Daedalus Street.
A building exploded inward. Walls bent, strained, and then detonated in a shower of bricks and dust that rained across a hundred-meter radius.
The earth quaked faster than a wave of cracks spreading across it. Houses slid sideways and crumbled into one another; ceilings crashed against floors, and furniture disintegrated into splinters.
By the time that building gave out, a blur had already torn past three other buildings behind it. Successive shocks erupted in its wake, cracked marble tiles caving deep into torn soil.
A trench stretched in a straight line, bisecting Daedalus Street from end to end.
It ended at the foot of a watchtower already buckling sideways, plowing through a cluster of alleys with no entry or exit.
"Cough! Cough!"
The sound of choked inhales echoed from within that devastation. Clouds of dust floated around, reducing visibility to near zero.
Something moved against that toppled tower, footsteps overlaying on top of continuous coughs.
Dust parted as Olivas stepped out, his jaw hanging loose. Green liquid seeped down his chin in clots of blood that hissed where they touched the ground.
His hand rose to his shattered jawline and wrenched.
Crack. Crack.
Bones creaked, skin visibly knitting back around his mouth, the jawbone sliding into place like it had never been broken. All the skin along his spine had been peeled away, revealing pulsing, root-like muscles curling in thick tendrils.
Those tendrils writhed, and the skin from his shoulder blades stretched down, covering his sheared back like pulled rubber. His spine bent backward due to the force, stretched taut. Then, cracks fissured down his back, seeping with green blood, and his spine snapped loose.
Olivas straightened, those bleeding lines on his back sealing shut. He ignored them and brought his focus forward.
And his pupils shrank to pinpoints.
Because reflected in them was a closed fist, already covering half his vision. Still enlarging.
Bell was in a horizontal dive above the ground, fist cocked all the way back, knuckles white and veins rising along his neck.
Behind him, the buildings flanking his trail folded inward. Roofs edged downward, walls contorting into vertical crescents like steel bending under pressure.
Multiple houses behind were already airborne, foundations wrenched free and launched upward by his passage alone.
Olivas jerked his arms forward, forearms crisscrossing to meet Bell.
[Ittou Shura]
For a moment, Bell's arm flushed red, muscles flexing all at once. A pain like thousands of ants eating through his body hammered into his mind.
He exhaled, his self-preservation instinct leaving him alongside a plume of steam.
Fist met guard.
A pressurized eruption of force screamed from their point of contact. The ground between them split in four directions, each fissure racing toward a different district.
One carved through a sewer line, and a geyser of water erupted thirty feet into air before collapsing back down. Another split a house from foundation to roofline, the two halves groaning apart.
Olivas roared and shoved Bell's fist aside. Bell slid backward, redirecting the force into soil, yet the recoil still launched him upward and onto a balcony, slamming him through a steel railing.
He pushed off that debris, gone before the tiles beneath his feet could even crack.
They met in the air above a nearby street.
Three exchanges happened before either of them hit ground. Bell's elbow against Olivas's nose. Olivas's knee against Bell's forearm. Bell's forehead against Olivas's throat. Each impact produced a concentric ring of distorted air, visible for a split second before dissipating. The street beneath them shattered with each exchange, as if the ground itself was flinching.
They landed simultaneously, twenty feet apart.
The street between them was unrecognizable. A trench ran straight from where Bell stood to where Olivas crouched, carved by their midair exchange alone. Neither of them had touched it.
Olivas coiled all four limbs, compressing his body like an animal before a lunge. A flame sword blazed in Bell's grip again, feet shoulder-width apart, weight dropping low.
Both of them moved.
A woman who had been crawling toward an alley on the next street saw them flash through her peripheral vision. She registered a line of heat across her cheek, a ringing in her ears, and then a building beside her shed its paint and concrete in a single burst.
Bricks hit the ground where she'd been crawling a full second after she was already wrenched away by a flaming chain. All she had seen was a smear of red and green intersect, and then the building came apart.
Three streets over, an ale barrel sitting outside a stall split along its length. Ale poured across marble in golden spirals that had barely reached the ground when—
BOOM!
They were already there.
Bell's heel dug into the ale, and it evaporated around his ankle. His sword was already mid-swing, leaving flaming trails in its wake.
Olivas ducked under it. Feet planted, knees straight, yet his upper body tilted backward, waist bones coming loose with a cascade of crunches.
From that impossible lean, Olivas snapped upright and drove his palm forward and down into the ground between their feet.
Marble turned to powder on contact. A shockwave traveled downward, bounced off the Adamantite walls of Knossos beneath Daedalus' bedrock, and came back up, right under Bell.
The earth burst beneath him.
Bell tumbled skyward, fifteen, twenty feet. Olivas was already waiting on a wall of an adjacent building, fingers buried in its vertical surface, legs coiled back to their limits.
Golden strings.
They hovered, threading out in dozens, each one a line to a version of what happened next.
One string led to his ribs caving under Olivas's soles. It snapped, gone.
One led to his own sword arm shattering against that whip kick. It frayed, burned through, gone.
One led to open air, a clean block. It dimmed, useless, gone.
The last string held.
Olivas's legs uncoiled off that wall, whole body launching into the kick those strings had already shown him.
Bell's arm was already moving before that last thread finished settling into gold. His wrist snapped back, and he hurled his flaming sword.
It hammered into Olivas's temple pommel-first. Bone screeched on fire-steel.
Olivas tore through the building behind him, forehead caving in, heat melting half his face.
He was flung down behind that building, tearing through three adjacent houses before vanishing somewhere in the devastation.
Flames detonated from Bell's heels as he launched himself forward, tearing through that same building Olivas had gone through.
He roared out from the other side. Three houses lay collapsed in the distance, flanked by two other buildings lining a path to them.
A green blur shot leftward from the collapsed houses, beelining a straight path toward a father and daughter nearby.
Bell burst forward, a palm spread wide, his flaming sword swinging back through the air in his grip. His feet landed on a building's wall, and he ran along it horizontally, accumulating speed with each stride. His flame sword dragged behind him, its tip leaving a trail of orange in his wake.
He reached the corner of that building and pushed off.
The corner came with him. That entire structure of stone and concrete reinforcement tore free as Bell launched himself forward. He carried it with him, one hand gripping the mass, the other holding his sword.
Olivas glanced back, and his steps stuttered.
Bell threw the corner.
Right at Olivas.
That mass of stone and concrete sailed over, casting a deep shadow that covered him and everything around him. Olivas had barely turned when that corner slammed down. The impact sent shudders through earth in a wide radius, a sinkhole forming beneath.
Bell fell on top of the debris, punching straight through it. Another shockwave from his landing sent Olivas plummeting even further down the sinkhole. Then, Bell descended after him, feet first, both heels driving into Olivas's chest with the full weight of his fall behind him.
Another crater formed inside the sinkhole.
Bell stood on Olivas's chest, looking down.
The creature's eyes were still open, fixed on him. Half of his face had melted, an eerie grin fixed on his lips. Two metallic rods had ruptured through his abdomen, flesh writhing around those wounds.
"You know what the difference is between us?" Olivas slurred, his words slipping through half-formed lips.
Bell pressed his heel deeper into the creature's chest, and Olivas choked in response.
"I have 'her' with me, you don't," Olivas coughed out.
Bell remained silent for a moment. Then, he opened his mouth.
"And 'she' wants me, not you."
Silence fell.
Olivas's grin froze in place.
Bell dropped his weight further and brought his lips close to Olivas's ear.
"Tell me... does it burn?"
...
..
.
***
[300 Power Stones = 1 Bonus Chapter]
[8 chapters ahead on P@tr3on = [email protected]/Not_Aaryan]
...
[Authors Thoughts]
Hiss! Olivas got phycologically KO'ed. Does it burn? I felt it all the way here! Bell really should master the art of destroying his enemies with words alone, it'll be fun that way.
Have a fabulous day, everyone!