Free Web NovelChapter 39: Phycho Fin vs Consuming Serpent
They stood across from each other in the center of the sand pit and took a moment.
Neither rushed it.
The crowd had spread around the edge of the pit without being told to, the gathering rearranging itself into the shape a fight produced automatically. Shoulders pressed against shoulders. Eyes forward. The noise that had been moving through the compound in fragments settled into something quieter and more focused.
These were the two most feared people in the compound outside of Davos and Servos.
Not by reputation alone. By demonstration. Everyone present had seen both of them work, had watched what they did to opponents in the sand and filed it away as information about what category of problem they were looking at. Monsters in their own right, operating at a level that made the normal calculations meaningless.
And when monsters fought, the people watched.
"I can’t believe Psycho Fin is actually going through with this."
"In his own right he’s powerful, but that woman has a B-ranked summon at minimum."
The conclusion had formed across the compound without anyone sitting down to reach it formally. Hela’s serpent was not ordinary. A serpent species was one of the most common summon types in circulation, distributed across every tier and rank, familiar enough that most experienced summoners could read the general shape of what one would do before the fight started.
None of them had seen one do what Barthalamew did.
Killing an opponent’s summon was already the condemned act. Swallowing it whole was something else. That wasn’t aggression. That was a statement about what the beast considered the fight to be, and what it thought of everything across from it.
No one who had watched that match had stopped thinking about it.
"Shut up."
Fin’s voice cut through the murmuring without raising in volume, the disgust behind it doing the work that volume would have. His eyes swept the spectators from the side and settled on the ones who had been talking.
"Unless you want to fight her yourselves."
The talking stopped.
Gazes sharpened. Mouths closed. Nobody moved to fill the silence he had left behind.
"Sigh."
Fin summoned first.
A wind spirit appeared at his side, humanoid in shape, blades extending outward across its body in rows that overlapped like scales but rang against each other like armor when the figure shifted its weight. The sound of it was constant and low, a metallic breathing that didn’t stop.
He didn’t stop there.
His second summon rose from the sand beneath his feet, an earth demon pulling itself upward from the ground, its horns breaking the surface first at the points where Fin stood, the rest of the body following in a slow deliberate emergence that displaced sand around its frame in a spreading ring.
"Are you done?"
Hela looked at him from across the pit, her expression carrying the particular quality of someone watching something mildly entertaining but not unexpected.
"Two is enough, isn’t it?" Fin shot back, the mockery in it easy and unforced. "Want me to summon three? That’s overkill for a weak little girl."
"Right on, kid. You’re a man!!"
Servos’s voice came from the side with full sincerity, the appreciation in it genuine, the mockery sailing past him entirely undetected.
"Okay." Hela’s mouth pulled at one corner. "My Barthalamew is quite hungry. He’ll make do."
The black serpent rose.
It came up from beside her in a slow uncoiling, its body blocking the torchlight as it reached its full height, the black miasma spreading outward from its scales in dense drifting clouds that moved with the particular weight of something that had intention behind it.
"Hm!!"
Davos’s hand came up and a barrier closed around the pit before the miasma reached the first ring of spectators, cutting the spread and containing it within the sand. He knew what that gas was connected to. He had no interest in letting it make contact.
Inside the barrier, the miasma moved.
It crossed toward Fin like something alive, low to the ground, finding the paths of least resistance, the shape of it suggesting the serpent it had come from even when the serpent itself was elsewhere.
Fin raised a hand.
The wind spirit responded, pushing a sustained gust across the sand that hit the approaching cloud and disrupted its leading edge. The miasma slowed, pressing back against the force, but didn’t stop.
It kept coming.
What changed the shape of the fight had nothing to do with the ground in front of Fin.
—woosh
From above.
Hela came down from height, a scythe in hand, her body angled in a dive that carried the full weight of her momentum behind the leading edge of the blade. The energy coming off her hit the air ahead of her in visible distortion, the pressure of it arriving before she did.
Fin abandoned the wind spirit without hesitation and dropped behind his earth demon, putting its mass between himself and the descent.
The scythe met the wind spirit.
—clang!!
The impact drove the spirit backward, its frame unable to absorb the force, the displacement creating space that Hela moved through without pausing, her pursuit continuing past where the spirit had been standing.
The miasma, spreading unchecked while Hela’s previous strike pulled Fin’s attention forward, had already reached him.
He had to face it directly.
Hela was never going to be a straightforward fight. That much was visible to everyone watching. Forget the serpent. She was a dual-class wielder. The physical output from her alone was staggering in a way that didn’t match the Tier 7 classification on its own, the kind of output that suggested the classification was only part of the picture.
Psycho Fin was not overwhelmed.
He pulled two blades from his sides and moved, cutting forward at angles aimed at the serpent’s body, slicing through the flow of miasma at its source, disrupting the pattern rather than fighting the cloud itself. The interruptions registered on Barthalamew immediately, the beast’s movements stuttering as the sustained output was broken by each cut. freeweɓnovel.cøm
He had studied Hela’s matches.
The serpent couldn’t release miasma and engage in direct combat simultaneously. When the gas was active, it required something from the beast that direct physical fighting also required. If you could force the interruption consistently, you pulled Hela’s most significant advantage out from under her and made the fight into something more manageable.
He had to capitalize on that gap.
His two summons moved to close around Hela while he worked, pressuring her positioning from multiple angles, keeping her from settling into a single line of attack.
—Rawrrr!!
The serpent’s roar came from somewhere deep in its body, the sound of a creature that had been interrupted one time too many. It coiled and launched itself at Fin in a violent crash of displaced sand.
Fin moved.
Not fast enough.
The impact sent him into the force field wall, his body hitting the barrier and stopping hard.
—boom
The next moment he turned to sand.
His figure dissolved from where he had been standing and reformed behind the serpent, blades already raised, angled for the reverse scale at the base of the neck.
"Shit head!!"
Hela was already moving.
She appeared from within the remnants of miasma still drifting through the pit, using the cover of it, landing directly onto Barthalamew’s back and driving the scythe toward Fin in the same motion, the strike carrying the fury of someone who had read exactly what he was attempting.
—vcling
It connected.
Fin turned to sand again.
"You can’t do that forever!!"
She located him before the words finished and pushed forward immediately, the distance closing fast.
The serpent didn’t wait for direction. It turned on Fin’s two summons by itself, moving with the self-possession of a beast that had its own opinion about how the fight should go.
"She’s leagues above us."
The voice came from somewhere in the crowd, quiet but not quiet enough.
"Fighting summons hand to hand like that isn’t normal."
"Which hidden class is that even?"
They couldn’t help it.
This wasn’t entertainment in the simple sense. It was information that recalibrated something. Even Davos and Servos, watching from outside the barrier, had gone still in the way that people did when they were watching something that required their full attention.
Human summoners, when they genuinely committed, were terrifying in ways that exceeded the obvious.
The pit was confirming that with every exchange.
