Chapter 861 - 860: Stronger With Every Clash

Darius descended before Simon answered.

His spear struck the Chaos Blade with a scream of metal. Simon angled the black sword aside, letting the point slide past his ribs. Fire erupted from the spearhead before the thrust finished.

The weapon had missed. but the explosion did not.

Simon swept wind between them and retreated through the blast, his boots carving through softened stone. Above him, the phoenix’s lower wings folded inward, pouring two streams of white fire across his escape route.

"DON’T RUN NOW!" Darius shouted, laughing.

Simon stopped retreating. Wind elemental energy gathered into the Gale Crown, the first Crown of the Fury Tempest Art. Its currents preserved his movement instead of allowing it to scatter. He carried that momentum through a sharp change of direction and slipped between the descending flames.

Darius turned, but Simon was already beside him. The Chaos Blade swept toward his neck.

A burst of fire hurled the human backward. Black steel opened his shoulder armour, drawing blood before the distance widened. Darius landed with his spear lowered and a fierce grin on his face.

"Yes!" he roared. "That’s what I wanted!"

Simon watched the blood darken his armour. There were several ways to shorten this battle. Hollow Sky Eye was one of them. Yet the strange warning at the back of his mind remained, and he wanted to understand it before disposing of the human.

Also, for a few exchanges, Darius could serve as a training dummy for the Fury Tempest Art. A good training dummy.

Darius drove forward, thrusting three times. Simon deflected the first, stepped outside the second, and lifted the third with his sword. The spear struck the road behind him.

Darius grinned.

Fire raced from the buried point through the cracks beneath Simon’s feet.

BOOOOOOM!

The road erupted. Simon rose through the debris, carried by wind. The phoenix was waiting above, its upper wings opening to release a storm of burning feathers.

Darius had forced him upward.

Simon narrowed his eyes and formed the Rending Crown. Opposing wind currents tore through the incoming feathers, breaking their shapes without extinguishing all their fire. The scattered flames curled back toward the phoenix.

He did not waste another attack on them. The Gale Crown carried him sideways, preserving his speed as he plunged toward Darius instead.

"You sure love to run, don’t you."

The human leapt to meet him.

Sword and spear collided above the ruined trench. Simon twisted around the shaft and released a short rending arc at close range. Darius’s fire veil bent beneath it, but the currents caught the breastplate underneath and pulled in opposing directions.

Metal tore,and Darius gasped as blood burst from his chest.

Simon’s sword followed immediately, but the phoenix swept one wing between them. Flame swallowed both figures. A spearhead emerged through the fire toward Simon’s eye.

He tilted his head.

The tip of the spear cut his cheek, and he drove the flat of the Chaos Blade against the shaft, forcing Darius down.

The human crashed into the trench. Simon landed on its broken edge, blood trickling from his cheek before the wound began closing with the help of Unholy Regeneration.

Darius stood among the flames, breathing hard. His grin had disappeared.

"You keep doing that."

Simon raised a brow.

"Looking at me as though you’re correcting an exercise."

Heat rolled from the trench. The red veins in the phoenix’s feathers brightened, and Darius’s fingers tightened around his spear. His next step shattered stone that had supported his weight a moment earlier.

’Again.’

Simon’s eyes narrowed as Darius attacked.

This thrust struck harder than the previous ones. Simon reinforced his arm with demonic energy and let the Gale Crown redirect part of the force through his movement. The spear veered aside.

Darius released his forward hand.

Rather than struggle against the deflection, he let the shaft rotate and blasted fire from its head. The burst accelerated the weapon’s opposite end toward Simon’s temple.

Simon ducked.

The butt of the spear smashed through a stone support behind him. Darius caught the rotating shaft, reversed his grip, and stabbed downward before the rubble fell.

CLANG!

Simon caught it on the Chaos Blade.

Fire shot along the spear and spilled over the black steel toward his fingers. He twisted free and answered with a close rending strike, forcing Darius backward in another burst of flame.

The human was learning.

Where Simon tore through armour, Darius placed yielding layers of fire. Where wind diverted his spear, he used the changed angle to begin another attack. Even when forced backward, he left flames on the road for the phoenix to gather.

"COME ON!" he shouted. "Hit me again!"

Simon obliged.

He changed direction beneath a sweep of phoenix fire, drove inside the spear’s reach, and struck Darius across the chest with the sword’s flat.

BANG!

Darius staggered, spat blood, and thrust back. Simon turned the weapon aside, but the counter was faster than before. White flame burst against his shoulder. His demonic energy resisted the heat, but the cloth covering it blackened.

"That’s better!"

Darius laughed through bloody teeth. His Aether had grown denser. The flames nearest his body were changing from gold to white, and his spear no longer trembled when their weapons met.

Simon finally understood what had been troubling him.

’This isn’t just the phoenix.’

A weapon-wielding Elemental Blessing user was unusual, but not that rare. Training could explain the spearwork. Simon had never assumed every skilled spearman possessed a Martial Blessing.

It did not explain this growth.

The longer Darius fought, the stronger his body became. Anger intensified it. So did the fierce excitement that made him laugh whenever an exchange nearly killed him. His physical power rose with the heat, although he remained a Peak C-rank.

An Elemental Spirit could lend a human immense power, but that did not explain why Darius’s rage was strengthening his body as though battle itself fed him. This berserker-like growth did not fit the Blessing he had revealed.

The strange nose. The strengthening body. The anger.

Something was wrong.

Darius’s next shout drowned the crackle of the burning trench.

"STOP THINKING AND FIGHT!"

The phoenix folded its lower wings around his spear. White fire compressed along the weapon, and Darius lunged with a force that split the road behind him.

Simon met the thrust at an angle.

BOOOOOOM!

The Chaos Blade held. His wrist jolted anyway.

The Gale Crown shuddered under the redirected force. Simon steadied its currents with more wind elemental energy before it destabilised. The spear passed beside him and released a white torrent that bored through the embankment.

A direct hit could kill him.

He had judged Darius to be stronger than his sister. The human was proving him right, and every exchange made leaving him alive more dangerous.

Simon stepped back, his expression turning cold. Practice had served its purpose. Understanding the source of Darius’s abnormality could wait.

Killing him could not.

The human drew his spear back, still grinning fiercely. Simon looked directly into his eyes.

The broken black rings around Simon’s pupils began spinning. A dark glow spread through them, deepening against the sky-blue pupils of his eyes.

Hollow Sky Eye.