He raised his sword's point to eye level with one arm as his eyes filled with rage. "You have no idea what I'm capable of now, nor what I've been through to get to this point. I will kill you this time, Thoma, and believe me: I'll make sure you suffer before the end as payment for what you did to me," he seethed. "What I did to you? More like what you did to yourself," I said calmly.
As the words left my mouth, I saw something in his distorted face twitch, but I couldn't place exactly what had gone on in his head.
"Then let what I've done lead you to your end. Ready for round two?" he asked, getting into a different guard than I was used to seeing him use. "Time to find out," my eyes flared with mana-leakage as I answered with a cold, distorted voice resulting from entering my second stage.
With a loud shout, he rushed in, swinging in a combination of blows that, I admit, were a little challenging to keep up with, even in my second stage. He put me on my back foot, kicking up snow and frozen dirt as we dashed and weaved between the trees, keeping pace with each other's movements and sword-strikes.
I'm only on the defensive right now, but I'm not going to last long if he can keep this pace up, I quickly surmised, beginning to consider my options.
I decided to bring our battle back around toward the main fight to check in on everyone. My mother and Plumed were still locked in combat, which was more surprising than anything else. While she didn't seem to be stressed or under pressure from the creature, she did have a look on her face that suggested she was intrigued more than anything else.
Vyra, Derion, and Haldir were just cleaning up the last few of the weaker ones, while Ysevel was casting some kind of healing spell on them from a distance. She had a few scratches on her, but nothing too serious as far as I could tell.
I felt a surge of mana behind me, and knew immediately that Irun was about to cast something my way. I quickly felt for the snow's embedded water mana, and summoned a pillar of ice behind and beneath me to block his spell, but it was obliterated by the force of whatever it was he had cast.
Again I felt the surge, but this time I reached further, grabbing at the frozen earth's mana and lifted a wall behind me. The spell was stopped in its tracks, but Irun, having upgraded himself, quickly dashed around the small wall I'd created and aimed a swing at my gut.
"Stop using cheap tricks and fight me like a man!" Irun shouted angrily. He swung repeatedly and grew increasingly angrier with each deflection or dodge that I returned.
He had no idea what I was planning.
I'd learned to bide my time through months and months of getting my ass absolutely handed to me by my mother, brother, and colleagues in Myrdin. All of my dashing and dodging was to see what the extent of his abilities were. Sure, he was fast, and held a lot more power than I had originally anticipated, but something was off, and I wanted to exploit it.
After having seen that he could only either force his way through my barriers, or cast spells that were strong enough to burst them to pieces, I realized that I had something he lacked: Perspective. Being strong and brutish was never my style, and even after having my seal undone, and putting on a decent bit of muscle, I still relied on my ability to see things that others couldn't.
That moment had finally come.
I got close enough to my mother and the others to where they would be a threat to him if my mother finished off her opponent soon, and I noticed Irun still hadn't caught on to that fact. His single minded focus of killing me, like I had wanted to when we fought the first time, would be his downfall, just like it was almost mine.
"Fine! Have it your way!" I shouted, making a blatant display of my torso. I held my sword arm out to my side with the point toward him, bending slightly at the elbow, while my other hand began to work the earth and air mana around me, causing it to swirl. He charged at me in a response of pure, blind rage to my challenge, aiming a vertical blow to cut me in half.
Just before the blow landed, I pushed against the earth mana, launching me to the side faster than I ever could've stepped, and caught the air current that I had created to carry me up and over him, forcing me into a rapid spin.
Once more, I infused a copious amount of mana into the edge of my sword and muscles, feeling everything as if it were a single, unified structure. Just before I finished my swing, I saw him barely able to react to my movements as he began to rotate his sword.
"Sunder," I said, furrowing my brow and gritting my teeth as my eyes glowed intensely.
With a burst of snow, earth, air, and blood that sent a shockwave around the two of us, our duel came to a dramatic close. "Thoma!" I heard Ysevel shout from my right. She must have been shaken up by the sudden shockwave, but I quickly dispersed the cloud surrounding us with a burst of wind-mana. I could hear her running towards us, but I didn't understand why.
I loomed over Irun as he tried to crawl away now bereft of his remaining human arm and sword. The bloodied stump of his shoulder was severed at the joint, removing it entirely from his possession. "You f-fucking bastard!" he screamed through clenched teeth, his voice, baritone as it was, cracked as he said the words.
Even though he was facing away from me, trying to crawl on his belly to escape, I could hear the sound of both tears and spittle fluttering as he shouted. There was a certain, gurgling sound that I chalked up to being a mixture of the two, and I would be lying if I didn't forcefully hide the grin that threatened to show itself.
"I told you that I would kill you, Irun," I began coldly as I stared down at him, hearing Ysevel's footsteps drawing closer. "I purposefully aimed for something I knew wouldn't kill you, but let you know what would happen if you tried to fight again when I severed your forearm," I continued, now beginning to hear muffled words coming through.
"I let you live once because you were my friend, Irun. The others here, however, might not be so benevolent. I will let you live again if you swear to never raise your remaining hand against the Continent ever again," I said, adjusting the grip on the hilt of my sword.
Irun spat a wad of blood onto the floor. "You think I'd come back here without a plan?" he said mischievously, a mild, pained chuckle resounding from his mouth. "I didn't come here just to pick a fight, Lanky. Gods below, I didn't even know you were here. I came here to cripple this country, and take the one thing being used to keep it safe," he gurgled blood as he began to laugh.
What the fuck does he mean by that? Wait, what is Ysevel shouting? Damn it, I can't hear her. Wait, why can't I hear her? I thought, trying to process his words and the ones being shouted at me.
Suddenly, just beneath the two of us, a spiraling circle of runes opened up, leading to a swirling torrent of violet mana. I didn't fully understand what was going on, or why the floor beneath me seemed to feed into an insatiable void. I looked over to Ysevel, who was within arm's length of me at this point, and held my hand out to try to tell her to stay away, but it was no use.
She grabbed my hand tightly.
The three of us sank down into the swirling portal, as we watched the snow-filled world around us disappear; leaving nothing but blood-soaked echoes in the snow.