Chapter 83. Finale (Patreon)

Ian was alone in the SPU’s tunnel-shaped room at the base of the stadium. He exhaled and a stream of bones swam from his pockets to his hands, forming a pair of bone gloves. He first mimicked the design worn by the Breaker, thin gauntlets covering only the back of his hand and the first three fingers. He flexed his fingers and the bones peeled back, reorganizing into a more practical design–one that fully covered his hands.

While playing idly with the gloves, his eyes studied the transparent barrier that separated the waiting room from the stadium’s interior. He felt taut with anticipation, the minutes and seconds before the duel stretching unbearably.

Closing his eyes and breathing deeply in and out, Ian tried to center himself and focus on using his Death affinity to perceive the surroundings. Spectators shone like sublime stars in the stands, each person an indistinguishable white silhouette. To pass the time, he tried to identify Euryphel and the other SPU delegates based on their vital signatures, but distance blurred away details.

Suddenly, the barrier slid downward; the cheers of the audience were no longer muffled, shifting from a drowned din to a resonating roar.

Ian opened his eyes, stood up, and tugged at his SPU uniform jacket to straighten out any wrinkles. After walking through the Hall of Legacy, he realized that today’s duel would be immortalized. If he was going to be featured in a projection for the foreseeable future, he figured it would be remiss to neglect his appearance.

As he walked through the threshold, soul gems and bones were at the ready, levitating under a new Death energy shroud. The shroud was fueled almost entirely by soul gems and was dense enough to be visible, so violet as to appear black, with only a sheen of plum visible at the edges. The oily cloth not only followed the contours of his uniform but also curved into stylized epaulets and vambraces, some smaller soul gems socketing decoratively into their whorled stitching.

This is what a decemancer looks like, Ian thought to himself. The Breaker has his earth, wind, and lightning, and those three elements are dramatic in their own way. But there’s something about Death that captivates–it is complete, touching body, soul, and the energy within us.

And it’s the forbiddenness of the soul that intrigues us most, isn’t it? Ian mused, his eyes taking in the aurora of floating souls hovering around the stadium.

As his feet fell upon the midpoint demarcation where he’d stand until the duel commenced, the crowd’s cheers reached a deafening pitch. Feeling his head starting to throb in step with his heart, Ian turned toward his half of the stadium and waited for the announcer to start the fight.

“...Now I think we’ve had enough talking. The Skai’aren is a formidable opponent, arising from obscurity with the intent of taking it all. There are no half-measures when it comes to life and death; the same goes for taking the championship!”

Ian’s eyes passed over the balcony where the SPU delegation was seated. Eury waved to him and gave him a thumbs up. Noticing Ian’s gaze, the entire delegation seemed to liven up and cheer him on, even sordid Diana cupping her hands around her mouth to hollar something. Euryphel and Shivin’i shot her a look of disdain, to which she just crossed her arms and smiled.

Ian couldn’t help but grin, some of the tension in his shoulders melting away. 

“Contrastingly, the Breaker has always been the favorite to win this year’s Grand Tournée. Continuing the six year Iastran win streak, the Breaker has come here today to take what’s rightfully his...or has he? The outcome is still undecided, and it’ll be a close fight!”

The announcer paused for a few seconds, giving the audience the opportunity to cheer. Ian shifted his attention back to the Breaker, preparing himself to react as soon as the match began.

After the crowd quieted down, the announcer looked on with baited breath, reveling in the moment. All of a sudden, he bellowed the words everyone was waiting for: “Commence!”

Unlike when facing Eury, the Breaker adopted a far-more aggressive strategy from the get-go, ducking underground and jutting out spikes of earth on his side of the stadium. Beneath the surface the Breaker wouldn’t be able to control the wind or use his lightning effectively, but that didn’t matter much: His Mountain affinity was powerful on its own.

Ian responded by sending four separate clusters of bone shards into the earth. They’d lock on the elementalist and force him to keep moving; ideally, they’d force the man to surface, but Ian wasn’t going to rely on his past experiences with Urstes. The gap between 96% and 99% affinity is too wide.

In the meantime, Ian got to work on something a bit flashier...and hopefully more effective if the other strategy proved inadequate. He had come prepared, bringing along a small void storage he’d acquired from Shivin’i. Bones both large and small began to stream out of it, assembling into the guise of a bone wyrm: a draconic head on a serpentine body, thrumming with pink-violet energy sourced from soul gems socketed both in its eyes and along the length of its spine. As the wyrm assembled, Ian moved his body around like a marionette to avoid wicked spikes of earth, his body often dodging by the barest of margins.

Ian knew that sending the construct underground to attack would be a poor choice–below ground was the domain of the Breaker, the man having full control over the earth. Sending a construct, or even himself, was akin to entering the maw of the beast. 

Instead he directed the construct to encompass him, its ribcage swallowing him whole. The worm coiled around itself, energy from the soul gems thrumming throughout the tight circuit of the wyrm’s body. With each breath, Ian pushed the charged potential towards the wyrm’s maw where it began to condense down into a ball of energy, emitting a midnight-black, oily discharge that snaked around its teeth and rose over its skull like solid smoke.

Ian could vaguely sense that his bone shards were having much more difficulty than usual traveling through the hardened earth, though at a distance he was unable to recall them. His eyes narrowed and he snorted defiantly, stroking a rib of the bone wyrm with a gloved hand. Earth wasn’t a particularly good conductor of Death energy, but given how much power he was accumulating in the wyrm’s jaws, that wouldn’t matter.

Besides: He’s a Regret practitioner. I only need to force him to change strategies. If Ian got lucky, he wouldn’t need to actually leverage a Death energy blast to force the man’s emergence in the real world.

At the exact moment the wyrm released its payload, the earth elementalist emerged from the ground like a cresting orca, earth covering him like a suit of armor and propelling him like a projectile through the air.

Ian’s mouth curved downward as the wyrm’s beam shot into the ground, delivering a concentrated blast of Death energy that exploded upon impact and began to seep into the ground, contaminating earth on the Breaker’s side of the stadium.

Iucorsu timed his emergence just right. A moment later and the practitioner would’ve been caught in the blast; a moment earlier, and Ian would’ve been able to stop the beam in time to avoid wasting energy.

Now that he was forced above ground, the Breaker wasted no time in assaulting Ian from the air, whipping up a gail of wind and scattering uprooted earth around the coiled bone wyrm. Where in his previous fights he’d made a spectacle of charging up and discharging his gauntlets, now his movements were much more precise, his fingers tapping lightly in rapid succession to send off a barrage of lightning in Ian’s direction. As he did so, earth rose from underneath the wyrm as a vortex of wind crushed down from above.

There was no time to dodge: the worm took the tri-elemental attack, dark-violet energy flaring over its length as the construct resisted being torn apart. The bones lubricated and connected by violet-pink energy began to strain and grate against one another as the jaws of wind and earth applied crushing pressure. Meanwhile, the wind was not only crashing down but also whirring against the wyrm like a series of saws. Finally, lightning coursed throughout the two elements and assaulted the wyrm’s already-strained energy directly.

At the same time, Ian’s bone shards erupted from the ground and picked up speed in the air, boxing in Iucorsu from four different directions. They were energized by the Death energy blast, giving them greater speed than usual. Ian knew Iucorsu would use his Regret affinity to dodge, but they added one more variable for the man to deal with.

Even as the wyrm seemed only barely able to weather Iucorsu’s attack, Ian forced the wyrm to uncoil, the soul gems providing enough energy for the wyrm to push back and storm forward towards the Breaker.

Ian’s expression grew severe. If I wasn’t using three prismatic soul gems, I might not have had enough energy to break free. The peak-quality of the gems allowed them to deliver massive amounts of energy at a rapid clip, fueling the needs of the bone construct as it resisted opposing forces. That the Breaker can produce such a force with his elementalism is humbling.

As the bone construct tore through the air, wind assaulted it on all sides and trying to throw it off course; meanwhile the Breaker plummeted to the earth, stomping and churning up a barrage of earth pellets. As before, he discharged his gauntlets, sending lightning to arc near Ian and electrocuting the wyrm, causing the energy holding it together to flare and crackle.

Dousing the earth in Death energy is more effective than I anticipated, Ian mused. If he can’t return underground, I can seize the advantage. And while each blast uses an absurd amount of energy, energy isn’t currently a problem.

Ian focused on the right side of the stadium and discharged another blast of Death energy, flooding the dueling grounds in inky black flames that melted into the earth on impact. Iucorsu was once again forced to dodge; this time he needed to juggle both avoiding the blast as well as deflecting the dogged bone shards. Now Ian doubled back, the wyrm guarding the only part of the grounds uncontaminated by Death.

I bet Iucorsu didn’t think I’d be such a turtle, Ian thought. I think I’m the first person in the entire tournament to intentionally take his tri-elemental attack head on.

Ian knew that giving his opponent a clear shot didn’t seem like an ideal plan on the surface. But dodging the Breaker’s attacks wasn’t an easy task: His lightning alone moved almost instantaneously, while air and earth covered everything.

But Ian kept in mind one key fact: Iucorsu was a Regret practitioner. If he were anything like Euryphel, he would push himself to the very limits to find a way forward that would end in success. Ian could try to dodge all he wanted and deliver all manner of attack, but Iucorsu would always find some way to land a hit or duck out of range.

What was the way to defeat such an opponent?

Complete dominance: He’d crush the man’s morale and force him into a position with no avenue of return.

The Breaker skated backward through the air, skirting around the stadium. While the open air was free of Death energy, most of the stadium’s floor was saturated; if he remained on the ground for more than a moment at a time, it began to sap his vitality, leaving Iucorsu with no other option but to remain airborne, albeit close to the ground.

As he flew, the Breaker intermittently kicked his feet against the ground, sending up a cascade of earth. He tapped his gauntleted fingers together to send out lightning, but Death energy insulated the falling earth against the discharge, preventing the lightning from having a clear target to follow. The Breaker’s gauntlets were able to deliver a significantly reduced charge to Ian’s bone wyrm, so the attack wasn’t completely pointless, but it didn’t affect the bone wyrm in any significant way.

After everything so far, my soul gems aren’t even a quarter depleted. I haven’t even needed to use my personal shield. Can you still see a way out, Iucorsu?

Ian decided it was time to close in for the kill. The bone wyrm rotated in place, spiraling forward and pummeling right through any earth Iucorsu sent his way. When the man punted forward a mass of earth the size of a boulder–wind spinning around it and compounding the force of the impact–the wyrm was pushed back and half of its skull crushed, but it was already too late.

It was over in a moment: Iucorsu had nowhere left to go, cornered by Ian’s bone wyrm and pieces of whetted bone. Dodging was only prolonging the inevitable.

Ian smiled grimly: Iucorsu had finally acknowledged his own defeat. They were both moving fast enough that the Breaker fell into Ian’s range without any dramatic fanfare. One moment the man was free, the next he was trapped in Ian’s hold.

He didn’t force the man to kneel–he figured it would be too presumptuous to put Iastra’s chosen in such an undignified position. Instead, he pinned Iucorsu’s hands behind his back and sent the bone shards to hover threateningly around his body. At the same time, his wyrm finished recharging, energy overflowing from its maw, and it aimed its head at Iucorsu.

They didn’t need the announcer to proclaim the end of the match. Ian emerged from the wyrm’s rib cage like a moth from a cocoon, levitating himself in the air while stretching his hand toward the Breaker’s bound form. Violet energy flashed in his eyes as he opened a closed fist, releasing his hold in a gesture of respect. He bowed his head while meeting Iucorsu’s eyes. 

The Breaker caught himself on a nimbus of flowing air. He gave Ian one severe nod, then smiled.

“Thank you for the match,” Iucorsu said, his words brought to Ian’s ear on the wind. “If you ever visit Iastra, we should spar.” Ian heard what sounded like a soft grunt. “And I’d like to see how you’d fare against my father.”

Ian smiled back, concealing a sense of wistful regret. I’d like to, Iucorsu. Perhaps in another lifetime.

“And that’s the match! Incredible! Victory to the SPU’s Skai’aren!”