CHAPTER 54: REN VS MIRABELLA (2)

For a split second, the whole world seemed to hold its breath. The audience, the wind, even the glint of sunlight on the arena floor froze in place.

Time slowed as the jagged ice blade that had once been Mirabella’s dagger came screaming toward Ren’s exposed flank.

Her sudden range extension caught him completely off guard. It was a brutal, vicious swing that didn’t belong in a friendly duel between students. This was the kind of attack meant to end a fight with one move.

But Ren’s eyes widened in understanding rather than fear. Without even needing to think, he willed his body into motion and activated his Stage 1 rune.

And then it happened.

Rumble!

A violet mirage burst into the sky above him, like a shadow tearing through a cloudless heaven. It wasn’t shaped like a beast, not exactly.

The form was more like an idea of a beast, a formless, rippling phantom that flickered like smoke and roared like thunder in silence.

The Umbral Kinephantom Panther soared through the skies, and Ren’s entire body lit up in a subtle glow of shifting purples.

His eyes gleamed like twin moons drenched in twilight. The moment he stepped forward, the air bent around him.

Not shifted. Bent.

In the next moment, reality caught on fire. He didn’t dodge or retreat. He accelerated, but not in any normal way.

His momentum exploded forward, fed by the resonance state of his rune. He had always been good at manipulating momentum, trading the force of one thing for another like a deal-making thief.

But now he wasn’t just redirecting momentum; he was accelerating it, gathering force like a collapsing star and using it all to vanish from where he was.

One blink, he was there. The next blink, he was behind Mirabella. The icy blade passed through nothing but empty air.

Mirabella’s eyes widened, a flicker of disbelief breaking through her calm. "What... the hell was that?"

Ren, now crouched behind her and breathing hard, grinned. "Panther stuff."

She turned with a frustrated spin, the jagged sword scraping the floor with a scream of metal and frost.

By then Ren had already disengaged. The arena crackled with leftover ice and displaced wind, but even the crowd had gone oddly quiet.

Some of them were stunned at how the weird, handsome boy with the kusarigama had just pulled something so ridiculous out of nowhere.

Still, even he couldn’t keep that up forever.

His resonance flickered, then faded. Mirabella’s did too. The wild aura of her ice resonance dissipated, her icy sword shrinking slightly as the mirage above her dispersed into a flurry of frost and sparkle.

Their bodies were strong, trained, carved by magic, but even so, activating resonance burned stamina. Too much.

On paper, achieving resonance granted double the power of the rune for the same amount of stamina consumption. But things didn’t work that way in real life. One could easily activate a rune for a split second or a few seconds at best, then quickly deactivate it to reduce stamina consumption.

But once resonance was achieved, one’s rune would remain activated at full power for the duration of the resonance. One could only deactivate the rune after the resonance faded away. That was the truth learned out in the field.

Neither of them could afford to be the one to waste the most stamina and cripple their combat power.

That meant the next stage of the fight was back to tactics, back to weaving, and back to blood.

Mirabella exhaled softly, but her gaze hardened.

Then she started weaving.

She didn’t say a word. She didn’t need to. Her mind worked with accuracy and speed, forming the complex weaves of her ice threads.

Radiance shimmered around her irises like frost on glass, and she summoned a sharp, clean palm-sized icicle. It spun in the air like a knife tossed upward. Then she threw it, not at Ren’s chest or head, but a little to the side.

Swish!

Ren dodged easily, frowning in suspicion, when the icicle exploded mid-air. It burst not into shards, but into a cloud of ultra-cold mist.

She can chain weaves?!

The whole crowd went silent. What they were witnessing was a skill level that could only be found in the main academy!

She was chaining an icicle weave and a frost mist weave together, creating this icicle bomb art that was a mixture of terror and beauty.

Because the mist didn’t vanish. It lingered. It drifted over the arena floor, crawling like it had a mind of its own, and wherever it touched, it made the stone frost over.

And then it touched him.

His skin instantly tingled. Then stung. Then went slightly numb.

She was trying to slow him down!

Ren’s expression didn’t change much, but in his mind, alarms were going off. That was a clever move. That cold mist didn’t hit like a hammer; it hit like a net, like a trap.

And if she kept it up...

Another icicle came. Then another. Every time he dodged, they burst, filling the area with more and more mist.

The temperature dropped rapidly. Ren’s breath fogged. His legs started to feel like he was walking through syrup.

She was turning the battlefield into her element.

And he hated it.

So, naturally, she went even further.

Her lips curved into a smile, serene and infuriating, and she lifted her hand once again. This time, the light that shimmered around her wasn’t just from a rune; it was two.

Her second rune activated, and a thunderous chill rushed through the stadium.

The air itself crackled as a new mirage shimmered into being. A massive snow butterfly, its wings made of crystal frost and ice dust, hovered above her like a divine spirit.

Ren blinked once. "Okay, I’m officially jealous now."

The crowd went wild. A second resonance. She had activated it without effort!

And more importantly, she had done it casually. That meant only one thing: sublime compatibility. Again! For her second rune!

Her dagger, already jagged and deadly, morphed once more. This time it transformed into an even larger, more brutal sword of frozen spikes. But that wasn’t all.

The frost snaked up her arm, across her chest, and down her back. It didn’t cover her like armor; instead, it shaped itself to her most vital areas, forming a sort of chitinous, glimmering ice protection. Her neck, her heart, her spine, her thighs were all protected.

She gleamed like a warrior queen carved from glacier stone, a goddess of winter wrapped in living snow.

And she didn’t even look out of breath.

Her sword came swinging, and the air screamed with frost.

Bang!

Ren fought back. Of course he did.

He twirled his kusarigama, ducked, spun, redirected momentum from a falling icicle to rocket sideways.

He threw his spiked weight like a boomerang and used the pull of the chain to close in for a kick. But every second, he was being pushed back.

Her armor made her defense too strong. Her cold mist made him slower. Her ice sword made every blocked hit feel like being hit by a falling fridge.

He had to move more. Think more. Chain more tricks. It was exhausting.

And the crowd noticed.

Chants started.

"Ice Queen! Ice Queen! Ice Queen!"

Dozens of voices. Then hundreds. All of them girls.

Mirabella didn’t acknowledge the cheers, but her smirk grew a little wider. Her silver hair fluttered like silk caught in a blizzard. Her violet eyes sparkled like polished gems in moonlight.

Ren was getting outplayed.

But as he dodged another swing by using the momentum from his falling kusarigama spike to rocket backward, barely avoiding being chopped like firewood, he grinned through gritted teeth.

"Alright," he muttered, "so that’s how you want to play it..."

By now, the arena was fully transformed into a frozen battlefield. Everything around Ren shimmered with frost. The air was white.

The floor cracked beneath his boots. Ice mist slithered over every surface like a living organism, numbing his skin and slowing his reactions. He could feel the weight in his muscles, the stiffness creeping up his calves.

His breath came out in short, steaming puffs. And yet, he smiled.

Because this was when he finally got to show what he’d been hiding.

Mirabella swung her jagged ice sword with mechanical rhythm, her movements flawless. She was pristine. Untouched.

Her dagger shimmered, her posture never faltered. The crowd chanted her name like she was already the winner.

But they didn’t know the truth.

They hadn’t seen what Ren had been preparing for. They hadn’t seen his Stage 2 rune.

And so, as the mist clawed toward him and Mirabella spun in like a bladed storm with her next slash, Ren whispered two words to himself.

"Let’s begin."

And everything exploded.

Rumble!

In that instant, the air around him ruptured. Not cracked, not shimmered... ruptured. His body vanished from where it stood with a soundless boom, as if someone had fired a cannon made of wind.

The very ground beneath his feet fractured from the force of his departure, stone flying up like it had been struck by a meteor. Mirabella’s eyes widened for the third time that day as her dagger swept through empty air again.

He had activated it.

The special ability of his Stage 2 Umbral Kinephantom Panther rune. And it wasn’t even its resonance.

It was momentum creation.

This was no longer about borrowing momentum from falling or swinging or physics tricks. This was pure kinetic birth. The rune was now capable of spontaneously generating force from within Ren’s own body!

From a standstill. From mid-air. Even from impossible angles!

It didn’t matter. The rune broke the rules and created push and pull as it pleased.

The resonance of his stage 1 rune allowed him to accelerate his generation of momentum, but this one allowed him to create it!

Bang!

He blurred across the arena with no windup, no preparation. Just bang, he was moving. Then bang, again, from a dead stop into another burst.

His kusarigama blurred in the air, and he twisted mid-air like gravity was an opinion. One moment he was horizontal, swinging above the ground. The next, he corkscrewed forward in a sideways flip, using the momentum burst to redirect his position.

His body became impossible to predict.

Mirabella slashed where she thought he was and got nothing.

She turned, already summoning another icicle, but Ren was already there. Not behind her. Not beside her.

Above.

He crashed down, spiked weight first, forcing her to leap back. Even that leap wasn’t safe because mid-air, Ren activated another momentum burst and followed her with a ridiculous, physics-defying mid-air redirection. He twisted around his own spinning chain and appeared in front of her again.

"What is this?!?" she gasped, slashing at him. But her dagger found only the kusarigama chain, which he’d wrapped around his forearm.

"You’re not the only one," Ren grunted, "who’s been holding back."

And then he opened his left eye.

Not physically. It was already open.

But now, it activated.

A shimmer spread across the iris like ripples dancing over still water. Faint white lines began to materialize around Mirabella’s body. Lines that danced.

Lines that twitched. Lines that predicted.

The passive ability of his left eye: Momentum Precognition.

He didn’t use it much. It drained focus, made his thoughts echo, gave him migraines. But right now he needed it.

And with it active, he could see everything. The faint lines gave him the directions and guidance he needed to anticipate her moves. He didn’t react.

He anticipated. He moved first.

And now, it was Mirabella who was being pushed back.

Her steps lost rhythm. Her defenses started to crack. Her dagger clashed against his kusarigama but each hit was slightly off because Ren wasn’t where she expected.

Even though she was physically stronger than he was, he was just too unpredictable. Pure brute force wasn’t working at all!

He danced through the mist, his spiked weight dragging arcs of wind, his chain whistling like a blade. His footsteps no longer obeyed inertia or gravity. He was the panther.

And the panther had awakened.

But she wasn’t going down quietly.

She snarled, finally visibly angry, and her Stage 2 rune resonated again.

Rumble!

The butterfly returned, larger, more radiant, wings shivering with flakes of diamond-shaped snow. Her ice chitin reactivated, covering more of her torso, her arms, even partially extending to her legs.

Her dagger expanded again into a brutal frost blade, now with even more jagged spikes and an eerie pale glow that burned with a quiet cold flame.

She surged forward.

Ren responded instantly, momentum bursting from his calves, launching him sideways.

They clashed.

And this time? Neither of them had the edge. He was able to generate enough momentum to equal her own even though it damaged his body quite a bit.

Her ice mist clouded his space locks. Her unpredictable footwork threw off his kusarigama swings. He tried to chain two space lock weaves to lock her in place and then use his momentum creation Reverse Pull to whip his chain back mid-swing.

But she’d already filled the zone with frost mist. She couldn’t dodge easily, but she didn’t need to. Her chitin armor tanked his glancing blows.

And when her icicle spells launched, they now moved with the momentum of a falling avalanche.

It was chaos.

Ice clashed against wind. Spikes smashed into frost blades. Ren’s movements grew increasingly erratic, intentionally erratic.

One burst left. Two bursts forward. One down.

Chain flick, leg sweep, shoulder crash. He was using created momentum like it was water, generating shockwaves just from accelerating against air. The crowd was breathless!

Girls were screaming. Some cheered Ren. Many more screamed Mirabella’s name like it was holy.

Because somehow, despite everything, Mirabella refused to fall.

Even when hit, she hit back. Even when slowed, she advanced. Even when overwhelmed, she smiled.

And then their attacks stopped.

Both stood across from one another, chests rising and falling. The cold mist between them froze into stillness. Sweat ran down Ren’s temple.

Ice clung to Mirabella’s silver bangs. The arena was a battlefield of shattered stone and frozen ground.

Neither could go much longer.

And both of them knew it.

"...You out?" Ren asked, voice hoarse.

"...Almost," Mirabella replied, her voice firm despite the wear.

Ren twirled his chain, slowly this time. "One last round?"

Mirabella’s grip tightened on her frost sword. "Winner takes glory?"

Ren smirked, eyes glowing faintly violet. "Winner takes bragging rights."

Mirabella narrowed her eyes and raised her sword.

They both moved.

And the entire crowd rose to their feet, holding their breath for the final clash.

Rumble!