Chapter 542 - Vs. Virillius Augustus III

  Virillius reversed his momentum in midair with a flap of the wings. Rotating his hips, he spun his body around and swung his bow. Its limbs transformed as it moved; the lower blade merged with his dagger to become a twisted hilt while its upper counterpart snapped into a right-angled position. Suddenly, he had a scythe in hand, its tip only an inch from his daughter’s neck.

  He twisted his wrists right as she moved to parry it and lifted the blade over hers. It was a classic trick that created a win-win scenario. Even if she blocked the blow before it struck her skull, the shockwave would still ring her ears. If not a kill, it was at least a moment of disorientation.

  And that was precisely why the standard Cadrian style included a dedicated counter.

  Executing just that, Claire lowered her stance and dove towards his exposed torso. In theory, he was practically defenseless. The textbook stated that the worst he could do was kick her and that any such action would be equivalent to surrendering his leg; she clearly had the upper hand.

  It was a shame then that the textbook was wrong.

  Virillius gave his wrists another quick twist and angled his scythe towards her spine. It nearly caught her in its grasp, but Claire spun out of the way just before it landed. Pressing one reformed blade against his scythe, she grinded it up the weapon’s length and threatened his fingers while simultaneously keeping the farm tool at bay.

  She aimed her other sword towards his gut, but kicking it in the side, he twirled his scythe into a perfect parry.

  Their weapons sparked and sang as they clashed, not because they shed bits of superheated metal, but because of the surging magic. Virillius’ blood sprouted bloody tendrils every time their weapons met. The tiny red vines looped around Claire’s blade and grabbed ahold of it, but her ice-cold aura froze them solid and shattered them before they could have any effect.

  He threw a crushing swing that was turned into a sideways swipe, a flurry of stabs that arced around all the obstacles in their paths, and a horn attack that worked its way straight into his daughter’s blind spot. But keeping her blade against his, she deflected his swipe, parried all of his stabs, and caught his antlers with her tail.

  Another chain of attacks that went nowhere at all.

  It was almost unthinkable that neither had landed any hits considering that their speed was best measured in hundredths of the speed of light. Their power had likewise grown to absurd levels. It wasn’t just the mountain that had already succumbed. Their surroundings had been obliterated.

  They’d already moved dozens of kilometers away from their point of origin and left a path of destruction in their wake. The forest had been disintegrated by the repeated shockwaves. The trees, the grasses, and the soil were gone, leaving the continent’s crust fully exposed. Even that had been heavily damaged. There were massive cracks all around with bits of lava seeping through them, courtesy of the pool once dormant within the volcano.

  And yet, they were both still ramping. Every time one upped the ante, the other would readily match and exceed it. It wasn’t like the changes were incremental. They were actively trying to test and outdo each other; the boosts to their speed and power were obvious even to the untrained eye.

  It almost looked like a game.

  Because, practically, it was.

  They were trying to draw out each other’s cards while exposing as few of their own as possible. It was as much of an unspoken agreement as it was the most practical approach. They needed to know how much room they had to work with before committing to attacks that would leave them more open, and much of the calculation came with fishing out everything in the enemy’s pool.

  In a real fight to the death, they likely would have picked up the pace and grown by larger leaps and bounds, but a showmatch demanded no such effort. That was why they changed their weapons every time they were broken. It was simply in the spirit of play.

  Still, even if their climb was slower, there was still a limit—a point where one would have to pull out a new trick out of the hat. And in the case of Clarie versus Virillius, it was ultimately the former who first gave in.

  The problem lay with her weaponry. It didn’t matter how densely she packed the ice. With the sheer amount of mana imbued in their blows, the brittle substance could hold out no longer. It shattered with every clash, regardless of whether she was blocking or attacking. Repairing her equipment was a simple endeavour. If that were all she did, then she wouldn’t have struggled. But she’d been forming a new, unused weapon with every breakage, just for fun. And having already exhausted hundreds of permutations, coming up with fresh and original shapes was taking up so much of her time that she barely had any left to respond to her father’s attacks.

  And while that wasn’t a problem in and of itself—she was still evading his blows—she ultimately decided that she’d rather show him a trick he already knew than let him confirm the first real strike.

  Her next two weapons were made of true ice.

  She formed a simple spear in one hand and a dagger in the other. Both were designs she’d already used, but she gave herself a pass on account of the new material.

  Her father noticed the change right away.

  It was impossible to miss.

  The true ice was a deeper blue than its ordinary counterpart, but at the same time, it was more transparent. The biggest giveaway of all was its ethereal glow. It shimmered unnaturally beneath the sun almost as if it was sapping its light.

  Along with the change in material came a shift in Claire’s approach. Finally liberated from her fragile equipment, she tripled the force behind her next blow. Her father blocked the weapon with ease, but not expecting the sudden jump in strength, he was sent flying backwards.

  Turning humanoid, Claire pumped her wings and gave chase. She aimed her dagger and threw it straight at his neck. It flew in a perfectly straight line, its fang ready to pierce and tear, but he deflected it with a bladed shovel while simultaneously catching her spear with a whip. He yanked her towards him, only for her to use the momentum to slide beneath his body.

  Catching her falling dagger with her tail, she swiped at his underbelly—the one place that he couldn’t defend. He had a layer of armour there as well, a thick red plate that perfectly guarded his guts, but Claire was prepared to break it. She poured her magic into her dagger, concentrating it in the knife’s edge as she slammed it into his stomach, but he flapped his wings before she cut into his flesh and flew just beyond her reach.

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  He turned in midair right after and brought his shovel down upon her, but she met it head on with her spear and shattered it in another violent explosion.

  For a second, it’d seemed like the usual fare.

  Until he clenched the fist she’d freed.

  The weapon’s shattered bits suddenly stopped falling. Turning their sharpest points to Claire’s core, they cut a sparkling path in the morning sky.

  She moved to parry them, but it was impossible. Quick and agile, they darted right past her weapons and shot towards her wrists.

  It was a shame then that they were swallowed.

  Shoulderhorse appeared in its eponymous position, opened its mouth wide, and consumed the spell in its entirety. Frowning, Virillius called upon his magic once more, but the only shards that responded were the ones that were scattered throughout the environment—the bits and pieces of every other weapon that she’d broken over the course of the battle.

  They too rushed her down.

  And they too were readily consumed.

  There was nothing that they could do against the full force of Claire’s portable vacuum.

  She charged him while he contemplated the mechanism and rammed her spear straight into his breastplate, but he caught it with his whip, pulled her towards him, and retaliated with a punch—a punch that she met with one of her own.

  There was an audible crack.

  The world itself almost seemed to break as an absurd amount of magic flooded the sky. It was more than Valencia’s colosseum could’ve possibly contained. More than what Allegra and Durham had put into their final strikes. And more than Virillius had been intent on exhausting.

  Though certainly caught off guard by the phenomenon, Virillius was never one to falter. He immediately turned the extra mana into a spell and incorporated it into his strategy.

  All according to plan.

  Forming a magic circle beneath her feet, Claire crafted a spell of her own as her father put his together. Hers was a complicated mess of visible magic circles that ultimately manifested as an enchantment. Anything her speartip touched would be instantly frozen. His was even more potent, a hex that would rip the blood from anyone within a thousand paces.

  But there was just one problem.

  The transient magic circuit used to process the spell’s effects encountered a null value when querying its available resources and bailed out of its execution before it could complete its allocation.

  Or in layman’s terms, the spell collapsed because she drained its mana.

  Claire closed in and drove her spear towards his chest as he cocked a brow at his broken magic circle. He managed to throw up a shield just in time to block it, but it froze and shattered without stopping or redirecting her blade.

  He’d pulled his hand away the moment he realised that her spell allowed her to pierce his defenses. But they’d finally reached the speed for it to be too little too late.

  The spear’s tip grazed his wrist, pierced his gauntlets, and ate into his flesh.

  It wasn’t a very deep cut, not even a flesh wound, just a tiny scratch.

  But Claire’s smile widened regardless.

  First blood was hers; she had won their silly little competition.

  With it finally out of the way, the two fighters immediately disengaged. Backing off to a distance of about a hundred metres, they spent a moment in silence before refreshing their gear.

  In Claire’s case, that meant calling for Boris—punching a hole in the fabric of spacetime, Claire grabbed her lizard from the other side of the universe and held his tail in both hands. He transformed as she brandished him, becoming an axe, a halberd, and a spear before settling as a two-handed sword. His newfound form was a massive piece of metal about two metres long and thirty centimetres wide. The backside of his blade was jagged, almost as if to reflect the spines he’d had as an iguana, while the front edge was sharp enough to split an atom. He was made up of no mere steel, but a dark, ink-stained metal almost reminiscent of polished cast iron.

  His body featured two distinct faces. One was the weapon’s guard, where he projected a haunting guise loosely shaped like a lizard. The other was incorporated into the reptilian illustration that extended from the blade’s hilt to its tip. Like the rest of the weapon’s decorations, the lizard was an icy blue. But unlike the others, it was dull and lifeless, lacking their light and translucency.

  Claire’s armour was similarly transformed. The material wasn’t exactly the same, but it inherited the lizard’s black and blue aesthetic. In essence, it was a more effective version of the armour she’d worn when fighting Olethra, which was to say that it came with a full set of bladed wings.

  Icicles, daggers, and swords floated in the space behind her. Metallic or not, they were all Boris—malleable sentient weapons ready to be grabbed or fired at a moment’s notice.

  With the change in attire came an equally impressive shift in her aura. Magic and divinity leaked from her body in such incredible excess that it almost felt like she was trying to drown the world in her power. It was a change that could readily be seen in her eyes. Her sclera had darkened, turning a deep, inky black, while her irises glowed in a mix of red and gold.

  Coincidentally, her father’s eyes had adopted a similar tint. His had kept their whites, but they shared a similar glow, only he had separated the colours where Claire had decided to mix them; one eye was pure gold, while the other burned a chaotic red.

  It came down to a difference in their approaches—a difference further emphasized by their armour. Whereas his daughter was largely equipped with leathers, Virillius was covered in metal. He was once again dressed in a full suit of silvery armour. The accents were mostly red—he’d opted for the colour of blood to better cover up the stains left by his enemies.

  The armour was not crafted in the Valencian style, or any distinctly Cadrian style at all. It was based on what he was given when he had conquered Vella’s trial. Of course, Virillius was not so foolish as to rely on the goddess. Using her design as a base, he’d adjusted it to his liking and to better cover his vulnerabilities.

  Specifically, he’d replaced the metal skirt meant for his lower body with another set of plates. He had greaves, poleyns, and cuisses for his legs as well as tassets and faulds for his hips. In that sense, the design was much closer to something that an elven knight would wear.

  Of course, Virillius was not able to transform his clothing the same way as his daughter. So where then did his armour originate?

  The answer was quite simple.

  It was crafted with his divinity.

  The radiant metal sheets were quite literally his godly might given physical form. He’d made them with the very same techniques employed by the divine when they blessed mortals with their holy relics. Only, by taking away their permanence, by adding a clause that would expire them after each battle, he was able to bolster their power to otherwise unreachable heights.

  Flitzegarde’s measurements dictated that even the weakest pieces had qualities measuring in the hundreds of thousands, while the mightiest among them, like his spear and shieldlance, spiked into the tens of millions.

  Design wise, the weapons themselves were almost surprisingly simple. That wasn’t to say that they didn’t fit in with the rest of his aesthetic—the shieldlance had golden lines running down its length, and each weapon had a bright red gem embedded right into its blade—but they weren’t nearly as complicated as Claire’s oversized sword. If anything, their silhouettes were normal, shaped as per the usual specification.

  Brandishing them, however, sufficed to prove that they were anything but average.

  He wasn’t slashing.

  He was just getting into position.

  But even that tiny movement caused his shieldlance to launch a massive shockwave that carved straight through the continental plate.

  Eudysseus shrieked in terror as the two fighters lowered their stances.

  By digging their feet into the soil, they had already disrupted its orbit.