Clouds boiled and thinned across the layered peaks, lending the mountains a restless grace. Below them lay a carpet of demon corpses, a river of black blood, a tableau as eerie as it was grotesque.
There was no prelude.
Orson rolled the Supreme Arcane Blade in his grip. His long hair, now streaked with white, streamed in the gale. A skyful of dark red stars flared to life. Great Wasteland meteors dropped like a storm, each one packed with world-ending force as they fell.
Bellara lifted her sword and cut the air. Light flashed. Sword beams crossed and lockstitched into a flawless curtain that spanned the sky.
She parried the incoming chaos orbs as if swatting hail. Not a seam in her guard.
Orson showed no surprise. This was divine strength. Even with absolute range advantage, he could not poke through.
He did not relent. He lifted an open hand into empty air and pressed. The sigils along his arm burned, and the elements obeyed. An invisible hand slammed downward.
The world lurched. The ground split. A chasm yawned open.
Bellara’s face tightened. Her footing went out from under her. She dropped.
Orson stood steady, shaping the battlefield at will. His grasp of Chaos Magic had crossed a threshold. He could not trigger skills, true, but simply by directing the grammar of power he could produce effects that changed terrain like a spell would.
Chaos orbs fell in waves into the rift. Eruptions thundered on and on. Wherever the flame-spray landed, demon bones vaporized into ash.
Fifteen years of grinding. Fifteen years of wrestling in the palm of a god. None of it had dulled his will to go home.
Even if a High Lord stood before him, he would blow them apart today.
The prompts kept popping like thorns. Bellara cut once and split the mountain like tofu. Her eyes burned. Hair streaming, she drove straight for him.
Orson’s chest rose and fell. His gaze deepened. As Bellara closed, he let the chaos barrage fall silent.
That sudden change pricked her instincts. "A trap?" she murmured.
In fifteen years and a hundred bouts, this had happened before, and she had unraveled it every time. From the Weapon God’s vantage, today would be no different. Even with both sides forbidding skills, she could crush him with the weight of a thousand years.
"This challenge is over. I am out of patience."
Bellara reached him almost unopposed, sword in hand. In these moments he usually surrendered to avoid having his skin peeled. Close quarters always turned into a one-sided beating.
Orson raised his eyes to the nightmare woman before him. What he felt for her was strange. Teacher and friend and deadliest foe. He could feel her disgust for this sealed heaven, yet for the promise she had made to the Fire God, she would guard it until forever.
She shielded the Sunforge’s people and locked herself in the same cage.
Orson had tried every line and lever to get her to attempt a joint break through the demon siege above. Nothing. So stubborn it made him claw his hair.
He had accepted an ugly truth. No one left The Sunforge World unless she died.
Two mules with iron necks. Only a fight to the death would decide it.
The Supreme Arcane Blade shifted. The chaos edge breathed dark light. A hard brilliance lit Orson’s timeworn eyes.
He struck. A cut like a hawk’s flash. The void shook. The line of it seemed to part sky from earth.
Bellara’s pupils shrank. The beam of that cut looked simple, yet it locked her body in place. Sword momentum was not a trick. It was what lived beyond perfect form, the single clean strike at the single perfect time, that left an opponent nowhere to flee.
Her spine went cold. Of her six forms, she loved the sword the most. This was her signature, honed in a thousand killing fields. The move that had cut him down a dozen times now came back to her unchanged.
She could not fathom how he learned . She had called herself his master, but she had never taught him even one motion.
She sank her stance and took the hilt in both hands. Serious now.
She answered with her own straight cut. Two sword lights crossed and smashed together. The world roared. The ridge blew apart and left a crater gouged from the mountain’s bone.
Both leapt. Both cut again in the air.
Point to point. Neither gave.
Orson rasped it through his teeth. He landed, twisted at the waist, flickered past like a ghost, and blood sprayed.
Lethal Strike 60,000,000.
Half his health vanished. A hole blew open in his chest. Blood spilled from his mouth.
"The thing you trust most is your sword."
Orson’s grin turned feral. Bellara’s eyes went wide as she tried to pull her blade back. His hand clamped down on her hilt and would not move.
"The thing I trust most is my pack. They are waiting for me to come home."
"You do not have your own will."
"You do not have your own desire."
"You are a puppet. What do you have to fight me with?"
His roar tore the air. Chaos flame surged along the Supreme Arcane Blade and detonated down the length.
Disbelief twisted Bellara’s face as half her body split and went black under the fire. Her health began to tick down.
He was completely mad. He took a lethal line just to land true damage on her.
Twenty-two million would erase almost any high demon. Against a lesser god who had maxed every attribute and carried the gifts of the elder pantheon on her flesh, it was a graze.
"Finally got to see you ragged."
Orson laughed like a lunatic and clutched his head. "A hundred defeats make the self. You have lost, Bellara. Bellara."
"You are beyond help," she said softly, eyes complicated. Follow current novᴇls on novel{f}ire.net
"Mad? You do not understand. You are the one who is truly mad."
He ran his palm along the blade and said, "Do you know why I kept staying and playing your game? To prove a point."
"Seeking truth? Playing? What gives you the right to speak to me about either?"
She snorted and bit down on her lip. "In my eternal life you are a passing mote."
The moment she said it, pain pulled tight at her heart. A thousand years of empty killing, then this one man, this passerby, and her days no longer moved the same. Her loathing of the ninety-ninth heaven had deepened. She caught herself imagining the world beyond. And, sometimes, thinking of him.
The feeling was strange and sore. But remaining was her fate.
"Mote or not, I will always believe this. A mortal body can stand beside the gods."
War filled Orson’s eyes. He threw his head back and roared. He glanced at the seal Riley had left in his status.
His brows tightened. Light burst from his gaze. The gale rose. An ocean of element swam over his head.
A pressure like nothing else rippled the mountains.
Bellara stared as if she had watched a sleeping giant open his eyes.
"Not yet. There is more."
Orson smiled as he always did and tipped his chin, asking her to wait.
"Soul mark fusion," he said.
Three soul marks, white as snow, burst from his body and hovered before him, glimmering like jewels.
"Overgod," Bellara breathed. In the countless worlds of Infinite Dimensions, there were legends of such marks, but she had never heard of anyone holding even one.
Now she was looking at a matched set of three.