After the Stifling Nebula’s loss, the monsters became a lot more secluded. At least, that was the impression Rieren got. She didn’t see many of them in the tournament grounds. Certainly no one came to her with help for training or anything of the sort. Why would they, when they were all eliminated?
There was a practical reason she didn’t see them too. After all, so many of them had thrown their lot in with the Stifling Nebula, only to end up being killed by Rykion. Of course, Rieren saw less of them.
She had at least spoken a little with the Darkstalker. The monster had made enough of a recovery after its brutal fight against Essalina a while back, though it hadn’t cared to attend the rest of the Trials afterwards. That was, until it learned what the Arisen was doing. It had rushed to the arena to prevent the rest of its monstrous cohort from throwing their lives away.
After the devastating battle, it had taken the rest of the surviving monsters and retreated. It had confirmed with Rieren that it would be making sure that none of the monsters acted out or did anything stupid.
How exactly it would go about doing so was something Rieren didn’t have the time to determine for herself. Her own battle against Silvas Fraile was coming up. She needed to prepare. If the bout between Rykion and the Arisen had been any indication, then things were not going to be easy at all.
So it was that Rieren spent nearly every moment after leaving the arena following Rykion’s victory and until her own subsequent battle to train. She didn’t care what went on in the rest of the world. She didn’t respond to any messages she received.
Batcat mewled softly at her as she once again left at in the competitor’s room on the day of her fight against Silvas. The kitten had been content to while its days away, roaming the arena. She had actually not spent a great deal of time in its presence recently. But it wished her fair fortune all the same, nudging her leg softly before she entered the arena.
“You are making me feel guilty, cat,” she said, kneeling down and petting its soft fur. “That you are doing so while I am in my current state… says a lot. But I promise, after the battle, we will spend more time together, alright?”
Batcat purred happily, satisfied with her promise.
All the while, the cultivator match official tried not to stare at them. The few times she caught him doing so, he’d had an odd look on his face. Maybe it was a little strange seeing a monster playing with a small kitten like that.
The battlefield was back to normal when Rieren entered it. No sign of the previous, destructive battle remained on it. No scars, no craters. Nothing.
Rieren glanced at the match official as she walked towards the centre of the arena. Starloper again. He was studiously ignoring her, of course, feigning that he had no idea who she was. She returned the favour.
“Is it not odd?” Rieren asked as she came within speaking distance of Silvas. “You would think this arena has seen no battles at all.”
Silvas cast a lazy glance at the field. “Well, I certainly appreciate not having to deal with the leavings of others.”
“Perhaps. But think of it this way—would it not be satisfying to see that your strength has left an indelible mark that others need to consider?”
“When you put it that way…” His grin was visible through his soft veil. “I believe the mark we leave on our opponents is the bigger of the two.”
“I shan’t contest that.”
Meaningless noise flowed around while they conversed. There was the commentator hyping up the crowd for the battle to come. Then there was the match official, who was Starloper again, who was blathering boredly about the same old rules. And of course, there was the crowd thundering with anticipation and urging the human to kill the monster like the last one had.
They both ignored it. This was a fight between them. A battle between those who were on the same side, with the only thing at stake the most vital of all—which of them was right. Everything else was meaningless side-dressing.
“Are you still willing to ignore what we went through in our old lives, Rieren?” Silvas asked.
“I never said I was ignoring, only that I believed I could live my life a better way this time,” she said. “That we could go about it better than before. You never learned what happened afterwards, Silvas. What I had to go through and deal with.”
Silvas frowned. She had him there. But then he pointed one of his curved swords at her. “The old you wouldn’t have hesitated no matter what the cost was. Maybe becoming a monster really has changed you.”
“My life has changed me.” She bared her own blade too, the edge of the Receptor Sword gleaming with a sharp sheen. “Know one thing before you proceed any further—I am the one who has allowed you to live again.”
His eyes widened. “You?”
“Me.”
And then Rieren charged. What minute distraction her reveal had dealt to Silvas was blown off by his battle-hardened wariness. As soon as Rieren took her first aggressive step towards him, he charged in as well, swinging in both swords at once.
His real swords. No sand this time. Rieren deserved the real things straight from the get-go.
The fight went just as Rieren had been expecting. Their swordplay skills were evenly matched, even though their styles were wildly different.
Silvas’s movements were fluid and intricate, like a dance he had honed over the course of his entire life. His blades slashed seemingly at random but there was a direction at play. It was following a carefully laid out plan, one that was adaptable based on his opponent’s reaction.
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Rieren was able to deflect them all, of course. Blurringly fast though his swords fell upon her, she wasn’t a slouch either. She placed her own weapon just so, making sure he hit nothing but the Receptor Sword.
Even better, Earthfall Blade ensured that none of the strikes had their true power behind them. Silvas’s pattern intended to push his adversary into position even if his sabres didn’t end up hitting flesh and leaving wounds. But that failed when he couldn’t even impart the right amount of force behind his blows. Every bit of his strikes was being harmlessly redirected.
They separated for a second. Their eyes were fixed on each other. There was pin-drop silence for a second before the crowd roared in approval, cheering at the incredible display of swordsmanship.
“You’re just as good as I remember,” Silvas said, still holding on to his battle-ready stance.
Rieren copied him, maintaining even the tension in her muscles. “I am also not disappointed in your skills.”
“What a tremendous compliment.”
“I mean it. I was not expecting you to maintain pure swordplay for so long.”
He smiled sinisterly. “Well, don’t count on it for long.”
As he said so, he tapped his sword together ever so lightly. The tension on Rieren’s muscle built as she prepared to dodge backwards, but the sound was miniscule. Barely there. A fingerbreadth of air rippled around his sword. That was it. A warning for her benefit.
Silvas was no longer going to hold back.
Before Rieren could reply, he came at her again. Except this time, he was bringing his Domain into the mix, sand materializing around him.
Rieren responded in kind. Water bubbled to life around her feet, ready to burgeon in stormy waves at her slightest intent.
Their sword fighting had a higher degree of frenzy this time. It exercised Rieren’s Mind, high as it was, to its fullest degree to keep up with the blinding speed of Silvas’s motion.
Worse, he wasn’t attacking simply head-on either. His sand kept bouncing around him, forming little footholds that allowed him to climb higher and orient himself differently to attack from all sorts of directions and angles. If his attack pattern had been intricate before, it had now become a convoluted tangle that Rieren had no hope of deciphering.
Her reflexes and strength were fast and strong enough to keep up with him. High enough to even allow her to counterattack at times as well, forcing Silvas to do the defending.
But regular attacks weren’t going to work. Though, skills didn’t do a great deal either. Silvas still managed to block every single blow from an instantaneous execution of Gale Blade. Insane, considering it was an S-Grade skill now.
Rieren even used Fray Passage at times, quickly reorienting herself to attack from different angles just as he had been doing. It performed two wonderful functions. One, it ruined the pattern he was trying to adhere to, and two, it allowed her to revert the momentum of the fight in her favour.
But the problem was that he had an adequate response to it too. Some sort of defensive skill had him facing her no matter how fast she moved to a different direction. A skill he obviously hadn’t possessed before.
This allowed him to confront her face on, slicing through any advantages Rieren had thought about using by attacking at an angle.
Their Domains continued to rise in strength as they fought. Another thing they both had to be wary about. When Rieren made hers rise in a geyser, Silvas was quick to avoid it and attempt to attack differently, either at range or from a different direction. But when the sand tried to get to her, Rieren had to focus on her Domain to defend against it.
Good thing she had been practicing on controlling her Domain with greater precision for several days straight now. It allowed her to concentrate on both controlling her Domain and on keeping up her sword fight against her opponent.
This wasn’t just about winning or losing for them. They had a point to prove, a pride to adhere to. A belief that made them continue fighting, harder and harder.
It came as no surprise then that Silvas turned on his sonic powers for her. His swords clanged together with no warning, the sound rippling out over the entire arena. The storm of slashes came in a second later, tearing through the air and the ground, expanding outwards to cover nearly the entire battlefield in less than a heartbeat.
Rieren’s Domain control was fast enough to counteract it, however. Quicker than thought, she pulled her watery Domain around herself in a swirling cloak, submerging herself completely.
The rippling slashes scratched along the spherical shell’s watery surface, but not a single one made it inside. Rieren was perfectly safe.
“Neat trick,” Silvas said. His voice was muffled from outside the blanket of her Domain. “Don’t remember that from the last timeline.”
Rieren didn’t reply. She wasn’t sure she could do so. Not without swallowing some of her water too, though perhaps she could control it well enough to prevent that. Whatever the case, something to test later.
At the moment, she simply responded by sending a rising crest of water at Silvas with River Serration’s motion empowered by Tidal Summons.
He dodged it easily enough. “Let me break that shell of yours.”
Rieren didn’t have to move much to send more waves crashing in her adversary’s direction, but Silvas’s sand had hardened around him to provide a strong barricade. A barrier behind which he created his actual technique—a titanic replica of himself, complete with two enormous, curved swords.
A second later, they crashed down on Rieren’s position.
She was already moving, of course. Rieren had made sure the Domain wrapping itself around her didn’t impede her movement. But the heavy strike falling from those enormous swords was difficult to outpace, simply because of the shockwave they unleashed.
The cleaving slash blew apart her Domain, sending water crashing against the arena wall. Even the liquid wrapping Rieren was broken apart. Chunks of the ground had flown off at the impact, and several shot through her defence to ruin its integrity, making it fall apart.
Just what Silvas had been aiming for.
He landed just a pace away from her, swords clanging together at the same time. In an instant, a storm of slashes burst out in all directions, overwhelming Rieren in a flash.
If she hadn’t had her concentrated Essence armour protecting her, she was pretty certain she would have been cut up quite horribly. As it was, the armour still cracked and broke apart all over her, though the gashes she suffered were minimal.
“Curse the Abyss,” Silvas said with an amused shake of his head. “Did turning into a monster thicken that armour of yours?”
“You sound far too interested in monstrousness, Silvas.”
“Think of it this way, Rieren. We are monsters.”
And to prove it, he summoned his Domain with greater intensity than before, creating a devastating sandstorm spiralling around him.
Rieren pulled in her water too. She had seen that power of his before, knew what she had to do to overcome it. That was why she had been training all this time to control her Domain with greater precision. It was the best way of breaking through.
Which was what Rieren proceeded to do. She enveloped herself with water and crashed into the sandstorm, her motion backed up by a storm of waves hammering into Silvas’s Domain at the same time. It worked. His storming sands tried to bash into her and stop her relentless charge, but her trailing waves kept up with her, taking blow after blow in her stead.
It took only a moment for her to reach her target’s location, to ready her sword for a series of strikes with which she was determined to end the battle.
But despite having his Domain overcome, Silvas never lost his cool. The winds had torn away his veil, revealing a dire grin that wasn’t dismayed for a second even though Rieren had effectively shattered any defences he might have possessed.
Because when he crashed his swords in again, he didn’t unleash another futile burst of noisy sashes. Instead, his swords turned into glowing beacons, turning molten orange.
And his Domain evolved.