Chapter 767: Extraordinary Training Method
This was the first time Ashes had initiated an attack since Lorgar’s full animalization.
Lorgar met her without retreating — and found, immediately, that something had changed. The attacks that had been landing with accumulated force were no longer landing. They were connecting with something and sliding off it. Her sweeping claw, which had a range wide enough to clear half the platform, could now only tear the corner of a robe. She was always a fraction of a second behind. She could feel the gap between her claws and Ashes’ position closing, feel the contact — and then Ashes was not there.
She had been hitting her. She could no longer hit her.
After several exchanges, Lorgar forced herself to a new approach. When the right claw failed, she committed her full remaining momentum and pivoted her body, driving her tail in a flat arc — an iron-whip sweep that instantly placed half the platform within its reach. Even an opponent fast enough to dodge most things could not fully retreat from that range. It was the move that had left most of Ashes’ wounds on her.
The expected crash did not come.
Instead: sounds of sharp inhalation from the crowd.
No—
Something moved at the edge of Lorgar’s vision, and in the same instant she felt a weight land on the turning top of her own head.
She can fly?
Every pair of eyes in the arena had widened. Ashes had cleared Lorgar’s body entirely — vaulted over a target that stood half a head taller than herself — and came down on the rotating head like a stone dropped from above. The tail’s sweep was powerful and low; it could only threaten targets close to the ground. A target in the air was beyond it. And the back of the head after a full-body rotation was, for the duration of the movement, a blind spot.
Ashes drove her fist into Lorgar’s eye.
The eyeball split. Blood scattered across half her fur, and the pain was instantaneous and complete — the kind of pain the body cannot metabolize, that arrives before thought can address it and stays after thought has tried everything. Even the animalized body, which could absorb impacts that would kill ordinary people, had not protected those eyes. They remained what they had always been: the most fragile parts, the parts that could be destroyed without destroying the body around them, and therefore the most decisive parts to reach.
Lorgar’s voice went hoarse with it.
Ashes pulled back her fist, giving Lorgar the pause — the opening to acknowledge defeat — and felt her hand held.
Lorgar had closed her eye around it. The eyelid and the muscles of her face had gripped the fist, trapping it for the moment it took for the claws to come.
She would increase her own injury to strike back. The claw arrived fast — it would land regardless of whether the grip cost her further damage to the eye, regardless of the mathematics. She had decided.
Ashes could not clear it in time. She raised her other arm and took it straight.
The sound was something she heard inside her bones rather than with her ears.
She sprayed blood from her mouth. When they separated, she glanced at her left arm. It had bent wrong. The shape was clean and unmistakable.
“Roar—!”
Lorgar charged with her jaws open.
Ashes went forward, not back. She rolled under the bite, slid below the blind zone at the base of Lorgar’s neck, and with one hand planted on the ground she drove both legs into Lorgar’s forelimb in a leveraged kick.
The forelimb buckled outward with a sound like a door folding. Lorgar staggered. Three-legged now, she lost most of her offensive options with the collapse of the limb — the geometry of a three-limbed predator simply did not include the same range of attack.
“Lorgar, that’s enough!” Guelz Burnflame’s voice came from below the platform, low and controlled in the way that voices only become when the speaker has a great deal to contain.
“No — I can still fight!” Lorgar’s breathing had gone ragged but her voice held. “Her situation isn’t much better. I just need to hold on — hold on a while and it’ll be fine.”
Ashes pressed her tongue to the blood at the corner of her mouth and felt a laugh rise. Her opponent was correct. The broken arm hung beside her, numb at the edges, and the force of that last blow had rearranged something internal — her organs felt displaced, or at least as though they thought they had been. She looked, she suspected, precisely as wrecked as Lorgar.
But the mathematics had shifted in a way Lorgar could not see clearly with one eye.
A person with a broken leg could still move on two. A wolf with a broken forelimb had lost one of four load-bearing supports and gained a new center-of-gravity problem on every stride. Add the lost eye and the depth perception that came with it — an opponent that previously needed four or five steps to clear an attack now needed to predict the attack’s trajectory before it arrived, without the visual information that made prediction reliable. Strength and size were not the question anymore. They had moved past the question of strength.
She had learned this from the God’s Punishment Warriors: when you blinded one eye, you changed everything downstream.
And she knew something else now. Something that had been gathering during the fight without announcing itself until it had become undeniable.
When that last claw landed, in the fragment of time between the impact and the pain, she had felt the magic power in her body move differently. Faster than usual. A surge, concentrated in the forearm she had used as a shield — an unusual density of power, almost as though her body had understood what was required of it and moved to meet the demand. Time had expanded briefly. She had seen the claws approaching and the fur patterns on the meat pads, seen them clearly, watched them arrive. Most of the power had gathered in the forearm.
A year ago, that blow would not simply have broken the arm. It would have cracked her ribs and disordered her internal organs. Now it had only hurt.
Is this what Agatha meant by the life-and-death sentiment?
She felt as though she was standing at the edge of a thick door. The other side of it was not visible, but it was close enough to have weight.
If Lorgar can control magic power to partially animalize her body, can an Extraordinary do something similar? Apply maximum power to a specific point at a specific moment, exceeding the normal ceiling?
Worth examining. Later.
The immediate matter was the duel.
If I take the other eye, she won’t have a choice but to acknowledge defeat. And Leaf’s herbs will keep her alive until we can reach Neverwinter and Nana.
Ashes drew a slow breath. Lowered her center of gravity.
Lorgar took her fighting stance across from her, and showed her remaining teeth.
Neither of them needed to say it. The audience had understood it. The entire arena went still — no cheering, no murmuring, only the low steady sound of the burning ground doing what it always did. Every person present understood that the next strike would decide it, for both of them, regardless of which direction it fell.
The silence stretched.
Then Echo screamed. “Watch out — overhead!”
Ashes looked up.
Something massive fell from the sky — wings wider than the platform spread in a diving arc, claws like open blades and as thick as a grown man’s forearm, the hiss of displaced air arriving only when it was nearly on them. It had the body of a beetle and the ambitions of an eagle: a striped shell across back and abdomen and head, six segmented claws, four pairs of wings that should by rights have been as thin as a cicada’s but were thick and full as a bird’s.
Nothing in nature produced things like this.
She cleared its first pass with everything she had, throwing herself sideways, feeling the claws shear the air where she had been.
Through the corner of her eye, she saw that Lorgar had also tried to dodge.
And that Lorgar’s broken forelimb had not cooperated.
The impact drove the wolf into the platform like a stone into sand. The cracks that opened around her were not small.
Lorgar’s scream cut through everything.