Primordial Heir: Nine Stars-Chapter 345: A Powerful Foe 2
No more words. No more analysis. The space between them vanished.
They moved at the same time. A golden blur and a crimson comet collided in the center of the rocky plateau.
BOOM!
The shockwave flattened the stunted trees for fifty yards in every direction. Stones shattered into powder. It wasn’t a punch or a kick. It was just the impact of their auras slamming together.
Then the real fight began.
Nero, with his draconic strength, threw a straight punch. The air screamed in protest. Subject #009 didn’t dodge. She caught it. Her golden talons wrapped around his scaled fist. The sound was like two mountains grinding together. She used his momentum, pivoting, and tried to throw him over her shoulder. He planted his tail, the scaled appendage digging a trench in the stone, and held firm.
He twisted, breaking her grip, and launched a kick at her ribs. She blocked with her forearm. CRACK! The sound was sickening, but her arm didn’t break. She used the contact to spin, her golden wing slicing toward his neck like a giant, bladed fan.
Nero ducked, the wing shearing through a granite outcrop behind him as if it were paper. He came up inside her guard, driving his horned forehead toward her face. She jerked back, his horns grazing her cheek, drawing a line of golden ichor instead of blood.
They broke apart, circled, and charged again.
This was a battle of pure, overwhelming physics. Every step cracked the ground. Every blocked blow sent tremors through the mountain range. They weren’t using complex spells. They were using their transformed bodies as weapons of mass destruction.
Nero’s crimson tail was a whip of terrible power. It lashed out, aiming for her legs. She jumped, the tail smashing the ground where she’d stood, leaving a crater. While in the air, she dove, talons-first, like a golden meteor. Nero crossed his scaled arms above his head. She hit with the force of a falling star. He was driven knee-deep into solid rock, but he held. He grabbed her wrists, his claws digging into her golden skin, and roared, hurling her sideways into a cliff face.
She hit the rock, cratering it, but pushed off instantly, using the stone as a springboard to shoot back at him. He was ready. They met mid-air, trading a blistering series of punches, kicks, and wing-blows that no normal eye could follow. Each impact was a thunderclap.
They fell back to earth, still locked in combat, and hit the ground rolling. They tore through the landscape. They plowed through a hillside. They tumbled across a dry riverbed, shattering the ancient stones.
Injuries accumulated. A deep gash across Nero’s scaled chest from a lucky talon strike. A bruise spreading across Subject #009’s golden torso from a hammer-blow of his tail. One of her magnificent wings was bent at an awkward angle, feathers askew. One of his horns had a fresh chip in it.
They fought from the high peaks down into a narrow valley. They used the terrain. Nero kicked a boulder the size of a house at her. She didn’t break it; she spun and kicked it back, faster. He punched it, and it exploded into a hail of gravel.
They were evenly matched. Strength for strength. Speed for speed. Durability for durability. It was a brutal, exhausting deadlock. The only sounds were the shrieks of tearing air, the explosions of impacts, and the ragged sound of their own breathing. Their eyes, red and gold, were locked in a silent, furious dialogue of violence.
They knew this was only the first act. This was just testing the limits of the body.
Time for the second act.
Nero disengaged, leaping back a hundred feet in a single bound. As he landed, golden lightning—not the crimson of his scales, but the pure, electric gold of his second law—erupted around his form. It danced across his claws, his horns, his tail, turning him into a statue of living, crackling storm energy.
Across the shattered valley, Subject #009 responded in kind. The air around her stilled, then began to spin with a silent, deadly intent. The Law of Wind answered her call. It didn’t howl; it focused. A visible, shimmering distortion, like heat haze made solid, wrapped around her golden talons and the leading edge of her wings, sharpening them to a monomolecular edge.
No words. Just a mutual, understanding glance. The test of flesh was over. Now, the test of essence.
They moved.
This wasn’t the world-shaking charge from before. It was a blur of impossible speed.
Nero vanished in a streak of golden lightning, reappearing above her, a clawed hand descending like a thunderbolt. She didn’t look up. She raised a wing. The wind-sharpened golden feathers met the lightning-charged claws.
SCREEEEE-KRAKOOOOOM!
The sound was a mix of tearing metal and a close-range lightning strike. A sphere of chaotic energy—golden electricity and slicing wind—exploded outward from the point of contact, shredding the ground beneath them into a glassy, smoking pit.
They were already gone, having pushed off the explosive force.
They appeared on opposite sides of the valley. Nero held up a hand, and a dozen orbs of concentrated lightning, each the size of a melon, formed around him. With a flick of his wrist, they shot forward, zigzagging unpredictably through the air.
Subject #009 didn’t dodge. She drew a line in the air with a single talon.
"Wind Wall: Refraction."
The air in front of her solidified into a layered, prismatic barrier. The lightning orbs hit it and refracting—bending wildly off course to slam into the valley walls in a series of deafening booms.
She countered. A single, graceful sweep of her wing.
"Zephyr Slash."
An invisible crescent of vacuum-sharp wind, too fast to see with the eye, sliced across the distance. Nero raised a lightning-wreathed arm. The wind blade met the electrical field and detonated in a burst of concussive air and scattered sparks that stung his scaled skin.
It was a dance of devastating elegance. A probe. A light test, as they held back their ultimate techniques. Lightning sought to overwhelm with speed and shocking power. Wind sought to deflect, to cut, to control the space between them.
Sword of storm against sword of sky. They clashed again in the center, a whirlwind of golden light and shimmering distortion, neither gaining an inch, neither giving ground. The air itself became a weapon, charged and sliced. The valley, already scarred by their physical battle, now bore the elegant, terrible marks of their clashing laws—glassed pits from lightning, perfectly smooth cuts in stone from wind.
No words were uttered. Only the language of power, spoken in flashes of gold and sighs of cutting air. The message was clear: the warm-up was over. The true depth of their power was still hidden, waiting beneath the surface of this dazzling, destructive display. What was certain they were both enjoying this exchange.
