Chapter 28: First Demonic Beast

Sigurd ran directly toward the Silvervein Direwolf.

The beast answered with a roar and accelerated, its wounded foreleg barely affecting the violence of its charge.

Silver patterns beneath its dark blue fur pulsed with Vis as twenty feet of muscle crossed the shattered basin, while Sigurd became a pale blur racing from the opposite direction.

To an ordinary person, neither combatant would have appeared to be running at all. There would have been only displaced air, exploding earth, and brief flashes marking where two bodies had been an instant earlier.

To Osric, however, everything remained perfectly visible. The instructor stood on an untouched section of cliff with his wine flask raised to his lips, watching Sigurd’s foot settle against a fragment of stone, watching the Direwolf’s shoulder rotate, watching both attacks develop with enough time that they might as well have been moving through water.

Their paths intersected.

The Direwolf swung its healthy forepaw while Sigurd stepped inside its reach. Five black claws passed over his shoulder with enough force to produce a violent pressure wave, but Sigurd was already beneath the limb. His sword swept toward the existing wound on its chest.

The Direwolf twisted before the edge landed cleanly, sacrificing another shallow cut to keep the blade from entering deeper. Its enormous body continued rotating, and the bladed tail came around from Sigurd’s blind side.

Sigurd heard the air change behind him. He dropped his weight, planted one palm against the earth, and allowed the tail to scream over his head before kicking upward into the beast’s exposed abdomen.

BOOM!

The impact lifted the Silvervein Direwolf from the ground.

Its massive body flew across the basin, smashed through the remains of the forest, and struck a stone ridge hundreds of feet away. The ridge fractured from bottom to top before collapsing beneath the creature’s weight.

Tons of rock poured down around it, raising a thick cloud that swallowed an entire section of the valley. Sigurd pushed himself upright and immediately sprinted toward the destruction rather than waiting for his opponent to recover. The ground cracked beneath each step. His sword remained close to his body, his eyes fixed upon the dust while his perception searched for movement.

Three silver flashes emerged first.

Sigurd changed direction. The crystalline projectiles crossed where his head and chest had been and struck the earth behind him, each impact producing a violent explosion of dirt and broken stone.

A fourth came lower. Sigurd cut it apart without slowing. The two halves spun past him, one burying itself inside the ground while the other sliced through a distant tree. Then the dust cloud erupted outward as the Direwolf charged from the collapsed ridge.

Sigurd met its claw with his sword.

CLANG!

The collision blasted away the dust surrounding them.

For a fraction of a second, Sigurd held his ground. Muscles tightened across his arms and shoulders while Vis reinforced his body, but the difference in raw mass remained enormous. The earth beneath his feet collapsed. His knees bent, and the Direwolf pressed down harder, trying to crush him beneath its paw.

Sigurd shifted his sword.

Instead of resisting the force directly, he angled the blade and stepped sideways.

The paw slid past. Sigurd’s sword followed the movement. A pale edge flashed across the beast’s wrist.

Severing Line cut deep enough to expose bone.

The Direwolf howled and snapped at him, but Sigurd had already entered beneath its neck. He drove his shoulder against its chest and released Vis through his legs.

BOOM!

Both combatants separated violently. Sigurd skidded backward across the valley floor while the Direwolf crashed through another formation of stone. Before either stopped completely, they moved again.

Their next exchanges tore across the valley.

The Direwolf pursued Sigurd through the ruined forest, claws shredding trunks whenever he changed direction around them. Sigurd used every obstacle rather than avoiding them.

He ran along one falling tree, launched from its trunk, and slashed across the beast’s shoulder while passing overhead. The Direwolf answered by twisting and striking him with its tail. Sigurd crossed his sword before his ribs just before impact.

CRACK!

He became a streak through the trees.

Five trunks shattered before his body finally struck the sixth. The tree bent backward, roots tearing from the earth, and collapsed with him.

Osric lowered his flask slightly.

Sigurd emerged from the wreckage before the Direwolf reached him.

Blood ran from the corner of his mouth. His left forearm trembled from absorbing the tail strike, and several ribs protested every breath. None of it affected his expression. He had already stopped thinking about individual attacks.

Three years of combat had changed the way he processed a fight. He wasn’t merely observing what the Direwolf was doing; he was building a model of how it fought. Its injured foreleg had worsened. Its tail possessed tremendous horizontal power but couldn’t reverse direction quickly after a committed sweep.

The silver beam required Vis to gather along the markings around its neck. Most importantly, whenever Sigurd threatened its damaged right side, the beast compensated by pivoting through its healthy rear leg.

He could use that.

The Direwolf emerged between two broken trees.

Sigurd deliberately shifted toward its wounded side.

The beast reacted exactly as expected.

Its healthy rear leg planted,its body pivoted and its tail began moving.

Sigurd changed direction before the attack had fully begun.

The tail swept through empty air while Sigurd accelerated toward the opposite flank. His sword opened another wound across the rear leg. The Direwolf spun furiously and attacked with both forepaws, but Sigurd had already predicted the response. He retreated three steps, allowing the first claw to fall short, then moved forward between the first and second attacks.

His blade stabbed beneath the beast’s ribs. The Direwolf’s body convulsed. Sigurd withdrew immediately. A paw obliterated the ground where he had stood.

The resulting crater stretched dozens of feet across, and the impact sent cracks racing toward the river. Water surged into several new fissures while sections of the bank collapsed.

The valley that had once contained forest, grassland, and scattered stone formations was becoming increasingly unrecognizable. Hundreds of trees had fallen.

Craters overlapped one another across the basin. The mountain wall still shed rubble from the Direwolf’s earlier beam, and dust hung above the battlefield in enormous drifting curtains.

Yet neither fighter slowed. The Direwolf’s silver markings suddenly brightened.

Sigurd saw them. He moved before its jaws opened, silver light erupted. The beam swept sideways this time instead of firing straight ahead.

Sigurd sprinted ahead of it.

Everything behind him disappeared beneath silver destruction. Trees were erased at their bases. The river exploded into steam where the beam crossed it. Stone melted and fractured as the attack carved a glowing scar across the valley floor. The Direwolf turned its head, forcing the beam after Sigurd while he accelerated through the devastation.

Osric watched from above.

To another Awakened practitioner, Sigurd’s movement might have seemed extraordinary. His body flickered between positions while the silver beam chased him across the valley. To Osric, the boy was painfully easy to follow. He could see every contraction of Sigurd’s legs, every adjustment of his center of gravity, every fraction of wasted movement.

Slow. Both of them were incredibly slow.

Osric smiled anyway. Speed was relative.

Three years ago, Sigurd had nearly been killed by an Armored Bloodfang because his body couldn’t always execute what his mind understood. Now he was fighting a Demonic Beast while simultaneously controlling distance, reading its habits, conserving Vis, and constructing the circumstances of its death.

That interested Osric far more than raw speed.

Below, Sigurd suddenly changed direction.

The beam followed. He ran directly toward the cliff. The Direwolf continued sweeping the attack after him.

Sigurd waited until the silver light was almost upon him, then kicked against the cliff face and launched upward.

The beam struck beneath his feet.

BOOOOOOM!

The mountainside erupted. An avalanche of shattered stone crashed toward the valley as Sigurd twisted through the air. The Direwolf lost sight of him behind the explosion.

That was what he wanted. Sigurd landed on a falling slab of rock. He jumped again, another fragment became his foothold.

Then another.

He descended through the collapsing mountainside using the debris itself as a staircase, accelerating with every step until he burst through the dust directly above the Direwolf.

The beast looked up.

Sigurd’s sword descended.

The Direwolf twisted its head, protecting its neck with one crystalline horn.

Severing Line struck.

SHIIING!

The horn separated cleanly.

Sigurd landed across the beast’s back.

The Direwolf roared and bucked violently. Sigurd drove his sword between two crystalline growths and held on while the creature crashed through the valley, smashing its own body against trees and stone in an attempt to remove him. Sigurd released the sword an instant before the beast threw itself sideways into the cliff.

BOOM!

Rock exploded.

Sigurd landed behind it. His sword remained embedded near its shoulder.

The Direwolf turned.

Sigurd extended his hand toward the weapon, but nothing happened.

He clicked his tongue.

The beast charged.

So did he.

Sigurd entered barehanded, slipped beneath the first claw, stepped onto the beast’s lowered foreleg, and ran upward along it. The Direwolf snapped toward him. Sigurd jumped over its jaws, landed against the side of its neck, and seized his sword as he passed.

He ripped it free.

The Direwolf spun.

Sigurd landed and both stopped.

For the first time since the battle began, several dozen feet separated them.

The Direwolf was bleeding from more than a dozen wounds. One horn was gone. Its right foreleg barely supported its weight, and blood poured from beneath its ribs. Sigurd wasn’t untouched either. His clothes were torn, bruises darkened his torso, and blood stained his mouth and arms.

The silver markings brightened again.

Sigurd lowered his sword. Vis gathered inside his Core. The Direwolf opened its jaws.

Sigurd moved. The beam fired but he wasn’t there.

The beast tried turning toward the pale blur approaching from its damaged side, but its injured foreleg failed beneath the movement. Its balance shifted exactly as Sigurd had anticipated.

One opening and that was enough. His foot touched the ground. His hips rotated. Vis moved with the sword rather than toward it. There was no visible preparation, only one seamless cutting motion containing everything he had learned from Severing Line over three years.

The Direwolf’s eyes widened.

Sigurd passed beside it, a pale line crossed its neck.For several seconds, nothing happened.

Then the Silvervein Direwolf’s head separated from its body.

Blood erupted across the devastated valley.

The enormous corpse collapsed behind Sigurd with a thunderous impact, sending one final wave of dust rolling across the ruined earth.

Sigurd stopped several yards away and slowly lowered his sword.

His first Demonic Beast was dead.