Chapter 564: Two Brothers Against A Wall [Bonus - ]

Chapter 564: Two Brothers Against A Wall [Bonus Chapter]

His katana didn’t ignite with lightning, but that was something Kara already expected, it pulled the sound clean out of the immediate airspace.

A vacuum field formed along Fang’s cutting edge, wrapping the steel in an invisible high-velocity atmospheric blade that tore trenches into the rock beneath his feet.

The dust hovering in the air between them was sucked toward the steel, sliced into powder, and expelled in a whistling spiral.

"Wooh..."

These were two very distinct styles in this battle with the first being Ren’s explosive lightning and Fang’s soundless vacuum.

Kara looked between the two of them with her wire-rimmed glasses catching the harsh glare of the purple sky.

"Two swords for the loud one, one for the quiet one," Kara muttered, her mouth twitching into a sharp mocking grin. "Cute... Let me guess, you two have some synchronized twin formation that took five years of monastery beatings to master? Come on, then. Show me what the United Hegemony Of Shogya considers elite before I fall asleep on my feet."

Ren lunged first.

BOOM!

The sandstone beneath his sandals ruptured into gravel as he detonated his Second Stage core.

He crossed thirty yards in the span of seconds as his twin katanas blurred into a violent intersecting cross of violet lightning.

’Rushing Thunderstorm!’

The blades came in high and low simultaneously... the primary aiming for the carotid artery on her right side while the secondary cutting a brutal horizontal arc toward her floating ribs.

The lightning screeched like a thousand dying birds, superheating the air between them to five hundred degrees in a fraction of a second.

SWOOSH!

Kara stepped in, she leaned her upper torso forward by three inches, letting the high lightning arc scream over her head, shearing off three loose strands of her dark hair, while her right hand blurred downward.

SMACK!

Her open palm struck the flat of Ren’s lower blade just below the habaki, killing the weapon’s rotational torque before the edge could bite into her suit.

"Too wide!" Kara grinned with her face inches from his. "Your left shoulder is dipping! Who taught you to drop your elbow on a low cut, your grandmother?!"

Ren’s eyes bulged with rage with his spit flying across the gap.

"DIE!"

He twisted his wrists to reverse the grip—

SHIIIIING!

From the blind spot behind Kara’s pinned left sleeve, Fang materialized like a ghost.

He had moved without a sound, sliding across the sand on the crest of his vacuum currents as his blade came in from below in an upward diagonal slash aimed straight through Kara’s left armpit, moving with zero atmospheric drag making it completely silent.

’Vacuum Sword... Rising Gale!’

The invisible air-blade whistled through the space where Kara’s ribs were anchored.

SNAP!

Kara didn’t turn her head.

Her Second Phase Gold Core pulsed once and a ripple of pure gravitational pressure detonated from her left shoulder.

WHAM!

The invisible vacuum blade shattered against the wall as the backlash traveled down the steel, sending an acoustic shockwave into Fang’s wrist that popped his radial joint with a sickening sound.

"Gah!" Fang grunted through clenched teeth with his foot skidding across the sand as the impact pushed him back three paces.

"Nice timing, terrible penetration!" Kara shouted, spinning on her right heel. "Eh, I didn’t mean it that way!"

Her right leg whipped around in a vicious horizontal roundhouse kick that tore through the air with a concussive crack.

WHOOSH!

Ren threw both katanas up in an emergency cross-guard to intercept the strike.

BOOOOOOM!

The force of the kick slammed into the steel with the shockwave blowing the white haori off Ren’s shoulders and driving him backward fifteen yards across the dirt, his sandals tearing two deep smoking trenches through the hard clay.

"Ren!" Fang shouted, his left hand immediately weaving an intricate one-handed somatic sign while his injured right wrist adjusted its grip on the katana.

"Vacuum Sword: Gale-Sphere Snare!"

HSSSSSSSS!

The air around Kara’s boots suddenly turned into a swirling high-pressure atmospheric vortex as the air molecules compressed, locking her lower legs in an invisible vice of descending pressure designed to anchor high-mobility combatants to the earth.

"Hold her!" Ren roared, charging back into the fray with his face covered in sweat and dust.

His twin blades blurred into an unrecognizable storm of violet arcs as he threw attacks... ten slashes, twenty slashes, thirty slashes per second, descending upon Kara from every conceivable angle like an executioner’s iron cage.

CLANG! CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!

Kara didn’t break the snare with brute force.

Her violet eyes narrowed behind her glasses as the moisture in the dry canyon air suddenly responded to her core.

Within the ocular channels of her own eyes, a fine microscopic film of water-mana began to circulate, cycling with extreme precision.

’Surprisingly I still haven’t shown Morwenna...’

She took a deep breath watching the attacks coming for her.

’Tidal-Blade Arts: Second Style... Rip-Current Perception.’

The world slowed to a crawl.

By rooting the technique directly within the moisture of her own eyes, the scorching heat radiating from Ren’s violet lightning didn’t blur her vision.

It didn’t warp the reading into flickering useless wisps like it had against Morrighan.

’I’m glad I got a better version of this technique... Truly that Mafia arc wasn’t a waste of time, completely.’

Instead, glowing razor-sharp blue current lines snapped into existence across the dusty air.

She saw the micro-twitch in Ren’s right pectoral two tenths of a second before the blade moved and she saw the minute shift in Fang’s center of gravity as he maintained the gale-snare fifteen paces away.

She saw the exact trajectory of every single strike before the steel even cleared the arc.

To the twins, it looked like horrifying witchcraft as Kara’s right hand moved in small increments.

TAP! SLAP! WHOOSH!

Kara batted some of the strikes away by the flats as she then tilted her chin by half an inch, letting a violet lightning bolt scrape the air beside her ear.

She leaned her shoulder two millimeters to the left, letting a vacuum blade graze the empty fabric of her pinned sleeve.

Every single strike missed her flesh by the width of a single hair...

"What is this?!" Ren screamed, his veins bulging against his temples as he swung with everything his lungs had left. "You’re not even looking at the blades! How are you reading this?!"

"Because you’re telegraphing like a billboard, sweetheart!" Kara laughed, leaning back to let a double overhead chop whistle harmlessly past her nose. "You inhale every time you commit to a heavy thrust! You tighten your toes before a low sweep! A blind dog from the slums could read your footwork!"

CLACK!

Kara reached into the void of her personal storage and a flash of pale gray light erupted from her right palm.

When her fingers closed, she wasn’t empty-handed anymore.

She held a four-foot-long single-edged arming sword forged by Thora. It was a new one made specifically for this form...

"You wanted me to use a sword?" Kara’s voice dropped into a dark whisper that sent a cold shudder down Ren’s spine. "Here’s your sword."

Fang’s eyes widened in horror from the perimeter. "Ren! Break off! BREAK OFF!"

...It was too late.

Kara’s Second Phase core surged.

A dense suffocating film of phantom heavy-water erupted along the matte-gray steel of the blade, wrapping the metal in a translucent fluid mantle that weighed more than twenty tons of solid lead.

Kara swung.

BOOOOM!

The void-blade met Ren’s descending twin katanas mid-air and the mass behind Kara’s strike didn’t just stop the swords... it violently pulverized the violet lightning into non-existence.

The concussive water pressure blew through Ren’s guard like a breaking tsunami, snapping the blade of his secondary katana clean in half with an ear-splitting crack.

WHAM!

The flat of the heavy-water blade slammed into Ren’s chest, caving his ribs in and blasting him fifty yards horizontally across the salt flats.

WHOOSH!

He skipped across the hard-packed clay four times, coughing up plumes of blood and shattered enamel, before crashing into the base of a shattered boulder.

"Ren!" Fang screamed.

The quiet twin didn’t hesitate since he knew his brother was down and he knew the gap in strength was an uncrossable abyss but the discipline of the Shogunate Isles was absolute.

Fang dropped his katana into a two-handed reverse grip, channeling every remaining drop of his Blue Core into the steel.

’Vacuum Sword... Heaven’s Eye.’

WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOSH!

A sixty-foot-wide cyclone of pressurized razor-sharp vacuum blades erupted from Fang’s stance, tearing the bedrock into millions of flying shrapnel shards as the storm converged directly on Kara’s flank.

The sound was deafening like a high-frequency shriek that shattered every loose stone within fifty yards but Kara didn’t even look at the cyclone.

"Annoying~"

She turned her body with her right arm coiling back like a loaded ballista.

The Rip-Current Perception running through the moisture of her eyes highlighted a single thin blue filament running through the exact eye of the vacuum storm... the microscopic pressure fault where Fang was anchoring the spell with his breathing.

"Once again, you really have a good technique," Kara muttered. "It’s just a terrible foundation."

She took another deep breath.

’Tidal-Blade Arts: First Style... Severing Horizon!’

Kara released the coil.

Her hips snapped forward with explosive leverage and the blade swept through the air in a clean horizontal three-hundred-and-sixty-degree arc.

BOOOM!

A thirty-foot-wide crescent-shaped wave of roaring pale-blue phantom heavy-water detonated from the blade’s edge.

The tidal crescent violently obliterated the cyclone as the mass of twenty thousand gallons of pressurized water smashed through Fang’s wind-blades, scattering the storm like dry autumn leaves.

Fang’s eyes widened in paralyzed disbelief as the thirty-foot tidal wave bore down on him.

CRASH!

The heavy-water wave slammed squarely into Fang’s chest and the shockwave crushed his sternum, blew his katana from his pulverized fingers while hammering him fifty yards backward into the solid granite wall of the canyon.

BOOM!

Fang hit the rock face, coughing out a massive spray of dark blood with his eyes rolling back into his skull as his legs crumpled beneath him.

He slumped against the stone, critically injured with his breathing reduced to a shallow broken whistle.

...He was completely out of the fight.

Kara flicked the blade, sending a fine sheet of phantom water spraying off the edge to patter against the dry dirt as she turned her head slowly, looking across the scarred clearing toward the boulder where the other twin was struggling.

"One down," Kara called out with her voice echoing off the canyon walls. "You still want to taste the steel, Strongest Sword?"

From behind the shattered boulder, fifty paces away, a ragged, choking gasp sounded.

Ren Minamoto dragged himself upright.

His white silk haori was torn to shreds, drenched in dark red blood that soaked through the linen from his fractured ribs.

The broken half of his secondary katana lay abandoned in the dust ten yards behind him, but his right hand was still locked around the hilt of his primary blade.

His knuckles were chalk-white with the skin split and bleeding across his joints.

He spat a thick globule of gore onto the sand, his chest heaving in violent agonizing spasms.

"Not... yet..." Ren wheezed, his voice trembling with a mixture of agony and obsession that bordered on madness. "The Heir... does not yield to a single arm..."

Kara scoffed, resting the flat of the heavy void-blade against her shoulder.

"You’re fighting with four broken ribs, an internal hemorrhage, and half your teeth missing, kid. Sit down before you drown in your own blood."

Ren didn’t sit down.

His eyes, sunken and bloodshot behind his tangled hair, suddenly rolled back into his head.

FSSSSSSSSSSSSSH!

The violet lightning coating his blade died out completely as instead, the space surrounding his body began to subtly warp, like the heat haze rising off an asphalt road at noon.

The katana in his hand seemed to flicker, its physical outline blurring until the steel looked semi-transparent, vibrating at a frequency so high that the human ear couldn’t register the sound.

’Minamoto Secret Art... Third Style... Void-Severing Mirage.’

Kara’s brows lifted slightly behind her wire-rimmed glasses.

’Invisible slashes,’ Kara noted, her grip shifting slightly along the hilt of the blade. ’He’s not projecting mana outward... He’s vibrating the steel at the frequency of the local fabric of space as the cuts travel through the atmospheric seam before the visual light catches up.’

Once again, it was something that she had studied.

"DIE!" Ren screamed, his voice cracking into a raw bloody screech and he swung!

There was no sound.

SHLICK!

A three-inch laceration suddenly appeared across the right shoulder of Kara’s tailored suit jacket as the fine charcoal wool parted cleanly with a thin hair-line crimson scratch blooming across her skin.

SHLICK! SHLICK!

Two more invisible cuts whistled through the air! One grazed the side of her collar while the other severed a clean slice of fabric from the hem of her trousers.

Kara’s eyes widened slightly.

’Fast,’ Silas thought, the adrenaline finally surging with genuine, focused sharpness. ’The guy actually has some teeth.’

Ren was moving forward in a limping charge, swinging the flickering blade with everything his dying stamina possessed.

SWISH-SWISH-SWISH!

Ten invisible slashes tore through the space around her as every swing was aimed at a lethal biological junction... her throat, her femoral artery and her remaining eye!

The attacks were completely invisible to mundane vision, cutting through the air with zero telegraphs so Kara had to actively give ground.

She took three rapid, evasive steps backward, her boots carving lines through the gravel as she twisted her torso to dodge the unseen edges.

A cut whistled past her cheek, severing another lock of hair while another sliced across the back of her wrist, drawing a thin bead of dark blood.

Up in the mezzanine of the Great Assembly Chamber, the delegates were leaning forward with their breaths caught in their throats.

"He’s landing hits!" an Indus minister shouted. "The Minamoto heir is pushing the Gold Core back!"

...

[Author’s Note]

Thanks for the castle and the support too! Every single bit matters... Phew~ Let’s get more GT! Also make sure to join the Discord.

https://discord.gg/fa72E7e5m