Chương 57: Heated Training
The volcanic rock shatters, and the air morphs as another sprout of lava rises from below, spilling out onto the earth as a boiling river of red.
Some of the lava splashes onto my arm, but it does little than to turn what lingering water there was on my arm into steam. I quickly cross my arms over my face, and I grit my teeth as Akeno slams her lightning-covered foot into my forearm. The force sends me sliding back a few meters, and the impact shakes the plateau we're standing on.
I take a quick breath, doing my best to stave off the creeping insanity as I turn my eyes to my opponent.
Akeno lands gracefully, lightning cackling around her body as she giggles erratically. There's a murderous smile on her lips, and her fingers are twitching as she slowly bends forward. Only the barest sense of lucidity can be seen in her eyes.
Granted, I can also feel the slightly mad smile on my lips, so I don't think I have the liberty to say that.
It's been…a week? Two weeks? I don't know, I can't really remember right now. Whatever the case, some time has gone by since our encounter with Satanael.
It was humbling, I suppose. We could've won. There was nothing stopping us from taking down the cadre. Yet we still allowed him to unleash that massive strike, forcing us to defend Kuoh and letting the cadre escape.
We'd become complacent. I'd let myself be swept away by my fascination with Sacred Gears and the Arondight, and Akeno had gotten distracted by her hatred for the Fallen.
Perhaps had we taken it all seriously from the start, had we not still been overly relaxed due to the Christmas dinner we just had, we could've taken Satanael down. It'd take time, sure, but eventually we'd overpower the cadre and kill him.
We'd lost that chance.
We won't lose it again.
So we decided to take a break from our jobs. No tutoring, no political dealings, no surveying, no creating, no meandering. For a brief moment in time, the duties we've set upon ourselves are to be shelved away, and we'll spend all our time training like we did years before.
And now here we are, in a remote corner of Iceland, fighting on a plateau floating atop the bubbling lava of an active volcano. An 'Isolation' Ofuda is set over us, created in tandem with Kanada's curses to prolong its strength and effect for as long as possible.
Our choice of location is intentional, and not just because training in a volcano is cool.
Sooner or later, we'll come across Kagutsuchi again. I can't just rely on making hundreds upon hundreds of Ofudas to take him down again. We'll need to level the playing field, and to do that, we'll need to build up our resistance towards intense heat.
The lava occasionally splashing on us is the solution. This isn't a viable method for anyone else, but since our Primal Energy sends our bodies' adaptation in overdrive, we can increase our resistance by simply living inside a volcano like this.
But more important than that, this volcano is a tremendous source of Primal Energy. Which sounds weird at first; Primal Energy comes from living beings after all.
That isn't quite right, however. Living beings are secondary sources. Every bit of Primal Energy comes, without exception, from planet Earth. It originates from the molten core of the planet, rising through plumes of magma and escaping out into the atmosphere to finally be used to fuel the living.
And volcanoes are essentially glorified holes in the earth's crusts, letting massive gusts of Primal Energy escape into the air.
This doesn't matter to the average joe, but to us?
It's perfect.
I quickly catch her foot between my knee and my elbow. She blinks, and I grin as I grab onto her leg and fling her into the wall. The girl turns into a blur as she speeds away, and she cries out in pain as she smashes into the wall of volcanic rock, half her body submerged in the lava.
I leap to further smash her into the stone, only to blink when she vanishes in a burst of lightning. My instincts ring then, and I quickly turn to see a lightning-enhanced fist heading towards my head. I quickly twist, letting her fist barely clip my left ear, turning the soft flesh into burnt char.
She spins abruptly, and now a lightning-covered foot rushes towards my chest. My eyes shine gold, and my leg bursts in a swirl of blues and whites as I move to meet her attack.
Her leg smashes against mine, and the impact expands as a massive explosion. We're both sent crashing back, only to suddenly tumble as the plateau we're standing on begins to shake. All the jostling had aggravated the volcano, and another minor eruption is now imminent.
I realize this, and so does she. Neither of us make any attempt to escape, instead grinning at each other as we resume our fight.
Naturally, neither of us are actually aiming to kill. We injure and maim and scar one another with abandon, but we do all we can to avoid genuine killing blows. Our aim is to grow our strength by expanding our reservoir of energies, and to do that, we'll need to heal ourselves using Ki and convert as much corruption as we can.
Even now, with our rationals quickly slipping, we're still holding back from straight up killing each other.
Although I can tell that it won't be long before she loses control over herself. I'll have to knock her out when that happens, take a quick break, and resume once she's fully lucid once more.
We continue fighting. She sends punches and kicks, all empowered by mystical lighting. I, in turn, fight back with my own attacks, all enhanced with Ki and Primal Energy. She weaves and bobs around my strikes, while I take all her attacks head on, defending whenever I can.
And, eventually, the volcano erupts once more. The plateau we're standing on shatters as we're sent flying into the air on a geyser of lava. Clouds of ash and dust rise as the lava tumbles onto the earth around us.
My eyes allow me to quickly determine where Akeno is hiding, and I read my arm back in preparation for a powerful punch.
But before I can manage that, every nerve on my body suddenly screams as I'm shocked by a thousand bolts of red electricity. My eyes go into overdrive, and I can't help the pained laugh that spills from my lips as I realize just what it was that happened.
In the split second she had, Akeno controlled all the built up static electricity bouncing in the cloud of dust and ash, empowering them with Ki and Mana, and she'd sent it towards me as an unavoidable attack. It's a powerful and cruel attack, and I wince as I look down at myself. My skin is disfigured, turned a dull red with branching scars overlaid all across my body.
"Cheeky." I cough out, grinning all the while. "But it's not enough!"
With a shout, I punch, and the massive cloud around us breaks away as a wave of pressurized air is sent from my fist. It cuts right towards where Akeno is hiding, and her eyes go wide as the cloud suddenly parts to reveal a massive torrent of swirling energies.
She quickly brings her arms up to defend, and she cries out in pain as the blast tears through her arms. She tries holding out for a moment, but she eventually gives in, and she trades her arms to escape the fatal blast, letting the torrent soar into the skies behind her.
We land back down, our legs somehow standing atop the sloshing magma. Her two arms are gone, and the magma below her bubbles erratically as droplets of blood sink into the molten rock. Meanwhile, my entire body is scarred with massive red branches, and a substantial number of blood vessels and nerves below my skin have all burst apart.
Had it been anyone else, these injuries would've most likely led to their loss.
But not us. Seconds after we land on the magma, our Ki-assisted healing kicks into overdrive.
My blood vessels and nerves are repaired in moments, and the horrific scarring on my body vanishes as my skin returns to their natural color. Popping and cracking sounds as flesh and bones begin morphing from Akeno's shoulders, growing and twisting into a pair of new arms.
All the while, corruption swirls into our bodies from our usage of Senjutsu. Our Primal Energy converts them, and our reservoirs grow.
She turns to me, and her eyes meet mine. She smiles widely, and so do I. Neither of our smiles are all that pleasant to look at, tinged with bloodthirst and madness. She bends forward, ready to leap like a jaguar readying to chase its prey. I crouch slowly, my legs tensing as power surges through my feet.
A second passes, then two, and then we blur as we leap off the swirling magma, smashing my fist into her leg.
And so, once more, our battle resumes.
This bout of ours lasts several more hours before Akeno finally loses all control. Her rationale collapses, and she charges at me with enough energy to blow right through my skull. But her lack of control also makes her predictable, and so it doesn't take much to let her sail past, and then aim a well-timed punch straight to her forehead.
The impact sends her down into the magma, and seconds later she floats back up, unharmed by the molten rock and completely unconscious.
I lift her over my shoulder before I leap out of the volcano, landing on the slope of volcanic rock just meters away from the magma-filled crater.
It takes her a few more hours to wake up. By the time she does, she's fully rested and wakes up refreshed. I'm no different, having spent hours meditating to calm the rampant madness I'd been accumulating.
"I lost again." She whispers.
"You got close." I say, patting her back. "If I didn't defend in time, that lightning thing you did could've knocked me out cold."
She just smiles tiredly. I give her back another gentle pat.
Then, as we've done for quite a while now, we spend the next day just ruminating over the prolonged fight we had. Brilliant attacks and tactics are remembered, and faulty ones are fixed using our combined experiences.
And the day after that, we experiment. Akeno thinks up more ways she can manipulate her lightning, performing different tests and consulting me whenever she needs to. I, meanwhile, use my eyes to find better ways to deliver stronger attacks with less cost.
We don't bother eating. We don't need to. We drink sparingly from a spring not too far away. We don't bother bathing either, or wearing clothes for that matter. We'll just burn our clothes away when we start fighting anyway.
Is it awkward? For the first few days, I suppose. But the feeling quickly drained away. And besides, it isn't as if I haven't seen her naked. Public baths are a thing, and she occasionally likes to shower together when we're alone.
Anyway,
Most of our days are spent in silence. A pleasant silence. Just sitting there, ruminating on thoughts and ideas as we sit next to one another, with nothing but the occasional gust of wind or tumbling rock to break through the quiet,
To be able to live in a world unbothered, with just us two as its sole participant and the starry sky as our audience,
It's bliss.
Of course, such a world is most likely impossible for us. We've integrated ourselves too deep into the supernatural web. Even if we're to disappear off the face of the earth and become hermits or something, an incident will inevitably pull us back.
…
Once that day of experimenting ends, we then return into the volcano, jumping down into the crater and landing on the sloshing magma.
And then, with new ideas in our minds and grins on our lips, our spar commences once again.
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