Capítulo 60: Demon Breaker Halie
"Survive."
The word echoed into Kir as a warning as suddenly the distance between them closed.
It wasn't simply that Halie had gotten closer, it was more like the space between them had disappeared when she threw a punch.
Caught by surprise, Kir took the hit on his abs, staggering backward. He'd worn his uniform today - a show of unity with his partners - but now his shirt was destroyed and the inside edges of his jacket burnt and frayed by the sheer heat produced at contact.
As she withdrew her hands, Kir saw her gauntleted fist glowing on the back of the palm. A magic circle for flame was visible for a moment before it calmed.
"Still standing..." Halie assessed.
Kir said nothing. He was too busy catching his breath.
"Halie!" Dahlia called out, but she was ignored as Halie started charging.
Sensing what was about to happen, Kir dove to the side as the air rippled around Halie, allowing her to appear within arms reach of Kir a half-blink later.
She punched for him, but he was already putting some distance between them, rolling away like his life depended on it. Judging by the crater her fist left where he'd been, he was right.
When he got his breath back, he reached for his mana, shielding himself as he rolled to a landing and stood, his tail flicking angrily behind him as he studied his opponent.
She was clearly capable of spatial manipulation, and immense strength. He wasn't sure if she was using bodily enhancement magic but her armor was etched with many magical circles. All this pointed to her being a mavin instead of a mage.
"This hardly seems fair, Demon Breaker," Luthien shouted.
Demon Breaker?! Kir wondered.
"Life's not fair," Halie growled back. Then, from a distance, she shoved both of her arms forward as if about to clap, which she did, once her hands appeared to both sides of Kir.
Simultaneously, her hands struck his shields, and Kir felt a slight cracking sensation as the lattice held, but it was going to be a close thing.
He readied a spell he'd been working on ever since learning about spatial magic, deciding to fight fire with fire. It only worked close by, but he figured now was the perfect time to try it, especially since it seemed Halie could take it.
He felt a significant amount of his mana drain as he opened up the space ten meters above Halie.
Sensing something amiss, she withdrew her hands and hopped backward. But it wasn't the space above her that she had to worry about.
It was the space below.
As Halie fell, Kir used that precious moment to align his two portals while opening them wider - he hoped - than her arms could reach.
Again and again she fell, picking up speed each time she passed from one portal to the next. Kir focused on holding the portals in position as he counted to thirteen before finally dissipating both portals as she fell through the upper one at terminal velocity.
Her impact on the ground chest-first sent clouds of dirt flying in a circle away from her and left a crater that exposed the gravel layer beneath the floor.
At first, Kir wondered if he might have gone too far, but then she started to pick herself up. Once she was kneeling, she reached up and took off her helmet. A trickle of blood scraped its way down the giant's forehead, dripping into her smile. "My turn," she said, then punched the ground.
Kir leapt back, but suddenly a hand wrapped around his ankle he was dragged through a portal and held upside down by Halie before she cast him into the air.
As he rose, Halie crouched into a deep stance, punching upwards with both fists pistoning almost faster than the eye could see. From all around his front, fists started appearing from seemingly everywhere, suspending him as they punched upwards again and again. Even though he managed to defend his core by blocking with both arms and pulling up his legs, the rest of his clothes got destroyed as pain spiked into every part of him.
"You're so weak," Halie growled. "Why are you so weak?"
Those words rankled Kir to his core.
He felt the angry core inside of him start to burn. Who the hell was this stranger to say what he was?
With an angry cry, Kir put up his shields for a moment, buying himself enough time to tear off the remains of his top as Halie pummeled against the lattice, her rapid punches breaking first through the anti-mana shell and then the anti-physical barrier.
By the time the second shattered, Kir had already let out his wings.
With a mighty surge, he pushed himself further away from Halie's strikes, remaining in the air as he readied his next spell. Taking both of his bone knives from their storage in his arms, he cast one past Halie, aiming for the space between her legs to put it behind her.
It had taken Kir a long time to figure out the workings of magic. To wriggle out the fact that magic was merely an overlay to the physics he knew and was used to. His next spell was one of the many fruits born of that effort... and inspired by the first duel he had at the Academy.
"Taser," Kir intoned.
Pointing the knife he kept at Halie, two spells appeared. One spell gathered and confined a positive magnetic charge before him, and the other, which appeared behind Halie, did the same but for the opposite charge.
The giant clearly sensed both halves of the spell before and behind her, but she had no time to react as a split-second later, the magnetic fields of both spells overlapped and closed the circuit at the speed of light.
A subdued zap of lighting surged between them, impacting Halie and traveling into her by her armor. While the visual effect was unimpressive and the way Kir was casting it was far less efficient than doing so at melee range, the effect on Halie's body was instantaneous.
The giant's body seized up, her body going rigid as she tried to hold onto her stance.
Kir was forcing 90 amperes into her body at a steady rate. Just below the fatality line. Yet despite this, Halie took the step backward she needed to close her hand around Kir's spell and crush it, leaving his knife where it was.
"My wards... Why didn't they activate?" Halie mumbled to herself loudly as she panted for breath.
"Because that was true lightning, not magic," Kir said, guessing she had wards against magical forms of many spells. True lightning had none of magical lightning's weaknesses but was harder to direct. Hence his need for creation points of a positive and negative charge.
Her eyes widened slightly, "An interesting trick... but you'll never beat me if you don't fight to kill," Halie said, standing to her full height as Kir retrieved a fraction of the mana from the half of the spell that had remained in his hand.
"I have no reason to kill you," Kir said.
"Then you are a fool!" she shouted, slamming her fist through the air beside her.
Kir flapped hard to push himself away from his position, but Halie hadn't been striking out at him. She'd reached into the space beside her and extracted what looked like a quiver full of massive spears. Javelins made of utterly smooth, clear crystal... and suspended in the center of each spearhead, glowing slightly from the differently colored magic circles that surrounded them, were feathers.
Red feathers, just like Kir's. He could feel something in them. Something familiar that called to him.
"Where did you get those?" Kir demanded, his tone darkening.
"From your mother's wing, torn from her body," Halie replied flatly, staring up at him. "She never told me where she abandoned you. So I've had to search, boy." She hefted a javelin and threw it.
Kir dodged as the missile disappeared into a portal, the tip of it cutting along his arm as it flew straight and true into the ceiling above. He caught a glimpse of red from the magic circle imbedded in the head before it passed him. And upon impacting the ceiling...
BOOM!
A massive burst shattered out the tile roof, erupting a cone of destruction outside and leaving a circular hole in its wake. The concussion of air that struck Kir from behind sent him plummeting towards the ground, but he'd expected it and was able to flap once to save himself from the full impact.
Stowing his wings as he impacted the ground, he rolled forward and charged Halie.
She threw another javelin at him and he dodged narrowly, focused solely on closing the distance so she could not use her portals against him.
Behind him, the white magic circle inside the spearhead shattered, pushing out the side of the arena with jagged shards of ice in a massive half-cone that broke the pavement. Crowds of people, already scared by the first blast, now fled.
Kir put everything he had into enhancing his body. He poured on speed.
He was going to beat some answers out of her or die trying.
"You hurt her!?" he shouted as he came into range, punching for her chest plate, not caring that it was flesh against steel.
The giant paused for a long moment, then answered. "Yes," Demon Breaker Halie said in an even tone as Kir managed to dent her armor.
Beside the arena, both Kordia and Rainier were arguing with Luthien trying to get him to stop the fight.
"I can't!" he shouted back. "Maybe if I were fifty years younger, but even then-"
Kir's rage had reached a peak. His vision glowed red as his eyes began to dye themselves with mana, infused with murderous intent, glowing red and casting his face in a vicious light.
If she hurt his mom... if she killed her...
The thought that this giant might have taken away the one person who might have answers for him pulled something out of Kir that he hadn't known was there.
Latching onto Halie's breastplate at the neck, bracing his boots against her hips, he punched for her head.
Had he not been so enraged, he might have noticed that Halie did not try to dodge as he struck her cheek with his knuckles again and again. She weathered every punch until she reached up and grabbed Kir around the hip with a single hand, pulling him off of her as if he were no more than a kitten batting at her with padded paws.
"I'll kill you!" Kir shouted hoarsely, raising a hand in which a white light started to gather. Before the Nova Blast could finish, however, Halie smacked his arm up and away, causing the beam of white to collide with the remaining two-thirds of the ceiling.
Had Kir the time to fully empower the spell, no one in the arena would have survived. Even in its underpowered state, the burst of energy vaporized the remaining ceiling and sent their audience diving for the ground as the sphere of perfect destruction spread.
The white light consumed the top quarter of the walls nearest to it as well, leaving a gaping hole in one of the Guild's towers.
Halie looked up, her eyes now fully open to see the destruction above her.
"That's more like it..." she said, before turning her face towards Kir.
Kir started to gather a second shot. He didn't care if it was point-blank. This woman knew who he was, which meant she knew his mother, which meant-
Halie's fist hit him in the left side of the head like a pile driver.
Everything went black.
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