Second Genesis

Grey didn’t feel the change until the wind was already whipping against his back.

He spun toward it, but he was still half a step too slow, and Veyrath’s fist slammed into his side with enough force to make the crystalline armor explode outward in a shower of fragments. Grey had built the thing to resist heat, not raw physical punishment, so the outer layers shattered immediately, but as he was launched away he still caught the faint edge of surprise in the Elemental Prince’s eyes.

Grey understood why almost instantly.

Elementals weren’t monsters of pure physical strength, not in the same way a Dormaji was. Veyrath was clearly using his flames to amplify the force behind his strikes, adding heat and combustion to every blow until flesh should have ruptured from the inside out, and against practically anyone else that punch probably would have left a torso looking like ground beef.

Grey’s armor happened to be built for exactly the part Veyrath relied on most.

The crystalline shell broke, but the heat behind the strike was swallowed, reflected, and dispersed before it could reach Grey’s body. His flesh remained untouched as he spun through the air, slammed The Virtueless into the stone, and let the rod carve a trench through the arena while bleeding away his momentum.

Grey flipped once more and was just about to land when his senses twitched. He reacted without thinking.

His feet tapped against empty air, shadows bursting beneath his Black Forces as though the sky had briefly become solid ground. Grey flipped again, Veyrath’s fist passing beneath him by inches, then landed behind the Elemental and shot forward.

BANG.

A blinding burst of light exploded across Grey’s vision.

Veyrath vanished from his Resonant Sense at the same time, but Grey’s crimson eyes carried none of the surprise they had before. His head simply tilted to one side and a fist passed over his shoulder, while the damaged sections of his anti-heat armor were already knitting themselves back together.

Grey caught Veyrath’s wrist.

The Virtueless slammed downward and buried itself upright into the ground beside them, then Grey kicked one heel backward between the Elemental’s legs.

He would have loved to aim for buried treasure. Unfortunately, Grey was fairly certain these chicken-shit elemental bastards didn’t have balls.

"Tragic."

Instead, Grey turned his hips and used Veyrath’s wrist to pull him forward into an overhead throw.

The Elemental immediately began combusting, his physical form dissolving to escape Grey’s grip, but Grey had already anticipated it. Rather than using his own shoulder as the fulcrum, he dragged Veyrath down over The Virtueless, using the buried rod as leverage and forcing the Elemental’s body over it before the transformation could finish.

BOOM.

Veyrath smashed into the ground. Flames exploded outward, his body dissolving into a cloud of embers before immediately reforming into three identical versions of himself.

Grey ripped The Virtueless free.

The halo behind his back thrummed, the world reflected inside it seeming to weigh down on reality itself as power flooded through his veins. The jagged crystal grin covering Grey’s face widened until it nearly stretched from ear to ear.

"Let’s dance, pussy."

BANG.

Grey exploded forward.

White-gold flame surged around him as all three Veyraths attacked at once, their fists and kicks flowing together with such perfect coordination that it would have been easy to mistake them for a single fighter attacking from three bodies.

In a sense, that was exactly what they were.

Elementals only wore humanoid forms because it was convenient. They were spirits in the truest sense, beings of energy and essence rather than flesh, and so long as they had enough power to sustain themselves, there was nothing stopping them from dividing their existence into several pieces.

Three opponents attacking from three directions should have been suffocating.

Grey laughed instead.

His movements became sharper with every exchange, The Virtueless sliding through his palms as he ducked beneath elbows, stepped around kicks, and slipped through gaps that barely existed. Veyrath’s heat never escaped far enough to bother the others watching, his control was simply too absurd for that, but anyone stepping into the battlefield would have felt like they had wandered into the heart of a star.

The frost pouring from Grey’s armor made that obvious enough.

Grey swept The Virtueless low and clipped the side of one clone’s knee, then leaned backward as another fist passed his face. His head snapped forward a heartbeat later and the jagged mouth of his crystalline mask opened wide.

CHOMP.

Grey bit down on Veyrath’s arm.

Flames and embers poured through the gaps between his crystalline teeth, heat flooding into his body hard enough to make his organs tighten, but Grey didn’t release his bite.

BOOM.

The arm tore free.

It collapsed into embers before reaching the ground, the lost flame flowing seamlessly back toward Veyrath’s remaining bodies, and the Prince didn’t lose a single beat because of it. The third clone was already coming in from Grey’s side.

Grey planted The Virtueless into the ground and used it as a pivot, swinging his entire body around and slamming one heel across the clone’s head.

A different Veyrath struck the back of Grey’s knee the moment he landed and Grey dropped.

That fall happened to carry him perfectly beneath a roundhouse kick that would have taken his head off.

His hand touched the stone, his leg swept outward, and Veyrath’s ankle disappeared beneath him.

The clone crashed down while Grey rose in the same motion.

A flaming saber cut toward his ribs.

Grey stepped around it, caught the attacking wrist, and drove The Virtueless into the clone’s hip.

BANG.

Veyrath was launched upward, flipping violently through the air.

The last clone attacked Grey’s back.

Grey didn’t turn. He didn’t need to anymore.

Veyrath wasn’t simply controlling fire, Grey finally understood that much. He was controlling heat, light, and energy itself, manipulating them so perfectly that he could remove his own presence from Grey’s ordinary senses.

But disappearing wasn’t the same as ceasing to exist.

The air still moved and space still bent. The world still reacted to the void left behind when something suddenly displaced it.

A normal fighter would never notice those differences, but Grey was far too sensitive not to.

His heel shot backward and upward.

CRACK.

Veyrath’s head nearly tore from his shoulders, only a thin cord of flame keeping it attached.

The clone Grey had launched earlier began falling from above.

Grey spun The Virtueless in his hands, the rod moving so quickly that the wind itself began spiraling around him. He raised it overhead, waited until Veyrath fell into reach, then drove the weapon straight through the clone’s chest.

BOOM.

The clone shattered into a rain of fire and embers, the power coursing through it just about to fuse into the others when...

Grey inhaled.

The flames around the impaled clone twisted violently toward him, then disappeared into his mouth as though he had become a vacuum.

Grey’s chest expanded, his eyes blazed, and then he roared.

A vortex of stolen flame, stripped of any control Veyrath had ever had, erupted outward and swallowed the third Veyrath whole.

Grey would never call himself anything other than a petty bastard, and today he was going to rip up whatever infernal pride Veyrath thought himself worthy of having.

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