to stop me?" the second knight-priest chuckled.
"You seem confident" his eyes flickered for a second, "Let’s see if your strength matches this arrogance of yours"
The stone on the obsidian ramparts didn’t just crack when Lord Manuses and the second knight-priest collided.
It shattered into fine, razor-sharp shrapnel that whistled through the night air.
There was no preliminary testing of the waters, no cautious probing.
The second knight-priest drew his heavy greatsword in a flash of blinding white light, the massive blade whistling as it cleaved toward Manuses’s neck.
Manuses met the strike bare-handed. His massive, alloy-dense claws clamped down directly on the sharp edge of the holy steel.
BOOM—!!
The concussive shockwave from the parry blew the tiled roof clean off a nearby barracks, sending heavy clay shards raining down into the streets below.
"I admit you do have some serious strength" the second knight-priest whispered.
The sheer physical output of two Middle-enlightened stage Martial Lords instantly turned the surrounding castle sector into a meat grinder.
Unlike his fallen comrade Aradin, the second knight-priest didn’t waste his breath on grand declarations of human supremacy or hollow insults.
His face behind the visor remained grim, his breathing tightly controlled, and his eyes focused entirely on the terrifying beastman before him.
He was reserved, treating Manuses not as an inferior creature, but as a lethal, highly respected adversary.
"You have a fine technique," the knight-priest muttered through gritted teeth, his muscles straining as he tried to push his greatsword through Manuses’s grip.
"Save your compliments for your prayers," Manuses smiled, his white-gold mane flaring with a brilliant, predatory light.
With a sudden twist of his torso, Manuses unleashed a massive, feathered wing like a solid iron battering ram.
The impact slammed into the knight-priest’s ribs, sending the armored man flying off the castle walls.
The human crashed straight through three consecutive stone buildings, his body tearing through reinforced masonry like cardboard before he stabilized his footing in the middle of a crowded lower avenue.
Manuses descended from the sky like a falling star, his heavy boots smashing into the pavement.
The resulting shockwave tore up the road, flipping massive stone slabs into the air.
The avenue was currently a bottleneck for the fleeing Norona forces.
Dozens of Orc infantrymen, massive Ogres, and frantic Goblin archers were caught completely unprepared in the immediate radius of the two titans.
They didn’t even have the chance to comprehend what was happening.
When the knight-priest swung his greatsword to parry another of Manuses’s ferocious claw strikes, the stray kinetic shockwaves tore through the crowds.
An Ogre warrior standing ten meters away violently burst into a spray of crushed bone and crimson mush from the sheer air pressure.
Their deaths came swiftly but in a horrifying manner.
A squad of twenty Orc sentries was instantly liquefied, their armor crushing their own internal organs into paste as they were caught between the grinding auras of the two Martial Lords.
"Are you enjoying this music?" Lord Manuses chuckled softly, he dashed forward, grabbing the second knight-priest by the face.
Bang!
The impact of the crash sent waves of shock across the district.
The screams of the dying monsters were instantly drowned out by the thundering roar of collapsing infrastructure, the pavement running thick with a gruesome river of green and black blood.
The knight-priest’s calm exterior was beginning to fray.
"Tch" he inhaled deeply, tightening his grip on his blade’s handle. "This is troublesome" he growled.
No matter how perfectly he executed his defensive forms, no matter how smoothly his holy mana flowed, Manuses’s ferocity was absolute, unyielding, and terrifyingly efficient.
The beastman was a hurricane of white-gold feathers and alloy-tipped claws, systematically chipping away at the human’s heavy armor, leaving deep, bleeding gouges along his thighs and shoulders.
A growing sense of frustration finally broke through the knight-priest’s reserved demeanor.
He realized with a sickening clarity that if this battle continued on purely physical and martial terms, he would be ground into the dirt before Lord Damascus could ever arrive.
Spitting a glob of crimson from his lips, the knight-priest leaped backward, placing his hand over the twisted runes etched onto the chest of his white-gold plate.
"I must admit, you’re stronger than I imagined" the second knight-priest inhaled deeply.
"I guess I have no other choice than to use it"
The air around him suddenly grew entirely silent, the chaotic sounds of the rampaging city muffled by a bizarre, conceptual weight.
His active skill concept—quadrupled in strength after his evolution—finally awakened.
Lord of Names.
"Beastman," the knight-priest called out, his voice suddenly carrying an unnatural, echoing authority that reverberated directly inside Manuses’s soul, freezing the massive lion-hybrid in his tracks.
"Your strength is worthy of remembrance. Tell me... what is your name?"
"Hmmm....this might be a trap" Manuses paused, his golden eyes narrowing slightly as he felt the invisible, binding threads of a high-tier law tightening around his consciousness.
Yet, backed by the unshakeable pride of the God of Beasts, he did not hide.
"The name is Manuses," he answered, his voice booming across the ruined avenue.
"Manuses Ryodor"
The moment the last syllable left Manuses’s lips, the conceptual law of the Lord of Names snapped shut.
"Foolish beast" the second knight-priest’s lips curled into a dark grin.
His eyes flickered for a moment.
OMMMMM—!
The knight-priest’s white-gold armor violently dissolved into a thick, swirling vortex of absolute-white mana.
His human skeletal structure cracked, elongated, and mutated at a terrifying, cellular speed.
Within the span of a single heartbeat, the human form vanished entirely.
Standing in his place was a perfect, mirror-image carbon copy of Lord Manuses.
The identical white-gold mane fluttered in the desert wind.
Massive, pristine feather wings unfurled from his back, and the exact same suffocating, Middle-enlightened stageMartial Lord aura erupted from his newly mutated frame.
The second knight-priest had not just taken Manuses’s face; he had flawlessly copied his physical density, his bloodline properties, and his exact power output.
The replicated Manuses raised his new, clawed hands, testing the weight of the alloy-dense knuckles with a dark, satisfied expression.
"An exceptional form," the copied Manuses smiled, using the exact same multi-layered voice as the original.
"Now... let us see how well you fight against yourself."