Bell's spine locked straight as an arrow, and he plunged. Wind tore at his armor, knee guards grinding into bone, tunic crushing flat against his chest.
His man-bun whipped, strands tearing loose one by one, Hestia's ribbon flattening and curling through what hair remained bound.
Behind him, Mahoraga bent its knees, coiling its legs atop Omen's wings. Arms extended downward, its grin splitting wider by fractions.
Omen snapped its colossal wings taut. Its shoulder blades compressed, right wing casting half of Daedalus into pitch night, the left setting everything alight in a huge, blazing arc.
The Divine General held its stance for a second. Then—
It detonated.
Sparks ripped from its torso. Air tore open in a wide corridor as the Shikigami barrelled down, hands leading, torso following, legs trailing.
Bell plummeted. A blur of white muscle flashed beneath him, sparks shedding from its skin to shatter against his breastplate. The shockwave hit his ears a second late, chasing them from behind.
He swung his arm down, fingers clamping around a thrashing white tail extending from Mahoraga's skull, and wrenched.
His body whipped horizontal mid-fall, heels slamming onto the Divine General's back. An afterimage blurred, and they were gone.
They rocketed downward now. Mahoraga vertical, Bell horizontal, gripping that white tail like the leash of a sledge.
Below, Dix swung his spear sideways. Olivas drove his arm toward it, trapping its shaft tight beneath his armpit.
Together, they used the spear as a collective lever and whipped their legs upward. A vacuum erupted behind their shins, spiraling cones of wind roaring to life around their knees.
Mahoraga's massive fists slammed down into their strikes. Bone on bone.
Wind screeched against wind, a corridor colliding with two cones. Those cones held for a second, then Bell buried his heels deeper into the Divine General's back, cranking its skull-tail harder.
Force travelled from his heels into Mahoraga's spine, through its arms, and those cones shattered like fragile glass as it punched through.
A crunch rang out from Olivas' leg. Kneecap caving inward, skin peeling away from his shin in strips, black bone webbing with fissures underneath.
Dix's knee guard groaned, then shattered into tiny shards hurled outward in a ring, the cloth beneath it disintegrating to ash.
Both of them launched downward. Buildings beneath them swelled from specks into a labyrinth of walls and ceilings, rushing up to meet them.
The wheel above Mahoraga spun.
Clunk
Its muscles compressed, and frame thinned out, bones creaking and reshaping as its body streamlined, cutting through the air even faster.
Bell's grip sharpened. His fingers tightened around the tail before it could slip, heels resetting their angle before Mahoraga's new frame could throw him off.
A tiny shard of Dix's knee guard plunged down between Olivas and Dix. Bell watched it spin end over end, slow enough to count each rotation.
Omen flapped its wings above them. Once.
That shard was whipping past his cheek now, parting a thin red line across his face. Dix and Olivas had a second to widen their eyes before Mahoraga clamped its fingers around their torsos—
And gone.
All of them dissolved into a speeding blur of white.
For a moment, beneath those colossal wings, a pale vertical line seared into being, like someone had taken chalk and dragged it from sky to ground.
Far below, Violas and Evilus grunts looked up as gales sheared their hair back. A second later, the ground quaked beneath them, heaving upward, then sinking, then heaving again in uneven intervals. Nearly all of them lost their footing.
Bell, Mahoraga, Olivas and Dix had hit the ground. From that point of impact, earth cratered for a hundred meters. Buildings toppled onto one another, and whole marbled streets exploded upward and flung outward like ribbons of debris.
Two hundred meters away, a group of gathered people stood frozen, all staring toward the shockwave.
Next, a chain of flames became visible, wrapped tight around a man as it hauled him from the impact zone and deposited him among them.
The others looked at him. One asked.
"You're the last?"
The man nodded. "I should be."
An old woman swept her gaze around.
"No one is left, right?"
Everyone looked around, shaking their heads.
Her shoulders went slack, a breath leaving her lips without permission.
She gazed at that chain, and multiple others behind it, all vanishing into specks of embers.
Before they could fade fully, she clasped her hands toward them.
"... Thank you."
In seconds, those chains dissolved under their collective gazes.
Embers from the chains drifted in a certain direction, bleeding through a dome of dust and debris surrounding that impact site, racing into an outstretched hand. Every particle coalesced into a sword of flame, its blade resting across a familiar shoulder.
Bell's shoulder.
Violas circled him from the right. Evilus grunts flanked him from the left. All carrying various injuries from the shockwave.
Dix knelt ahead of him, spear buried in cratered ground, coughing blood mixed with chunks of organ. One hand clutched his spear's shaft, the other fumbling into his pocket for something.
Olivas stood beside him, leg nearly knit back together, stretching his neck casually. Flashes of heat from above stretched his shadow wider than it was seconds ago.
Dix freed a vial from his pocket. Its glass was fogged with condensation, the liquid inside glowing with a faint tint of gold.
An Elixir.
He wrenched its cork free with his teeth, spat it aside, and tipped the vial back, draining it in a single motion.
Color rushed back into his skin. His chest expanded with a breath that had been choking him seconds ago. The blood at his lips thinned, then stopped.
He looked ahead.
At the center of the formation stood Mahoraga. Beneath its legs lay carcasses of Violas crushed to pulp and Evilus grunts unfortunate enough to be right beneath their landing point.
The Divine General's Sword of Extermination was aimed ahead, body bent into a specific stance. Feet shoulder-width apart, weight dropped low.
Above Mahoraga hovered its wheel.
And Bell stood atop it. Front foot on its spoke, back foot on that spoke's handle, a flaming sword resting over his shoulder.
.
"Not bad, Bell Cranel. Better than I expected from someone she talks about so much," Olivas said while spreading his hands wide, bones cracking across his skeleton in a synchronized rhythm. "If I'd fought you unprepared, it might've been close. But she warned me about you ahead of time. I'm ready now."
But then Olivas' face twisted. His lips peeled back from his teeth, jaw grinding like he was chewing on something bitter, yellow-green eyes narrowing to slits.
"She's spent years wanting to eat the Sword Princess." His fingers curled inward, nails biting into his own palms. "You're going the same way. Man bleeding into flame, less human every time you ignite your flames. She's watching you become worth eating."
He laughed, short and wrong. "I've given her everything, and I was never worth that much."
Bell said nothing. Wanting the corrupted spirit to eat you?Pathetic.
Dix rose to his feet, eyes sweeping the perimeter for an escape route. Then, he turned back to Bell, irises blazing red.
"You're surrounded by us, Bell Cranel," he said, leveling his spear toward Mahoraga.
Olivas dropped into a stance, left foot inching back, hands hovering in front of his chest.
More Violas and Evilus grunts surged forward, closing the circle from all sides.
Bell inched forward slightly on the wheel and pointed a single finger upward.
Every one of them followed his gesture with their eyes and went rigid, heartbeats spiking.
"You seem to be under a misconception. I'm not surrounded by you. You're all surrounded by me."
Omen was close to the Daedalus street now, and it wasn't stopping. It was surging even faster.
Its wings stretched over the entire area, a descending dome of flame and darkness enclosing everything beneath it.
Dix's heart leapt into his throat. His escape plan? Gone. There was nowhere left to run from that thing.
"A trivial problem," Olivas shrugged casually, though his hands were trembling imperceptibly.
Dix dragged his gaze back to Bell.
"...Do you happen to be a part of Evilus too?"
Bell didn't reply.
Didn't deny it either.
...
..
.
***
[300 Power Stones = 1 Bonus Chapter]
[8 chapters ahead on P@tr3on = [email protected]/Not_Aaryan]
...
[Author's Thoughts]
And there our boy goes, reverse jumping others now. Go! Go! Go! Fold all of them in half. Punch them through buildings while crushing their faces underfoot, we want carnage!
Next chapter needs to be pure carnage! Raawr!