The giant northerner rammed forward with his shoulder, not even pretending he needed to rely only on the weapon. Ludger slammed his copied club across his body and absorbed the hit half-sideways, boots tearing lines through the stripped ground as Kharnek’s sheer mass shoved him back two full steps.
Then Kharnek’s club came down again. Ludger rolled. The blow hit earth. And the clearing exploded.
Frozen dirt, shattered stone, and the last crusts of packed snow erupted upward in a violent spray, the ground splitting where the club landed. People at the edge shouted and jumped back as fragments rained outward. Ludger came up from the roll already moving, his own club whipping across in a tight vicious arc at knee height.
Kharnek reacted by jumping. Which should not have been possible for a man that size with a weapon that heavy in hand. And yet he did it anyway.
The strike passed beneath him by a finger’s width. When he landed, he landed hard enough to make the earth jump. Then both of them hit at once. Kharnek brought his club down diagonally. Ludger brought his up from below.
The weapons crashed together in the center of the clearing with a sound so violent that the nearest spectators recoiled outright. The impact created a shockwave strong enough to blast the remaining snow entirely off the ground around them, leaving only raw scarred earth and fractured frost-stone in a widening ring.
For a second, they stood there locked. Club against club. Power against power. Kharnek pushing down with monstrous raw force.
Ludger driving upward with reinforced earth, technique, and a body straining hard enough that the muscles in his arms and shoulders visibly tightened under the effort.
Both of them grinned then. Kharnek because this was fun. Ludger because finally, finally, this felt like training worth doing. After another brutal exchange, the first real weakness in Ludger’s plan showed itself.
Their clubs met again in a thunderous sideways collision, the impact booming across the clearing hard enough to make the nearest spectators wince and cover their ears for the third or fourth time. Snow was already gone from most of the area, blasted away long ago by the repeated shockwaves, and now even loose frost and dirt were being pushed outward in rings every time the weapons crashed together.
This time, though, something else followed the sound.
A crack.
The earth-forged club in Ludger’s hands splintered along one side. A jagged section near the upper half split apart, and several hardened chunks broke free and fell to the ground in a scatter of stone fragments.
Kharnek saw it immediately. So did everyone else. A low roar of reaction moved through the crowd as more pieces chipped loose after the next glancing impact, dropping into the torn dirt at Ludger’s feet.
Ludger clicked his tongue inwardly.
He had hardened it as much as possible. Compressed the structure, reinforced the density, kept adjusting the internal composition every time the weapon absorbed another crushing hit.
But in the end, there was still a limit.
Against a weapon like Kharnek’s, real, heavy, brutal, and forged from pure metal, the earth-copy was always going to wear faster in a direct clash. It was a good imitation. A dangerous one, even. But it was still an imitation meeting the original under repeated full-power impacts.
And metal, annoyingly enough, remained metal. Kharnek’s smirk spread at once.
“It looks,” he said, rolling his shoulders as he rested the giant club against one side for half a breath, “like this is my win.”
The crowd loved that. Several laughed. Others shouted agreement. A few had already started acting like the matter was decided, which was deeply premature and therefore exactly what spectators tended to do.
Ludger just shrugged.
Then he fed more mana into the weapon. The broken sections shifted at once.
Earth flowed upward from the ground around his feet, drawn in clean streams toward the damaged portions of the club. Stone and packed soil compressed, hardened, and fused back into shape in seconds, filling cracks, replacing missing chunks, and restoring the giant weapon’s form as if damage were just another inconvenience too slow to matter.
Kharnek stared. Actually stared. For one brief, glorious second, the huge northerner looked genuinely speechless.
The clearing went quieter too, not because anyone lost interest, but because several people had apparently not considered that Ludger could simply… fix the club in the middle of the fight.
Ludger tested the restored weight once in his hands, gave the weapon a small turn, then looked at Kharnek and asked,
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
“You were saying?”
That got a burst of loud laughter from the crowd.
Not friendly laughter either. The kind that came whenever a man got his confidence slapped out of him in public and everyone present felt obligated to enjoy the moment before violence resumed.
Kharnek’s eye twitched once.
Then he grinned. Slowly. Badly.
“Fine,” he said. “Then it’s time to get serious.”
That shut the crowd up faster than a slap.
Because everyone there knew what that meant.
Kharnek planted his feet and rolled his neck once. The easy amusement stayed on his face, but the weight coming off him changed. Less playful now. Denser. Meaner. The air around him seemed to tighten as mana began moving through his body in a different pattern, heavier and more violent.
Then the change started. His body began to turn red.
Not bright, not glowing in some polished magical way. It was a deeper shift than that, like blood heat and fury were being dragged closer to the surface until his skin itself looked flushed with battle-born violence. At the same time, his muscles swelled further, bulging with sharpened force as his already monstrous frame thickened into something even more absurd.
Veins stood out. His shoulders widened. His grip on the club tightened until the wood-and-metal monster in his hands looked somehow more appropriate, as if the weapon had only now found the body it truly belonged to.
The crowd erupted again, this time not in laughter, but in excitement. Now this was a fight.
Now Kharnek was done playing. Ludger watched the transformation and felt his own blood stir in answer. Good. That was exactly what he wanted.
So he didn’t wait. He drew on Rage Flow.
The moment the class skill ignited, the shift ran through him like a second heartbeat slamming into the first. Heat surged into his limbs. His body tightened, sharpened, and changed as the familiar flood of violent enhancement took hold. Mana and physical force wound together inside him, and the transformation began to show outward just as clearly as Kharnek’s had.
The air around Ludger darkened by a degree.
His presence sharpened.
His muscles drew tighter along his frame, not bulging in the same massive way as Kharnek’s, but condensing into something faster and more dangerous. The energy moving through him felt harsher now, more predatory, more unstable in the way only controlled rage ever was.
Kharnek’s grin widened. Now they understood each other again. No copies. No restraint. No pretending the earlier exchange had been anything but a warm-up for this.
The crowd at the edge of the clearing felt it too. The atmosphere turned electric all at once, full of anticipation sharp enough to sting. Even the loudest onlookers went quieter now, because the fight had just stepped over a line and become something else.
Ludger rolled the restored club once in his hands. Kharnek lowered his own into position.
Both of them stood amid shattered ground, scattered fragments, and the wrecked remains of what the clearing used to look like.
Then Kharnek bared his teeth and said,
“Now try not to die before I earn my coin.”
Ludger’s eyes narrowed, Rage Flow burning through him like a promise.
“Try not to disappoint me.”
And this time, when they moved, the ground itself looked afraid. They crashed into each other again like two storms deciding the same patch of ground wasn’t big enough. Kharnek struck first.
No hesitation. No setup beyond raw murderous intent sharpened by excitement.
His giant club came down in a brutal overhead smash, red aura blazing around his massive frame, muscles bulging harder now that he had truly cut loose. Ludger stepped into the line of the blow instead of retreating, raised his own copied club, and met it head-on.
The impact exploded.
A violent crack burst across the clearing like the sky itself had split apart. The stripped ground beneath them cratered deeper. Loose stone jumped. People at the edge of the crowd threw arms over their ears as the sound hammered through the camp hard enough to hurt.
Kharnek didn’t pause.
He dragged his club sideways from the collision and chained immediately into a horizontal sweep aimed to cave in Ludger’s ribs. Ludger pivoted, caught the shaft near the thicker section, redirected the force just enough to avoid being folded in half, then snapped back with a rising diagonal strike at Kharnek’s jaw.
Kharnek jerked his head back and answered with his knee, forcing Ludger to shift his hips aside at the last instant. The giant northerner’s club came again from above, then from the side, then low, each swing packed with the kind of monstrous weight only a body like his could produce.
Ludger matched him.
Blow for blow. Impact for impact.
Every time Kharnek’s club smashed into his, the earth-forged weapon cracked a little more. Jagged lines spread along the shaft. Chunks splintered loose. Stone fragments dropped to the ground and were immediately crushed into dust under their feet.
But now Ludger repaired it faster.
The instant a crack spread, earth flowed up from the ground to fill it. The instant a chunk broke away, compressed stone snapped into place to replace it. His mana pulsed through the weapon in constant violent correction, turning every exchange into a race between destruction and reconstruction.
Kharnek’s eyes caught that again, and this time there was no speechless pause. Only more aggression.
Good.
He came forward roaring, driving Ludger backward three hard steps with a savage series of full-bodied smashes. Overhead. Side. Reverse sweep. Short brutal hook with the lower end of the club. The attacks chained together with terrifying efficiency, each one feeding off the momentum of the last. Snow was long gone now. The area around them had become nothing but broken earth, shattered froststone, and churned dirt kicked up by boots and shockwaves.
Ludger met every strike with sharpened focus, Rage Flow raging through his limbs. His arms burned. His shoulders strained. His copied club kept breaking under the stress, but his control over the earth never faltered. Crack. Repair. Chip. Reinforce. Split. Rebuild. The weapon in his hands was being born and dying a dozen times every minute.
A few people in the crowd had gone completely silent now. Because at this level, cheering became secondary to simple survival instinct. The next collision hit even harder.
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