Chapter 236 - The Finals [P2]

["LOOK AT THESE OPENING EXCHANGES, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN! No probing attacks! No cautious maneuvering! Both representatives have thrown themselves straight into the heart of combat!"]

On the cracked scorched arena floor, Ayako’s katana moved with terrifying grace. She used elemental wind to accelerate the trajectory of her steel, turning every swing into a silver blur that trailed with lighting.

A horizontal slash aimed at Amber’s throat was immediately followed by a thrust toward her sternum.

Amber, not being one for retreat, swayed her upper body back just enough that the lightning-clad tip grazed past her collarbone, singeing the white fabric of her uniform.

Without breaking her rhythm, she drove her fist upward, shooting out a concentrated burst of silver light that was aimed straight for Ayako’s chin.

Ayako tilted her head slightly, allowing the light – and fist – to pass harmlessly by her cheek. The heat radiated from the magic only warmed her skin.

Before Amber could retract her arm, Ayako brought her left knee up in a bone crushing strike toward her exposed ribs.

THWACK!

Instead of safely dodging, Amber adjusted her footing and hardened her exposed ribs with enhancement magic. An unstoppable force met an immovable object.

Amber let out a delighted laugh when looking right into Ayako’s face. She reached up and wrapped her fingers around Ayako’s lapel in a tight grip.

"Gotcha~"

With a glow in her eyes, she inverted the gravitational pull directly beneath Ayako’s boots. The ground suddenly lost its grip, tripping the Myrian heiress into floating upward into the air.

Then, with a flick of her wrist, Amber reversed the gravitational pull down with full force, spinning Ayako mid-air and sending her crashing straight into the ground.

BOOOM!!!

Pivoting back to create a bit of space, Amber once again inverted the gravitational pull where she slammed Ayako while channeling an intense, vibrating tremor through her right forearm.

As her body floated upward, Ayako looked completely fine and unnaturally calm.

The moment Amber’s tremor-infused fist lunged forward, water bubbled from Ayako’s skin, wrapping around her body. The fluid shroud redirected the kinetic force, causing Amber’s arm to slip through and past her torso.

Mid-air, Ayako kicked off the air current itself to counter the gravity. Spinning her body upside down, she brought the hilt of her katana slamming down onto the back of Amber’s neck.

BOOM!!!

Amber was forced downward, her knees cracking into the stone floor, splintering the bedrock into fine powder.

At the front VIP seats, Dominik shot up to his feet.

"Holy shit! What are these monsters?! Ayako’s natural elemental transitions are absurd! She’s not even taking a second to think about which elements she has to focus on! She’s just... doing it! Meanwhile Amber has the rare elemental affinity of Space in which she uses Gravity, and she has an affinity of Light?! Holy shit!"

"Thanks for the exposition, Dom." Kurt threw him a thumbs up.

"You’re welcome." Dominik threw one back.

Amber didn’t stay down for even a second.

The moment the hilt struck her neck, she used the downward momentum to roll forward, gaining some distance, and flinging her leg in a wide sweep across the ground.

A wave of compressed gravity swept across the stone floor like an invisible tidal wave. The shattered bedrock shook under the sudden spike in weight, flattening everything in a thirty-foot radius.

Ayako, landing lightly on her feet, felt her knees suddenly buckle as the artificial gravity washed over her. Her clothes felt as heavy as lead armor, pulling her toward the earth.

"Hahaha! Down you go!" Amber sprang up from her crouched position like a spring, jumping high into the sky.

Instead of trying to fight the crushing gravity, Ayako accepted it.

She allowed herself to drop flat against the stone. As Amber came flying down for a body crushing landing, Ayako erupted into an explosive pillar of dark red flame which shot straight upward.

BOOOOM!

The fiery geyser detonated directly beneath Amber, scorching the air and launching the student council president high toward the protective barrier above.

The crowd gasped in unison as a collective wave of seventy thousand people stood up from their seats.

["W-WHAT AN EXPLOSIVE COUNTER FROM THE IZUMI HEIRESS!"] Ken yelled as his hand slammed onto his desk. ["She used the president’s own gravity trap against her to launch a fiery upward volley! Is Strongwill down?!"]

High in the air, drifting near the shimmering hexagonal grid of the ceiling barrier, Amber flipped through the smoke.

Her amber ponytail was slightly singed at the tips, and her pristine academy coat had a dark, smoking tear along the hem.

Wide eyed with shock, she hovered there for a second, floating weightlessly through spatial manipulation.

Then, she looked down.

A slow, wide smile spread across her face. It wasn’t her usual playful smile. Her amber eyes glowed with an unhinged, ecstatic sheen. A bubbly laugh spilled from her lips, growing louder until it echoed over the coliseum through its speakers.

She clapped her hands together like a child receiving a coveted toy and cheered, "Ahahaha! Oh, that was fantastic! That was so good, Ayako! I haven’t felt a burn like that since my faceoff with Emelie last year!"

On the floor below, moving free amidst dispersing abnormal gravity and the smoking crater of her fire pillar, Ayako slowly rose to her full height.

She reached up and tossed away the decorative hairpin holding her dark hair in place. Her long, black locks fell freely over her shoulders, swaying in the heat-warped breeze.

She then wiped a faint trickle of crimson blood from the corner of her lip with the back of her hand.

When she raised her head, her calm, polite demeanor was completely gone. Her gray eyes were burning with euphoria – the unmistakable mark of a combat fanatic who had finally found someone strong enough to break her refined polish.

"President Strongwill... No... Amber. You really are a marvel. I was worried you would break if I used too much force... but you’re built like an iron monument, aren’t you?"

"Break?!" Amber laughed, her body descending from the sky like a falling meteor, accelerated by a massive surge of downward gravity. "Try it! Come on, Ayako! Try to break me!"

CRASH!!!

Amber slammed into the center of the arena missile, sending a wall of debris flying fifty feet into the air.

Before the dust settled, both figures blurred toward each other at speeds that defied human perception.

The battle shifted into absolute madness.

CLANG! THWACK! BAM! BANG!

The two combatants were twin hurricanes of destruction, crossing corners of the arena within seconds, leaving a trail of ruined stone and shattered barrier runes in their wake.

Ayako’s katana became a multi-elemental vortex. She slashed with fire, thrust with lightning, parried with earth, and glided with ice.

Her blade whistled through the air, carving deep, glowing trenches into the ground. Every time Amber attempted to close the distance, spikes of iron would erupt from the stone beneath her feet, forcing her to smash through them using enhanced physical force.

Amber was a terror of pure martial dominance. She moved like a phantom, using short-range, light vanishing warps to reappear directly inside Ayako’s guard.

Her fists were coated in dense, compressed light magic that detonated upon impact like explosively blinding charges. Every time her punches and kicks struck Ayako’s elemental defenses, the resulting shockwaves vibrated the coliseums protective barriers, threatening to break them.

"Too slow! Too slow, Ayako! You need to go faster!" Amber laughed hysterically, weaving under a lightning-infused horizontal slash. She drove a palm strike straight into Ayako’s stomach.

The light magic detonated on contact, blasting her backward across the ring.

Ayako skidded across the stone, her boots leaving deep grooves in the floorboards. She didn’t even check her injury. Instead, with wide eyes and bloodshot adrenaline, she let out a thrill-seeking laugh of her own.

"And you need to punch harder! I’ll never fall if that’s all you got!"

The temperature in the arena suddenly plummeted and spiked simultaneously. Four gigantic magic circles – glowing red, blue, green, and yellow – materialised around Amber.

From the red circle, a torrent of superheated plasma erupted. From the blue, a blizzard of razor-sharp ice shards. From the yellow, a concentrated beam of crackling high-voltage electricity. From the green, a lance of cutting wind.

All four primal forces converged on Amber’s position at once, threatening to vaporize her where she stood. However, inside the eye of the elemental storm, she stood her ground.

Her manic smile didn’t fade for a single second. She threw her head back and spread her arms wide.

"Compress!"

A sphere of gravitational distortion expanded from her body.

The moment the four elemental streams collided with the gravity field, space itself folded inward.

The fire, ice, lightning, and wind were forced into a tight, spinning gravitational singularity, orbiting around Amber like the rings of a dead star. The sheer weight of the compressed magic cracked the entire western half of the stadium floor, caving the stone inward.

Ayako’s eyes widened slightly in pure awe. "Incredible... you compressed four highly advanced spells into a single orbital mass?!"

"That’s right! And here! You can have it back!"

With a sweeping rotation of her hips, Amber unleashed a brutal spin-kick directed straight at the compressed orb of magic.

BOOOOOOOOOM!

The four trapped elements released in a single, devastating beam of chaotic energy that shot straight toward Ayako. The air sizzled as the beam tore through the atmosphere, melting the stone floor into liquid magma along its path.

Ayako didn’t flinch.

She grabbed the scabbard of her katana in her left hand, her blade in her right, and crossed them in a tight X-guard before her chest.

The chaotic beam struck her guard.

RUMBLE—CRASHHH!!!!!!!

A blinding flash of light consumed the entire eastern side of the arena.

The shockwave was so immense that the primary barrier surrounding the ring shattered like glass, sending a violent gust of wind spilling out into the lower spectator stands.

Academy instructors and barrier specialists scrambled forward, frantically raising secondary defensive shields to protect the screaming crowd from the collision.

At the front VIP seats, Diana stood up, stepping in front of the nearby crowd to shield them from the howling wind and dust with her own spacial barrier.

"They’re going crazy down there," Dominik yelled over the deafening noise. "Now this is a finale worth remembering!"

"That’s what happens when two battle maniacs find an equal," Kurt called back. "Neither of them gives a damn about the winning trophy anymore. They just want to see who stands at the end."

The thick cloud of smoke hanging over the arena began to clear, revealed by the harsh midday sun.

The entire dueling ring was utterly unrecognizable.

What had once been a smooth white stone arena was now an apocalyptic wasteland of molten rock, deep craters, and cracked bedrock.

Standing on opposite sides of the ruined wasteland, thirty yards apart, were the two combatants.

Both of them were battered, bloody, and exhausted – yet their spirits were burning brighter than ever before.

Amber’s right sleeve was completely torn off, revealing her toned, bruised arm. She was breathing heavily as blood trickled down her forehead, staining her blonde bangs, but her eyes were sparkling with wild bliss.

On the other side, Ayako’s black military uniform was shredded at the shoulders and waist. Her left hand was trembling from the recoil of blocking the compressed beam, and a long cut ran along her collarbone. Yet, her smile was wider and crazier than it had been at any point in her life.

"Hey... *huff* Ayako... Y-You’re... you’re really *huff* out of your mind, you know that?"

"I could say... *huff* *puff* the exact same thing to you, Amber. My lungs are burning and my arm feels like it’s going to fall off... But... I’m *huff* I’m really having fun right now."

"Ahaha! Right?!" Amber laughed, dropping into a low stance as her entire body began to emit a soft, blue and white light.

"Ayako. I think... we should wrap this up pretty soon. If we keep going like this, we’re going to accidentally bring down the whole coliseum."

Ayako’s eyes glinted with deep respect. She raised her katana with both hands, holding the blade vertically before her nose.

Slowly, every single speck of her mana coalesced around her katana. The blade’s mana coating turned from a deep blue, into a shimmering aura of pale pink sakura petals.

"I couldn’t agree more, Amber."

Up in the commentary box, Ken was shaking with anticipation.

["L-LADIES AND GENTLEMEN... Both fighters... both fighters are gathering every single drop of their remaining mana! THIS IS IT! THE CLIMAX OF THE CONTINENTAL TOURNAMENT!"]

In the stands, seventy thousand people held their breath. Nobody cheered. Nobody moved.

Amber’s aura flared from silver and blue, into a pillar of radiant golden light that reached fifty feet into the sky, warping the space around her body until her silhouette blurred.

And Ayako’s blade hummed with a quiet, terrifying resonance, as the gentle sakura petals danced around her steel.

They locked eyes across the ruined field.

"Ready when you are, Ayako of Myria."

"After you, Amber of Eldoria."