Chapter 774: Tasmin Vs Brida [II / Bonus - ]

Chapter 774: Tasmin Vs Brida [II / Bonus Chapter]

The wooden wall at the edge of the ring shuddered from the impact, and a shower of loose frost slid off the top of it and pattered down into the snow.

Brida planted her boots against the splintered planks behind her and pushed herself off the wall.

She staggered two steps forward into the churned sand, her breath pluming in ragged white clouds, and spat a mouthful of red-tinged grit into the dirt then she rolled her broad shoulders until her collarbones popped.

CRACK!

She raised the back of her forearm and casually wiped away the blood trickling from the split corner of her lip.

The chuckle that had started in her throat kept growing.

"Hehehehe~"

It went from a dry raspy wheeze into a wide hungry grin that looked more than a little unhinged.

Her ribs throbbed with a hot sharp ache every time she breathed in, sending needles of fire down her side.

Tasmin’s kick had actually rattled her.

That shadow-strengthened strike had punched straight through her Bedrock Body and left a fierce burning bruise all along her flank.

Brida loved it.

’That bitch can actually hit,’ Brida thought, her pulse thumping in her temples like a war drum. ’And she really thought one clean shot to the ribs would put me down.’

Across the ring, the smirk slid right off Tasmin’s face.

She stayed balanced lightly on the balls of her feet with thin wisps of shadow still curling off her leathers, but her posture tightened.

Her dark eyes narrowed into cold slits as she watched the brawler stand up straight in the slush.

Tasmin knew that grin.

She’d fought next to Brida more times than she could count, and every time Brida smiled like an idiot after taking a hit that should’ve dropped her, it meant one thing... The warm-up was over.

"You kick like a wounded mule, Tas," Brida growled, rolling her neck to the left.

CRACK!

"I felt that one in my back teeth," Brida sneered, taking a slow heavy step forward. "Is that the best your little shadow circus has got...? Because if that was your big opening move, you’re gonna be eating breakfast through a straw for the next three weeks."

"I was just checking if your skull was as thick as your waist," Tasmin shot back, her voice dropping into a sharp whisper that still carried over the wind. "Next time, I won’t bother holding back enough to keep your head attached to your neck, you loud-mouthed ape..."

"Good," Brida barked, her grin splitting wider. "’Cause if you hold back now, I’m gonna snap those pretty legs like kindling."

"Try it, brawler," Tasmin spat. "I’ll carve your pride into ribbons."

Both of them dropped the last bit of pretending this was a friendly spar.

Deep in Tasmin’s chest, behind the frantic beat of her own heart, something colder answered.

THUMP!

Her Shadow Heart beat once, like an iron hammer striking the inside of her ribs, and the shadows pooled under her boots surged upward in an oily roaring torrent.

Her dark eyes vanished behind a burst of thick swirling black smoke that spilled down her cheeks and wrapped around her throat like living ribbons before sinking into her skin, her veins and her muscles.

Her outline sharpened until she looked like a figure of midnight cut straight out of the void.

VWOOOOOOM!

Across the ring, Brida dragged in one long breath and willed her Warrior’s Heart into action.

A ripple of golden-red vitality rolled across her skin then, in a single heartbeat, her muscles locked.

The warm bronze of her arms and shoulders darkened into a deep light-swallowing metallic sheen, hardening into star-slate from her collarbones to her knuckles, and twin plumes of crimson energy erupted from her amber eyes and curled past her temples like smoke pouring off a volcano.

KRRRRRMMMM!

The pressure coming off the two of them hit the arena all at once.

Every inch of snow on the arena floor blew outward in a ring and sprayed over the front benches.

Cracks shot up the wooden walls around the ring, the roots Eluned had woven under the sand groaned, and a long split tore across the eastern railing with a sound like a tree being torn in half.

KRAAAACK!

Up on the platform, Aeliana rose from her seat.

She took one look at the splitting walls and the girls in the front rows, who were leaning back from the railings, and calmly raised her right palm toward the arena.

’It’s better to be prepared than to be sorry...’

"Dome!"

The air over the ring folded.

A vast dome of pure spatial energy unfolded from her palm and swallowed the arena floor in a fraction of a second, sealing the ring off into a pocket of space all its own.

From the outside, it looked like an enormous bubble of shimmering glass, and every girl in the stands could still see straight through it to the two fighters inside.

Inside, the sand and the roots and the broken walls stayed exactly where they were, but the space around them stretched and deepened with the dome rising far higher than any roof had a right to.

Aeliana settled back into her seat on the platform, folded her hands in her lap and watched.

Beside her, Silas had sat up straight in his chair.

The easy slouch he’d kept the whole time with Eluned curled across his lap was gone.

His dark blue eyes locked onto the two women inside the dome, and the gold ring around his pupils flared bright as his Mythic Gold Core hummed in answer to all the mana flooding the ring.

Watching them push right up against the limits of what their bodies could hold, a memory clicked into place.

Among the things he’d taken from the World Vault, tucked away in his Inventory, was an ancient leather-bound grimoire... [Treatise on the Compression of the Primary Core: The Creation of a Mana Heart].

’I almost forgot!’

Number Five had explained it to him herself. It taught how to compress a primary core into an autonomous Mana Heart, whatever your element, and anyone who formed a true one would see their affinity skyrocket.

Tasmin’s Shadow Heart was already beating, but it still wasn’t fully condensed.

Brida had only just found her Warrior’s Heart... Both of them were standing right on the edge of something bigger.

’They both need that book,’ Silas thought, his fingers resting on Eluned’s hip. ’Once this is over, I’m giving it to both of them and to every other girl who needs it...’

Inside the dome, the ground exploded.

KA-BOOOOOM!

Both of them launched forward at full speed, and the sand where they’d been standing blew out into two craters the size of wagons.

They met in the center of the ring with a straight right each.

KRA-THOOOOOOOM!

The collision tore a shockwave out across the arena that ripped the sand off the floor down to the roots and slammed into the walls of Aeliana’s dome like a wave hitting a cliff.

The whole bubble shuddered, rippling silver from top to bottom, and underneath the two of them the ground caved into a smoking crater thirty feet wide.

Brida’s star-slate skin rang under the impact like a struck bell, but her boots didn’t move.

Tasmin’s arm went numb to the shoulder, and she let the recoil carry her back, skidding three long steps across the crater.

’Damn it,’ Tasmin thought, shaking her fingers out. ’It’s like punching the side of a mountain...’

She didn’t wait for the feeling to come back as she drove her will into her core and activated [Predator’s Mark].

SHING!

A crimson reticle flashed across her vision and locked onto Brida.

The metallic sheen of the star-slate didn’t fool it... Every place where the hardening ran thin lit up in glowing red, the joints, the hinge of the jaw, the soft gap under the ribs where the slate had to stay flexible enough for Brida to breathe.

She vanished.

With [Phantom Leap], she blinked into the blind spot behind Brida’s right shoulder and left a perfect shadow clone standing in front of her.

Brida didn’t even look at it.

She let her Warrior’s Heart go... The star-slate melted back into warm bronze in an instant, her muscles loosened, and freed of all that weight, her body moved faster than something her size had any right to.

She spun on her heel and threw a backhand into the empty air behind her ear before Tasmin had even finished appearing.

Fingertips met forearm, and in the last instant before contact, Brida’s arm locked back into slate.

CLANG!

It sounded like an iron rod hitting an anvil.

Tasmin’s spear-hand strike skidded off the hardened skin and raked along Brida’s shoulder instead, tearing open her tunic and leaving three shallow bloody lines where the slate hadn’t finished forming.

’She’s switching it on and off,’ Tasmin realized, her eyes widening. ’Soft to move, hard to hit... The bitch actually figured out how to use it.’

Brida’s uppercut came up at her chin like a battering ram.

WHOOOSH!

Tasmin leaned back, letting the wind off the knuckles brush her jaw, and drove a savage downward elbow into the middle of Brida’s bicep.

THOOM!

A dull ring ran through Brida’s entire arm but she didn’t even grunt.

She swallowed the force straight into her bones, held it there, and her crimson eyes blazed as she activated her next skill.

"Full... Counter."

BWOOOOOOOM!

A blinding red ring of force burst from her chest and threw every hit Tasmin had landed so far straight back into her at once.

Tasmin was ripped off her feet and launched across the ring, and she slammed into the inside wall of Aeliana’s dome hard enough to send a silver ripple racing across the whole surface.

WHAM!

"Ga—"

She slid down it, coughing with her ribs screaming but Brida was already charging.

Tasmin didn’t try to get up.

She activated [Shadow-Submersion Drift] and sank straight down into the shadow at the base of the wall, and when Brida’s fist hit the spot where she’d been, it punched a crater five feet deep into the floor.

BOOOOM!

Brida turned, scanning the ring.

There were no shadows left... The sand was blasted flat and the walls were too far away, and in the gray light of the dome, the only shadow left on the whole floor was the one stretching out from under Brida’s own boots.

Tasmin came up out of it.

She rose behind Brida out of Brida’s own shadow, the one place Brida couldn’t run from, and she didn’t come alone.

[Phantom Blitz] tore three clones out of the dark alongside her, and all four of them came at Brida from different directions in perfect terrifying unison.

The clones went first, and they went hard.

One drove a kick into Brida’s knee, one slammed a palm into her throat, and the third dropped an axe kick onto the crown of her head.

Each of them hit with enough force that Brida’s Warrior’s Heart locked her body into slate and her Full Counter swallowed the impacts, storing them up, ready to throw them back.

...That was exactly what Tasmin wanted.

The instant Brida’s counter fired, blasting all three clones into smoke, the real Tasmin was already inside the shockwave’s blind spot, right up against Brida’s back, while the slate across her ribs was still loosening to let her breathe.

Her right fist was wrapped in a drill of spinning darkness that hissed like boiling water, and she drove it into the soft gap under Brida’s ribs with every ounce of strength her Shadow Heart could pour into it.

KRRRAAAACK!

The shadow drill punched straight through as a floating rib gave way with a sharp ugly snap.

"Guh...!"

Blood sprayed from Brida’s mouth and she staggered sideways, and her left knee nearly hit the dirt but even as the cracked rib ground against her side, Brida’s amber eyes flared with volcanic fury.

’Got you close,’ Brida thought through the red haze.

Her left hand snapped shut around Tasmin’s wrist like a bear trap and pinned her arm right against her own wounded side.

CLAMP!

Tasmin’s eyes went wide.

She threw a vicious left hook at Brida’s temple, and Brida didn’t even try to dodge it. It landed flush, splitting open the skin over her cheekbone and snapping her head to the side.

BAM!

Brida used the momentum to swing her whole upper body back, locked her forehead into slate and drove it straight between Tasmin’s eyes.

KRAKOOOM!

The sound of their skulls colliding boomed through the dome like two boulders smashing together.

Stars burst behind Tasmin’s eyes, a gash split open across her forehead, and blood ran straight down into her left eye.

Before she could see again, Brida’s right fist buried itself in her stomach and lifted her clean off the ground.

WHAM!

Brida raised her arm high, hardened it into slate all the way to the elbow and brought it down like a hammer at Tasmin’s spine.

Tasmin’s instincts moved before her mind could.

She swung her legs up around Brida’s trapped arm, kicked out with everything she had and turned her own wrist into liquid shadow.

SHLOOP!

She slid free like an eel and rolled away across the crater as the hammer-fist hit the floor where she’d been.

KA-THOOOOM!

The ground split open in a jagged crack that ran all the way to the edge of the dome, and the whole floor of the arena dropped half a foot...

Tasmin pushed herself up onto one knee, then onto her feet, swaying. She wiped the blood out of her eye with the back of her wrist and stared at the crack running past her boots.

Across the crater, Brida straightened up slowly with one hand pressed tight against her cracked rib and her chest heaving.

She spat a glob of blood onto the sand and let out a breathless ragged laugh.

"You hit harder than that four-armed alpha did, Tas," Brida wheezed, wiping her bloody nose with the back of her knuckle. "I’m gonna frame the bruise you left on my ribs..."