Chapter 1092: 1091: Round Two
The shadow thorns fell like black rain.
Simon moved.
He didn’t try to block them all. That would have been impossible. Instead, he threw himself sideways, and the first wave of thorns pierced the ice where he had been standing.
BANG! BANG! BANG!
The ice shattered beneath them, sending white shards spinning into the air.
More thorns followed him.
They didn’t fall in straight lines. They bent and curled through the air like serpents, changing direction to chase him wherever he went.
Simon swung the Chaos Blade.
SHHK!
Three thorns split apart and dissolved into black mist. He twisted his body and let two more slide past his chest, so close that they tore through his robe. A gust of wind pushed him upward, and a dozen thorns stabbed into the empty space beneath his feet.
But there were thousands of them.
One grazed his thigh.
Another punched through his left shoulder.
PUCHI!
Pain shot down his arm. Simon gritted his teeth, cut the thorn off at its base, and kept moving. Behind him, his robe was already threading itself back together.
Unholy Regeneration began closing the hole in his shoulder.
Ilvara didn’t move from where she stood. She simply watched him, her dark eyes calm and empty, while the shadows around her rose and fell at her command.
Simon’s gaze swept across the western harbor.
The burning warehouses. The piers. The streets climbing up toward the terraces. The shelters beneath the rock, filled with people who had nowhere else to run.
His expression darkened.
If he fought her with everything he had, the western district would be wiped off the map. Maybe more than that.
And he couldn’t allow that.
If Vhal-Sar was destroyed, he would fail the Sovereign’s test. Seraya and Neris would be devastated. And the Daegrins, the race he planned to build an affiliation with, would lose their capital.
That would be a terrible result for everyone.
So Simon held back.
He kept his attacks small and precise.
He compressed the wind into blades so thin that they were almost invisible, and sent them slicing through the thorns instead of blasting them apart. He gathered crimson lightning into needles no longer than his finger and flicked them at the thorns’ bases.
They worked.
But they were slow.
For every thorn he destroyed, two more rose from the shadows around them.
Ilvara tilted her head slightly.
Then she vanished.
Simon’s instincts screamed.
He spun and raised the Chaos Blade.
CLANG!
Ilvara had appeared behind him, rising out of his own shadow. In her hand was a long, thin blade made of solid darkness. It struck the Chaos Blade and sparks of black and crimson burst between them.
The force drove Simon back across the ice.
She followed.
Her strikes were silent and fast. She didn’t shout or roar. She didn’t even change her expression. Every slash came at his throat, his heart, or his eyes, and every time he blocked one, she melted back into a shadow and reappeared somewhere else.
CLANG!
CLANG!
CLANG!
Simon blocked, deflected and dodged.
He read her movements as best he could. Her blade came from the left, then from beneath him, then from directly above. She was fast, but she wasn’t perfect.
On the fourth strike, her blade came half a heartbeat too late.
Simon was already moving.
He sidestepped the slash and drove a needle of crimson lightning straight into her shoulder.
CRACK!
The lightning burst through her body, and for the first time, Ilvara’s eyes narrowed slightly.
Black blood splashed across the ice.
But before Simon could follow up, the wound in her shoulder filled with shadow. It writhed and knitted itself closed, as though the darkness was stitching her flesh back together.
Simon’s eyes narrowed.
’Just like Sunless.’
Ilvara looked at her shoulder, then back at him.
She said nothing.
The shadows beneath Simon’s feet suddenly surged upward.
He jumped, but not fast enough. A thorn pierced through his right calf and another ripped across his ribs. Blood spilled onto the ice beneath him.
Simon clicked his tongue.
"Tch."
He couldn’t keep fighting here. Every time he dodged, a building behind him took the hit instead. Two warehouses had already collapsed. A pier had been torn in half. If this continued, it wouldn’t matter how much he held back.
He needed to take this fight away from the city.
Simon reached into the space before him and teleported.
He reappeared out over the sea, beyond the frozen mouth of the open gap, where there was nothing but water beneath him.
’Follow me.’
Ilvara rose out of the shadow of a wave in front of him.
She had followed.
But she didn’t attack.
Instead, she raised her hand.
The sea beneath them darkened. Shadows rose from the waves, from the clouds, from the smoke drifting over the harbor. They climbed into the sky and curved over the top of them, joining together into a vast dome of black.
It swallowed the light.
It swallowed the sea around them, the frozen gap in The Wall, and a portion of the western harbor.
Inside, everything turned dim and grey.
Simon looked around.
At the edge of the dome, near the base of The Wall, the coral-jawed man and the ram-horned Daemon were also trapped inside. They had followed to watch the fight, and now the dome had closed around them too.
Their expressions had turned ugly.
But neither of them said a word.
They didn’t try to break out either.
If they damaged the dome, it might create an opening for Simon to escape. And more importantly, Ilvara was stronger than both of them, and her authority in The Dominion was far greater than theirs.
They didn’t dare.
Simon studied the dome.
She hadn’t stabbed her heart. This wasn’t a Chaos Manifestation.
It was a technique.
But it was a powerful one. He could feel the weight of it pressing down on them, and it was both heavy and suffocating.
’She doesn’t intend to let me run.’
Ilvara’s shadow blade lengthened in her hand.
Then she attacked again.
This time, she came at him with everything inside the dome. Thorns rose from the sea. Shadow hands reached for his legs. Blades of darkness sliced at him from every angle.
Simon fought back.
He still held back, because part of the harbor was inside the dome. But he fought harder.
He cut through a dozen thorns with a single sweep of the Chaos Blade. He let the wind carry him through gaps in the shadow hands. He caught Ilvara’s blade on his scaled forearm, black scales flashing beneath the Chaos Wraps, then he drove his knee into her stomach.
BANG!
She was thrown back across the water.
Simon followed and slashed at her neck.
She leaned away, but the tip of the Chaos Blade still opened a thin line across her cheek.
Black blood ran down her face.
Ilvara touched the cut with her fingertips.
Then she looked at him.
For a moment, something flickered in her dark eyes. It was gone too quickly for Simon to read it.
A shadow spear burst out of the sea behind him.
Simon twisted, but it pierced through his side and out the front of his stomach.
PUCHI!
Blood sprayed from his mouth.
He grabbed the spear with his free hand, shattered it with a burst of crimson tribulation lightning, and pushed himself away. Unholy Regeneration surged through the wound, closing it as quickly as it could.
He was bleeding from his shoulder, his ribs, his calf and now his stomach.
Ilvara had a scratch on her cheek and a healed shoulder.
Simon’s eyes turned cold.
’This isn’t working.’
As long as part of the harbor was inside this dome, he couldn’t fight properly. And as long as he couldn’t fight properly, she would keep cutting him apart.
Then he would change the battlefield.
Ilvara vanished into the shadows again.
Simon closed his eyes for half a heartbeat.
Then he reached down toward the sea.
The water beneath him rose and froze into a long chain of ice, its links were thick and sharp-edged, and they glittered faintly in the grey light.
Ilvara appeared behind him with her blade raised.
The ice chain was already moving.
It snapped around her waist and locked tight.
For the first time, her eyes widened.
Simon spun and pulled.
Ilvara was ripped through the air like a stone in a sling. He swung her in a full circle above his head, then brought her down hard toward the sea.
But just before she struck the water, the surface beneath her split open.
A portal.
It was a dark, rippling hole in space, edged with faint silver light.
Ilvara fell straight through it.
The coral-jawed man and the ram-horned Daemon stared in shock.
They didn’t have time to do anything else.
Two more ice chains shot out of the sea and wrapped around their waists. Before they could break free, Simon pulled.
They were dragged across the water and through the portal after Ilvara.
The portal closed.
A moment later, Simon vanished too.
Several kilometers away, far enough that Vhal-Sar was only a golden curve on the horizon, three figures burst out of the air above the open sea.
Ilvara caught herself first, landing on a shadow that spread across the waves. The coral-jawed man and the ram-horned Daemon tumbled out beside her, tearing the ice chains from their waists.
There was no dome around them anymore.
Only the open sea.
Then the air in front of them folded.
Simon stepped out of it a few meters away.
He didn’t rush toward them. He walked, slowly and calmly, across the surface of the sea, his bare feet barely disturbing the waves.
As he walked, his wounds closed.
The hole in his stomach sealed. The torn flesh across his ribs knitted back together. His calf and shoulder healed with soft, wet sounds, the skin smoothing over until nothing remained but dried blood.
Simon rolled his left shoulder.
Then his right.
His neck cracked once.
The three Daemons watched him in silence.
"Fighting while protecting something has always been difficult," Simon said. His voice was calm and cold. "And unfair."
He stopped walking.
"I’ve always hated it."
Then he grinned.
It wasn’t a friendly grin.
"Why don’t we start round two?"
He raised the Chaos Blade and pointed it at all three of them.
"And all of you should attack me at once."
The skin on his forehead split open and his third eye opened at its center.
The silver cross in the eye glowed with a cold light, and the moment his third eye opened, Simon’s aura surged.
Crimson lightning burst across his body, crackling over his arms and chest and leaping between his four horns. The wind roared to life around him, whipping the sea into a spinning storm of spray.
The coral-jawed man took a step back when he perceived Simon’s aura.
The ram-horned Daemon’s eyes widened in disbelief.
Ilvara didn’t move, but her grip on her shadow blade tightened.
Above them, the sky thundered.
BOOOOOOM!
And rain began to fall.