Rieren’s robes had nearly fixed themselves under the influence of her perk from when she had torn them in the fight against the Arisen. She felt marginally awful that she was ripping through them again as she transformed once more.
Perhaps she ought to use some of her Credits to buy one of those special sets of robes that could transform along with their wearer. She recalled well how Essastior had transformed to and from a gigantic thunderbird, with his combination of armour and robes changing with him. Something like that would be quite handy for her.
Such thoughts niggled at the edges of Rieren’s mind as she squared off against the Masked Avatar. The man’s ceramic mask might block his true expression from her direct line of sight, but she could steal read his posture and stance easily.
He was standing with his fists balled and feet a little spread apart. Even if he was disinclined to show any shock or surprise, Rieren’s sudden surge in power had taken him aback.
“Do I stand a chance now?” she asked.
Around them, the others were quickly getting away. They knew a fight was about to begin. A battle between two powerful cultivators. A battle no one wanted to be anywhere near.
“Must we do this?” someone asked from their left.
Rieren didn’t dare take her eyes off the Avatar, but she thought she recognized the voice. It took her a second to realize it had to be one of the cultivators who had first fought the Arisen to a standstill, then tackled the rain of meteors. What was his name? Oromin. His presence here meant the threat from the Aether had been taken care of.
“Surely,” Oromin said, his voice growing in volume. He was coming closer. “We didn’t fight so hard to protect this little outpost just so you could destroy it with your little spat. The Shatterlands do not wish to be caught up in your squabbles. Leave this place immediately.”
The imperious addition at the end incensed the Avatar. Like Rieren, he hadn’t taken his eyes off his enemy. But now, likely annoyed, he glanced to his right for a brief moment.
“You were harbouring an enemy of the Elderlands,” he said with as much pride and arrogance as he could muster. “You ought to be begging me for ways you can assist and make up for your grievous error.”
“How is it an error if we didn’t even know this woman was supposed to be a fugitive from the imperial court? And on that note, why has the imperial court taken this long to apprehend her? Surely, this sort of gross incompetence far supersedes whatever help we unknowingly gave to her.”
“Enough!”
“Leave it, Oromin,” another cultivator said. It sounded like the woman in green. “This isn’t our quarrel. We do not have the right to impose.”
“Yes,” the Avatar said. “I will only say this once more. Leave, and I will be kind enough to forget this little interaction. Cause any further problems and I will ensure that the entire imperial court will hear of this. It won’t be good for the Shatterlands if word gets out how much of the evil plaguing the Elderlands are holed up in this region.”
If anything, that was the most incendiary thing to say here. But the others held their tongues. They were smart enough to not antagonize the Avatar any further.
Rieren heard the other cultivators leaving. The last chance at avoiding a confrontation with the Avatar was now gone. Mercion had already dragged a reluctant Silomene—who had looked pleadingly at Rieren—away.
“Let us end this,” the Avatar said.
“Yes.” Rieren pulled her sword into the proper stance in the moment before the fight began. “I have grown impatient as well. Come.”
It had been quite a while since Rieren had fought a cultivator. There had been the mock bouts back in Lionshard Sect, where she had fought against Cerill and Folend. But those were nothing when compared to a battle against a Masked Avatar, where both parties were aiming to not just kill, but annihilate.
Rieren wondered which kind he was. She had fought a few Avatars in her previous life and had learned that they all possessed the same kind of Domain that summoned a tree. But this tree could appear in many different kinds. She remembered the properties all the trees could take but didn’t recall which of those the blue-leaved and black-barked one was.
Well, she was about to find out soon enough.
Rieren wasn’t surprised that before she could make a move, the Avatar was already attacking.
He didn’t use any weapons. At least, she didn’t think so, at first. But as he got close enough, they became all too clear. Ornate claws jutted over his knuckles, made of a strange metal the same bright azure as the leaves on his Domain tree.
Rieren was quick enough to defend herself. In her empowered state, her Mind stat was more than high enough to note the motion of her opponent, to determine how best she could counter it even in the tiny fraction of time she received to think. She might not be as powerful as she could have been with a Temporal Recollector but Call of the Past wasn’t far behind.
Earthfall Blade made deflecting the Avatar’s blow an easy task. She just had to redirect the thrust of his fist to her right.
At the same time as the Avatar’s claws connected with her blade, one of the branches of his malformed tree exploded into ash, bark and leaves and all. With the sudden disappearance of the tree branch, a burst of power bloomed behind the Avatar’s blow.
Rieren had already deflected all of it, but her hair and robes ruffled as the imparted force was redirected past her. The Avatar’s blow had launched a powerful shockwave, which crashed through several buildings of the outpost, shattered its wall, and left a crater almost a quarter of a league long. Incredible potency.
She had already jumped back to get herself some space. It was clear what kind of Domain she was facing. This one was a Tree of Sacrifice.
This meant that Rieren’s attacks weren’t going to work. Not normally, at least. Every attack she might land on the Avatar would only be transferred to the tree, rendering any offensive manoeuvre utterly useless.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
But not if she found a way to attack both the Avatar and his tree together.
He was relentless in his assault. The Avatar threw himself at her with a speed and ferocity that by itself was enough to crack the ground and horrendously rend the air he passed through. For the moment, Rieren was mostly glad she could keep up with his motion, and that Earthfall Blade could deflect everything he threw at her.
Another consideration was how much the Avatar knew about Rieren’s knowledge. He must have been briefed about all the undesirables he was to hunt down. That meant he knew that Rieren had faced his kind before, that she had their measure and knew how to win.
In other words, the Avatar’s furious attack was a way of defending himself in an overarching sense. She couldn’t hit back if she was too busy defending all the time.
Getting some space to do anything about it was proving to be difficult. The Avatar stuck to her like a gnat. Their battle was destroying the entire outpost, just as Oromin had predicted it would, which was hard to bear considering how much they had gone through to protect it from the Abyssals, the Arisen, and the meteor shower.
This bastard of an Avatar had no respect for their efforts.
Even worse, when the dust of their altercation settled in whatever a manner it would, he would put the blame squarely on Rieren’s shoulders for not peacefully cooperating. This battle could have been prevented if she had simply allowed herself to be cut down, just like the Abyssals they had executed.
The little spikes of anger at the situation tried to interfere with her rhythm, but Rieren was well versed in such circumstances. Her mind knew how to partition her feelings, strong or weak, from interfering with her concentration and her ability to think on her feet. She hadn’t gone as far as she had without such an integral ability.
That partition of focus allowed her to summon her Domain. Even as she kept deflecting the Avatar’s ferocious rain of blows, water materialized around them, quickly churning into stormy waves that interrupted the flow of combat.
Just what Rieren had been seeking.
It granted her just the fractional breathing room she needed to get some space between them. A space she used to summon her geyser from beneath their feet.
The rising burst of water separated them even farther. Rieren was able to fall back with Silken Passage, moving backwards as fluidly as the Domain she had summoned. The Avatar had a counter to it. An explosion of blue petals cleared the area around him. It was too late, though. Rieren had successfully disengaged from the fight.
She grinned. Now, it was her turn to make that monkey’s-pus-guzzler pay.
Of course, the Avatar was intent on keeping up the pressure, even if it meant doing so from a distance. He summoned more of his Domain, the twisted black branches now encircling his arm like bracer. When he pointed it at Rieren, a flurry of petals shot at her like miniature comets.
A simple Heaven’s Arc was all she needed to prevent any from hitting her. They weren’t powerful either. The little crescent-shaped shockwave pummelled through the bursting petals before striking the Avatar.
It had no effect, just as Rieren had known. Instead, a deep cut opened in the tree far above them. A cut that began healing immediately.
The Avatar tried to close the distance and attack directly with his claws again. Rieren didn’t give him the opportunity to do so. She retreated further, using Silken Passage to keep her distance. Letting him restart his flurry of clawed attacks wouldn’t do at all.
Of course, there were his techniques and skills she had to be wary of. The Avatar’s movement skill summoned up a storm of petals all around her. At first, it didn’t look like something that resembled her Silken Passage. This was more in the line of a technique. There were those which could enhance movement.
But then, the petals continued growing all around her, even as Rieren kept retreating farther. A second later, they started interchanging positions with the Avatar.
She had to hold back her curse. Forget movement, this was short-distance teleportation. It shouldn’t have been surprising. The Avatar was already using a principle of interchange with his Domain to transfer all damage dealt to his person onto the twisted, floating tree above them. This was using the same idea.
But there was an easy counter to it. Rieren called upon her geyser once again, letting a column of water climb into the sky and take her with it. With it went all the petals around her too. Even the teleporting Avatar went flying up as well.
It seemed that wasn’t going to stop him. Despite the sudden range between him and Rieren, he was building power in the same hand with the branch of his Domain tree around it. A brilliant blue orb of energy was growing larger and larger. Rieren was pretty certain that getting hit by that wouldn’t be pleasant.
But she grinned anyway. This was exactly what she had been looking for.
Power thrummed through Rieren. She began a motion to use Heaven’s Cleave, letting out Aspects of lighting and wind to stitch the roiling water and steam into a twisting maelstrom rising from her sword. It grew quickly. Just as it had against her first Arisen, the lightning-stitched waterspout rose all the way to the heavens itself in a matter of heartbeats.
“Madness,” the Avatar growled out.
Rieren only grinned harder. Both the Avatar and his Domain tree were in her line of sight and in the path of Heaven’s Cleave. Exactly what she needed.
The glittering cerulean orb of power in the Avatar’s hand had grown to enormous proportions. It was easily as big as a boulder now. But it wouldn’t be enough. Not against Heaven’s Cleave. Few things were, and whatever a Masked Avatar could do wasn’t it.
But then he disappeared.
Rieren’s heart squeezed in her chest. She didn’t need to look back to know he had reappeared at her rear. His petals had already been spread out pretty wide, and her geyser had thrown them even wider. This was made worse by the fact that it was regularly difficult for her to twist around while she had Heaven’s Cleave active.
Thankfully, Rieren had a trick up her sleeve for such situations. She used Wrath of the Swordwing to summon her wings made of gleaming swords at her back. Then she slammed them both down.
Behind her, the Avatar was preparing to unleash his devastating attack. But Rieren was fast enough to counter before he got it off.
Using her wings as leverage, Rieren pushed herself forward, just past the point where the Avatar’s Domain tree was floating. Then she used her wings to twist around, much as though they were acting like her legs while her true limbs were floating far too high up in the air.
The Avatar had fired his enormous orb of concentrated blue energy. At the same time, Rieren slammed her sword down to unleash Heaven’s Arc.
Her aim and positioning were perfect. With both the Avatar and his Domain in front her, he had no way to transfer any of his wounds to his tree. He also couldn’t get away. All the petals he had thrown were ahead of her as well.
The twist of her wings had made them fall apart so that the glowing swords were all loose and floating in the air. When the mountain-sized waterspout crashed down, it wasn’t just the twisting and ripping mixture of all her Aspects that crashed into the Avatar. All her summoned swords brimming with explosive energy were carried forward as well.
That blue orb had never stood a chance. It disappeared in Rieren’s attack. Then again, so did everything else. If the Avatar screamed when he was struck, the sheer roar of Heaven’s Cleave made it inaudible.
When it all ended and Rieren was standing once more on solid ground, she couldn’t move for a good while. Her every sense was working unceasingly. All her nerves were on fire. She had to ensure that Heaven’s Cleave really had taken down the Avatar. She didn’t want to leave a fight unfinished, not when it could come back to bite her.
But nothing came out of the enormous gorge she had carved into the landscape. There was no sign of the Avatar rising from the distance.
He could have evaded the attack entirely. The Avatars were powerful beings with exceptional abilities. Rieren had done her best to catch him in the moment he was releasing his own attack upon her, when he was least able to dodge. It should have worked.
In the end, though, Rieren had no guarantees.
She summoned her Domain around her again, this time bringing up her Dusk Cloud. It wasn’t as big as last time. She didn’t need to become the gargantuan, cloudy edifice to take down a monster several times the size of the outpost they had been defending. All she needed was a little transport to get away.
So, climbing upon her cloudy mount, she hurried away from the battlefield and on towards Falstrom. To where she could finally start progressing to Late-Enlightened.