Chapter 435: Thor Vs. Talira [I]

The dimension expanded infinitely in all directions... there was no ceiling, no floor, and no horizon, yet their boots rested securely upon a solid frictionless plane of spatial force.

The mana of the outside world vanished completely, severed by a dimensional barrier that insulated their space from reality itself.

Thor looked around the infinite white void, her storm-blue eyes widening with deep genuine appreciation.

She stomped her heavy armored boot against the invisible floor, feeling the nigh-unbreakable power of the spatial fabric beneath her soles.

"GWAHAHAHA!" Thor laughed with booming approval, tossing her wild blonde hair back. "Now this is impressive! An isolated sub-space completely disconnected from the cosmic flow of the Sovereign Realm! You’ve got fine talent with spatial weaving, elf!"

Aeliana offered a serene curtsy, walking over to the perimeter and sitting gracefully upon a manifested chair of starlight mana.

"I thank you for the compliment, Lady Thor. I have spent many long evenings refining this construct under Lord Silas’s instruction. You may unleash your physical output without fear as this dome will not fracture... Just not all of it."

Standing in the center of the white expanse, Morwenna and Talira turned to face each other.

The Dread Queen and the Ancient Crimson Dragon locked eyes, both of their expressions sharp with intense lust for battle.

"I’m taking the first dance with the Thunder God," Morwenna declared, her hand resting firmly on Tidebringer’s hilt. "I’ve got centuries of divine grudges to settle."

"In your dreams, Miss Morwenna," Talira countered, her voice rumbling as her crimson wings flared behind her back. "The God of Thunder specifically challenged the blood of the Crimson Dragon. Step aside."

"Let fate decide it, then," Morwenna smirked, raising her right hand. "Rock, paper, scissors. One throw."

"Done."

The two mythic warriors squared off, their hands pumping in synchronized rhythm.

"Rock... Paper... Scissors... SHOOT!"

...Morwenna threw Scissors.

...Talira threw Rock.

Talira’s ruby eyes lit up with triumphant, draconic satisfaction. "Victory is mine."

Morwenna clicked her tongue in sharp annoyance, sheathing her hand and turning on her heel to walk toward Aeliana’s side of the void.

"Tch. Don’t embarrass our Lord, lizard. If you get knocked out in five seconds, I’m never letting you live it down."

"Worry about your own sword, Miss Morwenna," Talira replied smoothly, turning her full focus toward the God of Thunder.

Morwenna didn’t know why but Talira trying to be nice and also trying to insult her just made it more insulting.

Talira and Thor walked in opposite directions, putting fifty yards of open white space between them before turning to face each other.

Thor stood tall, rolling her broad corded shoulders with a ferocious toothy grin.

She raised her left arm, flexing her massive chiseled bicep until the iron-hard muscle strained against her silver battle armor.

"Listen well, little dragon!" Thor’s booming voice echoed across the sub-space. "To keep this exchange entertaining and properly balanced, I am bringing my physical output down to match your own! We fight with pure grit!"

With a casual flick of her wrist, Thor unhooked her legendary war hammer from her belt.

SWOOSH.

She tossed Mjölnir casually to the side.

The short-handled ancient hammer spun lazily through the air before coming to a dead stop in mid-space, hovering silently twenty feet above the ground, its runic engravings glowing with dormant power.

Next, Thor reached for her wrists, unlatching the ancient, rune-etched iron gauntlets... Járngreipr.

She tossed them down, the divine metal striking the invisible floor with a heavy concussive clang that sent ripples through the spatial fabric.

Finally, she unbuckled Megingjörð which was the legendary Belt of Power that doubled her god-tier physical strength.

She tossed the heavy leather-and-gold relic aside, letting it land beside her gauntlets.

Stripped of her divine armaments, clad only in her heavy silver breastplate, dark trousers, and bare corded fists, Thor dropped into a low brawler’s stance.

Her storm-blue eyes blazed with pure electric hunger for combat.

"No weapons... No divine armor buffs... Just raw fists!" Thor bellowed with a wide, feral grin. "Come at me, daughter of the flame!"

Across the void, Talira lowered her center of gravity.

Her pale skin began to radiate waves of shimmering superheated pressure with her ruby eyes glowing like burning embers as her crimson wings spread wide.

"I accept your terms, God of Thunder," Talira’s dual-harmonic voice resonated with chilling, draconic pride. "And I promise you... before this spar is over, I will force you to pick up at least one of those weapons."

BOOM!

The white floor beneath Talira’s boots did not merely crack as Thor expected... it detonated instead.

Talira blurred into a streak of pure crimson momentum, crossing the fifty-yard distance in less than a fraction of a millisecond.

At the exact same instant, Thor surged forward like a golden lightning bolt.

KRA-BOOOOOOOOM!

Their fists collided dead-center in the void.

The apocalyptic force of the impact generated a massive, omnidirectional shockwave of compressed air that tore across the sub-space, expanding outward like a nuclear pressure wave.

The violent gust whipped Aeliana’s robes and Morwenna’s dark coat wildly, but neither of the spectators blinked as the two titans clashed.

Neither fist yielded.

Talira’s molten-red mana screamed against Thor’s golden lightning, their knuckles locked in an contest of pure physical pressure.

SWOOSH!

Without breaking the lock, Talira rotated her hips, driving a lightning-fast left hook directly toward Thor’s jaw.

Thor anticipated the strike instantly, tilting her head back by a fraction of an inch as the razor-sharp wind from Talira’s knuckles sliced through the air.

Thor countered with a ferocious rising right uppercut, aiming to cave in Talira’s sternum.

Talira snapped her crimson wings forward, crossing them over her chest like an iron shield.

BANG!

Thor’s fist struck the draconic wings with the force of a siege ram, sending a concussive boom echoing through the dome but Talira didn’t slide back.

’My Lord does this too...’

She absorbed the energy, uncurling her wings with explosive force to deflect Thor’s arm while launching into a blinding high-speed combination of martial strikes.

RATTLE-BOOM!

The two women vanished into a high-speed blur of fighting.

Talira dominated the initial exchange with ruthless power.

Her strikes flowed with ancient draconic martial forms that her mother taught her... palm thrusts infused with thermal shockwaves, sweeping elbow strikes aimed at vital nerve clusters, and spinning heel kicks that created razor-sharp air blades.

Every single blow landed with thunderous shockwaves that distorted the surrounding space.

POW! CRACK! BANG!

Talira drove a palm strike into Thor’s shoulder, followed by a sweeping low kick that forced the deity to shift her footing, capping the assault with a savage double-fisted hammer blow straight down onto Thor’s guard.

The continuous barrage pushed Thor back three paces, the God of Thunder grinning through the storm of blows as her arms deflected the onslaught with ease.

"Good! Faster, dragon! Hit me harder!" Thor roared in the midst of the exchange. In the microsecond between Talira’s recovery and her next strike, Thor’s posture shifted.

Her storm-blue eyes flared with blinding gold.

Slipping beneath Talira’s extended left jab with terrifying fluid speed, Thor closed the pocket in a single explosive step.

Her right fist cocked back, loaded with concentrated mass, and drove forward in a brutal straight body blow.

KRA-THUMP!

Thor’s fist buried itself dead-center into Talira’s solar plexus.

The bone-shattering force of the clean hit punched a vacuum through the air behind Talira’s back.

The dragon woman’s eyes bulged with the air violently expelling from her lungs in a choked gasp as the shockwave rippled through her internal organs.

Thor dominated the tempo instantly.

Without giving Talira a fraction of a second to breathe, Thor pivoted on her heel, driving a heavy left hook into Talira’s ribs, followed by a savage forearm smash across her collarbone that sent the dragon woman tumbling across the white floor.

ROLL-CRASH!

Talira slammed into the spatial floor, skidding ten yards, but she did not stay down.

’Strong...’

Deep within her body, Talira’s draconic core roared to life.

She instantly flooded her internal organs, her ribcage, and her muscle fibers with thick, concentrated layers of primordial fire mana, completely reinforcing her internal anatomy against the blunt-force trauma and matching Thor’s crushing physical output.

Thor lunged forward, closing the distance to deliver a descending axe-kick stomp aimed at crushing Talira into the floor.

BOOM!

Before Thor’s boot could land, Talira’s hands slammed against the ground.

Using her incredible core strength, Talira flipped her body horizontally across the floor, narrowly evading the stomp as Thor’s boot cratered the invisible space.

In the exact same breath, Talira swung her right leg upward in a vicious rising sweep, driving the heel of her boot directly beneath Thor’s gut.

THWACK!

The upward blow landed cleanly, lifting Thor’s heavy armored frame two feet off the ground and breaking the deity’s forward momentum.

Talira vaulted to her feet in a fraction of a second. Her jaw unhinged slightly and her throat began glowing with a white-hot heat.

"Die!"

FWOOOOOOSH!

A colossal concentrated torrent of pure crimson-gold dragon fire erupted from Talira’s mouth at point-blank range, engulfing Thor in a thousand-degree inferno of incinerating heat.

...Thor didn’t even flinch.

Standing inside the roaring vortex of dragon fire, Thor threw her left arm outward, delivering a massive open-handed slap straight through the flames.

SLAP!

The concussive air pressure from Thor’s bare hand physically cleaved the dragon fire in half, deflecting the roaring stream of flame to the side like water from a hose, splashing harmlessly against the distant white void.

"GWAHAHAHAHA!"

Through the parting flames, Thor surged forward to seize Talira’s throat but Talira anticipated the counter.

Using the blazing recoil and the thermal updraft from her own dragon fire, Talira kicked off the air, twisting her slender body in a breathtaking mid-air corkscrew that allowed her to narrowly slip past Thor’s reaching gauntlet.

Spinning gracefully at the apex of her leap, Talira reached deep into her core, unlocking her newly awakened secondary elemental authority.

VUUUUUUUM!

A violent pressurized vortex of emerald-green wind erupted around Talira’s limbs.

Channeling the hurricane-force currents into her right heel, she brought her leg down in a high-velocity axe kick aimed directly at the crown of Thor’s head.

KRA-BOOOOOOM!

The wind-infused strike struck Thor squarely across the top of her skull with enough force to at least make her move as the shockwave exploded outward in a deafening sonic boom, warping the white space around their heads.

Yet... Thor did not fall.

The God of Thunder simply stood tall, her neck muscles corded like steel cables, tanking the full concentrated force of the awakened wind strike with raw durability.

Her boots didn’t even budge an inch either.

Thor looked up through her wild blonde bangs, her storm-blue eyes blazing with ecstatic battle-joy.

"GWAHAHAHA! A secondary wind element! That was magnificent, girl!" Thor bellowed, a wicked grin splitting her face. "NOW MY TURN!"

Thor coiled her arm back, preparing to unleash a counter-punch that would shatter the sound barrier.

Realizing that her humanoid form lacked the mass and physical power required to trade blows with the durability of an Asgardian deity, Talira did not hesitate.

She kicked off Thor’s shoulder, launching her body sixty feet straight up into the boundless white sky.

Hovering in the air, Talira closed her eyes.

She reached deep into the absolute center of her primordial bloodline, deliberately unlocking the ancient slumbering majesty of the Crimson Dragon.

CRACK! SNAP! KRA-THOOM!

The white sub-space fell silent for a single heartbeat and then, all hell broke loose as a colossal suffocating wave of volcanic crimson pressure erupted outward from Talira’s pale skin, instantly superheating the entire sub-space into a blazing furnace.

Her spine violently elongated with a terrifying wet snap, tearing through her humanoid silhouette as her physical mass ballooned outward with explosive acceleration.

Her pale skin hardened and calcified into thick, overlapping layers of volcanic-red scales that glowed like molten iron.

Her jaw unhinged, extending forward into a massive terrifying reptilian snout lined with rows of serrated sword-sized fangs beneath twin swept-back obsidian horns.

FWHUUUUUUM!

Two colossal leathery crimson wings burst from her back, unfurling to their full magnificent fifty-foot wingspan with a concussive shockwave of displaced air that shook the very foundations of Aeliana’s dome.

The transformation completed in four seconds flat.

Hovering in the center of the void was an ancient Crimson Dragon.

"RAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!"

Talira threw her massive horned head back, releasing an earth-shattering Dragon’s Roar.

The physical concussive soundwave tore through the sub-space like a hurricane, the air pressure so immense that even Aeliana had to plant her boots to maintain her balance.

Her reptilian eyes blazed with apocalyptic crimson fire, looking down upon the God of Thunder like a calamity woken from the primeval dawn.

Standing on the floor below, Thor threw her head back, her storm-blue eyes drinking in the magnificent terrifying sight of the fifty-foot dragon.

"GWAHAHAHA!" Thor roared with booming, unrestrained applause, her laughter echoing over the dragon’s snarls. "LOOK AT YOU! You’re definitely a bit smaller than those ancient elder-dragons my father used to hunt across the fiery realms... but your scale thickness, your mana output, and your fighting spirit are FAR above average!"

Thor rolled her shoulders, dropping back into her bare-fisted brawler’s stance as golden lightning danced violently across her knuckles.

"COME ON THEN, DRAGON! SHOW ME WHAT A TRUE CALAMITY CAN DO!"

High above the void, Talira’s molten-red eyes narrowed to razor slits, her fifty-foot wings beating with hurricane force as she let out another deafening battle-hungry roar.