Crackling bolts of white and crimson lightning spread across Arnus’ body, and his fists seemed to expand in size, great gauntlets of exotic energies forming from the ether. He slammed them together, a nova of power rippling into the air, and charged Granthar.
Sam saw an opportunity to strike as Granthar teleported, swinging Terra’s Will towards the man’s unguarded left side. A contemptuous flick of the D Ranker’s wrist blasted the weapon away, but did nothing against the ray of conceptual energy that blasted from Sam’s free hand, as he opened his palm. It blocked Granthar’s vision for a fraction of a second, long enough for Arnus to land a telling blow. The pugilist’s gauntlet sank into Granthar’s cheek, and with a grotesque explosion of gore, the man’s head was turned into a cloud of pink mist.
Even then, the D Ranker lived, and as a new head grew from the stump of the old, he laughed, a wet, gurgling noise. His hands reached out, latching onto invisible holes in the air, and pulled. For a mile in every direction, reality shattered, space torn apart and rewoven in strange patterns. Sam felt his body tugged in a thousand different directions, trying to answer the siren’s call of the laws of nature unbound.
He kept himself together by dint of his E Rank status, and merely felt the pulls as a local redistribution of gravity. To a weaker cultivator, however, it would have been devastating. The main purpose of the attack was not this, however. Rather, each rend in space acted as a razor capable of cutting through even D Rank flesh, as shown by a shower of blood that fell like a waterfall down Arnus’ face, as he brushed against one.
Granthar brought his hands together, and the spatial razors contracted, coming dangerously close to Sam and Arnus. Blood covered the tyrant’s clothes, but a wicked smile was on his face, as he forsaw victory. The shards of warped space started to dance in the air around Sam, but he pulled out his secret weapon. His Fragment stage Dao of Retaliation triggered, the foresight and reaction aspects of its concept allowing him to dodge the rifts, which were moving at a speed far slower than their D Rank creator. His body moved in strange ways, without bones or ligaments to constrict it. Next to him, Arnus did a similar thing, but as he did so, he forced his Dao into the world, directly contesting Granthar’s control.
Sam felt a stagnation forming in the air as the D Rankers warred, and realized that his own mastery could very well be the difference between victory and defeat. Thrusting his comparatively tiny pool of Dao energy into the clash of demigods, he added his conceptual energy to the ocean of power that Arnus was outputting. As Sam felt his own Dao being accepted by the other man, he was able to gauge a bit about the D Ranker’s concept. It was a mixture of Light, and Vengeance, something similar to what Sam would describe as a paladin archetype. It was a potential route for his own Dao to evolve to, in fact, save that he had no Light elemental mastery to speak of.
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
There was a tiny shift on the metaphysical front lines, and the joint efforts of Sam and Arnus pushed Granthar’s Dao backwards. Sam peered closer into the center of the fray, attempting to glean a few Dao insights for his trouble. At a closer look, it was as if two armies warred with one another, appearing out of a sea of frothing energy, becoming sharper and sharper in appearance the closer they came to the forefront of the clash. It was a stunning interplay of higher Tier concepts, one that permeated the world around it. Specters aligned with the Daos began to pop into existence around the three warriors, battling in the air itself.
A second later, Granthar was pushed backwards, both physically and on the conceptual plane. His Dao expression shattered, the army of shadowy soldiers crumbling away to reveal the man himself, floundering amidst the ruins of his own technique. Arnus and Sam struck in unison, hammer and fist slamming into Granthar’s face. While the D Ranker was capable of regenerating from almost anything, there was a limit, especially if the same place was targeted over and over again.
The man reeled, his head split in half, a wedge of the Dao keeping it open. Arnus roared, and imbued his next strike with as much power as he could muster, drawing it from his very lifeforce. Bands of crimson light appeared around his body, tightening in, even as his muscles expanded. Blood erupted from his skin, and coated him in a thin sheen of glassy red, making him look like a statue wrought of bloody marble.
His fist slammed down upon the wedge, and with a ripping, tearing noise, Granthar was split down the middle, both halves of the despot falling from the sky. Even then, tendrils of flesh reached out, attempting to reattach him, but Arnus struck one more, his body beginning to shrivel as he overtaxed himself. In his orgy of vengeance, however, he ignored the pain.
Sam remained where he was. He had already played as much of a role as he possibly could in this fight, and had suffered enough at the hands of Granthar. All he really was in a war between D Rankers was a distraction anyway, and that purpose had been already fulfilled.
Bolts of sizzling light impacted Granthar from all sides, the man’s discorporated form coming apart at the seams. Blades of cosmic darkness sliced out from his every corner, aimed at Arnus. Great furrows were torn out of the D Ranker’s flesh, and one took his arm off at the shoulder. All this served to do was stoke the flames of his rage to a roaring bonfire, one which culminated on the conceptual level in a building sized fist of white light, shot through with veins of red. Granthar’s head, split in half, let out a silent scream as he was pummeled into oblivion, his body atomized inch by inch as Arnus spent his life force on the final blow.
The man turned his head to Sam, and nodded once, not as a D Ranker to an inferior cultivator, but as a warrior to a warrior. Even as his limbs crumbled into ash, and his body faded away, Arnus remained strong, happy in achieving his vengeance.
A sound like thunder rumbled across the city as a massive tear in space opened behind the draconic titan, dragging the beast back to whatever hell it had come from. The creature screamed in impotent rage, but even it was unable to contest the forces acting upon it.
Sam watched as the realm faded around him, his mission finally complete. Only, he felt empty inside. Even the rush of levels that filled him with power did nothing to prevent that.
