Jabari’s resolve solidified into motion. “Indeed, Balisarda Sumernor,” he said, the words a final blade falling. “It’s about time someone put an end to this.”

  He charged.

  It was not the earth-tearing sprint from the courtyard, but something far more direct. A straight, devastating line drawn between himself and the king. The air of the throne room, thick with power, seemed to part around him. His right arm, a piston of condensed will, pulled back and then drove forward, aimed at the centre of the bronze-scaled chest.

  Hel moved.

  He did not step, run, or blur. Materializing, he simply was, as if he had always been there. He simply was, as if he had always been there. He entered Jabari’s vision from the upper left in a silent, diagonal dive, launched from his position beside the throne. His body formed a perfect, spread-eagled ‘X’, a star jump suspended in mid-air. The polished toes of his black dress shoes did not touch the marble. His arms were wide, his charcoal jacket taut across his shoulders, his face a mask of detached focus.

  Jabari’s fist, committed to its trajectory, could not divert. It slammed into the centre of Hel’s stomach with a dense, wet thump.

  The impact did not feel like striking flesh and bone. It felt like punching a sack filled with dense, resilient gel. The black fabric of Hel’s shirt and the tailored wool of his suit jacket distorted inward in a deep, concave bowl, stretching far beyond the natural limits of the body within. For a suspended moment, Hel’s entire midsection was a deep, unnatural hollow.

  Then, it rebounded.

  The elasticity was perfect, violent, and controlled. The fabric and the flesh beneath snapped back to their original form with a sharp, resonant crack. Instead of absorbing the force, the fabric collected, focused, and flung it back along the exact path it had arrived.

  The recoil traveled up Jabari’s arm like a lightning bolt of his own power. It jarred his wrist, rattled his elbow, and slammed into his shoulder with a shock that disrupted his entire forward momentum. His heel, which had been driving into the marble, skidded backward. The impact wrenched his body off its perfect line.

  He stumbled back, not a dramatic, sprawling fall, but a precise, jarring loss of exactly fifteen centimetres of ground. His boot scraped a sharp line on the polished floor before he regained his stance, his arm dropping slightly, the knuckles of his right hand throbbing with the echoed force of his own punch.

  Hel, having completed his transfer of energy, landed silently between Jabari and the throne, his polished shoes making no sound. He settled into a relaxed, upright stance, his hands once again clasped behind his back, the black satin paisley of his tie perfectly settled. His expression was one of polite, professional efficiency, as if he had just concluded a necessary bit of logistics. The only evidence of the blow was a slight, almost imperceptible shimmer in the fabric over his stomach, as if the surrounding air were still settling.

  The air in the throne room, already thick with power, grew taut with a new, volatile tension.

  “Balisarda Sumernor, fight me yourself, you coward!!” Jabari’s roar was a raw, scraping thing that shook dust from the shattered edges of the wall behind him.

  Balisarda’s lips curved, a cold, knowing arc of amusement that never touched his glacial eyes, which remained locked on Jabari’s enraged face. “Very well,” he said, his voice a study in condescending calm. “I’ll face you.”

  He took a single, deliberate step forward. As his foot met the marble, he turned his right hand palm-down. The air above his palm tore open without sound, a rip in reality the size of a fist, swirling with opalescent darkness. His fingers closed around a hilt that slid seamlessly from the void. The blade that emerged was slender, wrought from a metal the colour of ancient poison, its surface sweating a faint, oily mist. It was a needle made for a giant its edge glinting with a venomous promise.

  Jabari did not wait for the ceremony. With a guttural sound of pure fury, he launched himself from his stance. The marble beneath his back foot fissured in a spider-web pattern as he became a projectile of tattered wool and focused vengeance, crossing the space between them in a blink. His left fist, a hammer of pure force, aimed to crush the smirk from the king’s face.

  Again, Hel intervened.

  His movement was a silent, diagonal streak from the high right, intercepting the line of Jabari’s charge. He presented himself as a living shield, his body once again in that spread, star-like posture, suspended in the path of destruction.

  Jabari’s fist, carrying all his forward momentum, slammed into the same spot on Hel’s midsection. The impact was a deep, muffled concussion of force. The tailored charcoal fabric and the body beneath deformed dramatically, stretching into a deep, impossible hollow that seemed to swallow Jabari’s arm to the wrist.

  Then came the rebound.

  The stretched form snapped back with vicious, perfect efficiency. A tangible shockwave of reversed energy traveled back up Jabari’s arm. This time, the feedback was a white-hot jolt of pain that lanced from his knuckles through his wrist, spiking up into his shoulder joint with a sickening twist. It felt as though the bones themselves had been rattled in their sockets. His forward charge was not just stopped but violently reversed. The impact threw him backward a short distance, his boots screeching against the marble, and his balance deserted him for a critical instant.

  The force of his own blow, flung back along its exact path, wrenched a pained grunt from his lungs.

  It was the opening Balisarda required. He had continued his advance, a predator moving with the tide of the conflict. As Jabari stumbled, off balance and wincing from the echoed pain in his arm, Balisarda closed the final gap. The poison sword in his hand became a blur of sickly green.

  He slashed, not with a fencer’s finesse, but with the brutal, diagonal finality of an executioner. The blade carved a path from the crown of Jabari’s left shoulder down across his torso to his right waist.

  The sound was a dry, terrible whisper of metal parting fabric and scraping across the unimaginable density of Jabari’s flesh. No blood welled. No skin split. But a line of immediate, searing agony bloomed along the path of the cut, as if the sword had traced a wire of white-hot pain just beneath the surface. The tailored navy jacket and white shirt beneath parted cleanly, revealing the unmarked but trauma-reddened skin underneath.

  Balisarda did not snap his fingers. He did not blink. He simply took a graceful step back, watching Jabari’s reaction with analytical interest, the poison sword held loosely at his side, its distinctive power held in check, waiting for its master’s silent command to unleash its delayed, invasive truth into the body it had just touched.

  A profound, ringing silence followed the slash. Jabari stood braced, the line of fire across his torso a silent testament to the blow. No blood welled. No muscle parted. But the agony was real, a searing brand beneath his unbroken skin.

  Balisarda Sumernor did not press the attack. Instead, he took another step back, his gaze sliding from Jabari’s pain-clenched face to the man who had made the strike possible. His voice, when it came, was a conversational murmur laced with glacial mockery.

  “You see, Hel?” Balisarda said, not looking at the Principal, but including him as one would an appreciative audience. “This is the paradox of brute force. It can shatter a falling sky, yet be utterly baffled by a simple principle.” gesturing lightly with the sickly green sword in his hand towards Jabari. “He moves like a storm. He strikes like a cataclysm. But direction? Predictability? The storm only knows how to blow forward.”

  He finally turned his head, his icy blue eyes meeting Hel’s composed, sharp gaze. A smile of cold amusement touched his lips. “You have made him a prisoner of his own power. Every monumental effort he makes only returns to him. He is caught in a perfect, closed loop of his own violence.” His attention swung back to Jabari, who was slowly forcing his breathing back under control, the pain in his arm and torso a visible tightness around his eyes. “It must be maddening, must it not? To possess strength that can level mountains, yet to be thwarted by… calculation.”

  Hel said nothing. His hands remained clasped behind his back his tailored suit immaculate. He gave a single, slight nod of acknowledgment, his expression that of a master technician observing a successful experiment.

  Balisarda’s focus returned fully to Jabari. He raised the poison sword slightly, examining its oily green gleam. “This blade,” he mused, his tone almost pedagogical, “is a subtle thing. It does not cleave. It does not shatter. It merely… introduces a new reality into the old.”

  He closed his eyes. It was not a blink, but a slow, deliberate lowering of the lids, as if in quiet concentration.

  The effect was instantaneous.

  The searing line of pain across Jabari’s torso transformed. The heat vanished, replaced by an invasive, deep cold that seemed to blossom from within his very cells. It was not the cold of ice, but the cold of cessation, of stagnation. A visible, sickly green hue began spreading like a stain under the skin along the path of the slash, a necrotic shadow mapping the sword’s passage. A violent, wracking shudder tore through him, his teeth clenching to trap a groan. The muscles along his left shoulder and his right side of his abdomen didn’t just hurt they thickened, growing leaden and unresponsive, as if the tissue itself was drowning in a foreign, paralytic toxin. His vision swam at the edges, a greenish static fuzzing his perception. The distinct, coppery taste of the throne room’s power was now joined by a nauseating, chemical sweetness at the back of his throat.

  The verdigris sword in Balisarda’s hand shimmered, its substance becoming insubstantial, and then dissolved into motes of greenish light that winked out of existence.

  The power it represented, however, remained vividly, horribly present.

  Balisarda opened his eyes, watching the poisons work with detached interest. “The body is a kingdom, Jabari,” he hissed. “You have just welcomed a hostile occupying force. It will not kill you quickly. That is not its purpose. Its purpose is to make every movement an agony, every thought a struggle through thickening fog. To weigh that legendary will of yours down with the anchor of your own failing flesh.”

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  He took a final, dismissive step back, aligning himself once more with the silent, observant Hel. “Now,” Balisarda Sumernor said, his voice returning to its calm, absolute register. “Let us see how the mighty commander weathers a coup from within.”

  The mocking echo of Balisarda’s words still hung in the air, thick as the incense. Before Jabari could force his leaden, toxin-weighted muscles to respond, Balisarda’s left hand turned palm-up.

  Another silent rip tore the air. This time, from the void slid a blade that seemed forged from a captured storm surge. Its metal was the deep, restless blue-green of a midnight sea, and crackling veins of white lightning swam within its substance, casting a frantic, strobing light across the gold-veined walls. The very air hummed with ozone and the petrichor of an approaching squall.

  With the same economical grace, Balisarda stepped forward and slashed. The sea-electricity sword carved a horizontal line across Jabari’s chest, a sibling wound to the first.

  This time, the contact was anything but subtle.

  The moment the crackling edge connected, the sword’s distinct power activated instantly.

  The blade itself vanished, but in the space it had occupied, reality seemed to rupture. A colossal, concentrated geyser of seawater, compacted to the density of a tidal wave and sheathed in a sizzling web of lightning, exploded outward from the line of the cut. It was not water that poured over Jabari; it was a solid, electrified hammer of the deep.

  The impact was catastrophic. The sound was a deafening, twin-layered cataclysm, the roar of a bursting dam married to the shriek of tearing lightning. The force did not cut; it obliterated space. Jabari was lifted from his feet, not thrown, but erased from his position before the throne. A torrent of churning, sparking water carried him backward like a leaf in a flash flood, scouring a path across the marble floor.

  He slammed into the far edge of the shattered eastern wall, the jagged stone catching him mid-torso. The remaining force of the electrified deluge blasted outwards into the open sky, scattering a glittering, charged mist over the courtyard below. The surrounding stone smoked and crackled where lightning had earthed itself.

  Jabari crumpled against the broken wall, water sluicing from his form. His entire body was a symphony of new agony, a deep, crushing bruise across his chest from the hydraulic force, and a persistent, nerve-jangling buzz that danced along his limbs from the electricity. His unbreakable skin was reddened, angry, but un-pierced. The poison’s invasive chill still coiled in his abdomen and shoulder, a dull, persistent treachery beneath the fresh, spectacular violence. It had not been negated; the sheer overwhelming force of the sea had merely drowned it out for a moment.

  Jabari pushed himself from the smoldering stone of the shattered wall, water still dripping from his torn clothes. Each movement was a struggle against the dual weights; the deep, chemical cold of the poison solidifying his core, and the fresh, radiating ache from the electrified tidal force that had hammered him.

  From the dais, Balisarda Sumernor brought his hands together in a slow, deliberate rhythm. The sound was a dry, measured impact of skin against skin, a mockery of applause in the vast silence. Three times. Each clap seemed to hang in the air, a period punctuating Jabari’s failure.

  “Ha. Ha. Ha.” Balisarda’s laughter was a hollow, mirthless sound. “You’re not even sentient. You are a reaction. A blunt instrument.”

  From his place at Balisarda’s side, Hel spoke, his voice as cool and tailored as his suit. “You shouldn’t say that, my lord. Even a military dog might learn to bark.”

  The words were a spark on tinder. A low, guttural sound built in Jabari’s throat. He took a step forward. Then another. His steps were not strides, but heavy, deliberate stomps that made the marble tremble, each impact a defiance of the poison slowly dissolving from his body. He was a glacier of rage grinding forward. Across from him, Balisarda and Hel began their own slow, synchronised advance, a king and his elegant shield moving as one.

  “You,” Jabari began, his voice a rasp that gathered power with every word, rising from the depths of his chest. “You are a legendary figure. Known for your strength. Born in Thalvaren.” He halted, his feet planted, his body trembling with the effort of containing his fury. “You became an undisputed, undefeated gladiator of that realm. You, who with the Ultimate Bloodshed User, defeated the leader of the Fifty Factions.” His eyes, blazing with fire, locked onto Balisarda’s icy gaze. “TOGETHER!”

  He roared the last word, the force of it tearing through the chamber’s oppressive air.

  “SO FIGHT ME, BALISARDA SUMERNOR! ONE ON ONE, YOU FUCKING COWARD!!!”

  The scream echoed off the gem-veined walls, a raw challenge flung at the throne.

  Balisarda stopped his advance, a faint, pitying smile on his lips. “You should feel honoured,” he chided softly, “to fight me, and one of my ten Principals.” He gestured idly to the man beside him. “Hel here is ranked number eight.”

  “His ability,” Balisarda continued, his tone shifting to one of academic discussion, as if explaining the workings of a rare clock, “is elegantly simple.” He glanced at Hel, who stood poised and silent, a monochromatic statue of readiness. “Hel can reverse any physical attack landed upon him. Perfectly. Every ounce of force returned to its sender.” His glacial eyes returned to Jabari, gleaming with cold amusement. “You are not fighting him. You are fighting a mirror of your own formidable, and currently quite poisoned, strength.”

  The title landed like a stone in a pond. Jabari’s furious expression did not change, but behind his eyes, his mind raced, cutting through the pain and anger.

  “There have been many rumours surrounding Balisarda Sumernor having ten principals. Without a doubt, I had known them to be true. But the one part that was a mystery is who and what the Principals are.” A sudden, jarring realisation struck him like a mental lightning bolt. “Could this mean he is working in cahoots with the Fifty Factions? No, that is impossible. He is half responsible for the defeat of their founder, their leader. There’s no way they will just forgive him for that… but maybe it could be the case.”

  The strategic horror of the possibility momentarily chilled him more deeply than the poison.

  Jabari’s roar still vibrated in the golden air when Balisarda Sumernor responded. With a casual, almost dismissive flick of his left hand, he drew his index and middle fingers sideways through the air.

  Above him, the space rippled and tore in five distinct places. From the void slid an arsenal of surreal blades, hovering like accusing fingers pointed at the sky.

  One emitted a low, sub-audible hum that made the teeth ache.

  One shimmered, its surface flowing like liquid mercury, reflecting distorted fragments of the room.

  One seemed to warp the surrounding light, the air twisting in a heatless mirage.

  One was the stark, jagged white of sun-bleached bone, porous and cruel.

  The last was a crystalline lattice, a complex geometry of frozen edges that promised a shattering impact.

  Jabari did not wait for the volley. As the fifth sword solidified, he propelled himself upward, a desperate bid to close the distance from above. His muscles screamed under the poison’s weight, but his will forged them into pistons. He drew his fist back in mid-air, aiming a devastating downward punch for the moment his boots would reconnect with the marble and drive the force up through Balisarda’s frame.

  Hel was already there.

  He did not jump. He ascended in a silent, diagonal line from Balisarda’s upper left, intersecting Jabari’s trajectory with the serene inevitability of a law of physics. Jabari’s fist, committed to its earthward arc, met the familiar, unforgiving canvas of Hel’s stomach. The impact was a deep, sickening compression of force. The tailored fabric and the form beneath stretched into a profound, elastic hollow.

  And snapped back.

  The rebounded force was a sledgehammer of his own power driving up his arm. It jarred his shoulder with a white-hot spike of agony, shattered his balance, and arrested his descent. Instead of landing in a strike, he was thrown backward, flipping through the air to crash onto the marble back-first. The impact drove the air from his lungs in a pained gasp. He rolled, the world tilting, and somehow forced his feet beneath him, skidding to a crouch.

  It was the exact moment Balisarda chose. A mere inclination of his head, a forward nod.

  Four of the hovering swords shot forth.

  Disoriented, his body ringing from Hel’s reversal and the hard floor, Jabari’s focus was a split-second behind reality. He had just found his footing when the world dissolved into a symphony of targeted ruin.

  The Sound Sword struck his chest first.

  There was no audible explosion. There was a sensation, a vibration so profound it bypassed sound and became pure, concussive pain. It was a deep, internal bang that hammered directly into the centre of his being, rattling his sternum, shaking his vision into blurry streaks, and filling his skull with a high-pitched, neural scream that silenced all other thought. For a terrifying moment, he was deaf to everything but the violent resonance inside his own head.

  The Wind Sword hit next, slamming into his side.

  It did not cut. It unmade the surrounding air. A micro-tornado, a vortex of concentrated, grinding pressure, erupted from the point of contact. It seized him, not to lift, but to tear and disorient. With a roaring, pneumatic maelstrom that scoured his skin, whipped his tattered clothes into a frenzy, and filled his lungs with a vacuum that burned. It screamed in the cavernous room, lifting tapestries and scattering debris in a deafening whirlwind.

  The Shard Sword met his back.

  On impact, the crystalline blade did not shatter but blossomed. It disintegrated into a hundred jagged projectiles of ice, glass, crystal, and razor-metal. They did not cut his impenetrable skin, but they hammered into him with the force of a point-blank shotgun blast of diamonds. Each impact was a piercing, icy sting that layered into a sheet of concentrated agony across his shoulders and spine, driving him forward a step under the hailstorm.

  The Bone Sword stabbed toward his abdomen.

  From its tip, a spear of jagged, ivory-like bone materialised, lancing forward. His instincts, screaming through the sensory overload, reacted. He twisted, his right fist lashing out in a blind, desperate parry. His knuckles met the conjured bone not with a crack, but with a dense, chalky crunch. The entire lance shattered into a cloud of dry, white fragments that dissolved into motes of dust.

  Through the roaring vortex, the stinging shards, and the ringing silence in his head, Jabari heard Balisarda’s laugh, a clean, bitter sound that cut through the chaos. “Ha ha ha ha. Welcome to your grave.”

  Jabari braced, feet grinding against the marble as he fought the tornado’s pull, a rock in a torrential river. He was holding, just barely, a monument of will against the storm.

  Then he saw it.

  Balisarda reached up and plucked the final, shimmering sword from the air, the Mimic Sword. He held it aloft, then gave another slight, decisive nod.

  The liquid metal of the blade flowed, losing its form. It stretched, bulged, and reconstituted itself into a new, grotesque shape. It became the head of the Ultimate Bloodshed User, wrought in polished, metallic grey, every familiar line of the face, the set of the jaw, the hollows of the eyes, but elongated and fused into a sword’s hilt and blade. A profane effigy, a weapon forged from memory and mockery.

  A wave of visceral, stomach-churning disgust, coupled with raw shock, punched through Jabari’s focus. His stance, already strained by the tornado, faltered for a single, catastrophic instant.

  The wind, waiting for any weakness, seized him. He was ripped from his footing and launched vertically, the roaring vortex hurling him eight metres upward into the chaotic air of the throne room.

  “Argh, dammit!” The curse was torn from his lips, lost in the gale. A ghost had outmaneuvered him. “I let myself get hurled into the sky!”

  The tornado, its energy spent on the launch, began to dissipate. Jabari tumbled through the air, reaching the apex of his ascent just as his head smashed through the intricate, painted panels of the throne room’s ceiling. Plaster and wood shattered around him. For a moment, he was suspended in the broken rafters, the open sky beyond the castle roof a distant rectangle of grey.

  Gravity reclaimed him.

  He clenched his fist as he fell back toward the hole he had just created. A furious, primal scream built in his chest and erupted, raw and ragged, as he descended feet-first back toward the battleground.

  He did not aim for the open floor. He aimed for the ceiling itself, just before he passed through it. As he dropped, he twisted his body and drove his right fist upward in a colossal, rising uppercut into the ornate, gold-leafed beams and plaster.

  The impact was catastrophic. A huge section of the ceiling, several metres wide, disintegrated into a rain of splinters, dust, and shattered artistry. It yielded a passage.

  Jabari fell through the new, jagged hole, debris cascading around him. Below, through the swirling dust, he could see the two figures. Balisarda looked up, Hel poised beside him. As he plummeted directly toward them, he coiled his body once more, the poison and the fresh bruises screaming in protest, and prepared to drive every ounce of his falling momentum into a single, decisive strike from above.