CHAPTER 461: DEN

Lifting the bottom of the shaft off the floor, Percy spun the weapon a couple more times, before glancing back at his opponent. It was difficult to make out any of the blurry details, but he still caught traces of pain in the woman’s expression and caution in her stance as he spoke.

“Come on. Time to end this.”

The female disciple didn’t need to be told twice. Despite her injury, she held the advantage, but that wouldn’t last much longer. If left alone, Percy would gather even more metal, and his body would slowly rid itself of the toxins. She lunged at him once more, giving him a chance to cleanly bisect her with a horizontal slash. Her body never so much as hit the floor, however, disappearing before her guts spilled onto the arena.

At the same time, a new set of lacerations appeared on Kassorith’s torso – only half of the usual damage, thankfully, due to the woman’s missing limb. Percy ignored the surge of vertigo ringing inside his borrowed skull, rushing after his opponent while she was still within reach. She was at her most vulnerable right after expending her mind mana, so he couldn’t afford to squander the opportunity.

Sadly, she seemed to understand her shortcomings just as well. Slithering away, she kept her distance from Percy, who struggled to catch up – the venom coursing through his host’s veins not doing him any favours. The two continued to fight like that – with the woman hovering just out of reach like a vulture, building up her reserves for her occasional attacks, and then running away whenever Percy was about to retaliate.

The good news was that she couldn’t deal nearly as much damage with a single hand, and with such infrequent attacks. Even better, Percy managed to land a few hits of his own – his scythe nicking his opponent every second or third time she approached. On top of that, he took a page out of her book, spitting some venom onto his scythe’s edge to give the woman a dose of her own medicine. Luckily, Kassorith hadn’t removed his fang after the most recent activation of his bloodline, so Percy was able to produce as many toxins as his opponent.

‘Not so tough now, are you?’ Percy thought, but kept that to himself, knowing that the battle wasn’t over yet.

The venom and the amputated limb began to slow the woman down, while Kassorith’s body was starting to win against the toxins impairing Percy’s senses. Even so, the damage he had received and the blood he had lost still made it difficult to keep fighting. It took everything he had just to stay upright, and he had to guard his vitals at all times. If he made a mistake, it would only take the female disciple a single cast of her mental spell to open him up to a finishing blow.

To prevent that, Percy took full advantage of his scythe’s reach, zoning the woman out. He prioritized his safety over everything else, buying time to recover. At the same time, he continued to work alongside his host to gather even more metal mana. They’d coated their throat in a thin, protective layer, spreading the rest evenly across their torso.

The woman seemed to realize her desperate attacks weren’t getting her anywhere, so she stopped wasting her mana. Through Mana Sense, Percy saw the resource accumulate inside his opponent’s head, likely building up to something nasty. It wasn’t that hard to guess what she was planning either. Seeing how she couldn’t win a battle of attrition, her only option was to end the fight quickly. She probably intended to gather as much mana as she could, to try and throw Percy’s senses off for a prolonged period of time. If she managed to slip through his defences before the effects of her rare affinity faded, he’d be screwed.

‘We need to be ready for it,’ Percy advised, bringing his host up to speed.

Before long, he and Kassorith had enough mana for a second scythe. Feeding the liquid metal into the first one’s enchantments, they got a fluid covered in intricate unit cells back. The woman gritted her gums at the sight of Percy’s new weapon, her facial features now clear to him even from a distance. Still, she didn’t attack yet, likely judging that she wasn’t ready. She continued to wait just outside his range, drawing more and more mana to her head. Percy didn’t rush, doing the same. Two scythes were great, but he could expertly wield thrice as many if she gave him the chance.

Soon, the third one took form, Percy wielding all of his weapons with renewed vigour. Their shafts rolled and pivoted along his host’s joints, their curved edges crying shrilly as they split the air. The choir of scythes filled the stadium with tension, the audience hushing in a wave, sensing something monstrous was about to be born. But Percy wasn’t satisfied with that, realizing that he could accomplish so much more inside this body.

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‘Kassorith is far stronger than me. Especially after the ritual. His joints are more flexible too. Even his mana can bend more easily without breaking…’

The only downside was that the steel was a lot heavier than Percy’s reinforced mana, but the countless lightness runes along its surface had solved that problem entirely. Free of the venom at last, Percy pushed himself to his very limit, allowing the weapons to spin faster still, the blades turning into a complete blur that even he struggled to keep track of. A series of afterimages coiled around him like silver snakes, forming an inviolable zone of death.

Kassorith’s lower body was the only inconvenience, since it prevented Percy from reproducing his main body’s elegant footwork. If it hadn’t been for that, he might have caught the woman already. However, the Thess’kalan’s tail offered an advantage of its own – it allowed him to weave his upper body back and forth, or from left to right, granting his movements a whole new dimension. Other than that, he was more than happy to let his opponent come to him, since he could just produce more scythes if she waited.

The woman sighed. She’d either gathered enough mana to attack, or realized she’d never get a better chance. So, she moved.

Like all the previous times, Percy didn’t even notice her firing the spell. All of his senses went dark as he found himself suspended in an endless void. Even the very ground beneath Kassorith’s tail seemed to vanish, as did the air inside his lungs, or the gravity allowing him to tell up from down. The silence was suffocating – a crushing stillness that gnawed at his nerves more savagely than any wound. No reaction from the crowd, no scrape of steel – just the abyss pressing in.

But he didn’t panic, knowing this was just the mind mana’s doing. He was still in the same spot, armed with all the scythes he had painstakingly forged, their ferocious blades protecting his body like before. As long as he survived the next few seconds, the battle would be over, and both sets of ritual ingredients would belong to him.

The only things Percy could still feel were internal in nature. There was the sharp sting of his numerous wounds, his racing heartbeat, and his burning muscles. He felt some resistance as the blades met flesh – probably shredding the woman’s body into minced meat – though it was muted. Percy had to be extra careful to keep swinging his weapons like before with so little feedback.

The resistance disappeared the very next second, the corpse probably fading away. Another met the same fate, followed by two more. Percy had no idea how many illusions the woman had conjured in total, but it didn’t matter. He just had to slice through everything that came near.

Intensifying his efforts, he felt the scales on Kassorith’s palms peel, the joints in his fingers screaming in protest. Everything around him was cut to pieces – real or not. Even if the woman somehow survived, she’d lose as long as he protected his host’s vitals for another moment. Counting how much time she’d spent gathering the mana, it shouldn’t be long before his senses returned.

In the end, he failed to completely stop her.

Before the world even regained its colour, he felt a few deep lacerations appear on his reptilian body, bringing new injections of venom with them. Percy had to commend his opponent for managing to slip through the fleeting gaps in his barrier of death. Sadly for her, the price she’d paid to get this far had been steep.

Percy’s scythes collided with something unbreakable, one of the edges shattering on the spot, the other two weapons flying violently out of his hands. But he grinned, using the final shaft under his control to prop himself up. There was only one thing in the whole stadium hard enough to stop his slashes – the arena’s enchantments, protecting the woman from certain death.

Something came to a halt behind him, as the darkness around him was replaced by a flash of light, his senses returning one by one. Colours blended, before settling into the familiar backdrop of the cheering spectators, Kassorith’s ears buzzing with their enthused cries. The scent of iron rushed back, sharp and overwhelming, the blood on the arena reclaiming its presence with brutal clarity. A flick of his host’s tongue revealed the woman’s warm body crashing limp on the floor, as Mana Sense showed her core burning in her sternum with the same intensity it had at the start of their battle – its contents mostly untouched. Finally, countless tiny fountains of blood hissed across her body, drenching the female disciple in a sticky pool as Percy whispered the name of his new technique:

“Carnival of the Savage Gods, Third Parade, Serpents’ Den.”

Technically, he hadn’t actually used his boosting art to execute the manoeuvre, relying on his host’s superior physique instead. Still, Percy hoped that his new mutation and his soon-to-be-improved trollsfury tattoo would allow him to replicate the move once he returned to Remior. Making his scythes more flexible shouldn’t be too hard, at least – he just had to weave their shafts out of his magical silk, after tweaking its properties slightly for rigidity. ℞Αɴ𝐨ʙĘș

Either way, that was a project for later.

Turning around, he examined his opponent’s injuries. Drenched in blood as she was, the woman was still alive, her back heaving up and down weakly with every breath. Colourful runes shone through the crimson film covering her from head to tail.

Lifting what remained of his weapon triumphantly, his eyes scanned the roaring crowd, the whole arena trembling with excitement as he finally paid attention to their chants:

“KASSORITH! KASSORITH! KASSORITH!”