Free Web NovelChapter 22: Ren versus Ash
"That is how easily I could have killed you. I fail to see how you humans do not understand that you are far outmatched here," Ren stated.
Ash gritted his teeth and looked at the wound on his shoulder. "This hurts as hell," he muttered in a low, heavy tone. Then he looked up. "Hahaha, but you should have really killed me when you had the chance, lizard. Now you won’t get it again." As he said that, he flexed his hands, and the wraps around them ignited, creating a dense flame wrap.
’Those flames on his hands, they are not basic. They seem very intense. Hmm.’ Ren looked at the hands keenly.
"The headmaster said to bring you back alive, but I’m not sure that I can keep that promise." He roared and blasted forward, the ground beneath his feet cracking as he moved like a cannonball.
Ren watched with no particular haste. He wanted to test out a few things, and he could tell that this fellow was somewhat strong enough to test them.
He activated Hardened Scales when the punch was about to connect.
BOOM!
He took the attack to the head and was hurled back fast. He dug his claws into the ground and forced himself to a stop, a cloud of dust rising where he dragged.
"Haha, why did you freeze? Did you get scared?" Ash yelled and then shot forward again, cutting through the dust, his fist already pulled back for another punch. But the moment he burst through the dust, he realized that he had made a mistake.
Ember Breath.
The flames hurtled through the air like a twisted vortex of fire. There was no time to dodge. His feet were off the ground; it would be impossible. He crouched beneath his crossed fists. The flames around his hands grew and covered his body as much as they could.
KABOOM!
The collision was like a bomb. Ash was hurled back. He flipped through the air in a streak of smoke and slammed into the ground. He bounced once and then flipped to land on his feet.
Parts of his body were burnt from that single attack. He had survived it, but the pain that he felt at the moment was something else. He gritted his teeth.
"Tch, so this is the strength of dragon’s breath?" he muttered to himself. He had always prided himself on his ability to use flames of immense heat and also his fire resistance. If someone with weaker resistance had taken that attack, they would have become nothing but roasted meat.
"Do not tell me that you have had enough, human. It would be pitiful, and honestly, I have not had enough fun yet," Ren said from across the distance.
"Tch, is this dragon mocking me?" Ash looked up with burning anger in his eyes. He gritted his teeth and then stood straight.
"No one mocks me. Never!" he roared so loudly that a few veins popped on his neck.
"Whoa, seems I struck a nerve," Ren said.
"Arghhhhhhhhh!" Ash roared. The flames around his hands grew. He blasted into the air like a rocket, his gaze locked on Ren.
"Die, lizard!"
Ash came down like a meteor.
His fist hit the ground where Ren had been standing half a second earlier, and the earth simply gave way beneath the impact, a crater tearing itself into existence, trees at the edge of the clearing snapping and toppling from the shockwave alone.
Ren had moved. Barely.
He turned to look at the crater with something resembling genuine interest.
’That would have hurt,’ he noted privately.
Ash was already out of the crater and moving again, no pause, no breath, his fists trailing dense flame as he closed the distance in an instant and swung. Ren took it on his Hardened Scales, the impact shunting him back several feet, his claws dragging twin furrows into the earth.
Another punch came before he’d fully stopped moving. Then a third, each one landing with the weight of something far beyond a normal human, the flames around Ash’s hands intensifying with every exchange, the air between them growing hot enough to shimmer.
A fourth punch drove Ren back into a tree trunk, the entire thing splitting on impact and collapsing behind him.
"Now you’re running," Ash said, breathing hard but grinning wide, eyes blazing. "Come on. Face me. I thought you weren’t scared."
Ren straightened up from the collapsed tree, shaking splinters from his scales, and looked at Ash with an expression that was less anger and more the quiet, clinical reassessment of something that had just surprised him.
’His output is genuinely high,’ he thought. ’Not enough to break through, but the accumulation is real.’ A few more exchanges at that intensity, and it starts to matter.
He had to admit, for a human, Ash had mettle.
Real mettle.
Ash came again, both fists this time, a simultaneous overhead swing that tore the sky open as it came down, flames spreading wide enough to engulf the space between them entirely.
Ren stopped retreating.
He planted both feet into the ground, spread his stance wide, and activated Scale Hardening to its fullest, the golden lines along his scales flaring bright as he locked himself in place and raised his head.
"My turn," he said quietly.
The fists slammed into his head.
The collision was not a sound so much as a physical event. The ground beneath them simply ceased to exist in any recognizable form, a massive crater blooming outward from the point of impact, the shockwave ripping across the clearing in every direction, flattening grass and brush and sending loose rocks skipping through the air like thrown stones.
Ash’s hands went numb on contact. He felt it travel up through his wrists, his forearms, into his shoulders, the reverberation of something that had hit him harder than anything in his entire life.
He was moving backward before he registered moving.
Ren didn’t give him a moment to recover.
He opened his jaws wide and unleashed Sonic Roar at point-blank range.
The sound hit Ash like a wall, a physical, visible compression of force that picked him up entirely and hurled him backward through the treeline, his body tearing through trunk after trunk, each one splintering on impact before he finally came to rest somewhere deep in the wreckage, buried under collapsed wood and settling dust.
Ren lowered his head, his chest rising and falling steadily, and looked at the trail of destruction stretching through the forest ahead of him.
Forty meters of flattened treeline. Easy.
He watched the settling debris for a long moment, ears perked, eyes sharp.
The forest went quiet.
Then the wreckage exploded outward.
