Chapter 434: The Underworld (X)

They broke the clinch the way tired killers did it, not with a clean leap, but with elbows, hips, and the ugly need for air.

The princess shoved his chest with a palm full of royal mana.

Gray turned his ruined shoulder into the shove so the force threw him sideways instead of onto his back.

He hit a curtain of thorned vine, ripped free, and immediately changed the shape of the fight.

He stopped aiming for her body, and instead started cutting the Domain.

Creack...

Fwip!

The first slash went into the root-bed under her left foot.

The second opened a trench between two of the thicker vines that had been feeding the blood moon’s glow.

The third severed a hanging coil that had been waiting to snatch his sword arm the next time he raised it.

The princess noticed at once.

"You are attacking my field."

"Your field is the only thing doing real work." Gray spat blood and circled right, forcing her spear to track across broken ground.

"You are strong... and this fucking ground is obedient. If I keep trading blows with you, I lose. If I make the ground late, you become a person again."

She answered by changing methods too.

The soil no longer tried to swallow him whole.

It rose in narrow ridges, one after another, like the ribs of a beast, each ridge timed to his step.

When he hopped the first, the second lifted under his landing; then he twisted off the second, a vine snapped across the third and tried to take his ankle at the exact height his old dodge had used.

Gray did not use the old dodge.

He dropped to one knee in the mud, let the vine pass over his head, and stabbed not at her, but at the ridge itself.

The rapier punched through wet soil and into the buried root that had been lifting it.

SKRCH!

The ridge died under her.

She had already committed to the spear thrust that expected him to be standing. The point passed where his throat would have been.

Gray came up inside the miss and hooked his elbow over the spear shaft, pinning it against his ribs.

For a moment they were locked around the weapon instead of around each other.

"Let go."

"Make me."

She flooded the spear with Demonic Energy until the shaft burned through his coat and into skin.

Gray hissed, kept the pin, and smashed his knee toward the same hip he had failed to move before.

This time he did not kick to throw her, but kicked to turn her stance onto the dead ridge.

It worked for half a breath.

Swoop!

Her boot slipped, and her weight tilted.

The bloodline light around her waist flared to catch her.

Gray used that flare as a map.

He released the spear, dropped, and dragged the rapier along the outer edge of the light instead of into it, searching for the place where the defense was thinner because it had just been forced to stabilize her footing.

Tink...

Swip!

Still no real wound.

But the princess felt the search.

She abandoned the spear with her right hand, left it hanging in the air on a thread of mana, and punched him in the liver with the empty fist.

BOOM!

Gray folded around the hit, vision swimming, and still had the presence to mark a falling thorn behind her before the follow-up could finish him.

"[✧Swap✧]"

He vanished from the punch and appeared at her back, already moving differently again.

He hooked his off-hand into her hair, not to hurt her, but to steal her balance, and yanked her head sideways while his rapier cut the mana thread holding the floating spear.

The crescent weapon dropped.

The princess let her hair go with the pull instead of fighting it, spun with the pain, and drove her forehead toward his nose.

Gray had already been there once.

He met the incoming skull with his palm.

SMACK!

The block saved his nose and cost him the skin on his hand.

"Arm!"

She bit his palm.

"Fuck! Are you a dog?!"

He cursed, tore free, and kicked the dropped spear across the mud before she could call it back.

The weapon skidded into a crater.

Her eyes went bright with offense.

"That was mine."

"Then pick it up."

She did not pick it up.

She made the Domain pick it up for her.

Vines surged out of the crater, wrapped the spear, and hurled it back toward her hand like a thrown gift.

Fwip!

Gray cut the first vine.

A second took its place, and a third wrapped his wrist and tried to make him drop his own blade.

He changed strategy again.

He let the rapier go.

The princess’s eyes widened at the stupid choice.

Gray stepped through the opening it created, both hands free, and slammed into her in a wrestler’s clinch.

She was much stronger than him in terms of raw strength, but there was some that could still be stolen. He got a hook under her arm, a hip against her hip, and tried to load her onto the broken ridge behind her heels.

She was too heavy with mana.

The throw failed.

She made him pay for the attempt with a short, vicious burst of energy from her core, point-blank, no shape, just pressure.

WHUMP!

Gray’s feet left the ground.

He flew, hit the far vine-wall, and felt something in his side grind. The rapier was still in the mud.

The spear slapping back into her palm sounded like a door closing.

"Without a sword, you are just an incubus..."

Gray peeled himself off the wall and smiled with blood in the gaps of his teeth.

"Then I will be an incubus."

He cracked his neck slighly.

The princess lifted the spear for a finishing line, moonlight gathering along the crescent.

Gray ran at the light anyway, then dropped at the last step and slid on one hip through the wet soil, under the spear’s lowest arc.

Swoosh!

Mud sprayed.

The crescent carved a burning ribbon over his back.

He came out of the slide at her lead ankle and wrapped it with both arms.

A wrestler’s trip.

The princess could have flown.

She could have blasted him off.

Instead, her pride made her try to stand through it, as if a mid-level incubus dragging on her leg was an insult that had to be crushed by posture.

That was the window.

Gray hauled.

Her standing leg lost the argument with the dead ridge and the slick mud. She went down to one knee with a snarl.

The spear stabbed into the soil beside his head and missed by the width of a finger.

THUNK!

He abandoned the ankle, climbed her instead of retreating, and got a forearm across her collar.

She hit him in the ribs once, twice, a third time. Each hit made his breath shorter. He did not give the space back.

"Get off."

"No."

A vine tried to peel him away.

He shoved her sideways so the vine struck her own shoulder first.

The Domain, of course, hesitated, unwilling to crush its mistress. That hesitation was another method he had not used before: making her field doubt the target.

The princess understood it immediately and hated it.

"You are using my bloodline against me."

"I am using your manners against you..." Gray spoke hoarsely. "The field does not want to hurt you... but I do not have that problem."

She dropped the spear on purpose this time.

Both hands free, she grabbed his ruined coat and tried to roll him under her. Weight, mana, royal body.

On a clean floor she would have flattened him. On this torn, sap-slick wreck, the roll became a messy scramble of knees and curses.

They hit the mud together.

Gray ended up behind her for one stolen second.

He did not waste it on a punch and instantly got his arm under her chin.

The first attempt was sloppy.

She tucked her jaw and bit toward his wrist.

He adjusted, higher, tighter, his bicep against the side of her neck, his hand locking into the crook of his other elbow.

His chest pressed her back while his legs hooked through hers to stop the bridge.

A head choke... not elegant, but of course... it worked.

The princess made a furious sound and tried to stand with him on her back.

Her strength lifted both of them a few inches off the soil. Gray hung on like a man who had decided the ground could wait.

She threw an elbow into his ribs.

Thump!

"Urgh..."

He took it.

She flooded her body with Demonic Energy until the skin under his arm burned.

He still did not let go.

"Release me."

"Yield."

"I am a princess of the Crimson Moon."

"Then yield like one."

Vines exploded around them, frantic now, no longer neat.

They wrapped Gray’s waist, his thighs, his shoulder. One thorn punched into his back. Another scored his cheek.

The soil rose to their hips and tried to bury the lock.

Gray’s vision started tunneling... but he gritted his teeth through as the choke was working on her too.

Her next burst of mana came out much weaker than the one before.

The blood moon above them flickered, as if the Domain had lost a piece of its conductor. She clawed at his forearm, then at his hair, then reached back and tried to find an eye.

He tucked his head against hers and tightened.

"You can break my arm," he managed to breathe out against her temple.

"You can crush my ribs. You can tell the field to grind me into the roots. If you do any of that hard enough, I die, and you still wake up with my arm under your jaw wondering why you needed a Domain to beat a man who would not stay down."

"Y-you... you... a mere incubus!" Her voice had less air in it.

"You cannot finish this."

"I do not need to finish you." Gray’s lock stayed.

"I need you to admit you cannot finish me either."

She tried one last method.

The jewel at her collar flared. Her royal bloodline surged in a dense, ugly wave meant to blast anything touching her skin off her body.

Gray felt the wave hit his chest and shoulder like a hammer wrapped in fire. Something in him tore as his mouth was suddenly filled with fresh blood.

He still did not open the choke.

The princess’s hands slowed on his arm.

The Domain’s vines hesitated again, caught between killing the man and hurting the throat they were trying to protect.

For a long, shaking moment there was only the sound of both of them breathing badly, the drip of sap, and the blood moon hanging over a fight that had stopped looking royal.

"Enough," she forced out.

Gray did not move.

"I said enough." More air left her.

Pride stayed in the words anyway.

"If I keep this up, I will kill you. If you keep this up, I will drop. That is a stupid ending."

"Then say it."

Her fingers tapped his forearm once.

"Draw."

Gray still waited a second longer, because people lied when they were angry, and this princess really was bratty.

She tapped again, harder.

"Draw, you bastard! I will not beg."

He loosened the choke by a little, not off her, just enough for a full breath to reach her lungs.

His arm stayed under her jaw, and her back stayed against his chest. The vines around them stayed tight, as if the Domain itself had not decided the match was over.

Neither of them let the other go first.

The princess dragged in air and laughed once.

"Remember this... You did not beat me! It’s a draw!"

"...Good."

Gray nodded, a little breathless.

[...Your power is still a lot below the Monarch realm.]

’Battle experience is also a kind of power...’

Gray grinned.