Chapter 121: Enraged Mode [pt 1]

The floor got up.

Four hundred feet of packed ash lifted in the middle and came together, and it did not do it slowly. Ash poured uphill into a shape. Bone came off the rim in a long grinding drag and went into it. The arm Theo had taken off at the elbow came back across the ring end over end and hit the shoulder and stuck there.

And the fire came back on all at once.

Not black... This time, it was white.

It went up out of the seams and the throat and the two dead grey eyes in a single soundless rush, and the whole bowl lit like a struck match, and every shadow Theo had swallowed in the last four minutes was standing behind him again in a hard black line. The heat came a breath behind the light and took the sweat off his face.

He had time to say one thing.

’...That’s not fair!’

At the treeline, Sivvy started screaming and Yura got a hand over her mouth.

The Warden of the Cinderfall came across two hundred feet of its own arena in a little over a second, and Theo did not have his armour on.

’Fragment!’

The Shadow Fragment came up his legs at a speed that hurt, plate slamming shut over the shins and the ribs, the helm closing round his head half a beat late so that the first strike came in against bare jaw and obsidian at the same time.

It broke his cheekbone and threw him ninety feet.

He tasted ash before he tasted blood.

He came down on his shoulder in a trench and skidded, and turned it into a roll, and got a hand under himself, and the second strike was already there.

Theo brought Raindrop up on nothing but reflex.

He did not block it. He could not have blocked it. What he did was hold the blade in the path of it at an angle, and Raindrop did a Raindrop thingy.

It slid.

The Warden’s forearm came down the length of the sword and went off the side of it into the ash, and the whole strike went past Theo’s ear at a hand’s width, and the sound it made going by took the hearing out of that side of his head.

’That’s it. That’s the whole fight, right there.’

[Raindrop — when swung, the sword naturally follows the path of least resistance]

Theo got up.

Ash came off the plate in sheets.

The panel sat in the corner of his eye and it was the only clock in the world.

[Enraged Mode: 4:41 remaining]

The next four minutes were the worst thing Theolyne Chadwick had ever done on purpose.

It came at him and did not stop coming. There was no circling in it and no pause, no rearing up and no roaring, just a white-lit thing with a wolf’s head hitting him from the front over and over with both arms, and every single strike would have taken his head off his neck.

So he parried them.

He parried with a blade that weighed nothing, off a wrist that barely registered it, and every parry was the same parry. Meet nothing. Find the angle. Let the arm go where it was already going, and be somewhere else when it got there.

[Flowing Edge] brought the blade back up before he had finished thinking about it.

By the second minute his forearms were shaking. There was ash in the joints of the plate and it ground every time he turned his wrist. By the third he had stopped being able to feel the grip and was holding the sword with the shape of his hand rather than the strength of it, and the wrap of the hilt had printed a line across his palm that was still there in the morning.

And the darkness did the rest.

Theo did not attack once in four minutes. He used it entirely to stay alive, and he got better at it every twenty seconds. Nothing teaches like a wolf’s head coming down at your neck.

When it came in low he hardened the shadow under his own heels and slid himself eight feet sideways without moving his legs at all.

When it came in high he thinned the dark in front of his chest and let it come, and thickened it four inches from the plate so the arm hit something that gave and slowed and cost the strike a third of its weight before it ever reached him.

’Don’t stop it. Just make it cheap!’

When it caught his ankle he grew a crude black arm out of the floor of the ring, ten feet of it, ugly as a tree root, and it did not have the strength to hold the Warden for even half a second.

It did not need half a second. It needed the time it took the Warden to look at it.

Theo was gone before it finished looking.

Twice he made a Theo.

That was the one he was proudest of afterwards and the one he could least afford, a crude black man-shape standing eleven feet to his left with a crude black sword, holding still, holding nothing, and both times the Warden went at it at full speed and both times Theo put the real blade through the back of its knee while it was busy.

Both times the wound burned shut, white fire running up the cut and sealing it before he had the blade clear.

Both times it cost him about a fifth of everything he had left.

At the treeline, Yura had not blinked in three minutes. Bethe had her good hand over her mouth. And out in the deep ash on his face, unable to stand, unable to look away, Donzo Varr watched a Mundane Realm boy get hit by a C-tier Dungeon Warden, an Enhanced IV rank Monster, forty-one times in four minutes and not go down once.

’He should be paste. He should be PASTE.’

Donzo’s mouth had gone dry in the ash and he could not make it stop moving.

’What is he. What is he, what is he, what—’

[Enraged Mode: 1:52 remaining]