The silence stretched, taut as a bowstring.
The air itself seemed to hold its breath, heavy with the tang of impending violence.
The first move was not a move at all, but a disappearance.
Ottar vanished, the sound of his departure a thunderclap that shattered the stillness.
He reappeared instantly before Draco, a feat of speed that few could follow.
The great sword descended in a cleave meant to bisect the dragon-kin.
It was a test, a question of strength against strength.
Draco did not dodge.
He met the arc of the blade with a crossed guard of his forearms.
The impact was cataclysmic.
A shockwave of pure force erupted outwards, pulverizing the packed dirt of the training ground into a fine dust and sending a ring of snow blasting away from them.
Ottar's sword, a weapon capable of easily cleaving deep-floor monsters, bit lightly into Draco's scales.
Sparks flew, not from flesh, but from the grinding of two ridiculously hard objects.
Draco's feet, digitigrade and powerful, dug furrows into the ground, but he did not yield.
His glowing, earthy eyes met Ottar's over the flat of the blade.
With a guttural growl that vibrated in his chest, Draco shoved, a titanic effort that sent the Warlord sliding back several meters, his boots carving trenches in the earth.
"Your strength is impressive," Draco's voice rumbled, deeper than before, a landslide given sound.
Ottar said nothing.
He adjusted his grip, his expression unreadable.
He lunged again, this time not with a brute overhead smash, but with a series of fluid, devastating strikes.
A horizontal slash aimed at the neck, a swift up-draw aimed for the gut, a sweeping low cut at the legs.
It was a combat style of Ottar's own creation, designed to overwhelm and pulverize.
Draco moved.
He was no longer a statue but a tempest.
His movements were a blur, a mix of evasion and parries.
He used his claws to deflect the blade, the screech of metal on scales echoing across the grounds. He twisted his torso, letting the killing edge of the sword pass a hair's breadth from his chest.
He dropped low, a talon lashing out not at Ottar, but at the ground, kicking up a blinding cloud of dust and debris.
For a moment, Ottar's vision was obscured.
It was all the opening Draco needed.
He surged forward, his form a low, predatory crouch.
He didn't aim for Ottar's torso, too well-defended by the sword and his own musculature. Instead, he feinted high with his left claw, drawing Ottar's parry, and then struck low with his right talon.
The razor-sharp digit scraped against Ottar's greave, carving a deep gouge in the metal and drawing the first drop of blood.
Ottar grunted, more in surprise than pain, and retaliated with a backhanded swing of his great sword that forced Draco to leap back, his tail….a thick, armored whip….smashing into the ground where Ottar's feet had been a moment before.
The duel soon became a whirlwind of motion, three minutes passing in the blur of steel and claws.
Ottar was a relentless force, his stamina seemingly infinite.
He pressed his advantage in reach, his sword a blur that sought every chink in Draco's defense. Yet, for all his ferocity, he was fighting a phantom.
Draco moved with a motion that was both terrifying and beautiful.
He dodged, he parried, he blocked.
He rarely overextended, almost never wasting energy.
Then, a lull.
Ottar disengaged, creating distance, his chest heaving slightly.
His eyes, sharp and analytical, scanned his opponent.
And he saw it.
A cold dread, colder than the winter wind, settled in his gut.
Draco stood calmly, his breathing even.
His brown scales, which had been taking the full force of his attacks, were not broken.
They were not shattered.
They were, at most, scratched.
A few shallow gouges marred the surface, but they were superficial, cosmetic wounds that did nothing to impede their function.
In stark contrast, Ottar's own body told a different story.
A shallow cut wept blood from his cheek where a claw had grazed him.
His greave was dented and torn.
His arms ached from the sheer feedback of blocking Draco's counter-strikes.
He was the only one accumulating damage.
The realization struck him with the force of a physical blow.
Draco wasn't just matching him.
He was toying with him.
It seemed as though Draco was using this as a casual sparring session, a test of his new form's durability.
The sheer arrogance of the thought ignited a fire in Ottar's chest, a burning humiliation that eclipsed his battle-lust.
"You…" Ottar's voice was a low, dangerous growl.
"You are holding back."
Draco's glowing eyes blinked slowly.
"What makes you think I am holding back? I assure you, I am taking this fight quite seriously," Draco replied, his expression displaying a flicker of confusion.
"Lies!" Ottar roared, his composure cracking.
"You use only your body, your claws! Not a shred of the magic I know you possess….the magic that leveled a district! Fight me for real! Or do you think me so weak that you must patronize me with this farce?"
Draco's bestial expression held a flicker of caution.
"The power I used at that time wasn't magic, it is unrefined, uncontrolled, and currently forbidden by the gods. However, what I can do now, with this current transformation, is far more controlled, but also far more destructive. If I were to fully unleash it, this battle would no longer be fair, and you would gain nothing from it," Draco explained.
"I am the Warlord!" Ottar bellowed, his aura flaring to a terrifying intensity.
"I have faced death and laughed! I do not need your protection! Show me! Show me the true power of what I must surpass!" Ottar insisted.
Draco was silent for a long moment, the only sound the whistling wind.
Finally, he gave a slow, deliberate nod.
"As you wish. However, I will not be paying for any repairs. You requested this."
The atmosphere changed instantly.
The suffocating silence that had hung in the air was replaced by a palpable increase in gravity. The weaker Freya Familia members at the edge of the field buckled, some falling to their knees, their lungs struggling to pull air that had suddenly become as heavy as lead.
Ottar lunged, but he never reached his target.
"Hold."
Draco didn't shout the word; he commanded it.
The earth beneath Ottar's feet turned from solid dirt into something strange and sentient.
Before the Level 7 could leap, the ground rose up like a pair of titan's hands.
Reinforced, hardened soil, saturated with Draco's magic to the point of becoming a substance close to the hardness of adamantite, wrapped around Ottar's legs.
Ottar roared, straining muscles that could lift tons, but the earth didn't just hold him; it anchored him to the ground.
Draco casually raised a single clawed hand.
Behind him, the training ground began to churn.
The mud and dirt rose in a dozen swirling pillars, twisting and compressing until they took the shape of massive, stony fists, each the size of a small boulder.
"This is the weight of the world," Draco said.
He thrust his hand forward.
The first fist struck Ottar in the chest with a thunderous impact.
Before he could even cough up the blood rising in his throat, the second fist hit his shoulder. Then the third.
The fourth.
Draco was no longer moving.
He stood like a conductor, his fingers dancing in the air, directing a relentless barrage of earthen strikes.
Each fist was like liquid mud an inch before impact, molding to the contours of Ottar's body, only to harden into diamond-tough stone the millisecond it landed, delivering the full force into his bones.
Thud-crack. Thud-crack.
The sound was sickening.
Ottar was being pulverized.
He swung his great sword, shattering one of the earthen fists, then another, but for every one he destroyed, three more rose from the ground.
He was a boar being buried by a mountain, one blow at a time.
"Is this enough?" Draco's voice resonated from the very stones.
Ottar didn't answer.
He couldn't.
His vision was a red haze.
His ribs felt as if they were mostly powder, his lungs were punctured, and his left arm hung uselessly at his side.
Yet, as if through some miracle of the Falna and a will that bordered on divine, he stayed upright.
He forced his legs to move, the earth cracking around his ankles as he dragged the weight of the world with him, step by agonizing step, toward Draco.
Draco's eyes widened slightly.
"Your spirit is commendable, Warlord. Truly. But the body has limits."
Draco closed his fist and raised his arm.
The earth beneath Ottar erupted upward, a massive pillar of stone catching the Warlord under the chin, launching his frame twenty feet into the air.
While he was airborne, Draco appeared above him, faster than any of the spectators could track.
He didn't use his claws.
He simply placed a palm on Ottar's chest.
"Down."
A pulse of brown energy erupted.
Ottar was slammed back into the earth with such force that the entire training ground subsided by three feet, creating a massive crater. Dust billowed, obscuring everything.
Silence returned.
As the dust settled, Draco stood at the edge of the crater, his transformation slowly receding.
The brown scales faded back into obsidian, then back into dark skin.
He looked down into the pit.
Ottar was there, standing.
His great sword was buried deep in the ground, and he was leaning on it, his head bowed.
His shirt was gone, his torso a map of bruises and jagged cuts.
He looked like a man who had walked through a meat grinder.
"Unacceptable…" Ottar croaked, his voice barely a whisper.
"Not again…"
Draco started to raise his hand, then stopped.
He frowned, stepping into the crater and walking right up to the Warlord.
He leaned in, peering into Ottar's eyes.
They were wide open, but vacant.
The pupils didn't dilate.
There was barely a spark of consciousness left in them.
Ottar was likely out.
He had been barely conscious since the pillar hit his chin.
Yet, his body….driven by an ironclad pride and absolute desire to not embarrass his goddess, Freya….refused to fall.
"Incredible, but you should rest now. You are definitely strong Ottar, however for what is to come, I need you stronger" Draco whispered into Ottar's ears, a genuine note of respect crossing his face.
He reached out and gently tapped Ottar's forehead.
The moment contact was made, the tension holding the Warlord upright snapped.
Ottar's knees finally buckled, and the strongest man in Orario collapsed into the dirt, finally finding the peace of the dark.
Draco looked up at where the Freya executives stood, paralyzed in shock.
Then he looked towards Babel, where he could subtly feel the creepy gaze of Freya, her silver eyes wide with a mixture of ecstasy and obsession.
"The duel is over," Draco announced.