Chapter 727: Weird Flow Of Wind [Bonus - ]

Chapter 727: Weird Flow Of Wind [Bonus Chapter]

The mist over the center of the field pulled apart into ragged drifting shreds, chased outward by the steady draft of the ventilation ducts.

Valerius stayed low in his crouch for three long heartbeats with his boots locked against the wet gray tiles.

"Haaah... Haah... Haah...."

His arms burned all the way down into his forearms.

The mesh vest rattled over his ribs with every jagged gasp, and his heart hammered like an iron bell, loud enough that he could hear the blood roaring in his ears over the hiss of evaporating water.

Slowly his knees uncoiled as he let out a long ragged sigh that ended in a dry rattling cough.

"Fuuu... That was close."

He looked down at his sword... The plain steel blade was still whole, but it hummed with a fierce microscopic vibration that made his palms tingle.

Around the guard and along his knuckles, thin ribbons of pale green wind were still twisting past one another in contrary orbits, skimming over the steel like miniature waterspouts moving in reverse.

’Sweet heavens above...’ Valerius thought, his golden eyes wide on the pool of water rippling around his boots. ’If that thing had landed clean, they’d have scraped my remains off the tiles with a mason’s trowel.’

The weight of Silas’s descent had felt like a mill-dam torn open over his skull.

When Silas dropped from the ceiling with the ambient moisture packed into that heavy churning column, Valerius’s first instinct had been to brace his spine and shove his Purple Core into an explosive upward shockwave. It was what he always did.

...Hit by massive pressure, push back with more violence until something gave.

Except nothing had given this time, because he hadn’t pushed.

He stared at his open left hand and the air currents curling around his fingers.

Two opposing streams of wind had wrapped his forearms at the exact instant of impact.

One had corkscrewed clockwise and bitten into the falling mass of water, and the other had spun counter-clockwise against the flat of his blade and sheared across the first.

At the point they collided, they hadn’t made a wall... They’d shredded the force between them and unraveled Silas’s strike into spinning harmless spray before the weight could snap his collarbones.

He hadn’t planned it of course.

’Plus I watched Da Silva’s younger sister do something similar with the rotations of the Sovereign Realm...’

But this had happened half by instinct, perhaps a desperate reflex born from Silas’s advice in the elevator.

’He told me I lean on raw burst to fix my angles,’ Valerius realized, and a dazed grin spread over his sweat-streaked face. ’So I didn’t push back against the column... I sheared it.’

It was completely bizarre.

The circulation felt backwards, like writing two different sentences at once with both hands, but the result was undeniable.

The force hadn’t hammered into his heels... It had torn apart in midair and splashed across the tiles.

’Complicated as hell,’ he thought, shaking out his tingling right wrist while the last of the spray pattered down around him. ’The paths are tangled like old kite strings but there’s definitely nothing wrong with the result.’

Across five paces of damp shining tile, Silas was already lowering the point of his broadsword.

His dark bangs hung wet across his forehead, tossed by the dying draft of the shockwave.

The gold ring around his dark blue pupils held steady and cool with the kind of look that made Valerius feel like a tailor was measuring him for armor and didn’t care whether the customer survived the fitting.

"You’re still standing," Silas said, wiping a drop of water off his cheek with the back of his sleeve. "I was half-ready to catch your collar before you bounced off the floor..."

"Catch my collar?!" Valerius planted his free hand on his hip and threw his head back with an indignant laugh, though his ribs throbbed with every word. "Please! I had that entirely under control! That was textbook dispersal! A Sterling family trade secret, perfectly executed under extreme pressure!"

"Dispersal," Silas repeated, sounding as dry as river gravel. "Is that what you call closing your eyes and praying to the ceiling rafters?"

"I did not close my eyes! I was merely blinking through the spray!" Valerius leveled his arming sword at Silas’s chest, golden eyes flashing with renewed heat. "Don’t get cocky just because you jumped out of the ceiling like an overgrown barn owl... My turn to drive the pace."

Silas gave his broadsword a loose flick and let the steel whistle in the cool underground air.

"Whenever you’re ready, Val. Let’s see if you can do it twice."

BANG!

Valerius didn’t waste another breath on banter.

He kicked off the wet tile with a Wind Burst that left two circular shock-rings in the puddle, and the puddle burst outward behind him in a fan of spray as the distance between them vanished in a blur of emerald.

Silas’s boots shifted and caught the rhythm of the charge. He kept his circulation inside his regular mana channels and called the Second Style.

...Rip-Current Perception.

The harsh glare of the floodlights softened into a dim watery slate.

Thin luminous blue current lines began to weave through the air between them, tracing the fractures and weak points and weight distribution of Valerius’s charging frame.

’There,’ Silas thought with his eyes locking onto a bright fault line along the inside of Valerius’s left knee. ’He’s leaning on the forward plant again—’

WHOOSH!

Before Silas’s blade could snap forward to exploit the seam, the air in front of his face vanished.

Valerius triggered his Vacuum Domain on the fly and dropped the pressure around his blade to near zero before releasing it with a deafening pop.

The sudden rush of wind and the dry air it left behind ripped the delicate current lines apart like cobwebs in a storm as the blue tracers flickered, smeared into static, and went dark.

’Damn it,’ Silas grunted inwardly. ’Rip-Current needs moisture to hold the weave while his vacuum eats it right out of the air.’

CLANG!

Silas swung his broadsword up into a clean vertical guard and caught Valerius’s horizontal slash just below the crossguard.

SKRRRRRR!

Sparks sprayed over Silas’s mesh vest as the steel edges ground together with shrieking fury, and the shockwave of the clash shivered every puddle on the floor.

Valerius didn’t try to lock the bind this time.

The moment the blades met, the silver ring on his index finger flared with its blue runes burning bright.

’Zephyr’s Loop!’

The 1.5x casting speed kicked in and skipped his usual recovery...

CRACK!

A compressed burst of wind detonated off the flat of his sword and blasted Silas’s blade three inches outward.

Valerius spun with the recoil with his torso twisting like a coiled top, and whipped his steel around in a shrieking circular cleave.

"Zephyr Slash!"

WHOOOOOOSH!

A spinning whirlwind of emerald mana tore through the air, howling like a pack of wolves as its vacuum edges peeled the tiles up in curling strips and hunted for Silas’s ribs.

Silas didn’t try to force Rip-Current back into focus.

He fell back on drilled muscle memory, dropping his hips two inches and sliding his right foot back along the wet tile.

’Just need to flow...’

His wrist went loose as silk as he met the outer rim of the whirlwind with a shallow angled deflection and slid the flat of his broadsword along the curve of the wind.

SCREEECH!

He guided the cyclone’s arc up toward the ceiling rafters and stepped cleanly through the empty eye of the storm.

"Too wide, Val!" Silas snapped his broadsword forward in a lightning thrust at the blond’s sternum.

BANG!

Valerius didn’t parry as expected.

He used Aero-Displacement, evacuating the air in front of his chest while condensing a dense invisible platform of pressure behind his right heel, and kicked off it with a supersonic crack as his body shot backward four yards in a straight horizontal line.

Silas’s thrust pierced the empty vacuum pocket where the blond had stood half a second earlier.

The air rushed in behind it and tugged his black jacket forward with a sharp snap.

’Fast,’ Silas thought with the golden rings in his eyes narrowing. ’He’s chaining the ring’s speed boost straight into his displacement hops... but he’s burning through his Purple Core twice as fast to do it.’

Valerius landed on the balls of his boots and skidded three paces across the wet tile before he dug in his heels.

His chest heaved under the vest. His brass-blond hair was plastered to his forehead, and his golden eyes blazed with manic excitement, his grin wider than ever.

’I have to make it happen again,’ he thought with his hands tightening on the hilt. ’The double flow... I have to find that shearing motion on purpose this time, not just when I’m about to get flattened!’

He raised his blade to the ceiling.

"Let’s see you dance with this!" Valerius roared.

WHOOOOOOSH!

He poured his Purple Core through both arms at once.

His boots blurred against the floor as he broke into a rapid chain of Air Hopping, zigzagging across the arena in a jagged unpredictable lightning pattern.

BANG! BANG! BANG!

Each step cracked against the gray tiles like a small charge going off as sparks of broken stone jumped from his heels.

He threw three Severing Gales, one from the left, one from the right, one from below.

The razor green crescents tore through the chamber and crisscrossed in a lattice of compressed air that screamed toward Silas from three converging lines... but Silas didn’t flinch.

He planted his rear boot, drew on his regular mana, and swept his broadsword through a fast continuous horizontal circle like before.

"Severing Horizon!"

SHHHHHHHK!

A thin dark-blue ring of sea mana burst outward from his blade in a flawless 360° circle, no thicker than a fingernail and spinning with terrifying speed and leaving a hissing line of spray along the floor behind it.

CRASH! CRASH! CRASH!

It slammed into all three Gales at once and the impacts went off in a chain of wet concussive pops with water and pressurized wind canceling each other in clouds of dense spray that rained down over the tiles like a sudden summer storm.

Through the falling curtain of droplets Silas surged forward, boots skimming the wet floor without a sound.

’Now,’ he thought with his blade coming around in a low sweeping cut. ’Close the distance and take away his wind-up space.’

He brought the pressure with relentless swordsmanship, landing tight crisp combinations of cuts and thrusts that gave Valerius no room to breathe.

CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!

A low cut skipped off Valerius’s guard... A rising backhand rang against his crossguard... A thrust whipped past his ear and snipped a few brass-blond hairs off his scalp!

Every time Valerius tried to make distance, Silas stepped inside his guard.

Every time Valerius raised his sword to cast through Zephyr’s Loop, Silas tapped the flat of his blade and used his regular Flow’s easy deflections to knock the casting off line.

SHING! CLANG! SKRRRK!

Step by step, yard by yard, Silas drove him across the fifty-meter floor.

Valerius’s boots skidded over the wet tile as his parries came heavier and more desperate and hurried.

’Fuck...’

His breath whistled in ragged gasps as his back drew close to the outer perimeter of the arena.

Valerius’s heels scraped through the wet grit, and the fight kept rolling him toward the wall.

...Five paces from the blue boundary line... Four... Three...

Up in the stands Morwenna leaned her chest against the iron railing, stormy eyes tracking the footwork with cold satisfaction.

"He’s cornered," she muttered. "The blond’s got nowhere left to tack... One more push and the Captain takes his sword."

’I’m out of room,’ Valerius thought, feeling the faint humming heat of the barrier against the back of his neck. ’No space for Aero-Displacement and no room to run either.’

Silas lunged in with a hard smack of his boot on the wet tile with his broadsword rising for a heavy downward strike that would pin Valerius’s guard against the wall and end the exchange.

In that fraction of a second, pinned with his back to the blue runes, Valerius let go of every conscious calculation.

He stopped trying to force the wind to obey... He stopped trying to blast his way out with burst speed... He closed his fingers around the hilt, and instead of pushing his mana outward, he let it split.

SHRRRRRRK!

Around his right forearm and the steel of his sword, two distinct currents of emerald wind flared to life at once.

One whipped clockwise, screaming up toward the tip of the blade while the other ran counter-clockwise along his wrist, flowing backward toward his elbow.

Silas’s broadsword came down, perfectly placed to smash through the center line.

WHOOSH!

Valerius drove his arming sword straight forward into the attack and let the opposing streams meet Silas’s steel.

ZZZZZZZZZZT!

The air between the blades shrieked and the floor tiles rang under their boots and the sound was horrifying, like two millstones grinding together at the speed of light.

The streams sheared across it from opposite directions at the same instant as the weight of Silas’s cut tore into ragged disconnected fragments, and the broadsword was wrenched three inches to the left as the contrary currents ripped at its center of mass.

Silas’s eyes went wide with the gold ring contracting around his pupils. 𝔣𝖗ⅇℯ

’What the hell—?!’

His strike had completely unraveled as the broadsword hung off line in empty air.

Before he could reset his wrist or use Flow, the counter-clockwise current around Valerius’s wrist snapped outward in an impossible redirection.

Without a shift of shoulder or a turn of torso, the wind dragged the arming sword through a sharp mid-motion hook, bending the thrust around Silas’s guard at an angle that defied every rule of human anatomy.

CRACK!

The flat of Valerius’s blade slammed into the side of Silas’s mesh vest, and the iron links bit hard into his ribs and knocked the breath clean out of his lungs!