The air in the vault was a thick, choking haze of pulverized concrete and ozone. Silence pressed in, heavy and absolute, where moments before there had been the roar of explosions and the shriek of energy. Damien stood gasping, the conjured pulse rifle in his hands feeling as heavy and useless as a block of lead; the inner well of power he drew upon to make it fire was scraped dry. Across the wreckage-strewn floor, Bane leaned on his war maul, not as a warrior, but as a cripple using a crutch. His massive chest rose and fell in ragged, desperate heaves, and the raw, pink tissue on his shoulder had split open again from the strain, weeping a thin, clear fluid. The empowering red glow on his weapon was gone.
Their eyes met across the ruin of the chamber. Damien's gaze flickered down to his inert rifle, then back to Bane. Bane's eyes glanced at the useless lump of metal that was his maul. In that shared look, the reality of their mutual exhaustion was absolute. Then, Bane's eyes broke away, shifting to the side, locking onto the soft, tempting glow of the scattered beast cores.
With a surge of pure survival instinct that overrode his injuries, he broke the stillness. He let his maul drop, its heavy head hitting the concrete floor with a loud CLANG. He lunged, a desperate, ragged scramble, not at Damien, but at the nearest pile of glowing Ember-class beast cores.
Damien knew he could not let him refuel. He had no Saupa left to form another energy bolt, but the physical matter of the rifle was still under his control. He focused his will, and in a maneuver born of pure necessity, the sleek weapon in his hands dissolved, the motes of light not dissipating but collapsing inward, reforming with startling speed. In his right hand, the light solidified into his sabre-shaped cutlass. On his left forearm, a small, physical buckler shield, its inside lined with a thick, shock-absorbent padding, materialized with a final shimmer.
He charged, intercepting Bane a mere meter from the pile of cores. The fight for power became a brutal, close-quarters melee. Bane's first attack was not infused; it was a pure, brutal punch, relying on nothing but the terrifying, passive force of his five-times-human strength. Damien raised his shield to block.
The impact was a catastrophe.
His innate Origin Force Shield flared, but it did nothing to stop the raw, physical force. It felt like trying to stop a falling boulder. He was physically launched across the room, his body a ragdoll. He slammed hard into a stack of metal crates, the sound a deafening CRUNCH of metal and bone. The impact drove the air from his lungs in a pained gasp and sent a starburst of agony through his ribs. The padded shield had saved his arm from being turned to pulp, but the kinetic energy had traveled through his entire body. As he struggled to his feet, a horrifying thought pierced through the pain: If this is the damage from a single, un-infused blow, the state Bane must have been in after the explosion was truly catastrophic. The man's ability to regenerate was more monstrous than he had imagined.
Bane was on him again in an instant, a relentless engine of destruction. Another blow slammed into the shield. This time Damien was thrown sideways, crashing over a scattered pile of smaller cores. He was being systematically beaten, a nail being hammered by a sledgehammer. He was faster and more agile than a normal human, but against Bane's enhanced physiology, it was nothing. He was constantly being knocked around, desperately trying to keep his shield between himself and the bone-shattering impacts, his conjured cutlass used for nothing more than frantic, ineffectual slashes at Bane's armored hide.
Pinned against a solid rock wall, Damien saw Bane raise his fist for what he knew would be a finishing blow. He couldn't take another full impact. His mind, overclocked by adrenaline and desperation, raced, latching onto a memory from The Sunder Codex. A high-level, almost philosophical theory he had skimmed. "Do not meet overwhelming force with force, but with dissonance."
He had to try something. As Bane's fist descended, Damien tried to channel the impact force from his physical shield, through his own body, and distribute it evenly with his Origin Force Shield. The result was an agonizing failure. The force, instead of being localized to his arm, now wracked his entire torso. He felt the shock in his bones and organs, and a spray of blood erupted from his lips. He was thrown again, his vision swimming. His body was not a suitable container for that much raw power.
He struggled to his feet, his shield arm numb and trembling. Bane charged again, a predator sensing the kill. Learning from his first mistake, Damien now tried to push the energy outward, away from his body. As the blow landed, he tried to vent the force into the surrounding air. It was like trying to punch water. The energy had no medium to travel through and fed back into the shield with a deafening CRACK, nearly shattering his forearm. He cried out in pain as he was sent tumbling, his shield clattering to the floor a meter away.
He was in a truly desperate state now. He scrambled for his shield as Bane stood over him, raising his maul for the final execution. Damien, on instinct, rolled and got the shield up just in time, but his footing was a wreck. As the blow landed, his shield arm was low, angled by chance towards the floor. A portion of the energy he was feebly trying to vent found a path of least resistance—down his braced leg and into the concrete. A loud CRACK! echoed as the floor beneath him spiderwebbed with small cracks. He was still hurtled backward by the blow, but he felt it instantly—the damage to his arm was noticeably less. It was partial, accidental, but it worked.
The insight hit him like a physical blow. It wasn't about containing the force, or pushing it into the empty air. It was about grounding it.
He staggered to his feet, a bloody grin on his face. Bane, enraged that his last attack hadn't finished the job, charged one last time, his face a mask of furious effort. This time, Damien was ready. He deliberately tried to ground the attack. He planted his feet, but his timing was off. He succeeded in channeling about half the force into the floor, which cracked more significantly, but the other half still slammed into him, knocking him off his feet once more, though the damage was much less severe. He was refining the technique through pure, brutal trial and error.
Bane, utterly enraged that his prey was still resisting, came in for the final, killing blow. Damien, bleeding and battered, planted his feet firmly. As the maul descended, he met it with his shield, and this time, he perfectly channeled the entire, overwhelming impact from the physical shield, through his arm, down his braced body, and into the ground beneath him.
A deep BOOM echoed through the vault, not from the impact, but from the floor itself. The raw kinetic force of Bane's attack visibly flowed down Damien's body like lightning into a grounding rod and discharged into the concrete. The floor around Damien's feet exploded outward in a shower of dust and debris, leaving a shallow crater. He was still forced back a step by the sheer physical push, but the supernatural, bone-shattering damage was almost entirely gone. He had solved the puzzle.
Bane stared in utter disbelief at the cratered floor, his attack completely neutralized. That momentary shock was the only opening Damien would get. In that split second, both men, acting on pure instinct, dove for the scattered jewels of power at their feet. They each scrambled and managed to grab a handful of the small, glowing cores, crushing them in their fists.
A last, desperate jolt of Saupa flooded their depleted systems. They both knew they had just enough for one final move.
They disengaged, standing several meters apart, both battered and bloody.
Bane roared, a sound of final, absolute commitment. He abandoned his weapon and channeled every last scrap of his recovered Saupa and his 5x physical might into his right fist, which began to glow with a furious, unstable red light.
Damien, taking a deep, ragged breath, channeled his own burst of energy not into his shield, but into his cutlass. He applied the same disruptive principle he had just learned, not to defend, but to attack. The dark blade of the sabre didn't glow; instead, the air around its edge began to vibrate with a high-frequency, shield-piercing shriek.
With a final cry of pure, unrestrained hatred, they lunge at each other.
Bane's incandescent fist met Damien's vibrating, reality-slicing blade in the center of the vault.