As he ran, leaping and dodging the brutal, weighty blows of Lira’s blazing saber, Victor reached back and slung Lifedrinker into her harness. The axe had grown considerably since he’d first acquired her, but she was still only a hand axe to him in his titanic form. Against a foe like Lira, clad in her dense, magical metal skin, Lifedrinker was too small, too light. It was a problem—considering she was his favored weapon—but one that he’d have to tackle another day. For now, he had a colossus to kill.
As he leaped, landing hard in a pile of jagged broken stones where one of Arcus’s meteors had torn up the arena floor, Victor took another look at his Core. Thanks to his enormous will attribute, his Energy was regenerating at a decent pace, but he still only had a third of his maximum pool to draw from. Was it enough? His breath Core was bursting with magma-attuned Energy. Would the fiery, titanic form granted by his Volcanic Fury be sufficient to stand against Lira’s enormous, metallic body?
Knowing he’d lose himself to the rage and likely be unable to strategize, Victor continued to stall, suffering the jeers and taunts of the crowd while he dodged another of Lira’s ground-shaking charges. As she pounded past him, hacking her massive, curved sword in a brilliant arc that seemed to cut the very air, Victor used Titanic Leap to launch himself to the far side of the arena. Mid-flight, he summoned the gigantic axe he’d taken from Karl the Crimson, grunting as thousands of pounds of dense, black metal appeared in his hands, pulling him toward the ground.
As his feet touched down, he said, “Sorry, chica,” and canceled his Imbue Spirit, taking his shard back from Lifedrinker. In the next heartbeat, he recast the spell, sending a shard of Glory-attuned spirit into the enormous axe as he ran, dragging it behind him like a plow blade. The axe vibrated in his hands, humming with potential as the spell took hold, and Victor whirled, lifting the tremendous weapon crossways in both hands. The muscles on his shoulders and back bulged with the effort as he stared at Lira, watching her approach for the tenth time, her blazing sword held high, ready to cleave him in twain.
Karl’s axe, usually dark as night and heavy as a fallen star, glowed with golden Energy, shedding sparks that sizzled and popped against the stone ground. Victor could feel its eagerness—his eagerness, considering the spirit within the weapon came from him. He smiled fiercely, watching Lira. When she’d closed the distance to just thirty yards—a few short steps for her—Victor opened both his Cores, flooding his pathways with magma and rage. Gathering that Energy up, he cast Volcanic Fury.
Lira, clad in her magical, metallic form, had to weigh thousands of tons. Each of her steps crunched the stone beneath her boots, sending spiderwebs of cracks outward. When she stepped on loose rocks or even small boulders, she ground them to dust. Even so, she could move. She bunched her enormous legs and bound toward Victor, perhaps hoping to interrupt his spell. It was too late, though; Victor’s berserk transformations were nearly instantaneous, and by the time that blazing, star-bright saber ripped through the air at him, Victor had doubled in size, allowing him to lift Karl’s axe high, as though it weighed no more than a slender reed.
Victor’s parry was instinctual; he had no mind for strategy. The world had turned orange and yellow. He saw everything through a haze of heat, smoke, and flickering fire. He knew nothing but the desire to fight and kill, to destroy and demolish. When he saw the giant bearing down on him, swinging that bright, curved sword, he jerked his axe upward, catching the blazing blade with the edge of his metal, wedge-shaped axe head. If he’d had the wherewithal to worry, it might have alarmed him that, following the ear-shattering clang of the weapons’ impact, a sliver of black, sparkling metal fell, steaming and glowing white-hot to the rubble-strewn ground.
Victor—faster, nimbler, and much, much stronger now that he’d embraced the wrath of his Volcanic Fury—stepped around the enormous, metallic woman and swung Karl’s axe in a full three-hundred-sixty degree arc, winding it up so it whooshed through the air—thousands of pounds of dense, enchanted metal—and pounded it into her exposed right flank. The wedged axe head struck her right beneath her wing, clanging against that impossibly dense, thick, metallic body with a reverberating gong that sent painful vibrations through the metallic haft of the axe.
The sparkling, golden glow of Victor’s imbuement flared like fireworks exploding, and he felt the axe skip and slide down the woman’s side. When the sparks faded, he saw the rewards for his efforts—a thin, silvery scratch in the otherwise iridescent blue-black armor. Fury tinted the sepia tones of his vision toward red, and Victor roared, his mind knowing one thing—frustration. How could this obstacle stand before his wrath? How dare it? As renewed strength exploded through his muscles, he went truly berserk, so mad with a frenzied need to smash and destroy that his conscious mind was pushed deep beneath the surface as his instincts drove him into a deep madness.
With fire in his eyes, black smoke streaming from his nostrils, and a wild, crazed snarl on his face, Victor swung his hammer of an axe in great arcing blows that rang like a madman pounding on a massive bell. He pummeled Lira’s metallic form, driving her back despite her enormous mass. She tried to swing her saber to intervene, and each whooshing slash might have ended him, might have cut limbs from his body, but Victor moved too fast in his frenzy, and his powerful blows made Lira clumsy, her slashes ugly and obvious. Victor ducked them and knocked them aside with his axe, failing to note the damage the saber inflicted as it carved grooves in the dense, black metal and even slashed off bits of the axe head.
Despite his titanic strength, despite his impossible fury, Victor’s frenzy had little effect other than to push Lira around. He never dented the armor, and the superficial scrapes and gouges had little impact on its effectiveness. Meanwhile, he was draining his Cores dry; his rage-attuned Energy was drawn from the deep, powerful well of his spirit Core, but his magma’s source was far shallower. Victor’s breath Core was a tenth the size of his spirit Core, and his Volcanic Fury required fuel from both Cores.
Unfortunately, Victor’s madness didn’t allow him to worry about trivialities like the source of his rage and power; he only cared that it flowed and that he could use it to destroy and kill those who stood before him. Destruction was everything, and nothing else mattered. As his frustration mounted and he failed to damage or even knock down the giant metallic warrior, almost instinctually, he pulled great torrents of Energy from both of his Cores and, with a ground-shaking stomp of his boot, cast Wake the Earth.
The effort of creating the spell drained his breath Core of Energy, and Victor felt his reason return as his Volcanic Fury was cut short. The abrupt loss of his size and strength might have spelled his doom, as Lira was just about to hack her saber in a tremendous overhead chop, but the ground lurched violently, and she was knocked aside by a fragment of steaming stone that split the earth between them. Victor was a Herald of the Mountain’s Wrath and, as such, felt little discomfort as the ground roiled and heaved around him. He rode the shifting stone with sturdy feet—a sailor well-accustomed to the bounding waves.
Victor’s wits had returned with the loss of his fury. As he rode the heaving shelves of rock, watching as steam exploded from fissures, stones burst from the ground, and Lira was tossed about like a ship in a hurricane, he looked up to see Ronkerz standing tall, his arms wide, constraining the massive destruction of his spell to the arena. Victor’s faint, half-formed hope that he might bring the canyon walls down and bury the whole damn town died before it truly had a chance to take shape.
Still, Ronkerz’s efforts to force the spell to remain localized seemed to be concentrating its effects. The ground continued to buck and tilt while geysers of steam and smoke exploded from one rift after another. Shards of black, smoldering stone erupted from the already tortured surface of the arena, tilting great slabs of rock upward to grind against one another. Meanwhile, Victor found it harder and harder to maintain his balance, but nowhere near as much as poor Lira.
The gigantic metal-clad woman was tossed from one surging hunk of stone to another, and it wasn’t long before her dense, blade-covered wings were bent and deformed. Victor might not have been able to impact the shape of her armored shell, but her own weight worked against her as she smashed and rolled around the cataclysmic, smoke-filled scene. Riding a slab of stone that suddenly surged beneath his feet, Victor began to laugh as he watched his colossal foe struggle.
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Somewhere in the madness, he’d lost track of Karl’s axe and briefly lamented the fact; it was an excellent, sturdy weapon for pounding on foes too resolute for Lifedrinker’s edge. He couldn’t worry long, however, because even he was beginning to struggle in the madness of the arena. The air was thick with hot black smoke, the fissures splitting the stone ground were starting to pool with actual lava, and Victor was finding less and less solid ground on which to regain his balance between tremors. He had to focus everything he had on the process.
When the ground finally stopped moving, his spell having run its course, he stood on a peak of stone created by two plates colliding near the center of the arena. Turning in a slow circle, he found himself in a miniature hellscape. Black smoke filled the air, and where there wasn’t smoke, his eyes and lungs found hot, acrid steam—not surprising, considering the geysers venting near the magma-filled fissures. Where the ground was solid, it was covered in piles of jumbled, broken, blackened stone. Lira, still in her colossal form, still clad in iridescent blue-gray metal, lay with one of her legs submerged in a pool of lava. Her wings were bent like old TV antennae, and her armor was scuffed and dented—not an inch of it was pristine.
Victor hopped down, hoisting Lifedrinker from her harness. He canceled his Imbue Spirit, drawing his shard back from Karl’s axe, wherever it had fallen, and then recast it on Lifedrinker, giving her back her usual shard of inspiration-attuned spirit. On nimble feet, he jumped from stone to stone, avoiding the bubbling, sulfur-scented pools of molten stone and giving a wide berth to a periodically spurting steam geyser. Lira hadn’t moved, and he was hopeful that whatever spell she’d cast to encase herself in that near-impervious metallic casing would fade.
As he drew near, her giant helmet-shaped head turned toward him, and then, with a deep, hollow, echoing grunt, she lifted her gigantic leg out of the lava and let it fall to the stone with a ground-shaking thud. The metal glowed a soft orange-red, and magma dripped off it like oil from a hot skillet. The leg was clean of residue in seconds, and the glow faded, revealing unmarred metal. “That was a good effort,” she grunted in that same hollow, echoing voice, then, with a tremendous grinding of metal on stone, she began to clamber to her feet.
Victor watched her, his knuckles white where they gripped Lifedrinker’s haft, and he began to despair. How deep must her reserves of Energy be to maintain that metallic shell? How was he supposed to damage her? Earlier, he’d contemplated employing his whip or even breathing magma on her, hoping it would cook her inside that shell, but she seemed immune to the heat. Lifedrinker couldn’t pierce her shell. His giant axe could barely scratch it, and, besides, he didn’t know where it was.
As he slowly backed away from the colossus, watching her struggle to stand, her giant limbs slipping and scraping on the broken ground, Victor hastily scanned his dimensional containers, seeking a weapon that might pierce that shell. He glanced over his many spears left over from Karnice and silently cursed the fact that he’d traded the best of them away. “Not that a spear would be ideal,” he grunted. No, he decided, what he really needed was an enormous maul made of something heavy enough to crack that shell—something he simply didn’t have. Karl’s axe had been his heaviest, densest weapon, and it hadn’t worked.
Victor looked inward and saw that his spirit Core was up to about twenty percent. It was enough to cast Iron Berserk, though not to maintain it for long. Sighing in frustration, he gripped Lifedrinker, holding her close as Lira took her first, ground-jarring step toward him. Victor wanted to fight. He wanted to win, to break that shell and peel it off his enemy. He wanted to make Ronkerz eat his pride. Even as the last thought crossed his mind, he recognized his own wounded pride. Was he really going to lose? Was he going to kneel and accept Ronkerz’s judgment?
He thought about begging his ancestors for help, but something didn’t feel right about it. He was in a duel where he could yield at any moment—no one’s life was on the line. Arcus and Arona had already been defeated. His people were safe back in Sojourn. Asking his ancestors to intervene felt…wasteful. Maybe, if he lost and took the defeat honorably, Ronkerz would work with him. Perhaps he could strike up a deal where Ronkerz would gain more by letting him leave than by keeping him around. Glancing up, he wasn’t surprised to have the giant simian’s angular purple eyes lock onto his. “What’s your game, asshole?” Victor mouthed the words more than spoke them, but he meant them all the same.
As Lira took another step toward him, Victor nearly backed into a pool of still-bubbling magma. He glanced over his shoulder and saw that it was too large a pool to step over; the ground had split for a dozen yards in either direction, and the rift was nearly fifteen feet wide at the center, filled with hot magma that bubbled with the steam of a buried geyser. Victor stood with his back to the pool and turned to watch Lira. Growling with frustration, he slung Lifedrinker over his shoulder and let her harness snatch her into place.
“Okay, puta madre! Let’s fucking do this!” He growled the words and took up a wrestling stance—his center of gravity low, his hands loose and ready before him. He watched the enormous metallic giant approach. She couldn’t take full strides or even travel straight to him; the ground was too broken up. When she was two steps away, just seconds from being able to cleave him with that brilliant saber, Victor cast Iron Berserk, surging in size and strength. Lira didn’t slow as he exploded with power, roaring as his vision tinted red.
Her enormous sword held high, Lira stepped forward and chopped down. Victor didn’t stand still, however. He also stepped forward, squatting low. Now inside the arc of her sword’s cleave, he slammed his chest into her metal-clad belly—she was still a good deal taller than he—and, wrapping his arms around the back of her thighs, he pulled with all his might, lifting with his quads, his glutes, and every damn muscle he could dig into. Victor’s center of gravity was far lower than hers, and he stunned himself by how easily he popped her off the ground.
Everything after that was reflex, taught to his muscles through thousands of drills. He pivoted on his left foot and fell to the side, using her momentum as he’d done in a hundred wrestling and football practices. Call it a “double-leg takedown” or “wrapping up” a tackle—it didn’t matter; either way, he dropped her to the ground or, in this case, into the pool of bubbling magma. Lira’s arms flailed, her scimitar went flying, and then her head and shoulders splashed into the boiling, molten stone. Victor released her waist and scrambled away as she began to slide, kicking and splashing, into the crevice.
He stood and, brushing the gravel and dust off his hands, watched her slip, inch by inch, deeper into the lava. Her legs kicked at first, but she stopped, perhaps realizing she was speeding her descent by thrashing. He could see the armor turning orange-hot near the lava line, and he wondered what she was thinking. He figured she must be panicked; if she ended the armor spell, she’d be deep in the lava without protection. If she didn’t, she would keep sinking, her arms too inflexible to reach up and grasp the fissure’s stone edge.
Frowning, remembering how she’d held her blade back and given him a chance to yield, Victor stepped forward and grasped one of her enormous ankles under his arm, stopping her from slipping further into the lava. He looked up at Ronkerz and shouted, “Does she yield?” The crowd, recovered from the madness of his earthquake, had been screaming for his blood as Lira recovered and stood. However, a hush had fallen over the arena when Victor had thrown their champion.
Ronkerz stood and opened his arms, shouting into the canyon in his booming basso voice, “Well, Rumble Town? Who’s the winner? Victor the Titan or Lira the Big One?”
As if they’d been waiting for his permission, the crowd’s hushed silence disappeared as they buzzed with conversation, shouted curses, and excited cheers. In seconds, someone took up a chant, and slowly but surely, more and more voices joined in, “Victor, Victor, Victor.”
Ronkerz spread his arms wide and shouted, “Victor! You are the champion! Lira’s life is yours.” Victor locked eyes with the great simian again and knew what Ronkerz knew: He wouldn’t kill his Big One. Things might have been different if she hadn’t offered him mercy and if his Core wasn’t empty of rage. Still, Lira wasn’t the one who’d killed Arona. If he wanted to kill anyone at that moment, it was Ronkerz, and that was a fight he wasn’t ready for. Victor grunted as he took a step back, heaving on Lira’s enormous leg. She slid a couple of inches, grinding over the stone as more of her red-hot armor emerged from the lava.
“Come on, then, mujer grandota,” he chuckled, backing up another step, heaving on the leg. With great effort, he slowly backed her out of the lava until he’d dragged her entire, unmoving form a dozen feet from the bubbling chasm. When he was finished and dropped the leg with a heavy, hollow clang, Ronkerz appeared, seemingly out of nowhere. “You could have helped,” he grunted, leaning forward with his hands on his knees to suck in some deep breaths.
Ronkerz shrugged. “Better that she owes you her life cleanly.” As Lira’s metal casing cooled, ticking and steaming, deep, heaving breaths echoed hollowly from within. “As she recovers, you should go back to your resting cave. I will repair this blasted landscape, and then you will receive your awards.”
“Awards?”
Ronkerz nodded. “Rasso Hine and a treasure from Lira. Something dear enough that she remembers this lesson well.”
Victor nodded, more than a little surprised that it seemed Ronkerz would stick to their bargain and then some. “Can I speak to Arcus?”
The giant simian nodded. “The man weeps, begging for an audience with you. He has something to get off his chest. I’ll bring him around. I’ll have words with you, too, before you quit this place.” He nodded toward the cave on the far side of the smoldering canyon. “Go now. I must put this place right so my people can return to their lives.”
Victor nodded, glanced at the enormous woman, still clad in her cooling armor, still lying unmoving, and turned to walk toward the cave. The crowd saw him separate from Ronkerz, saw him walking away of his own volition, and they began their chant again, hushed at first, then louder and louder until the canyon walls echoed with his name, “Victor, Victor, Victor!” Hearing their adulation, feeling their eyes on him, Victor’s back straightened, and he lifted an arm, slowly turning from side to side, clenching his fist. He felt his Core begin to flare with renewed Energy, and something in him wanted to go berserk again, to lift his axe and scream his warcry, but he restrained himself and, with a broad smile on his lips, simply basked in the glory.