Chapter 568: Devil [I / Bonus - ]

Chapter 568: Devil [I / Bonus Chapter]

Tariq landed five paces back in the crater with his breath coming in ragged triumphant gasps as his golden eyes went wide with savage blood-slicked ecstasy.

"I cut you!" Tariq roared, wiping blood and grit from his chin. "You bleed like any other mortal, Bloom!"

Seraphina looked down at her shoulder as he stared at the thin line of red soaking her collar for two full seconds.

Her expression did not darken with fear and her jaw did not tighten with pain.

FSSSSSSSSSH!

A delicate golden-red flame flickered to life over the severed skin.

’Is she burning herself...?’

Unfortunately for Tariq, the solar fire did not burn her flesh... it accelerated her cellular metabolism with unnatural efficiency.

In less than two heartbeats, the laceration closed, the severed muscle fibers knitting together beneath the skin, leaving the porcelain flesh smooth and whole.

Seraphina slowly looked up through her dark bangs, her ruby eyes blazing with a cold terrifying amusement that froze the breath in Tariq’s throat.

"Did you really think drawing a thimble of blood meant you were winning, little prince?" Seraphina whispered, her voice carrying a soft melodic chill that made his skin crawl.

"Tariq, fall back!" Safira screamed, charging forward from the crater’s rim with both khopeshes igniting with dull yellow earth-mana. "Form the dual barrier! Do not let her isolate you!"

"Out of my way, nuisance," Seraphina muttered.

She did not even turn to face Safira as she extended her left arm backward, flicking her wrist toward the charging woman like someone brushing away an irritating gnat.

BOOM!

A concentrated high-velocity lance of compressed volcanic flame erupted from the palm of her hand.

The backwash alone tore a three-foot trench through the dirt as the flame lance struck Safira squarely in the center of her bronze breastplate, shattering the metal into molten slag and blasting her body sixty yards backward across the desert floor.

SKID-CRASH!

Safira hit the base of a towering sand dune, tumbling through the hot silt, coughing up dark blood as she lay temporarily paralyzed, clutching her scorched ribs.

Now, the crater belonged to two people.

Seraphina Bloom turned her full attention to the Second Prince of Khemet.

She looked at the trembling broad-khopesh in his hands then, with slow deliberate movements, she released her grip on both of her curved hunting daggers.

THUD! THUD!

The weapons dropped into the sand at her feet, sinking into the grit.

Tariq blinked, his pupils contracting with uncomprehending disbelief.

"You... you discard your steel?"

"Against you?" Seraphina’s laughter was loud and dripping with mockery. "Carrying weapons against a spoiled third-rate royal who hides behind sand dunes would be an insult to the smiths who forged them... My hands are more than enough to take you apart, Prince."

WHOOSH!

She disappeared.

Tariq’s combat instincts flared violently as he swung his broad-khopesh horizontally in a desperate, blind semicircle meant to clear his entire forward perimeter—

SMACK!

Seraphina had already crossed the ten-pace gap, slipping beneath the arc of the heavy blade.

Her left palm slapped the flat of his steel with contemptuous ease, violently redirecting the weapon’s momentum into the dirt, while her right fist drove upward in a vicious short-range uppercut that caught Tariq squarely on the underside of his chin.

CRACK!

The sound of his jaw fracturing sounded like a dry branch snapping under a heavy boot and Tariq’s head snapped violently backward with a spray of dark blood and three shattered molars bursting from his lips as his vision exploded into white static.

Before his boots could leave the ground, Seraphina’s left hand shot out like an iron clamp, snatching him by the collar of his bronze scale-mail.

She yanked his heaving, off-balance frame downward, meeting his chest with a rising solar-infused elbow strike directly into his sternum.

WHAM!

The bronze breastplate caved inward with a sickening hollow sound with the concussive shockwave blowing through his chest, driving every drop of oxygen from his lungs.

Tariq’s eyes rolled back in their sockets, his body convulsing as blackness crept across the edges of his sight.

The overwhelming brutality of the assault... this terrifying unanswerable speed and the physical disrespect with which she dismantled his guard suddenly triggered something buried deep within the dark corners of his memory.

FLASH!

The desert heat faded into the sterile marble glare of the Sun Palace in the capital of Khemet.

He was eight years old again.

He was kneeling on the scorching stone tiles of the private sparring pavilion with his nose broken and his child’s tunic soaked in his own vomit and blood.

Standing over him was his dead older brother... Prince Khensu, the towering merciless berserker who commanded the southern frontier garrisons.

Khensu was laughing, his heavy star-iron-plated gauntlets dripping with Tariq’s blood, kicking him in the ribs every time he tried to push himself up, mocking his weak pathetic sand-shaping, telling him that the other sons were born only to serve as stepping stones for the strong...

’No... not again...’ Tariq’s mind screamed in a haze of childhood terror. ’I survived the frontier... I survived the trials... I am a Prince of the Sun...!’

BLINK!

The memory shattered.

Tariq snapped back to reality just in time to see Seraphina Bloom standing before him with her right fist coiled back at her hip, wrapped in a mantle of roaring three-thousand-degree solar flame that turned the surrounding air into a shimmering mirage.

"Die with some dignity, little prince," Seraphina purred.

Tariq crossed both arms in front of his face in a instinctual block, pouring every drop of mana he possessed into the bone and muscle of his forearms!

BOOOOOOOOOOM!

The punch struck the crossed forearms of his bronze armor and the heat did not disperse outward.

It poured straight into his biological inner with the unstoppable violence of an erupting magma vent...

The dense quartz silica flowing through the blood vessels, marrow, and skin of Tariq’s wrists and forearms underwent instantaneous vitrification.

CRRRRRRRK!

Before his wide horror-struck eyes, the skin, tendons, and bones of both his hands and wrists transformed into solid translucent red glass.

...And the force of the punch had not finished moving.

BANG!

Under the crushing concussive weight of her fist, both of Tariq’s glass-crystallized hands completely shattered into a thousand glittering bloody shards.

"AAAAAAAAAAAAGH!"

Tariq howled in agony, stumbling backward and clutching the smoking, shattered stumps of his wrists as hot arterial blood sprayed across the sand.

His knees gave out beneath him, and he collapsed onto his face in the dirt, sobbing and choking on his own gore.

Seraphina stepped forward with her expression settling into a cold detachment.

"Very disappointing..."

She raised her right foot with her heel glowing with a sharp point of crimson flame, preparing to bring it down onto the base of his skull to extinguish his life-force permanently—

"TARIQ!"

A blood-curdling hysterical shriek tore through the basin.

Fifty paces away, on the crest of the sand dune, Safira had dragged herself upright and her face was pale as chalk, covered in blood and dust too but her eyes burning with mad resolve.

"I...."

She plunged both arms deep into the sand with her Second Stage Purple Core roaring as she tore open her own soul pathways.

"I’ll fucking kill you...!"

RUMBLE-CRASH!

The entire hundred-yard basin of the dunes erupted into an apocalyptic boiling tidal wave of yellow sand as Safira poured her own living flesh directly into the construct.

Her legs, her thighs, and her lower abdomen dissolved into the raging storm of sand, merging her body directly with hundreds of metric tons of churning earth!

Only her face, her bare shoulders, and her upper chest remained visible, protruding from the wrist of a colossal thirty-foot hand of compressed sandstone that shot out of the ground like a titan’s claw!

WHOOOOOOSH... SNAP!

The colossal hand swept across the crater with its massive fingers snapping shut around Seraphina Bloom’s entire body.

"Just fucking die already!"

The thirty-foot earthen claw hoisted Seraphina thirty feet into the air, squeezing her frame with the hydraulic pressure of a tectonic fault!

Tariq, kneeling in the dirt and clutching his bleeding ruined stumps, looked up through the red haze of his agony, his eyes widening in horror.

"SAFIRA, STOP!" Tariq screamed, vomiting blood onto the sand. "STOP IT! You are merging your body with the silica! If she releases her heat now, your entire body will—"

"I don’t care!" Safira shrieked from the wrist of the titan’s hand with blood pouring freely from her ears and eyes as she strained against the immense weight of the spell.

The sand fingers around Seraphina began to violently compress, transmuting from loose silica into dense unyielding basalt rock, seeking to crush every rib and organ in the high lady’s body into paste.

"If I do not hold her, you die!" Safira wept, her voice echoing through the stone with loyalty. "I will crush her! I will turn this entire basin into bedrock and bury her sixty feet deep! If I can just hold her for ten seconds—"

Inside the tightening crushing basalt fist thirty feet in the air... A soft melodic chuckle echoed through the stone.

"How cute," Seraphina’s voice sounded relaxed and completely untroubled by the tons of rock pressing against her ribs.

Safira froze.

FWOOOOSH!

From between the seams of the massive basalt fingers, filaments of incandescent, silver-white light began to bleed into the sky as the temperature detonated.

Seraphina Bloom opened the floodgates of her Primordial Fire Spirit.

"Burn," Seraphina commanded.

BOOOOOM!

A vortex of three-thousand-degree solar flame erupted from Seraphina’s trapped frame and the basalt rock did not withstand the heat for a single microsecond.

The suffocating wave of heat poured through the earthen construct, racing straight down the tectonic conduits into the living cellular pathways Safira had merged with the stone.

"NO!" Tariq screamed, clawing at the dirt with his bloody elbows with tears streaming down his dust-caked cheeks. "MOVE, SAFIRA! DISPERSE THE MERGE! GET OUT OF THE EARTH!"

It was already over as the solar heat was merciless, and instantaneous.

Starting from the massive stone fingers encasing Seraphina, traveling down the wrist of the titan’s arm, and tearing straight into the organic tissue of Safira’s upper chest... the quartz particulates within her cells flashed.

CRRRRRK-CRACK!

Her arms turned to clear glowing red glass, her collarbone turned to glass and her neck turned to glass.

Safira’s kohl-lined eyes widened in terror as the crystalline vitrification swept upward across her chin, freezing her vocal cords in mid-shriek.

’Wait...’ Safira’s final thought echoed in the freezing darkness of her mind, cut off before it could finish. ’I... I cannot breathe... the heat... it is not burning... it is turning my heart into—’

SNAP!

The thought died.

Her lips, her open mouth, her wide dilated pupils... everything vitrified into a solid hollow statue of brilliant translucent red glass.

The massive earthen construct froze in mid-air, transformed from an apocalyptic crushing claw into a fragile glittering monument of superheated glass suspended thirty feet above the desert floor.

Tariq looked up with his chest heaving in violent strangulated gasps as a desperate irrational flicker of hope clutched at his shattered sanity.

’She is glass...’ Tariq thought, his mind scrambling through the madness. ’The core... the core is still inside the crystalline shell... if the construct does not break... if the glass stays whole... I can use my remaining mana to stabilize her... I can take her to an expert after the match... they can reverse the vitrification... she can survive this...’

Thirty feet above the desert floor, standing casually on the palm of the frozen glass hand, Seraphina looked down at the crystalline statue of Safira.

Her long crimson hair flowed around her shoulders like liquid flame, her ruby eyes glowing with cruel curiosity.

"I wonder," Seraphina murmured aloud, her voice carrying cleanly down through the dead silence of the basin.

She raised her right arm, the muscles along her forearm tightening as a blinding sphere of compressed solar flame coalesced around her knuckles, spinning with the high-pitched shriek of an active turbine.

"Would you really die from this?" she asked.

Tariq’s heart stopped beating as the blood in his veins ran completely cold.

"NO!" Tariq shrieked, dragging his battered bleeding body across the sand, sobbing hysterically as he reached toward the base of the construct with his ruined stumps! "NO, PLEASE! SERAPHINA, STOP! SHE IS DEFEATED! KHEMET SURRENDERS! I CONCEDE THE MATCH! PLEASE, BY THE GODS, DO NOT BREAK HER!"

His frantic pathetic pleas fell on deaf ears as Seraphina did not even glance down at him.

TWITCH!

"Flame-Slash." Seraphina whispered and she released the strike.

A concentrated crescent-shaped blade of pure, compressed solar fire detonated from her hand, slamming dead-center into the chest of the glass statue.

CRASH-SHATTER!

The glass violently disintegrated.

The three-thousand-degree blade punched clean through Safira’s vitrified torso, vaporizing the crystalline core into microscopic powder, while the concussive shockwave rippled through the rest of the thirty-foot construct.

CRACK-CRACK-CRACK-SHATTER!

The colossal glass hand collapsed into hundreds of thousands of sharp glittering red shards, raining down across the sand like a macabre blizzard of shattered crystal!

Tariq knelt in the dirt with his mouth hanging open, staring blankly as the glittering glass showered down around his shoulders.

CLINK!

A single curved shard of red glass tumbled from the air, landing softly in the bloody hollow of his ruined left wrist.

Tariq looked down.

Embedded within the translucent crimson shard of crystal was the perfectly preserved contour of Safira’s right eye looking wide and forever frozen in a state of uncomprehending shock.

Silence fell over the Great Dunes.